March 28, 1952 - January 8, 2023

Barry B. Burr, 70, died with wife and daughter by his side in Chicago, IL on Sunday, January 8, 2023. He was the second son born on March 28, 1952 to John and Clara Burr and grew up in Whiting, Indiana.

Barry worked at Pensions & Investments, Crain Communications in Chicago for more than 30 years and served as Editorial Page Editor. Barry, who retired in 2016, received, among other awards, the Northwestern University Medill School/Strong Funds award for editorial columns, the Peter Lisagor award for editorials and the National Herbert Bayard Swope award for news writing.

Throughout his journalism career he interviewed many notable figures such as Nobel Prize in Economics Winners Milton Friedman, Eugene Fama, Franco Modigliani, and Merton Miller; politicians such as Ronald Reagan; General Paul Tibbets; and actor Jimmy Stewart.

Barry earned his MBA at University of Notre Dame Du Lac, concentrating in finance and accounting. Prior to that, he attended Indiana University where he earned an A.B. in history and made the Dean’s List all through college.

Barry was always curious and industrious. He started his first job at 9 years old as a paperboy for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. Six days a week he’d deliver newspapers door-to-door on bicycle, except in the winter when he used a sled. By eighth grade he had moved into the restaurant industry working at Art’s Drive-In flipping burgers and learning their trade secrets. In college he worked summers at Wisconsin Steel Co as a laborer, then environmental engineer.

After school, his career brought him full circle back to newspapers, though this time not as a paperboy, but as a journalist. His adventurous spirit took him on a multi-month solo backpacking trip through Europe in 1974, with one of the highlights being visiting long-lost relatives in Croatia at their vineyard. Work afforded him with even more opportunities to travel and live around the world. He wrote for many publications, including: The Royal Gazette in Bermuda, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, The Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela, and The Morgantown Daily in West Virginia where he covered the state capital.

Barry was a true beach boy (and also loved The Beach Boys band). His fondest memories always revolved around the beach. Growing up, he loved to explore the shores of Wolf Lake with his canine companion, Buddy. He would often speak of afternoon trips to the beach with his mom and brother Ron, and sometimes his Uncle John, and cousins Allen, Pete, and Ami. Barry often enjoyed playing pick-up games of baseball and attending family summer picnics at Whiting Park, where Uncle Rutz would tell stories of the good old days and Uncle Jack would set off firecrackers to the thrill of the kids. Barry eventually settled in Chicago, near his beloved Lake Michigan.

Over the last twenty-four years, Barry endured many health issues as a result of his battle with cancer. He was an eternal optimist and always looking to make the “big comeback.” Despite his challenges, he always thought of how he could use his hardships to help others. He was brave. He signed up for every clinical trial that he could qualify for in the hopes that it would not only help him, but that his contributions to science could help so many others. He was incredibly fond of his doctors and the entire oncology team at Northwestern hospital – from registration to port draw staff to the infusion team and Dr. Jochen Lorch, Dr. Jennifer Choi, Rebecca Meyer and Jenise Diemer, Kerry Luby and her team.

Barry loved his family dearly. He loved to stay in touch with his cousins (his biggest column each year was the Burr “Christmas Chronicles”), and was the glue that brought people together. He will truly be missed. He is preceded in death by brother-in-law Geoffrey Woo. He is survived by his wife, Vivian Burr née Woo; daughter, Lesley Burr; son-in-law Peter Scher; brother Ronald Burr, sister-in-law MyHanh Burr, sisters-in-law Ellen, Julie, Heddy, and brother-in-law Joseph Eddie Woo. He was “Uncle Barry” to John (Mikhalina), Daphné, Evelyne (William), and Ronny, who surely all have a favorite joke by him. The family is forever grateful to Shirley Refol for her invaluable support and caring for Barry in his last months 

Hi everyone. Most of you know me, but for those I may have met only once or long ago, I’m Lesley, Barry’s daughter. You all are here because my dad was something to you. Thank you all for coming today to honor him. I know many of you traveled a long distance to pay your respects, and I can’t help but think how much he would have loved to see you all together. If he were here, he’d be walking up and down the aisles with his video camera glued to his face, documenting all of this.

I’m someone that performs best under pressure, but I really struggled to write this. How do you sum up the meaning of someone’s life, or what they mean to you in a single speech? How do you find the words to say goodbye to someone you have never lived life without?

There’s a quote that goes something like, “Don’t disregard the little things in life. They are a big part of your time on this earth.” That quote sums up my dad in a nutshell – he was a man who delighted in simple, wholesome things. He was sentimental – about everything. 

• He was always writing little notes on scraps of paper all over the house, facts, memories, what we ate for dinner Wednesday night, what grocery store we went to last Sunday. 

• He’d save coins he picked up off the street – not coins of a particular value or age, just regular ones.

• He had a collection of old fortune cookie fortunes that we discovered after his passing he had stashed in his closet.

That’s how much he loved life, he loved every aspect of it. Even the most small and seemingly mundane details about life had immense value to him. 

I want to share some of those little things about him that stand out to me, and that added up to make him who he was as a human being and as a father:

First and foremost, Dad was extremely inquisitive.

It’s what made him an excellent journalist. And outside of work, his curiosity about people would drive him to ask a seemingly never-ending barrage of questions. Sometimes I’d be annoyed by it. But It enabled him to carry on a conversation with just about anybody – even if it seemed like they had nothing in common, he’d uncover common ground. He always genuinely wanted to know people, where they came from, what made them tick. 

Dad was an information bank. 

He could tell you random things like when President Zachery Taylor died, or what day of the week September 30, 1977 was on. He would always send me text reminders of every anniversary – grandma and grandpa’s wedding anniversary, their death anniversaries, the 400th anniversary of some battle I never heard of, the last time we ate at such and such Chinese restaurant and what we ordered.... I could never forget an important historical event (or ordinary happening) if I tried. And when I married my husband, Peter, my dad made sure he never forgot those dates either.

Dad had a distinct sense of humor. 

We’d be at the dinner table deep in conversation, and he’d be quiet for most of it. And then suddenly he’d burst out with a joke that he’d been working through in his head the whole time, except he’d be struggling to get to the punch line because he’s already laughing. You could just tell that his brain was always working, thinking of the next witty thing he would say.

In his last week or so at the hospital before he moved to hospice and passed away, he was using the last bit of energy he had to try and scribble some notes down on a notepad to give to people. He specifically requested I not share the notes with anyone yet (presumably because he wanted to perfect his writing first), but I took a peek. Even in the end, one of the last things he wrote was was a joke that he must not have been able to get out of his head. “Tell Daphné my GPS keeps getting stuck at Northwestern.” 

Dad was a natural storyteller.

I’ve heard so much about the good ol’ days. One of his favorite stories to tell me and my mom was about his time working at Art’s Drive-In. He was about 14, and worked as a burger flipper. His manager provided guidance that any patties that fell to the floor were not to be thrown out, but put back on the grill and then served. Other trade secrets he learned – always dilute the ketchup with leftover liquid from chopped tomatoes, and the mustard with pickle juice. This was probably my first lesson on how to be more economical. And what not to do should I ever open a restaurant. 

Dad always found himself in the midst of historical events. 

My parents and I were in the Philippines visiting my mom’s family. I was about 4 or 5 at the time. Somehow a cousin-in-law was able to trick the government of Manila into thinking my dad was a bigger journalist hot-shot than he was. We got to meet with Vice President Joseph Estrada, and they threw what essentially amounted to a modest parade, banda de musico and all, where Dad received the key to the city of Manila. 

Usually, the roles he played were supporting ones – bystander or reporter. But this particular time, he made history. He’s in good company – the key to Manila was presented to William Howard Taft in 1905, and Miss Universe 2015 Pia Wurtzbach received one too. My mom was so embarrassed, but hey, at least now we can get into Manila whenever we want.

Dad had a big, wild imagination – and taught me the importance of making time for play and joy.

I’m an only child. Every evening, and every weekend, no matter how hard he had worked at the office, he’d transformed into my devoted playmate and partner in crime when he got home. 

We’d play so many board games. He tolerated hours of Pretty Pretty Princess, and taught me how to play chess. He would never let me win, no matter what game we were playing. It taught me how to lose gracefully, but also showed me that he always considered me fully capable of beating him.

He also instilled in me a love of literature. Without fail, every night no matter how tired he was, he’d read to me – Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales, Chronicles of Narnia, and our personal favorite, the Redwall series. It eventually led to a love of writing and creating my own stories, as a hobby, and later as an English major and in brief stints writing for magazines and websites in my early twenties.

Dad always thought of others first, and went the extra mile for them, no matter what he was going through himself. 

When I became enamored with figure skating, he bought me a pair of rollerskates so he could help me practice gliding in our basement – the perfect workaround for snowy winters and the fact that skating class wouldn't start until spring because he just knew I couldn’t wait to get started. This devotion to my passions later evolved from building makeshift skating rinks into driving me at 5am on Saturdays to the skating rink, tolerating the loud rap music I’d blare in the car to wake myself up. 

He also loved to help others. In fact, one time when I was little, my cousins were visiting and my parents took us all to Saturday evening mass right here in this church. It was one of those muggy summer days that turned into a terrifying thunderstorm. Dad offered his umbrella to a fellow parishioner who wanted to run out to his car and pull it around the front for his wife – little did he know the umbrella he lent out was actually grandma’s old sun umbrella and definitely not waterproof. The guy handed that umbrella back to my dad, entirely soaked from head to toe. You can’t deny Dad’s intentions were always pure – even though things maybe didn’t work out like he hoped.

Even in his last year, as he grew sicker and weaker and lost his ability to eat and to speak, and eventually to stand, he was always thinking about me and my mom. Every time we visited him in the hospital, he’d always do this little wave, almost like a “shoo,” if we stayed with him too long (usually around 5:30). He’d be concerned about us driving after dark and about us missing our dinner time.

The day he died, he literally waited until our friend Shirley arrived at his room, and quietly he passed away, when he knew we wouldn’t be alone. He passed away at 5:30, which was the time he’d always send us home. He wanted to make sure we would be leaving on time.

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My dad battled cancer for over 2 decades. And when he wasn’t fighting the cancer, he dealt with immensely painful side effects. He always was looking to make the big comeback -- that he would overcome the cancer and be able to continue living a big life – taking my mom to Europe, finally moving out of Chicago to a quiet house on Lake Michigan somewhere.

But cancer is relentless, and those big plans never came to fruition. 

I used to think how terrible it was that his illness meant there were things in life he never got to accomplish, but he never, ever saw it that way. If my dad was here, he’d say he lived a good life. It truly was the little things that mattered the most to him, that he took joy in, and that gave him courage to keep persevering all these years.

Last night at dinner, we were actually talking about my dad’s odd habit of saving random things he thought were funny or odd or poignant (like notes and coins and fortunes). Half the time we couldn’t understand what he was saving this stuff for, and now we might not ever know. 

But it honestly doesn’t matter. The point is, he made those little things significant. 

He knew how much the littlest things were a big part of his time on earth.

And every time I find a note he wrote tucked into a book about what year he purchased the book, at what used book fair. Every time I stumble up an old fortune from a Chinese restaurant stuffed in an envelope, I will remember him. I will remember the little things about him, the great things about him, and how he will live on inside the little moments that make up my life.