Ronald Saunders Obituary

Saunders, Ronald M.

Decades ago, in Maywood, Illinois, he had a patchwork map of paper routes displayed in his publishing office for the local newspaper, painstakingly designed-not for profit, but for people. Each route centered around where kids lived and what their mothers felt was safe, so each weekly delivery reached their neighbors, including grandmothers on their porch swings, eagerly awaiting the local news. For the carriers: their first job, and then their first letter of recommendation. It was his way of building something that belonged to the whole community while giving the next generation a place to begin.

Ronald M. Saunders, of Oak Park, Ill., formerly of Maywood, Ill., passed away peacefully on Sunday, May 18, 2025, surrounded by family.

Ronald was born in 1942 in New York to Robert and Laura Saunders. Ronald is survived by his wife, Cynthia; his two sisters, Pamela and Penny (Harry Lee) Hall; his four daughters, Brett (Jeffrey Fadigan), Yvonne (Lt. Col. Andrew Teigeler), Dyan (Seán McCarthy), and Stacy (Joseph Mitzenmacher); and his six grandchildren.

He had an idyllic childhood-swimming in the creek, husking corn late summers, and sledding in winters-in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes. He graduated summa cum laude from Oberlin College in the 1960s, then deferred his admittance into Columbia University Medical School to serve for a year in YMCA World Service in Ecuador. There he became fluent in Spanish and led youth programs to bring kindergarten education to poor children in the mountains and coach youth basketball. His service led him to forgo medical school and instead study theology as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago. When the program concluded, he remained in Chicago-a center of Civil Rights activism-and redirected his efforts to public service through the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal office leading the charge for the War on Poverty, where he became the youngest Director of a pilot early childhood education program later dubbed Head Start.

As a young man in the Sixties, Ronald experienced everything-from traveling across country in a van, to registering voters in Mississippi-all while sporting a free and gentle spirit typified in one of his favorite movies, Easy Rider.

His work with OEO led him to fellow activist and future spouse, Cynthia. They chose to raise her four children, who became his own, in Maywood, a town with wonderful neighborhoods and housing stock, but which had experienced dramatic demographic shifts, damaging economic deflation and a loss of leadership continuity and institutional memory resulting from a period of rapid White Flight in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Ronald believed in giving people a fair chance, including their first chance and a second chance. He established a yarn and macramé shop, Hearth and Home, in Maywood, which tucked in a program to rehabilitate convicted criminals. He gave that start-up to an older relative who ran it as a yarn shop for many years, Irene's Yarn Shop, in Broadview, Ill. He also established a long-running community newspaper, The Graphic, to fill a gap left by larger corporate media and ran the business like a nonprofit youth development and jobs program. He created a map of intricate and often tiny paper routes designed to fit where the carriers lived and where their mothers were comfortable allowing their children to deliver the weekly papers, which were often delivered into the hands of grandmothers sitting on porch swings awaiting their local news. This was the first job of these young paper carriers, and Ronald would write their first letters of recommendation toward their next steps in job advancement.

A little over a decade later, he established The JobSource, a weekly newspaper, delivered across Chicagoland, plus parts of Indiana and Wisconsin. The career and job-focused paper was designed exclusively to help people find and fill a job, with a dose of hopeful job seeking advice; a concept ahead of its time, anticipating today's online job platforms and prompting the big city newspapers to adapt and compete to offer dedicated career-focused journalism for the first time.

His later ventures supported entrepreneurs and included focused publications on everything from fine cuisine to lottery games. With his experience in logistics and delivery, his final career accomplishment was helping to develop a medical nuclear waste pickup service.

As a volunteer in Maywood, Ronald was active in many community organizations as President and in other roles, most notably for Rotary through which he earned the honor of Rotary Man of the Year for Northern Illinois, NoMCO (North Maywood Community Organization), Chamber of Commerce, and the Lincoln School PTA, where he once surprised everyone by suddenly breaking into Spanish as he realized a sizable number of Spanish-speaking parents among the audience, from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guatemala.

Ronald ran for Mayor of Maywood in 1981, a hotly contested election during which he received threats from individuals claiming ties to organized crime warning him to get on board or else not to run. His phones were tampered with and his trash stolen. He lost the race by a handful of votes, but after contesting due to credible accounts of ballot box stuffing, he won on the recount. However, considering the passage of time for legal process, the courts ordered a special election instead of installing him, upon which event he ultimately lost to the "incumbent," who was the first African American to become Mayor; a result he could live with.

His service to others started at home, where he was very supportive of his wife's successful executive career in manufacturing for a Fortune top 50 company, practically unheard of for a woman at that time. He was a devoted father who read to his young daughters every night, drove them to activities, and played with them at the drop of a hat, whether throwing the football and Frisbee outside or playing Nerf dodge ball inside the house. After retirement, being utterly reliable for the next generation too, he was always first in the car pick-up line for his grandchildren at school.

Ronald evolved with grace to meet the times of his life, often ahead of his time, moving easily from activist to adopting-father, from businessman to hands-on grandfather. He will be remembered as a gentleman and a scholar, as a community-builder, and in his final days, as a spiritual warrior who preferred to face a "conscious death" without sedation, because as he puts it, "pain means something" and "this is a unique experience." In life, as in death, a role model for his family and for everyone in face of these difficult times.

At his request and to honor his character, in lieu of funeral services we ask that all who wish to participate make a donation in his honor to the American Heart Association, YMCA World Service, or a charity of your choice.

© 2025 The Family of Ronald M. Saunders. All rights reserved.

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