Bruce Sagan, who died on Sunday at the age of 96, had two great loves: his wife (and partner in many ventures) Bette Cerf Hill and the city of Chicago.
Great love stories tend to be exclusive affairs. Not so in the case of Bruce and Bette. The love they shared was expansive. It welcomed others–a large family spanning four generations, a wide circle of friends and anyone who had the good fortune to encounter them–into a world that was gracious, convivial, playful and endlessly stimulating. To be in their presence was to be alive to life’s possibilities.
A similar spirit animated Bruce’s relationship with the city. At once modest and utterly self-assured, he left an enduring mark on Chicago but did not feel a need to affix his name or create monuments to himself. There is no Sagan Theater, no Sagan Center for the Performing Arts, no Sagan Institute. Yet it’s hard to think of anyone who has made greater contributions to our common life. A number of treasured cultural spaces in the city–the Steppenwolf Theater, the Joffrey Ballet and the Printers Row Book Fair–would not exist in their present forms, were it not for Bruce’s strategic clarity, entrepreneurial elan and personal generosity.
(Left) Bruce Sagan and his mother, Esther and (right) a portrait of Bruce Sagan, 1953.
Courtesy of Paul Sagan and the Herald archives
President Barack Obama greats Bette Cerf Hill and Bruce Sagan.
Courtesy of Paul Sagan
He brought the same qualities to the struggle for a more equitable city, serving as chair of the Illinois Housing Development Authority and playing a prominent role in the fight against redlining, but it is, above all, as a newspaper man that, I am quite sure, he would want to be remembered.
This publication was at the center of his life’s work. Having purchased it at the age of 24, it became the nucleus of the publishing empire of community newspapers he ultimately built. After he sold the Economist Newspaper Group in 1988, he retained ownership of the Herald, finally converting it into a non-profit and merging it with the South Side Weekly in 2022.
In this time of economic precarity and uncertainty in journalism, no one in the field was more clearsighted, unsentimental and open to innovation than Bruce in his 90s. I always came away from our conversations with renewed clarity and an infusion of his contagious vigor.
It seems odd to describe someone so relentlessly practical as a visionary, but no other word will do. Bruce had a vision of urbanity—of the possibilities of urban life—and worked throughout his long life to realize it. In a sense, the city was his medium.
Bette reported to friends that, as death approached, Bruce said to her with characteristic ardor and fidelity to the facts, “I thought our love would last forever, I was wrong.”
I can hear Bruce’s voice speaking those achingly beautiful words. They resonate with the uncanny combination of hardheaded realism and immense generosity of spirit that graced the lives of all who knew him and were privileged to witness the love he shared with Bette.
Bruce Sagan and his wife, Bette Cerf Hill.
Courtesy of Paul Sagan
Bruce Sagan and his sons (left to right) Paul and Alex Sagan.
Courtesy of Paul Sagan