Anne Lunde

Anne Lunde died on 22 April 2026 after a long illness. She was 74. She had spent her last years at Belmont Village in Glenview. There was no memorial service.

Journal and Topics published a detailed remembrance by Igor Studenkov on 12 May 2026, several weeks after her death. The Chicago Tribune and other local outlets also noted her passing. Colleagues and fellow historians emphasized both her stubborn streak and the unmatched depth of her Northwest Side knowledge. Taft Alumni Association board president Paulette English called her 'a force of nature' whose knowledge of the Edison and Norwood community and the greater Northwest Side was legendary, and said she left an unmatchable legacy.

Anne Lunde was born in 1952 in Chicago's Edison Park neighborhood. Journalism was already a family craft: her mother, Grace Lunde (nee Stafford), worked for Des Plaines Publishing Company, starting as a columnist, later editing the Edison-Norwood Times Review, and serving as a founding editor of the Edgebrook-Sauganash Times Review before retiring in 1995.

Lunde attended Ebinger Elementary School in Edison Park and Taft High School in Norwood Park, graduating in 1969. She went on to Rockford College. From an early age she was immersed in the Northwest Side communities she would later document as a reporter and historian.

Lunde began as a reporter and later editor for Des Plaines Publishing's neighborhood newspapers, following the path her mother had taken. When the company sold its papers to Pioneer Press in 1994, she remained with the titles. By the early 2000s she was one of the managing editors for Pioneer Press's Central Bureau, whose papers included the Des Plaines Times, Edison-Norwood Times Review, Edgebrook Times Review, Mount Prospect Times, Niles Herald-Spectator, Norridge-Harwood Heights News and Park Ridge Herald-Advocate.

Retired Pioneer Press reporter Kathryn Routliffe remembered her as curmudgeonly, driven, and 'everywhere all at once,' adding that 'Anne knew everybody and knew about everybody.' Expansion at Sun-Times Media in the early 2000s gave way to contraction after the 2008 financial crisis. Many city and suburban papers were sold or closed. Lunde was laid off in 2009, and the Edison-Norwood Times Review shut a year later.

Between October 2013 and February 2024 she reported for Journal and Topics, mainly for the Park Ridge Journal (later combined with the Niles Journal) and the Rosemont Journal. Health issues gradually reduced her assignments, though she still filed occasional pieces until October 2024. Managing editor Tom Wessell, who sat next to her for nearly a decade in Des Plaines, said her city council and feature work was rich in facts and historical background, and that she made other reporters better. Former Pioneer Press staffer Jennifer Johnson, who often covered the same meetings after Lunde joined Journal and Topics, said asking Lunde about Edison Park or Park Ridge 'would produce better results than a Google search.'

Outside daily reporting, Lunde devoted decades to local history and alumni life. She was active in the Taft Alumni Association for about forty years; former board member Jerry Stephenson credited her as one of those who resurrected the group in the 1980s, and said she was rarely without cameras and a notebook. She served as historian and archivist for the Norwood Park Historical Society, sat on the Park Ridge Heritage Committee, and worked as consulting historian for the Park Ridge City Centennial Steering Committee. She researched and designed the History Wall at Norwood Crossing retirement center in Norwood Park.

In 2024 she co-authored Norwood Park, A View From the Ridge, a 355-page history of the community. She had no children. Her brother, Albert, died a few years before her. In later years she lived at Belmont Village assisted living community in Glenview.

Lunde's legacy rests in the paper trail of neighborhood newsrooms and in the local history projects she helped build. Through decades at Des Plaines Publishing, Pioneer Press and Journal and Topics, she recorded council meetings, features and people who might otherwise have left no lasting public record. Through the Taft Alumni Association, the Norwood Park Historical Society, Park Ridge heritage work and the History Wall at Norwood Crossing, she organized memory for communities on Chicago's far Northwest Side.

Her 2024 co-authored book Norwood Park, A View From the Ridge fixed a detailed account of that neighborhood in print. Former colleagues described her as someone whose work was her life, and whose reporting was meant so that the present would not be lost to history.