Jeanne Towar

Jeanne Towar died peacefully at her home on 7 October 2026, at the age of 91, with her daughters by her side. Her obituary was published on Legacy.com on 13 October 2026 through Sullivan Funeral Directors, and Crain's Detroit Business reported her death on 20 October 2026, recalling her as a longtime metro Detroit newspaper executive and community leader. The cause of death was not made public.

Instead of a funeral service, her family arranged a memorial gathering at the Birmingham Athletic Club at 10:30 am on 8 November 2026.

Jeanne Towar grew up in West Dearborn and Wayne, in the western suburbs of Detroit, and attended Wayne Memorial High School. Her mother worked as a bookkeeper for The Wayne Eagle, the local weekly. As Towar recalled in her farewell column in 2015, her mother thought she was too old for a babysitter but too young to be left at home alone, so she persuaded the publisher to let her daughter run errands and do odd jobs at the paper.

At 13 she was writing engagement and wedding notices, church and club news and a column called In Tune with the Teens about life at her high school. She worked at the Eagle until she was 18. "Newspapers have been my life and they have given me so much," she wrote decades later. "I loved the look of them and the smudge of printer's ink on my fingers. The roar of the presses is music to me."

Towar built her career largely on the business side of newspapers, rising through advertising and management at a time when few women held senior posts in the industry. After serving as classified manager of The Wayne Eagle, she became advertising director of The Macomb Daily and the Utica Daily Sentinel.

From 1983 to 1988 she was publisher of The Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, which made her the first woman to publish a daily newspaper in Michigan. She later called those years the high point of a career with many highs. In November 1987 she and editor Jim Sneddon created a regular column on the city's service clubs and charities, and the two of them also founded the paper's Give-A-Christmas Year Around fund. She was also publisher of The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Indiana.

At Crain Communications she served as a vice president and as publisher of Detroit Monthly magazine, whose October 1990 issue announced her appointment. She went on to become marketing director of Crain's Detroit Business and founded Crain's Custom Publishing. Her last executive role was as publisher of The Birmingham Eccentric and vice president for editorial of its owner, HomeTown Communications Network, from which she retired in 2003.

She then took over the Community Connections column that had grown out of the Tribune's service club coverage, writing it weekly for The Mirror, The Daily Tribune and The Oakland Press for 15 years and more than 750 columns. She ended it in June 2015, writing that her 80th birthday loomed and that she no longer wanted a weekly deadline.

Towar had three children: daughters Laura Allison and Linda Marsano and a son, Scott Bevard, who died in 2009. She had seven grandchildren and seven great grandchildren. In 2015 she wrote that her only sister had come into her life the previous year and that she wanted time to get to know her.

She gave a great deal of time to community organisations in Royal Oak, Birmingham and the wider Oakland County area. She was an elected trustee of Oakland Community College from 1996 to 2002 and chaired its board for the last two years of her term. She became a trustee of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Oakland and Macomb in the mid 1980s and was made a lifetime trustee in 2003. She spent 12 years on the board of HAVEN, the Oakland County domestic violence and sexual assault agency, and served on the boards of The Community House in Birmingham, the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, the Salvation Army Royal Oak Citadel and the Royal Oak and Birmingham chambers of commerce. She was a past president of Bloomfield Hills Rotary Club, a member of Royal Oak Rotary and the Royal Oak Woman's Club, and secretary of the Royal Oak Interclub Council.

A lifelong lover of dachshunds, many of them rescues with special needs, she became an advocate for the no kill animal rescue movement and served as secretary of the board of the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance, which works to end the killing of healthy and treatable dogs and cats in Michigan shelters.

Towar opened the publisher's office of a Michigan daily newspaper to women and spent the rest of her working life in senior roles across Detroit area newspapers and magazines. The Give-A-Christmas Year Around fund she co-founded at The Daily Tribune has provided more than 1.5 million dollars in discretionary money to local charities.

Her honours included a place on Crain's Detroit Business list of the 100 Most Influential Women in Metro Detroit and the Michigan Women's Foundation Women of Achievement and Courage Award, both in 2002, HomeTown Communications' Lifetime Achievement Award and the Business Officials Network Wonder Woman Award in 2003, HAVEN's Voice for Victims award in 2010 and the Salvation Army's Civic Service Award in 2014.