Photo Via Joel McNally - Facebook
Joel McNally
Joel McNally with former President Barack Obama
The Shepherd Express community is in mourning from learning of the death of Joel McNally. Joel died on Tuesday. He was 80 years old.
I must have been 11 years old when I first read Joel McNally. In the early ‘70s, as his career in journalism was just beginning, the Milwaukee Journal assigned him the role of pop music critic. It was a beat he enjoyed without taking it too seriously. I remember that one of his Sunday columns was devoted to making fun of the sort of rock critic terminology employed by the heavyweights at Rolling Stone or Creem. If I recall it correctly after all these years, “riff” sounded to him like a new line of Nabisco crackers.
Joel brought a sense of humor to his mission as a writer. He loved his job, but it was more than just work. He covered City Hall for a while and was legendarily carried out of a meeting on orders of Mayor Henry Maier, a politician who took himself too seriously and seldom cracked a smile. Like a latter-day Mark Twain, Joel used his next assignment for the Milwaukee Journal, the “Innocent Bystander” column, to satirize the world as he saw it. He took particular delight in tweaking the deer hunters each fall at the start of hunting season. He was sometimes a thorn in his editor’s side.
After 27 years with the Milwaukee Journal, Joel was let go in 1995 during the paper’s ill-executed merger with the Milwaukee Sentinel. In 1996 he became editor of Milwaukee’s weekly alternative, the Shepherd Express, and I was thrilled and a bit taken aback to share the corner office with him. He departed as editor in 1999 but continued to write his weekly column, “Taking Liberties,” a pointed and no-holds-barred commentary on the state of politics in the United States. The Shepherd’s Publisher Louis Fortis gave Joel a verbal contract allowing him to write the column for life and to say what he thought on any issue—as long as he adhered to the facts. Joel was also a frequent guest on local TV talk shows, including Milwaukee PBS.
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Joel moved to Charlottesville, VA in 2016 with his wife Kit, whom he married in 1966 after graduating from Indiana University’s Journalism School. He continued writing his Shepherd Express column until ill health intervened late in 2024. He remained as an irascible foe of the bullying, corruption and lies that have increasingly characterized American politics. We will miss him.
