Marie Jacque Schanen
March 20, 1914 - August 7, 2008

In a fitting coda to her life, Marie Jacque Schanen spent her last summer living in a cottage beside the lake she loved, surrounded by family members and close to the community where she was born, raised a family and helped found Ozaukee Press.
     Mrs. Schanen died on Aug. 7 at the age of 94 at her summer residence at Sucker Brook on the Lake Michigan beach just north of Port Washington.
     Born on a farm at the edge of Port Washington, she attended Port Washington High School, where she met William F. Schanen Jr., whom she would one day marry and in 1940 join in the risky adventure of starting a newspaper that pioneered the printing method that today is used for virtually all newspapers.
     Bill Schanen Jr.’s idea was to produce a tabloid weekly newspaper using photo-offset printing that provided clear reproduction of large photographs, something that was impossible with the traditional letterpress equipment used by other newspapers.
     Mrs. Schanen worked beside her husband in the hands-on business of putting out the newspaper, doing everything from writing news stories to folding and inserting pages of the newspaper that were printed two at a time on a tiny press.
     Ozaukee Press went on to become one of the state’s largest circulation weekly newspapers and has been honored a number of times as Wisconsin community newspaper of the year in recognition of journalistic excellence.
     Mrs. Schanen’s newspaper work was interrupted by the arrival of five children. Her son, Bill Schanen III, current publisher of Ozaukee Press, recalled that “our family life pretty much followed the rhythms of the newspaper business. My mother and my sisters and I knew we wouldn’t see our father on Tuesday nights when they started pasting up the pages of the Press, and that Wednesday was a big day because the paper came out then, and that Wednesday night there could be a few calls to the house from people disgruntled by an editorial or news story.”
     After her husband died in 1971, the same year her daughter Maureen died, Mrs. Schanen gave more of her time to the newspaper, where she wrote the popular column titled “I See by Marie” and other features, and to her then-grown children and their families.
     “She was the best sport I ever knew,” her daughter Moira Reynolds said. “She never said no to doing anything. She was just a wonderful companion, no matter what we wanted to do.”
     Her husband’s passion was sailing, and Mrs. Schanen became an able sailor in her own right and sailed as a crew member in the Chicago to Mackinac Race in 1963, a time when very few women took part in offshore sailboat racing.
     “She would often sail with my wife and me and our children on cruises,” Bill Schanen III said, “and she could handle anything, including putting up with two little kids in a cramped sailboat in awful weather.”
     Her daughter Micca Hutchins recalled a Lake Michigan crossing in a “terrible northeaster” when “Marie took her tricks at the helm as we drove through the night and my children saw their grandmother, 85 years old at the time, handle the boat like the pro she was.”
     She was an adventuresome traveler on land as well. One of her traveling companions, her daughter Deirdre Schanen, told of a trip to France and Luxembourg during which their plan to navigate the railroad system on their own backfired and they found themselves trapped on a local train for a day without food. Through it all, Deirdre Schanen said, her mother “never got angry and never lost her sense of humor. But then that’s how she was about everything in her life—always gracious, never saying a bad word about anyone.”
     Loretta Croatt, one of a number of former Ozaukee Press employees who paid their respects to Mrs. Schanen at a visitation prior to the funeral Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Port Washington Tuesday, remembered her as a glamorous, always friendly presence at the newspaper. “She always looked perfect, even when I saw her at church just a few months ago,” she said.   
     Mrs. Schanen remained vigorous late into her life. At the age of 91, she boarded a cruise ship in New York with her friend Lou Steinert and voyaged on the Atlantic Ocean along the East Coast to Canada. “She went everywhere” on the sometimes exhausting trip, Mrs. Steinert said. “She wanted to see everything and do everything.”
     One of the constants in Mrs. Schanen’s life was her love of Lake Michigan, whose views she enjoyed from her house on the bluff south of Port Washington and the Sucker Brook cottage, where summers, including her last, were filled with visits by an ever-changing cast of family members. Well into her 90s, she was taking two-mile walks on the beach.
     Marie Schanen was one of four children of Nicholas and Anna Jacque, born March 20, 1914, on the family farm located on land that is the present site of St. Peter of Alcantara Catholic Church and the surrounding developed area.
     She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Milwaukee State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and worked as an elementary school teacher before her marriage in 1939.
     She is survived by a son, Bill (Jean) Schanen III of Port Washington; and three daughters, Deirdre (John Strauss) Schanen, an artist, of St. Charles, Ill.; Micca (Alan) Hutchins, a health care project manager, of Mount Horeb, and Moira (Alan) Reynolds, a teacher, of Naples, Fla.
     Mrs. Schanen had nine grandchildren: Bill (Greta) Schanen IV, Erin (Richard Reichelsdorfer) Schanen, Shannon (Matthieu) Dutriaux, Suki (Jake) Hovermale, Nicholas Burton, Duffy (Alyson McGinty-Hutchins) Hutchins, Monet (Kirk) Haskins, Annie-Laurie Reynolds and Robert Reynolds. She had four great-grandchildren and two step-great-grandchildren.
     She is further survived by two sisters, Pauline Schils of Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Lucille (Elmer) Schmit of Port Washington; a brother, Nicholas of Port Washington; and a sister-in-law, Shirley Schanen (Gerald) Gruen of Port Washington.                                          She was preceded in death by her husband and a daughter, Maureen Schanen, who was a student at the UW-Madison at the time of her death.
     Mrs. Schanen was a charter member of the Port Washington Yacht Club and a member for more than 60 years of the Port Washington Woman’s Club. In 1973, she spearheaded a successful drive to bring the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and its famous conductor, Kenneth Schermerhorn, to Port Washington for a concert series.
     Sixty-eight years after Mrs. Schanen and her husband published the first issue of Ozaukee Press (on Aug. 15, 1940), the newspaper continues to thrive as an independent, family-owned weekly, now managed by members of two generations of the family. The family business, headquartered on Main Street in downtown Port Washington, also publishes SAILING Magazine, a national publication.
     Mrs. Schanen was buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Port Washington Wednesday.
                The family has designated the Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine, Wilmer Eye Institute, (One Charter Center, 100 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21201) for memorials in Mrs. Schanen’s name.

 

 

 
Service:

A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Tuesday, August 12th at 6 PM at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Port Washington

Cemetery:

Marie will be laid to rest next to her husband in St. Mary's Cemetery in Port Washington.

Tributes