Jon Margolis, who distinguished himself as a national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune before retiring to Vermont and lending his talents to the state’s much smaller world of journalism, died Monday at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. He was 83.
Margolis’ wife, Sally, confirmed his death. They would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on Feb. 15, she said.
In a note to friends early this month as he was preparing for treatment of an illness, Margolis, of South Burlington, reflected on his mortality with his trademark whimsy.
“It’s OK. Nobody lives forever. I’ve lived for 1,000 months, and you know what? I’ve enjoyed almost every last one of them. I’m a lucky guy,” he wrote. “For the last 740 or so of those months much of the joy came from the presence in my life of the former Sally Thompson.”
Margolis may be best known to Vermonters for his years chronicling politics and policy in the state after moving to the Northeast Kingdom in 1995. He freelanced, then founded his own news website and then, from 2010 through 2020, served as a political columnist for VTDigger. Throughout that time, he was a steady presence on “Vermont This Week,” the weekly roundtable on the television station now known as Vermont Public.
“Jon understood our big ambitions as a fledgling news organization in Vermont and put his professional elbow grease into the effort,” said VTDigger founder and former editor-in-chief Anne Galloway.
“Working with Jon was one of the greatest pleasures of my career,” she said. “I will miss his warmheartedness, raspy voice and acerbic sense of humor.”
Margolis’ time in Vermont journalism was just the coda to a long career that brought him from city halls and state capitals to the presidential campaign trail. During his 23 years at the Tribune — most of them based in Washington, D.C. — he covered four presidential campaigns, according to an obituary prepared by his family.
“That was the center of everything for all those years,” his daughter, Katey, said in an interview.
But reporting wasn’t the only thing that made him tick. Margolis loved baseball — the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Mets and, most of all, Jackie Robinson. He enjoyed fly fishing and even wrote a beginner’s guide to the sport. And he was an aficionado of opera and jazz.
Katey’s most enduring memory of her father, she said, was a game day ritual when he was living in Chicago. He would go out to buy the ingredients for a roast beef sandwich, return home to prepare and enjoy it with a cream soda (or perhaps a beer), turn the game on, turn the sound off, put on some opera and lie on a couch with a newspaper.
“That, to me, is very much my father,” she said.
Born in Trenton, N.J., on Sept. 25, 1940, Margolis studied history at Oberlin College before taking his first journalism job at the Bergen Record in Hackensack, N.J., according to the obituary. He would go on to report for the Miami Herald, the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and Newsday on Long Island.
It was at Newsday in 1971, according to his family, that Margolis established a national reputation covering the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York that killed 33 incarcerated people and 10 prison employees. “He was really proud of the Attica coverage that he did,” Katey said.
After a stint as Newsday’s Albany bureau chief, Margolis joined the Tribune in 1973, serving as a national political correspondent from the end of the Nixon administration through the election of President George H.W. Bush. By 1989, according to Katey, he was ready to leave the campaign trail and moved to Chicago, where he became a sports columnist and then general columnist.
Margolis took a buyout from the Tribune in 1995 and retired to a property in Barton that he and Sally had bought years earlier. But he didn’t really retire. He freelanced for the Rutland Herald, the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Seven Days, and he published a popular history, “The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964.”
In 2008, the former ink-stained wretch did something improbable: He started his own website, Vermont News Guy, to cover his adopted state. In an interview with Seven Days at the time, he said he had done so in response to the budget cuts that had depleted newspapers in Vermont and elsewhere.
“I kept telling anyone who would listen, ‘Someone should do something about this,’” he explained. “A lot of people would turn to me and say, ‘Why don’t you?’”
Margolis’ new venture prompted him to start making the trek to the Statehouse in Montpelier a couple times a week.
“If you wanna know what’s going on in the legislature, you’ve gotta be there,” he told Seven Days in 2010. “You’ve gotta talk to people. You have to run into people in the corridors and have a cup of coffee with them.”
Margolis soon became a constant — and recognizable — presence at the Statehouse, shuffling around with his hands behind his back and a gleam in his eye, often wearing a tan or tweed jacket that added to his professorial air.
He didn’t relish running the website (“It was too much work,” he admitted) and, after the 2010 election, he shuttered Vermont News Guy in favor of writing for VTDigger and what was then known as Vermont PBS.
“When Jon came to me in the early days of VTDigger to offer a column, I was beyond thrilled,” Galloway said, describing her fledgling news outlet as “an upstart website that was still finding its place in the journalism landscape.”
Cate Chant, an early editor for VTDigger, said the organization “benefited greatly from Jon’s professionalism.”
“He brought his old-school journalism values and practices to every piece he reported and wrote,” she said.
Margolis was “a real shoe-leather reporter and columnist who dug deep and picked up the phone instead of settling for a quote from a press release,” said Mark Johnson, a former senior editor and reporter for VTDigger. “He was a good guy to work with and showed you didn’t have to be mean-spirited to write an insightful column.”
At VTDigger, Margolis also took on an informal role: mentor to a younger generation of journalists.
When Jasper Craven arrived at the news outlet in his early 20s to cover Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, Margolis doled out “just incredible advice on how to cover national politics,” Craven recalled. The veteran journalist explained that, on the campaign trail, reporters tend to chase the same tired stories. “He gave me some tips of the trade on how to break out of the pack,” Craven said.
“To have someone like Jon have confidence in me and support me and share his wealth of knowledge was just very crucial at that time,” Craven said.
According to Jim Welch, a former senior editor and interim executive director of VTDigger, Margolis “was the perfect bridge between traditional and new media.” Every day, Welch said, “he set a fine example for young reporters in pursuing the best version of the truth and holding public officials to account.”
And though he had hobnobbed with presidents and members of Congress, Margolis brought a certain humility to his work in Vermont’s tiny capital, according to Colin Meyn, a former managing editor of VTDigger.
“To his credit, he was never someone who tried to cast himself as bigger than the issues that he was writing about,” Meyn said, adding that he had to do his own research to learn about Margolis’ background. “He was much more focused on what was interesting about the things he was covering that day and who were the political players and the issues that deserved attention.”
Not everybody loved what he wrote. Like any good political columnist, Meyn said, Margolis enjoyed “poking people when it was appropriate, calling people out on their B.S.”
“He also relished taking positions that he knew would piss people off,” Meyn said.
After the 2020 election — and his 80th birthday — Margolis decided it was time to put down his pen. At that point, by his own estimation, he had written some 500 columns for VTDigger.
In a farewell piece, Margolis wrote that as his birthday had approached, “it occurred to me that there is something unseemly about an 80-year-old covering the news and writing political analysis.”
“Such work is better suited for younger people who are more energetic and less jaded, people who have more to learn because they know less,” he wrote. “Yes, there are disadvantages to knowing too much; it’s always possible that some of what you know has become obsolete.”
Margolis concluded, “Enough. I will miss doing this. But no one is irreplaceable, and the time has come.”
In addition to his wife, Sally, and his daughter, Katey, Margolis is survived by his son, Michael; his daughter-in-law, Amy; his granddaughter, Shally; and his sister, Susanna.
