Tom Roeser Dead - A great conservative voice in the liberal pandering Democratic City of Chicago and across this nation...Also was a tireless giver to Catholic Charities. Godspeed my friend and my hero, Detective Shavedlongcock
Tom Roeser -- a political, social and religious commentator known for his staunchly conservative views and often-biting columns -- has died, according to Catholic Citizens of Illinois and news reports.
Roeser was the author of a book about Chicago's legendary priest of Skid Row, the late Monsignor Ignatius McDermott. And although Roeser lived in Park Ridge, he regularly traveled into the city to attend services at St. John Cantius Church, which offers Tridentine Latin mass.
In recent years Roeser took to blogging, and one of his favorite targets was the leadership of the Archdiocese of Chicago, including Cardinal Francis George and Chancellor Jimmy Lago, who he viewed as an arm of the Democratic establishment.
Tiring of the rhetoric, George wrote last year to members of Catholic Citizens of Illinois, which Roeser helped lead, asking them to rein him in.
What follows is the Catholic Citizens biography on Roeser:
Thomas F. Roeser, president of his own corporate relations firm, and regular Op Ed contributor to the Chicago Sun-Times, is radio talk show host, writer, lecturer, teacher, and former vice president of The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago, whose newspaper columns have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. A former John F. Kennedy Fellow, Harvard, and Woodrow Wilson International Fellow, Princeton, New Jersey, he has served as Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Roosevelt University, Chicago. He is a Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, the Chicago-based free market research center. He is the author of the book, Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott, Co-Founder of Chicago's Famed Haymarket Center (McDermott Foundation, 2002).
Roeser is a former assistant to the Secretary of Commerce who formed the nation's first program to assist minority entrepreneurs (now the Minority Business Development Agency) and later served as Director-Public Affairs for the Peace Corps. For 27 years he formed and operated the government relations department for The Quaker Oats Company--serving for many of them as Vice President. He has been Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Wharton School of Finance, University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Loyola University of Chicago; DePaul University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and St. Johns College, Oxford.
He was born in Evanston, Illinois and attended elementary and secondary schools in Chicago, graduating from St. John's University at Collegeville, Minnesota. After an extensive experience covering politics in Minnesota, he became a research-publicist to the Minnesota Republican Party; then an aide to two U.S. congressmen and a governor. He returned to Chicago to launch The Quaker Oats Company's government relations department in 1964 and continued his education with post-graduate studies at DePaul and Loyola Universities.
He took a leave of absence from Quaker in 1969 to form the nation's first unit of government dedicated to fostering minority enterprise. Roeser gave President Richard Nixon a strategy that coordinated the 116 government programs which could be utilized for minority entrepreneurs. He then recommended the abolition of his own federal agency. This controversial challenge to the permanent bureaucracy led to Roeser's reassignment as Director-Public Affairs for the Peace Corps.
He returned to Quaker in 1971 and served as vice president until retirement in 1991, and since that time has been representing a variety of clients on public policy issues.
As the first corporate government relations executive to become a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard, he designed the course "Influencing the System" which shows how nine constituencies intersect to produce public policy. He later received a Woodrow Wilson International Fellowship at Princeton, NJ, and in addition to his work at Quaker took the course to many private colleges across the nation.
On radio, Roeser (a member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, AFL-CIO) hosts his own program of talk which airs on WLS-AM (ABC) Sunday. He has been a senior correspondent and talk show host for Catholic Family Radio, a network with outlets in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. He is an occasional commentator on "Chicago Tonight" which is seen on WTTW-TV, Chicagoland public television.
Long active in Chicago civic organizations, he was a founder of Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts), Chicago's anti-vote fraud organization, and is chairman of the City Club of Chicago, one of the city's oldest civic reform organizations. He is a director of the Better Government Association, and the United Republican Fund of Illinois, serves on the Chicago Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a Board member of Haymarket Center of Chicago. He has been program chairman for Rotary One, the founding chapter of Rotary International, the first service club in the world. In addition, he is a director of The Rockford Institute and serves as member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. He serves as program chairman of the Chicago Legatus chapter (an organization of Chicago area Catholic CEOs and senior business executives). He is married to the former Lillian Prescott, the father of four grown children and grandfather of thirteen.
In 1988, he and Mrs. Roeser were named by John Paul II as Knight and Lady of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.
By ChicagoCatholicNews.com
CLICK HERE TO GO TO HIS BIO