BOSTON — Chazy Dowaliby, a longtime newspaper editor and consultant and a onetime aide to former U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, has died. She was 69.
Dowaliby died Monday after a long battle with cancer, her family said.
Dowaliby was executive editor of The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Massachusetts, from 1998 to 2016. She later joined the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government as director of communications, marketing and outreach, retiring in 2018.
She began her journalism career at The Eagle Tribune of Lawrence, her hometown, later working at the Daily Freeman in Kingston, New York. In the mid-1980s, she was president, publisher and chief operating officer of Suburban Newspapers of Northern New Jersey, a division of Ingersoll Publishing Co.
She also served as editor of the group’s newspapers in California and New York. From 1988 through 1991, she was editorial director of Ingersoll newspapers in Birmingham and Coventry, England, and oversaw three national publications of the Irish Press Group in Dublin.
In 1991, she founded Chazy Dowaliby and Associates, a consulting firm that advised print publications, private clients, national corporations and government leaders. She specialized in start-ups, internal communications strategies and image creation in northern Europe and Malta.
A friend, former Ledger publisher Rick Daniels, recalls her “searing energy and boundless intellect.”
“She was a fast friend of the truth and those whose hearts were good,” he said. “Chazy was the archetype of the great journalist, and — like her name — singularly unforgettable,” he said.
In 2016, Dowaliby was inducted into the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame.
“Chazy cared deeply about Quincy, its people and its future,” Mayor Thomas Koch said. “It showed not just in the pages of the Ledger, but in her daily involvement in so many community organizations and initiatives. She was not just a force as an editor; she was a force as part of our community. That’s an extraordinary standard that goes to the heart of community journalism.”
Dowaliby joined Biden’s U.S. Senate campaign in 1972, and she was with the Delaware Democrat when he took the oath of office in an emotional ceremony at the hospital where his two young sons were recovering from injuries suffered in a car crash that killed Biden’s wife and baby daughter.
The former vice-president, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, phoned Dowaliby last month in her room at Massachusetts General Hospital to say goodbye, friends said.
A private memorial service is being planned for January.
The Associated Press
