Obituary of Ronald Merritt Saunders – Oak Park, Illinois

Ronald Merritt Saunders of Oak Park, Ill. (25 yrs), formerly of Maywood, Ill. (26 yrs), passed away peacefully on Sunday, May 18, 2025, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago surrounded by family.

Ronald was born on April 30, 1942, in Buffalo, N.Y., to Robert and Laura Saunders. He is survived by his wife , Cynthia Walley Saunders; his two sisters, Pamela Saunders of Spokane, Wash., and Penny (Harry Lee) Hall, of Jacksonville, Ill.; his four daughters, Brett Saunders Fadigan (Jeffrey Fadigan) of Oak Park, Ill. and Swarthmore, Penn., Dr. Yvonne Teigeler (Lt. Col. Andrew Teigeler) of Las Vegas, Dyan (Seán McCarthy) of Corvallis, Ore., and Stacy Saunders (Joseph Mitzenmacher), of River Forest, Ill.; his six grandchildren, Jacob, Nathan, and Samuel Ronald Mitzenmacher, Isabelle McCarthy, Isaac and Joseph Teigeler.

Ronald had an idyllic childhood—swimming in the creek, husking corn late summers, and sledding in winters—in Trumansburg, N.Y. near Ithaca where his father worked for Cornell University. He graduated summa cum laude from Oberlin College in 1964, then deferred his admittance into Columbia Medical School to serve for a year in YMCA World Service in Ecuador. There he became fluent in Spanish and led youth programs to bring kindergarten education to poor children in the mountains and coach youth basketball. His service led him to forgo medical school and instead study theology as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago, but when the program concluded he remained in Chicago—a center of Civil Rights activism—and redirected his efforts to public service through the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal office leading the charge for the War on Poverty, where he became the youngest Director of a pilot early childhood education program later dubbed Head Start.

As a young man in the Sixties, Ron experienced everything from traveling across country in a van,  to registering voters in Mississippi, all while sporting a free and gentle spirit typified in one of his favorite movies, Easy Rider.

His work with Head Start led him to fellow activist and future spouse, Cynthia. They chose to raise her four children, who became his own, in Maywood, a town with wonderful neighborhoods and housing stock, but which had experienced dramatic demographic shifts, damaging economic deflation and a loss of leadership continuity and institutional memory resulting from a period of rapid White Flight in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Ronald established a yarn and macramé shop, Hearth and Home, on 5th avenue in Maywood, which tucked in programs to rehabilitate convicted criminals, and which he turned over to his mother-in-law who ran it as Irene's Yarn Shop in Broadview, Ill. for many years. He also established a  community newspaper, The Graphic, to fill a gap left by larger corporate media and ran his long-term business like a nonprofit youth development and jobs program. He created a map of intricate and often tiny paper routes designed to fit where the carriers lived and where their mothers were comfortable allowing their children to deliver the weekly papers, which were often delivered into the hands of grandmothers sitting on porch swings awaiting their local news. For these young paper carriers, Ronald would write their first letters of recommendation as a next step in their job advancement.

A little over a decade later, he established The JobSource, a weekly newspaper, delivered across  Chicagoland, including parts of Indiana and Wisconsin. The career and job-focused paper was designed exclusively to help people find and fill a job, with a dose of hopeful job seeking advice; a concept ahead of its time, anticipating today's online job platforms and prompting the big city newspapers to adapt and compete to offer dedicated career-focused journalism for the first time.

His later publishing ventures supported entrepreneurs and included focused publications on everything from fine cuisine to tips for winning lottery games. With his experience in logistics and delivery, his final career accomplishment was helping to develop a medical nuclear waste pickup service.

As a volunteer in Maywood, Ronald was active in many community organizations as President and other roles, most notably for Rotary through which he earned the honor of Rotary Man of the Year for Northern Illinois, NoMCO (North Maywood Community Organization), Chamber of Commerce, and Lincoln School PTA, where he surprised everyone at a general session by suddenly breaking into Spanish as he realized a sizable audience of Spanish-speaking parents among the crowd, from  Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guatemala.

Ronald ran for Mayor of Maywood in 1981, a hotly contested election with nine candidates during which he received threats from individuals claiming ties to organized crime warning him not to run, had his phones tampered with and his trash stolen all while stumping about fighting the corruption inherent in the contracts process funneling money away from Maywood business toward nearby Melrose Park. He lost the race by a handful of votes and, amid credible rumors of ballot box stuffing in a central precinct, called for a recount which ultimately ruled in his favor. After the prolonged legal battle, however, the courts ordered a special election instead of installing him, upon which event he ultimately lost significantly to the "incumbent", Mayor Joe Freelon, who was the first African American to become Mayor; a result he could live with.

His service to others started at home, where he was very supportive of his wife's successful executive career in manufacturing for a Fortune 100 company, practically unheard of for a woman at that time. He was a devoted father who read to his young daughters every night, drove them to activities, and played with them at the drop of a hat, whether throwing the football and Frisbee outside or playing Nerf ball battles inside the house when Mom was out. After retirement, being utterly reliable for the next generation too, he was always first in the car pick-up line for his grandchildren at school.

Ronald evolved with grace to meet the times of his life, often ahead of his time, moving easily from activist to adopting-father, from business man to hands-on grandfather. He will be remembered as a gentleman and a scholar, as a community-builder, and in his final days, as a spiritual warrior who preferred to face a "conscious death" without sedation, because "pain means something". In life, as in death, a role model for his family and for everyone in face of difficult times.

© 2025 The Family of Ronald Saunders. All rights reserved.