Ron Neal, aged 63, died on Thursday, March 8, 2012, at the Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale Arizona, owing to complications arising from congestive heart failure.
Mr. Neal, the son of Antoinette Shrimpton Neal and Dr. Herman J. Neal, was born on April 1, 1948, at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
“Ronnie”, as his family liked to call him, grew up in a black middle-class neighborhood, Chatham, on the South Side of Chicago. He did well academically at Ruggles School, then enrolled in September 1961 at Hirsch High School. A proud Hirschite, Ron was accepted into the National Honor Society, served as sports editor of the Hirsch Herald from his freshman year, and played first clarinet in the high school band.
On graduation from Hirsch in June 1965, the young Ronald delivered the Salutatorian address to his class. He concluded by quoting French Nobel-winning writer André Gide; “Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in your self”.
His academic record and extracurricular activities earned him acceptance at Dartmouth College, an Ivy League institution located in Hanover, New Hampshire.
After matriculating at Dartmouth as a member of the class of 1969, Ron helped found the Afro-American Society (creating the journal Blackout!), wrote for the Daily Dartmouth and played clarinet in the Dartmouth College Marching Band.
In the turbulent social milieu of the 1960s, Ron then packed up and returned home to Chicago, where he transferred to the University of Chicago and completed a BA in Linguistics. After graduation, he taught General Education Development (GED) courses in the Chicago community college system before enrolling at Northern Illinois University. There he finished a Master’s degree in Adult Continuing Education.
Ron left Chicago in 1979 (after the Great Blizzard) and moved to New York City. He was employed there as a freelance editorial specialist, working in proofreading, copy-editing and editing at typographic companies, accounting firms, legal institutions and commercial magazines.
In 1989 he was convoked to write the UN Proofreaders Competitive Examination. He passed and was posted to UN Geneva in 1991. The naturally gregarious Ron generated a wide circle of UN friends in Geneva, and stayed in touch with literary and staff activities there throughout his life, last visiting Switzerland in April 2012.
In 1994, Ron returned to New York to work at the UN Secretariat, where he became a press officer at the Department of Public Information. He also worked as a copy editor and writer at the journal Africa Recovery. He was active in staff affairs, sitting on the editorial committee of UN Staff Report. He strongly believed in the ideals of the United Nations as an international civil servant, and always promoted those ideals of peace and solidarity in Geneva and New York. Ron Neal continued work on a freelance basis in New York until 2006.
Severe health problems starting in the early 2000s (he suffered from kidney failure and hypertension) eventually forced him to retire. Ron believed strongly in the virtues of alternative health care and sought out doctors offering alternatives to the dialysis he was undergoing. He was also a member of the Toronto Vegetarian Society.
Mr. Neal had donated his body to the University of Illinois Medical School, where his late father graduated in 1952.
Aside from his full-time editorial career, Ron achieved some note as a Brechtian playwright; his play The Eagle Flies on Friday captured the revolutionary spirit of 1960s Chicago in a highly idiomatic style.
All who knew Ron testified that he was a devoted baseball fan, rooting relentlessly for his favorites, in the 1990s the Toronto Blue Jays, and subsequently the champion Philadelphia Phillies and his hometown Chicago White Sox. (But never the New York Yankees!) Ron attended induction player ceremonies at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., in summer 2010.
A voluble conversationalist and loyal companion, Ron Neal left many friends on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the United States and Canada.
He will be missed.
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