Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/61757
Superlatives people, culture, style View from the top ann gerber CHICAGO'S LONGEST-RUNNING SOCIETY COLUMNIST STILL HAS PLENTY OF STORIES TO TELL. by sarah preston gorenstein T here are gossip columnists, and then there's Ann Gerber. The queen of Chicago's soci- ety beat is in a league of her own, dishing up the dirt on local and national headline makers for 62 straight years. "Gossip is a form of news," she says, "and news is what happens to people." Not one to miss a good social gathering, Gerber is back home from her annual two-month sojourn to Palm Beach to cover the big spring galas for her long-running column in Skyline. "For 25 years I was attending five galas a week," she says. "In the spring, I still go out at least three nights a week." Ann Gerber at home. The hard-working Chicago writer has been pounding the pavement since she was 16, when she landed her first reporting job at the Lerner Newspapers while attending Senn High School in Edgewater. "All I ever wanted was to be a writer," Gerber says. By the time she was 17, Lerner had been promoted to editor, and the rest is history. And what a colorful history it's been. It was 1987 when then-Sun-Times publisher Robert Page hired her to be the paper's society/gossip columnist. Many still remember, and talk about, the blind item Gerber ran on Oprah Winfrey's continued on page 58 57 michiganavemag.com photography by anthony tahlier