Critic And Gregarious Loner Andrew Patner Passes Away At 55

• Sun-Times Media
• Andrew Patner

The death of Andrew Patner at 55 is terrible news. Wasn’t it just yesterday or the day before that I was chronicling his dispute with WBEZ over what Patner considered the indiscriminate use of jagoff on its airwaves? “Is there any line of language not to cross?” Patner (a cultural commentator on rival WFMT) wondered in e-mail to his “WBEZ friends.”

Patner had done some journalism, but at the time he was in law school and trying to figure out his life. He was a second-generation Chicagoan in the sense that he was somebody’s son: his dad was Marshall Patner, an attorney who’d founded Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI). The ACLU had honored him. So had the Newspaper Guild.