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Journalist Quick was anti-smoking crusader

By Eldon Knoche
of the Journal Sentinel staff
June 4, 1999

Wil Quick had a passion for civil rights, genealogy,
the military and the Republican Party, but his greatest
fervor was his fight against smoking.

A reporter and editor at the Milwaukee Sentinel from
1960-'85, he filed ordinance complaints with the city
against a Sentinel sportswriter and a Milwaukee Journal
associate editor for smoking in company elevators.

He once got into trouble with the papers' management
because he poured water into the pipe of a composing
room foreman.

He spent much of his retirement trying to persuade
restaurants around the state to become smoke-free.

Quick, 74, died Wednesday at Sinai Samaritan Medical
Center. He suffered a heart attack May 25 as he was
driving home from giving a speech to broadcast
journalists on how to cover the tobacco industry
and smoking.

"You can know full well he was in his glory, talking
about a subject dear to his heart," said Jack Lohman
of Colgate, who founded the Wisconsin Initiative on
Smoking and Health about a decade ago.

Quick joined the organization shortly after its
founding and had a major role in expanding the
number of smoke-free Wisconsin restaurants listed
in a dining guide from 65 to the current 1,460,
Lohman said.

"He quickly became the predominant volunteer for
the organization," Lohman said.

"My father was always on a crusade," Joseph Quick
said Thursday. "He would latch on to things and was
dogged in his fight for something he believed in. He
never waited to find out what other people thought
about opinions he had."

Smoking bothered Wil Quick's eyes and gave him a
headache, and by the 1970s -- long before the
nation was in its anti-smoking mode -- he was
in full pursuit of cigarette, pipe and cigar users.

He was born Howard Wilbert Quick on Aug. 12, 1924,
in Boulder, Ill., and grew up in southern Illinois.
He started in the news business by calling in the
results of high school track meets to the Centralia
Evening Sentinel and became the newspaper's sports
editor at age 17.

>From 1943-'52 he was in the U.S. Army and served
in World War II and Korea. A sergeant major at
the end of the world war, he received a second
lieutenant's commission in 1948. He was a platoon
leader in Korea and was among the last to be
evacuated in the Chosin Reservoir campaign in
1950. He received a Bronze Star for his work
in stockpiling ammunition for rifle companies
during their last weeks in northern Korea.

Quick worked at newspapers in Dayton, Ohio;
Huntington, W.Va.; and Three Rivers, Mich.,
before coming to the Sentinel.

Though a fiscally conservative Republican and
active in the local and state parties, he was
socially liberal and went on open-housing
marches with Catholic priest James Groppi.

He frequently returned to southern Illinois to
search cemeteries and documents for his family's
history and published a 530-page book about his
heritage.

Active in veterans organizations, Quick revisited
the Republic of Korea in 1983 to write a series of
articles about that rebuilt nation.

He is survived by his wife, Josephine, of
Milwaukee and four children, Joseph of Madison,
David of Milwaukee, Rose Mary McCarthy of West
Allis and Teresa Thiel of Oshkosh.