Ex-Newsday editor Aurelie Dwyer Stack dies

Former Newsday senior editor Aurelie Dwyer Stack was a journalist who was a stickler for grammar, an artist who strove for creativity, and above all a lover of the North Fork of Long Island.

"She definitely loved the North Fork -- loved it, loved it, loved it," her stepdaughter Ruthanne Marchetti recalled Monday. "She would drive out from work, and as soon as she got to the North Fork, she would roll down her window and yell: 'I love it here!' "

Stack, who joined Newsday in 1960 and retired in 1987, died Sunday at 86.

Visiting will be Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. at Coster-Heppner Funeral Home in Cutchogue. A funeral Mass will be offered at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church in Greenport. Burial service will be private.

Stack was born Aurelie Dwyer in Brooklyn in 1925 and moved with her family to Westbury when she was young, then back to Brooklyn, then to Rockville Centre, where she graduated from St. Agnes High School in 1943. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year, studying art, then studied at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan for a year.

Before joining Newsday, Stack worked as a fashion illustrator in Manhattan, a copy writer and fashion editor in Hempstead and as a publicist for a TV series about submarine warfare.

She held a number of editing positions at Newsday, starting on features about women, becoming editor of the Viewpoints section and executive news editor for Part II. She developed a reputation as a grammarian, and proudly a wore a T-shirt from her family reading: "I am the Grammarian about whom your mother warned."

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Former Newsday intern Lawrence Downes, now an editorial writer for The New York Times, remembered the softer side of Stack. "She took it on herself to show me how Newsday worked and how newspapers worked," said Downes, who worked with Stack in 1986. "She knew so much about editing. It was not her job to teach interns, but she took the time to show me the ropes and I was always grateful for that."

She married John Stack on Valentine's Day in 1976, just months before she retired from Newsday for the first time that August. She returned to Newsday part-time in 1983 and retired for good in 1987. She had bought a summer house in Mattituck in the late 1960s, and moved there permanently shortly after her marriage. John Stack died in 2008.

"She was a very disciplined person, but she loved creativity," said Marchetti, of Windsor, Conn. "She always worked toward loosening up a bit in her quilting and crafts."

In addition to Marchetti, Aurelie Dwyer Stack is survived by a sister, Dorothy Maag, of Pinehurst, N.C.; a brother, Charles Dwyer, of Leesburg, Va.; five other stepdaughters -- Margaret Maguire of Annapolis, Md.; Sharon Willse of Mendham, N.J.; Beth Tompkins of Annapolis, Md.; Nancy Stack of Melrose, Mass.; and JoAnn Maguire of Randolph Center, Vt.; -- and seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

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One of the grandchildren is Clarke Reilly, now a presentation editor at Newsday.

Reilly said, "It was really special for me, not only to follow in her journalism footsteps, but then to work at the same paper she worked at."