Donald A. MacGillis

1946 - 2020

Former Berkshire Eagle editor Donald A. MacGillis, a Pittsfield resident for nearly forty-nine years, died on October 7 after spending the previous night stranded in the cold on Maine's Mount Katahdin and suffering a 50-foot fall in the dark. He was 74 years old.

MacGillis arrived in the Berkshires in 1971 to take a reporting job at the Eagle following a brief stint at the Hartford Courant and service in the Army, during which he was stationed in West Germany and met his future wife, Ingrid Scheitweiler. After starting out in the paper's Great Barrington bureau and then moving to the court beat, MacGillis left the paper to return to West Germany, where he worked for a time as a freelance journalist.

But he returned to Pittsfield after his wedding in Germany in 1974 to take a job in the Eagle's editorial department, which was led at the time by Roger Linscott, who won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. After Linscott's retirement in 1986, MacGillis took the helm of the department, presiding over a stable of talented writers and columnists.

As editorial page editor, MacGillis was known for his exacting standards and his steady habits: he caught the same B-Bus to and from the office, and ordered the same egg salad sandwich at the Soda Chef on North Street.

In 1992, MacGillis became the paper's executive editor, guiding the newsroom through a turbulent period of cutbacks prompted by the Miller family's ill-fated purchase and renovation of the Scheaffer-Eaton building on South Church Street prior to the 1990-1991 recession. The turbulence culminated in the paper's 1995 sale to Media News Group. The day after the sale, the new owners laid off MacGillis and more than a dozen others. To offer consolation, his wife and his children, Alec and Lucy, joined him for lunch at the Soda Chef.

MacGillis found work as an editor at the Boston Globe, but the family decided not to uproot itself from Pittsfield, where Ingrid MacGillis worked as a teacher at Miss Hall's School. Instead, he rented a small apartment in Brighton, where he spent his weekday nights before returning to the Berkshires on weekends. He continued this routine for 17 years, a period during which he served as an assistant editor on the metro and health and science desks, as an editorial writer, and finally as national political editor during the 2012 election. He reluctantly accepted early retirement after the election, after which he would keep his hand in the news business by serving as chairman of the Eagle's advisory board under its new local ownership. "He had several more good years in him, but the industry pressures prevailed," said Alec MacGillis, who had followed his father into journalism.

Donald MacGillis was born on the South Side of Chicago on May 18, 1946, in the vanguard of the Baby Boom. He was the fourth of six children of Hugh MacGillis, who worked for the Veterans Administration, and Dorothea Imrie, a nurse. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, and when he was 10, it moved again, to West Hartford, Connecticut. Hugh MacGillis died when Donald was 11, leaving his mother to raise the six children with the help of Social Security survivor benefits.

After graduating from Hall High School in West Hartford, where he played center on the football team, MacGillis attended Yale, where he became editor of the Daily News. He graduated in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in English and was drafted soon afterward. He was stationed at Leighton Barracks near Wurzburg, in northern Bavaria, where he worked for the 3rd Infantry newspaper, studied German, and launched a cultural outreach effort to assuage anti-American feeling amidst the Vietnam War. At the kickoff event for the initiative, he met Ingrid.

The family returned often to Germany in later years to visit his wife's relatives and make forays into adjacent countries. His love of travel was also fulfilled by journalistic trips to report on Jewish "refuseniks" in the then-Soviet Union, on AIDS prevention in Uganda, and on the 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. In his final two decades, he made many visits to the Umbrian region of Italy, where his daughter makes a living as an artist.

An avid Red Sox fan, MacGillis played for years on the Eagle's softball team and later with a weekly pickup crew in Monterey. An avid woodsplitter, he mostly heated his 150-year-old house on Holmes Road with the products of his labors. An avid hiker, he belonged to a weekly hiking group and served on the board of the Berkshire Natural Resources Council.

He had climbed Katahdin often with a hiking group before returning there with his 25-year-old nephew, Paul MacGillis-Falcon on October 6, eager to show him the challenging Knife's Edge trail to the summit.

"Think of all the dumb little mishaps from shifting logs, or a missed step that you have gotten through mostly unscathed," MacGillis wrote in a signed editorial for the Globe following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Reassemble the chain, test the tension, start all over again with a new tank. Think of how you could just keep doing this and think of nothing else."

In addition to his wife and children, MacGillis is survived by his sisters Christine MacGillis, Ann MacGillis, and Jane Kimball, by his grandsons Harry, Vito, and John, and by eight nephews and nieces.

Contributions in his memory may be made to the Berkshire Natural Resources Council, Report for America, or the Edith Wharton estate at The Mount.

Due to Covid-era restrictions, the family is holding only a private memorial at this time, but it hopes to hold a larger remembrance at a later date.