Andrew Patner: Journalist whose eclectic career encompassed the life of Chicago, classical music, cultural matters and politics

A tribute to him in the Maroon said that he was the first full-time journalist on a major Chicago paper to write about being gay, and the first Chicago radio presenter to come out

Patner: he knew everybody, and if you didn’t, he’d put it right

The journalist and broadcaster Andrew Patner, who died suddenly aged only 55, was one of those characters who seemed inextricably linked to the city of Chicago. Riccardo Muti, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (which Patner had accompanied and reported on for their last 17 tours), said that he was "a man of great culture and deep humanity." Like Studs Terkel, whose career Patner's mirrored (and to whom he was widely seen as a natural successor), the combination of his journalism and his political stance became embedded in the cultural life of America's "Second City".

Andrew (he was a second cousin, and we were close, despite the near-generation difference in our ages) had been the critic-at-large for the venerable Chicago classical music and culture radio station, 98.7 WFMT, and its website, WFMT.com, since 1998. He presented the Monday night conversation programme Critical Thinking and his Critic's Choice commentaries were broadcast three times each week. More recently he had appeared as a commentator on cultural and political matters for WTTW 11 television, WFMT's sister station.

He began his long career in print journalism as editor of his Chicago high school paper, and ended it as contributing critic to the Chicago Sun-Times, where, since 1991, his astonishingly broad brief had been to cover classical music, opera, theatre, dance, visual art and architecture, cabaret, books and cinema – and included a year as acting theatre and dance critic.

Born in Chicago, Patner was educated in the very good South Side schools near the campus of the University of Chicago, the then left-leaning, private university founded by Rockefeller oil money. His father, Marshall, was an eminent public-interest University of Chicago-educated lawyer, best known for winning his Supreme Court case upholding comedian Dick Gregory's right to protest publicly continuing racial segregation in Chicago schools (although he told me that he regarded his greatest contribution as overturning the Chicago by-law banning pavement cafés). When I entered the University of Chicago in 1959 Marshall was still undecided about the practice of law, and was the proprietor of the Medici Café, the local hang-out for law students, civil-rights workers and journalists (and, I think I remember, a proto-beatnik or two).

Patner also attended the University of Chicago and was a campaigning editor-in-chief from 1979-80 of the Maroon, the student newspaper (in which he criticised the University's award of a large prize to former Secretary of State Robert McNamara because of his role in the Vietnam War). However, he set a pattern for his life by leaving without finishing his history degree and finding something more interesting to do.

In this instance, his next move led to Chicago Magazine, where he was staff writer and editor from 1981-1983, and won a Peter Lisagor Award in 1984 for articles on race and politics on the eve of Harold Washington's election as the city's first black mayor. In the same year, having decided to complete his undergraduate education, he received his BA with distinction in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, after which he travelled in Asia. In 1985 he was accepted by the exacting UC Law School, and very nearly finished his course in 1988; but instead he became a staff reporter from 1989-90 for the Wall Street Journal, then America's only truly national daily paper.

This was not a happy move. He was sharing a flat with a childhood friend, and when it became evident that he was dying of Aids, Patner was determined to nurse him to the terrible end. As the Sun-Times' Neil Steinberg reported, he "cared for him so diligently that he lost his job at the Wall Street Journal." Steinberg revealed that Patner (who said the same thing to me), in addition to losing a good friend, had also felt persecuted by his office. This was a strange episode for a man who never lost his sense of self-irony, and whose self-confidence was strong, but never as forceful as his affections and convictions.

He began broadcasting in the early 1990s for WBEZ-FM, the Chicago National Public Radio station, as a reporter and producer, and had a talk show, Metropolis, that ended in 1997. In 1991 he began his long association with the Sun-Times, and in 1998 with WFMT.

During this period he was also working with gusto on his biography of the radical journalist IF Stone, which was published in 1998. Patner's interests and enthusiasms were catholic: in 1984 he and his friend Richard Shepro "translated" (from English into American) The Official Foodie Handbook by Ann Barr and me.

I had the occasional pleasure of coinciding with Andrew as part of the press contingent at various music festivals, and I am sure it was he who introduced me to Gérard Mortier, then director of the Salzburg Festival, who became a friend. Seeking neither reward nor credit, Patner brokered the connection that resulted in WFMT syndicating the broadcasting of the Salzburg Festival. Though he never swanked, Patner knew everybody, and if you didn't, he'd put it right.

Although Chicago was the centre of his universe, he was in the best sense cosmopolitan: he taught students from 19 nations for the Soros Foundations/Open Society Institute for three summers in Prague and Budapest in the early 1990s. He was a 2003 Getty/USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Fellow in Los Angeles. At the time of his death from a rapid, overwhelming infection, he was working on a book about five historians and writers on the Holocaust.

A tribute to him in the Maroon said that he was the first full-time journalist on a major Chicago paper to write about being gay, and the first Chicago radio presenter to come out. His genial, devoted and talented partner of 25 years was the New Yorker "Talk of the Town" illustrator Tom Bachtell. Alex Ross, the celebrated music critic for that magazine, eulogised Patner in his "The Rest is Noise" blog as "one of the wisest, wittiest, most generous, most vivid, most altogether vital people in the world of the arts."

Andrew Patner, journalist and broadcaster: born Chicago 17 December 1959; died Chicago 3 February 2015.