Bio: O’Leary, Carol (WNA Hall of Fame - 2018)

Transcriber: Robert Lipprandt
bob@wiclarkcountyhistory.org
 
Surnames: O’Leary, Wilson

----Source: The Star News (Medford, WI) 10/11/2018

By Brian Wilson and Kris O’Leary

Over the course of a career that has spanned more than five decades, Carol O’Leary has done just about every job there is in putting out newspaper including helping to run the press.

O’Leary is an owner of Central Wisconsin Publications, Inc., and publisher of the Star News and the Courier Sentinel. She is also active on a state and national level serving as a member of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation board. O’Leary has served on the boards of the Inland Press Foundation and the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. She is currently vice president of the ISWNE Foundation and a member of the National Newspaper Association.

This week O’Leary gained an additional title of inductee into the Wisconsin Newspaper Association (WNA) Hall of Fame.

Carol O’Leary started working at her hometown newspaper, The Savanna Times Journal, when she was 19.

She started out as the bookkeeper, proofreader and receptionist. She wed publisher J. A. O’Leary and they became partners running the newspaper. In 1970 they sold the paper and moved to Abbotsford in 1971 when they purchased the Tribune Phonograph and the Record Review. In 1981 the couple started the Central Wisconsin Shopper.

In 1976, they formed a printing company, Tri-Star Printing, with investors, to purchase a new webpress. In 1987 J. A. and Carol bought out the investors share of the printing plant and purchased the Star News.

J. A. died unexpectedly in 1997, just one week after the publisher of the Stratford Journal had died of cancer.

In 2010 the family purchased the Tribune Record Gleaner from Dean Lesar. After the death of Trygg Hansen, publisher of the Cornell and Lake Holcombe Courier and the Cadott Sentinel, the family reached out to the O’Leary family to purchase the papers so the communities wouldn’t lose their papers. The papers were later combined to become the Courier Sentinel.