Felicia Antonelli Holton, AB’50, who died this October at the age of 91 (see Deaths), was the editor of the Magazine not once but twice. Her first two-year perch atop the masthead began in the summer of 1955. Two summers later, the University of Chicago Magazine was named the nation’s best alumni publication—an award now known as the Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year.

Felicia returned to the Magazine in 1980, hired to reinvigorate the publication, and reinvigorate it she did. She and her staff—including, in the early days, associate editor James Graff, AB’81, now executive editor at the Week, and secretary-bookkeeper Margaret Mitchell, then AM’82, now AM’82, PhD’89, and dean of the Divinity School (see “Chapter and Verse”)—were soon producing award-winning issues filled with articles from a profile of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, AB’58, to “Pursuing the Peptide Connection,” explaining groundbreaking work in diabetes research.

In July 1983 at a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, where Sibley had once been editor, Felicia was the terror of the first question-and-answer session, asking the speaker one hard question after another. “No wonder,” the editor beside me explained, “she’s from the University of Chicago.”

Felicia was interested in big issues and big questions, but she was also fun. Nowhere was her sense of fun more apparent than in her annual fundraising letters on the Magazine’s behalf.

“You all like to write,” she told alumni in 1981. “We’d like to ask that you write your name on a check ...”

Not enough funds in your coffers to endow a faculty chair? In 1983 Felicia had a deal for you: make a “generic” gift of $10, and “an issue, a page, a paragraph, a word, or a comma” would be yours. Readers sent their gifts—and requests for exclamation points, semicolons, and more.

Edgar W. Mills Jr., PhB’47, DB’53, had a special request: “my very own folder in your correspondence file. ... Of course, it would also be OK to name the file drawer for me—or even the entire filing cabinet. The Edgar W. Mills, Jr., Top Drawer has a certain elegance, don’t you think?”

Felicia did. He got the top drawer. A photograph of the drawer and Felicia smiling beside it is tacked to my office bulletin board—my equivalent of a W.W.F.D. bracelet, a question I’ve lived by since following Felicia as editor in 1989. When the Magazine moves back to Hyde Park in December—to the new University building that is part of the revitalization of 53rd Street—you can be sure that the photograph will be going too.