Lesley Weidenbener: Sallie Rowland was an impactful leader

Sallie Rowland, a community and business leader in all the ways that matter, died May 2 at age 91 after a battle with lymphoma.

IBJ didn’t publish a story about that, and I regret it.

That decision—or in many ways, the lack of a decision to run a story—has nothing to do with Sara A. “Sallie” Rowland, an interior designer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership and over the years was a member of some of the region’s most important community boards, including the Indiana Historic Preservation Commission, Economic Club of Indianapolis, Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, Christian Theological Seminary and more.

Instead, IBJ has—at least in my more than eight years here—not been especially consistent about when we run stories when someone dies. In this case, two of the people on my team—News Editor Mason King and Daily Editor Jeff Newman—said they would have absolutely written about Rowland had they known about her death when it happened. I did receive an email about it and failed to pass it on.

That was my mistake—and several people who admired Rowland have let me know! I appreciate that. Their comments have encouraged a conversation about how to better approach the question about when to run stories about deaths.

IBJ is not what we call a paper of record. We don’t publish obituaries and death notices regularly, although occasionally a company or family will buy an ad and use it to publish an obituary. We don’t get notices from funeral homes about deaths. And while you’d think that we would hear about them quickly, we don’t always. (Again, I want to emphasize that, in this case, the family DID send me an email, which I failed to act on.)

That adds to our piecemeal approach. Recently, we published a story about J. George Mikelsons, the founder of ATA Airlines, who died the day before Rowland. We wrote in February about the death of Morrie Maurer, who co-founded the National Bank of Indianapolis.

Both of those men were certainly worthy of the attention. So was Rowland, who was born in 1932 in Baltimore and graduated from Indiana University in 1954. She went to work at Business Furniture and then started a corporate design business with partner Bill Hawkins. In 1968, she founded Rowland Design, which grew to be one of the largest interior design firms in the country.

But while Rowland commanded attention for her work on hundreds of office spaces across the region, she is best known for her work in the community, which started in earnest when she became president of the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission.

In an interview for The Gathering Oral History Project in 2013, Rowland said that at the time, the “bulldozer mentality was running amuck and every time we turned around somebody wanted to knock down another building.”

Under her leadership, the commission designated several historic districts. “We’d saved the Union Station and saved the Circle Theatre,” she told Sarah Evans Barker, who was conducting the interview.

Rowland joined several corporate boards, including at Indiana National Bank and the Midwest National Bank—in both cases becoming the first woman to serve on the boards. She was the first woman to serve as president of the Economic Club of Indianapolis. She was a moderator with the Stanley K. Lacy Leadership Series. I could go on and on, but I don’t have the space.

Please let me know when there’s a story or person that needs coverage. Email our editing team at webteam@ibj.com.•

__________

Weidenbener is editor of IBJ. Reach her at lweidenbener@ibj.com.