By Ed Meyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Those who knew Chuck Kirkwood, a former chief trial attorney in the prosecutor’s office in Summit and Portage counties, are remembering him today as a man of imposing stature with an equally huge intellect and heart.
Five weeks after being diagnosed with cancer, Mr. Kirkwood died in his sleep Tuesday, surrounded by family members, at his retirement home in Stuart, Fla., his son Brian Kirkwood said.
He was 72.
Former Beacon Journal managing editor Glenn Guzzo, who now lives in Florida, was a close friend of Mr. Kirkwood and his family during his 18 years of retirement.
Guzzo hailed him as “a big man with a booming voice and a big personality.”
But he also had “a huge mind and a huge heart. Everything he did, he did exceedingly well. He had the nearly unique ability to empathize with others and laugh at himself,” Guzzo said.
Charles E. “Chuck” Kirkwood, born in Jersey City, N.J., was the son of a traveling Mennonite minister.
In a 2000 Beacon Journal profile of his legal career, he said that his father’s travels were so extensive, he went to 13 different schools before graduating from Liberty High School in the tough steel town of Bethlehem, Pa.
There, his son Brian said, he was a friend and classmate of Billy Packer, who went on to national prominence as a sportscaster and author.
Mr. Kirkwood was a 1962 graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois and Northwestern University Law School in 1965, where he helped pay his way by working as a bartender.
He began his legal career in Ravenna, spending three years in private practice before being hired by the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office, where he would become chief criminal trial attorney.
From there, he moved on to the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, where he also led the criminal division from the mid-1970s through 1981, supervising more than 1,500 cases.
It was there that his career took off. As former Beacon Journal reporter Carl Chancellor wrote in the 2000 profile, Mr. Kirkwood was universally respected for “his intelligence, his legal acumen and his competitive nature.”
In 1977, Mr. Kirkwood’s peers in the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association honored him with the state’s Prosecutor of the Year award.
He also was a professor at the University of Akron School of Law from 1981 to 1994 and was honored as Professor of the Year in 1983.
Retired Beacon Journal reporter Richard McBane said he met Mr. Kirkwood for the first time on the newspaper’s courthouse beat.
“He was chief assistant to Stephen Gabalac at the time, and he immediately ‘tested’ me to see how far he could trust me. Apparently I passed,” McBane said.
“I subsequently learned a lot about how to evaluate criminal cases, and how to pick out the essential points. I think it made me a much better court reporter.”
Columbus attorney Carol Ann Costa, a former member of the Ohio Supreme Court Disciplinary Council and one of Mr. Kirkwood’s law school students at UA, recalled the first time that she was about to argue a case before the high court in 2005.
“I was petrified. Mind you, I had been a practicing attorney for 15 years,” Costa said.
Mr. Kirkwood talked with her, immediately calmed her down and she went on, she said, to win the case.
Costa recalled Mr. Kirkwood telling her: “Remember. They’re just people. Just talk to them. That’s what I did, and [everything] was fine,” she said.
In his own criminal trial work, Mr. Kirkwood had a principal rule as he spoke to the jury — “make the complicated simple,” Costa said.
She said colleagues marveled at Mr. Kirkwood’s keen mind for reducing a case to its barest essentials.
While other lawyers used stacks of legal binders, Mr. Kirkwood, Costa said, “was famous for showing up to try murder cases with a single sheet of paper.”
He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Diane, his sons Brian and Scott, his daughter Erin Kirkwood Sillanpaa and three granddaughters.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial donations be sent to Treasure Coast Hospice, c/o Charles Kirkwood, 1201 Southeast Indian St., Stuart, FL 34997.
Funeral services are private.
Ed Meyer can be reached at 330-996-3784 or at emeyer@thebeaconjournal.com.