Ronald Lloyd Reese, affectionately known as “Peepaw” to his loving family, passed away on September 29, 2026, with his wife, Minnie, by his side. He was 82 years old.

Ron was born May 31, 1944, in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to Chicago permanently in middle school and was raised on the city's South Side, where he attended Burnside Elementary School and graduated from Harlan High School in 1962. Ron then enrolled at the University of Illinois at its Navy Pier campus, the school's downtown undergraduate division, before the Circle Campus opened in 1965.

He entered the workforce with the Jewel grocery chain, starting on the floor at the Lake Meadows store and later advancing to store manager — a position held by very few Black employees in the industry at the time. He left Jewel for the brewing industry, working first for Pabst Blue Ribbon and then for Anheuser-Busch, where he drove a distribution route serving Hyde Park. Ron was a union man from the start, and remained one throughout his career, so it was only fitting that a strike would change his life's course.

In the mid-1970s, a labor dispute at Anheuser-Busch resulted in a work stoppage. While collecting strike pay on the picket line, he learned from a family member about an unclaimed application to the Illinois State Police. He sat at his stepbrother’s dining room table and completed the application, and was later accepted into the State Police academy. He graduated and joined the department in 1977, assigned first to District 3 in northern Cook County and later to District 15.

Ron was among 75 charter members of the Illinois Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers (ABLE), an organization established in 1984 to address conditions facing Black officers within the Illinois State Police. He later served as ABLE president, vice president, parliamentarian, and associate director, and traveled to nearly every annual convention until illness prevented him from attending. At the national level, he served the National Black State Troopers Coalition, Inc., founded in 1985, as parliamentarian and as executive director. He was also a member of Troopers Lodge #41 and served on the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) side of negotiations for the first collective bargaining agreement between the FOP and the Illinois State Police in 1988.

In addition to patrolling miles of interstate, Ron’s assignments ranged from responding to prison uprisings to a security detail for a homecoming visit by President Ronald Reagan. In 1990, he was selected to attend the Northwestern University Traffic Institute, where he graduated with a class drawn from police agencies worldwide. He often said this was the signature accomplishment of his career. He advanced through the ranks of Trooper, Sergeant, and Master Sergeant before retiring from the Illinois State Police in 2002 after 25 years of service.

For more than 50 years, he belonged to the Riff Raff Gang, a circle of friends who traveled together, threw picnics, played cards, and kept each other's company across the decades. He took up golf in earnest at 58, in his last year on the job, then joined the Tee Birds golf club and made a standing habit of Florida golf trips. He and Minnie met in New Orleans and later married in 1973, and over the years they saw the world: Acapulco, Africa, Australia, Europe, Russia, the Baltics, the Caribbean — where they returned more than anywhere else — and Tahiti, the most memorable of them all.

A three-sport athlete in his youth, he witnessed Chicago high school legends like Dick Butkus and Cazzie Russell up close, and played on 16-inch softball teams as an adult. He loved long road trips to visit family in New Orleans and Mississippi, and followed politics closely. He laughed with Richard Pryor at the Auditorium Theatre, and as a true son of the South Side, dined at Army & Lou's, rooted faithfully for his White Sox, and was the longest-standing patron at Mars Barbershop on 75th Street. When he wasn't barbecuing his own ribs on his single-barrel smoker, he was making a run for some Lem's Bar-B-Q, and he never needed much convincing to take a drive for a card game with decades-long friends, or a good Maxwell Street Polish sausage from Jim's.

Few things, however, were more important to Ron than his grandsons, Miles and Oliver. He loved them deeply and was a fixture on the sidelines for their football, soccer, and basketball games.

Ron was preceded in death by his father, Ocea Reese, and his mother, Marian Primus, and is survived by his wife, Minnie Pearl Reese; his son, Ronnie Lloyd Reese; daughters Andrea Marie Reese and Ronda Lynell Reese; his daughter-in-law, Molly Reese; grandsons Miles Reese and Oliver Reese; and cousins Mary Alice Campbell and Carole Ann Sevier.

Family and friends will be received at the Conboy-Westchester Funeral Home, 10501 W. Cermak Rd., Westchester on Friday, October 9, 2026 from 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. All to meet Saturday at St. Eulalia Church, 1825 S. 9th Ave., Maywood for a Visitation from 9:00 a.m. until time of the Funeral Mass at 10:00 a.m. Entombment Queen of Heaven Cemetery. For funeral info 708-F-U-N-E-R-A-L.