Inducted into MDDC’s Hall of Fame in 2018. This article is based on information submitted at the time.

Deborah was the second of the eleven children of Kimbel and Mary Oelke, who together founded The Dundalk Eagle in 1969. In 1968, she graduated from Villa Julie College and met her future husband, Donald Cornely in 1969, who she married in 1980. She began her newspaper career as an advertising representative for the Community Press in Dundalk in 1968 and began to work in the family business at The Eagle shortly thereafter (the Community Press folded soon after the inception of The Eagle). Over the next few years, she worked several jobs at the paper, including helping to design the first classified advertising system, working the inking machine that created the mailing address rolls and joining her mother and her sisters as wingmailers, who used manual gluing and slicing devices to label newspapers for out-of-town postal delivery.  

In 1978, she started in the paper’s composition office and, over the next 30 years, worked in several positions, eventually becoming managing editor 1986 and then associate publisher in 1996. During her supervisory tenure, she oversaw several innovations at the publication, including the introduction of desktop publishing, internet and email access for editorial and advertising staff, modernization of composition operations (including the move to color printing) and transition of delivery services from traditional “paperboys” to more efficient and inexpensive postal services.  

During that time, her editorial staff, under the guidance of longtime editor Wayne Laufert, won more than 100 awards for writing and photography.  

In 1990, she was named to the board of MDDC and, in 1998, became its president. During her tenure, the association’s website was first activated and, under her direction, an educational and charitable foundation was established. The association expanded its lobbyist activities to include Delaware and instituted an internship program.  

In 2004, she joined the board of the Dundalk Chamber of Commerce and became its president in 2010. She served as the vice president of the Dundalk Community College Foundation where she was chairperson of the strategic planning board.  

She retired in 2015 after ownership of The Eagle transitioned to APG Media of Chesapeake. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband where she pursues her hobbies of antiquing and raising a few chickens.  

Today, her nephews, Jonathan and Jason O’Neill, continue her legacy, and that of her father and mother, as the editor and senior executive advertising account executive respectively.