William Block, whose self-effacing and socially conscious leadership shaped the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for nearly 60 years and infused wide-ranging interests in art, music and altruism, died yesterday at UPMC Shadyside of pneumonia. He was 89 and lived in Oakland.
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| William Block
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A patron of the arts and art education, Mr. Block was a member of the boards of the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Pittsburgh Glass Center. His civic contributions included efforts to promote literacy, coordinate the work of the region's charities and foundations and spotlight the human impact of urban development and renewal.
His dedication to excellence and to making sure that the newspaper he loved remained a strong presence in a changing marketplace made it possible for the Post-Gazette to buy the bigger Pittsburgh Press in 1992 after a traumatic newspaper strike that threatened the survival of both papers.
"If the Post-Gazette had not been a quality editorial product for so many years, we could not have purchased The Press," recalled Raymond Burnett, who served as business manager for the Post-Gazette before it acquired The Press after 31 years in which the newspapers were linked in a joint-operating agreement.
As chairman, publisher and before that co-publisher with his brother Paul Block Jr., Mr. Block set high standards for the Post-Gazette even as he entrusted day-to-day operations to a series of strong-willed editors, including Frank N. Hawkins in the 1960s and 1970s and John G. Craig Jr. in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Some people are in the right place at the right time, and Bill was such," said Craig, who retired in 2003. "For more than half a century Pittsburgh was served by a newspaper and newspaperman whose values and aspirations were synonymous with the best of his hometown's ... because he knew of and was of Pittsburgh.
"When I met him in 1976, resident journalistic involvement of this sort, and a willingness to spend the money to support it, was in rapid decline; today it is all but gone in the nation's major cities."
Somewhat paradoxically, Mr. Block was both a publisher who deferred to his editors and a constant -- and accessible -- presence at the newspaper.
"I can say that in all the time that I worked for him -- and that was a hell of a lot of years -- he never approached me in one of my spots to say, 'I think we should do this' or 'I think we should do that,' " said James E. Alexander, a former Post-Gazette city editor and managing editor who worked with Mr. Block for decades. "I can't believe that's a possibility for some publishers."
Mr. Block preferred to be addressed as "Bill" in the relaxed conversations he would strike up with reporters at the newspaper's Downtown offices. His unassuming manner belied the reality that he had been chairman of a publishing and broadcast enterprise that at various times included several newspapers and television stations (including, for some time, Pittsburgh's Channel 11), WWSW Radio, three cable systems and an advertising distribution firm.
"He was such a gentleman and so easy to work for," Burnett recalled. "It's hard to convey how nice he was without sounding maudlin."
"My memories of Bill Block are like those of all the old-time Post-Gazette people," said William E. Deibler, a former managing editor who is now retired. "He was not only a kind and generous employer; he was a friend. Everybody thought of him that way, from copy boys to the top editorial people."
Deibler first joined the Post-Gazette as a correspondent in Harrisburg, where he had previously worked for The Associated Press. When he flew into Pittsburgh for an orientation session, he discovered that the city's hotels were on strike.
"I came back to the office and said I really don't know what I'm going to do, and Bill Block said, 'Don't worry, you're going to stay with me.' And so we went out to his home."
In November 1974, Tim Menees, then a reporter in Seattle, had decided he wanted to be an editorial cartoonist and sent applications around the country. His work caught Mr. Block's eye and he flew Menees in for an interview. Mr. Block was interested, but he wasn't ready to make a commitment.
"Cy Hungerford has been here in Pittsburgh for years," he told the aspiring cartoonist. "I'm not going to force him to retire. This is his life and it would kill him."
Menees was impressed, he later told longtime associate editor Clarke M. Thomas in an interview for "Front-Page Pittsburgh," a recently published history of the Post-Gazette.
"As much as I wanted the job, I thought, 'Wow! If this is the attitude of the owner of the paper it must permeate the place,' " Menees told Thomas. " 'He must care about people so much that he's not going to farm out an elderly employee just to get new blood.' "
Hungerford was in his late 80s. A year and a half later, Hungerford, who died in 1983, decided to cut his workload and Menees was hired. He's been at the Post-Gazette ever since.
'A great civic leader'
Mr. Block's influence as publisher was perhaps most evident on the editorial page.
"I've always been that horrible term -- liberal -- more so than my editors," Mr. Block said in an interview for "Front-Page Pittsburgh."
"When I got back [from military service] in 1946, I veered the editorial policy more to the center," he said. It was a new line for a newspaper that, in his father's day, had been a critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
"We've been liberal in connection with civil rights, conservative on economics. That is my personal feeling and the road that we followed," he said.
Under Mr. Block's leadership, the Post-Gazette backed President Harry S. Truman when he fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for exceeding his authority during the Korean conflict, and stood behind Roy Harris, a composer-in-residence at Chatham College, who had been condemned, unjustly, in the paper's view, as a Communist sympathizer. Over the years, it endorsed both Democrats and Republicans for national and statewide offices.
The newspaper was especially supportive of the postwar smoke-control efforts of Richard King Mellon and Mayor (and future Gov.) David L. Lawrence, a duo he once described as an unlikely couple -- "Lawrence the poor Irishman, Mellon the blue-chip aristocrat" -- who were nevertheless able to work together. Mr. Block got to know Lawrence, and the two men would get together at Golden Gloves boxing matches sponsored by the Dapper Dan Club, a Post-Gazette charity.
Although Mr. Block encouraged the newspaper's editorial writers to engage in give-and-take on controversial subjects -- and sometimes acceded to a consensus even when he disagreed with it -- at other times he insisted on exercising the publisher's prerogative, especially when it came to election endorsements. "He'd say, 'Let's take a vote on this,' but in the end he would make the final decision," recalled Clarke Thomas.
Sometimes, Mr. Block wrote signed columns for the Post-Gazette, usually after returning from one of his many trips abroad, some in connection with his involvement with the International Press Institute. He served as chairman of the IPI's American Committee from 1973 to 1977.
During a three-week trip to mainland China in 1978, Mr. Block wrote a letter to the editor of the People's Daily complaining about the incessant horn-blowing of motorists and truck drivers. The editor wrote that he agreed with his position; his letter also was aired over the official state radio.
But the din of Beijing remains -- attesting to the limits of the power of the press in that nation as in this one.
Arriving in his adopted city after World War II, Mr. Block found a newspaper staff that was all-white, like those of the other mainstream papers in the city, and most of their counterparts across the country. In 1955, at the insistence of Mr. Block, according to Thomas' history of the paper, the Post-Gazette became the first mainstream Pittsburgh newspaper to hire an African-American reporter, Regis Bobonis, who later left the paper to become editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, the city's nationally known African-American paper.
Although Mr. Block's primary influence on Pittsburgh was through his newspaper, he was active as an individual in civic, charitable and cultural activities. He was a former chairman of the Health and Welfare Planning Association, an advisory panel that helped evaluate and coordinate the work of the various charities and foundations in the region. In the mid-1960s, he chaired the newly created Social Planning Committee of the city of Pittsburgh's Planning Department. That panel was charged with examining the human impact of urban renewal projects.
"He was a great civic leader, especially in the areas of human services and social policy," said Morton Coleman, director emeritus of the Institute of Politics at the University of Pittsburgh.
"He was concerned a lot about the impact of development on people, on how it affected how people actually lived their lives.''
Mr. Block also was a longtime supporter of NEED -- the Negro Educational Emergency Drive -- a local program established in 1963 that raised funds to help African-American students attend college.
Mr. Block was willing to put himself on the line when the interests of the newspaper and its readers were at stake.
In 1954, the Post-Gazette joined with the Greensburg Daily Tribune and Morning Review and other news organizations in challenging a judge's order forbidding the taking of photographs inside the Westmoreland County Courthouse. While sheriff's deputies were focused on one Post-Gazette photographer carrying a large, conventional camera, another used a concealed infrared camera strapped to his waist to take a picture of convicted murderer J. Wesley Wable, known as the Turnpike Killer, as he was being escorted to a courtroom.
The photographers, a Post-Gazette reporter, its editor and Mr. Block were found to be in contempt of court after a hearing in which Mr. Block defended the photographing of Wable, saying his trial was of national importance and "that made it seem to us a part of our responsibility to the public to cover it reportorially and with picture coverage."
In 1956 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the contempt judgment, but threw out five-day jail sentences for Mr. Block and his employees because the photographs were part of a "test case" of an order that several Pennsylvania newspapers considered a violation of the First Amendment. The legendary Justice Michael A. Musmanno dissented from the decision upholding the contempt sanction. He wrote: "Freedom of the press means freedom to gather news, write it, publish it, and circulate it. When any of these integral operations is interdicted, freedom of the press becomes a river without water."
In an era of chain ownership and cost-cutting to maximize profits, Mr. Block ran counter to the trend in several ways. He surprised fellow publishers in 1962 when he announced that, while there were fewer newspapers around, the survivors were better and that part of the credit went to The Newspaper Guild, the union that represented his newsroom staff.
Mr. Block's views about unions proved to be an asset for the newspaper during its purchase of the strikebound Pittsburgh Press in 1992, a transaction that boosted the Post-Gazette's circulation and bucked a national trend toward chain ownership of big-city dailies.
The sale was conditioned on the Post-Gazette's reaching agreements with the labor unions that had failed to settle with Scripps Howard, the chain that owned The Press.
"Across the years Bill Block built a feeling of fairness and trust that helped in the labor dispute," recalled Clarke Thomas. "The labor guys were willing to settle for him rather than Richard Mellon Scaife [publisher of the Greensburg Tribune Review, who also was interested in buying The Press]. Bill was a trusted person."
Of the Post-Gazette's purchase of The Press, Mr. Block himself said, "It was like Jonah swallowing the whale. I was gradually gliding into a sedentary retirement until the strike and the decision by Scripps [Howard] to sell brought me back into nonstop exertion."
At his 80th birthday party in 1995, a family and corporate celebration on a sunny afternoon at the Pittsburgh Zoo, an employee thanked him for saving the Post-Gazette and, with it, his job.
Mr. Block, typically, demurred.
"Oh, I should be thanking you," he said. "I wouldn't have a job if all of you weren't there."
A life in full
William Block was born in New York City on Sept. 20, 1915, the son of Paul Block Sr. and Dina Wallach Block. The family had entered the publishing business in 1897 when his father founded Paul Block Associates. At one time or another, the family company owned the Brooklyn Standard-Union; the Duluth Herald; the Lancaster (Pa.) New Era; the Milwaukee Sentinel; the Memphis News-Scimitar; and the Newark Star Eagle. Paul Block acquired the Post-Gazette in 1927.
Mr. Block attended two private schools in New York before enrolling in the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. After graduation from Hotchkiss, which honored him with its Alumni Award in 1982, he entered Yale University, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1936.
After Yale, Mr. Block worked briefly at the Post-Gazette, helping to oversee construction of a new newspaper plant on Grant Street. His education in the family business continued at The Blade, the family's newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, where he started on the ground floor in several departments. Among the tall, skinny heir's duties in that pre-automation age were shifts carrying heavy bundles of papers from the presses to the mailroom tables.
"The pressmen loved the idea of putting me on the fly ... to carry all those papers," he recalled in his privately printed memoirs. "I wouldn't let on that it was practically breaking my back."
Drafted several months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Block was an enlisted man for 15 months; in June 1942, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Anti-Aircraft and was assigned to Fort Stewart, Ga.
Racial segregation was omnipresent in the South of that era as well as in the Army. The newly minted lieutenant found himself assigned to a unit consisting entirely of black enlisted men, commanded, with few exceptions, by white officers. One day, he recalled in his memoirs, he was having lunch at a table with two chaplains, who were black, and one of the unit's few black officers.
The regimental battery commander, a Mississippi native, entered and ordered the three blacks to leave the table. Mr. Block recounted that, while uncomfortable at this slight, he at first did nothing. But the next day, when the scene was repeated, Block said, "Captain, don't you think we ought to fight one war at a time?"
With that, he left the table along with the three black officers. Young Lt. Block was transferred out of the unit the next day. He later was sent to Camp Haan, Calif.
Mr. Block had happier memories of that assignment. On his first night in California, at the Mission Inn in Riverside, he spotted a woman whose name, he would soon learn, was Maxine Horton. "There was a very beautiful girl playing the saxophone in an all-girl band," he recalled. "That was the evening I met the young lady who was later to be my wife. It was Sept. 13, 1943."
Mr. Block juggled the wartime romance with military duties, and before long the couple was determined to get married.
"Finally, the colonel said I could have a long weekend," he recalled. "We rushed to a jewelry store in Riverside and got a ring ... we drove to Las Vegas and were married by a justice of the peace, I think his name was O'Malley. His wife and a policeman were witnesses."
Five months later, Mr. Block applied for assignment to a planned post-war Far Eastern Military Government and was sent to Charlottesville, Va., and Yale to study Japanese. He shipped out to Yokohama after V-J Day, where his ship rode at anchor for days. Then, with the logic known only to the military, it was decided that Mr. Block's unit, after its months of training in Japanese language and culture, should be sent to Korea, a nation whose language was totally unknown to him and most of his compatriots.
Mr. Block served in the military administration that helped Korea make the transition from Japanese occupation until he left the service in 1946. By then his father, Paul Block Sr., had died and Paul Jr., Mr. Block's older brother, was in command in Toledo. Mr. Block, along with Maxine and their infant son, William Jr., returned to take over the family's operations in Pittsburgh.
Newspaper wars
Mr. and Mrs. Block made their first temporary home here in a suite at the old Schenley Hotel, now the University of Pittsburgh's student union. This was still the Pittsburgh of soot-belching steel mills and a population that shrugged off grimy skies as a cost of prosperity.
"Our train arrived from Chicago about 7 a.m. and we went to the hotel. It was a very warm August day. I opened all the windows (there was no air conditioning) and ordered breakfast for Bill Jr . . . There was a glass of milk for Bill, and by the time Maxine had him all cleaned up and ready for breakfast, a film of soot had settled on the glass of milk. I remember Maxine looking at it and shuddering. She said, 'My God, do we have to live here?' I answered, 'This is where the job is.' "
"The job" proved satisfying but also frustrating as the Block family encountered resistance to various expansion plans.
In 1949 the Blocks launched a Sunday edition with a lavish event that filled the 17th floor of the William Penn Hotel. But, as Mr. Block later recalled, "Hearst [then the owner of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph] and Scripps-Howard really ganged up on us ... a lot of dealers refused to handle the Sunday Post-Gazette." The result was a Sunday edition that lost money and closed in less than a year.
But the ambitions of Mr. Block and his brother for the potentially lucrative Sunday market remained. An opportunity more than a decade later to buy and absorb the rival Sun-Telegraph seemed the gateway to realizing it. The effort produced another failure, however, one that Mr. Block would remember as the low point of his career in journalism.
The Hearst paper was by then much weaker than the publication that had helped doom the Post-Gazette Sunday edition in 1949.
The Sun-Telegraph had been a six-day afternoon and Sunday morning paper but its purchase bled the Post-Gazette. Only two years later, in a reluctant act of self-preservation, the Post-Gazette negotiated its joint-operating agreement with a longtime rival, The Pittsburgh Press.
The agreement was sealed only after U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, convinced that it was important to preserve two distinct editorial voices in Pittsburgh, granted the newspapers a dispensation from anti-trust laws.
Under the agreement, the Post-Gazette and The Press remained independent editorially but combined their business operations in one building on the Boulevard of the Allies. The Press handled all the advertising, production and circulation work. The Post-Gazette retained control only of its own reporters and editors. The arrangement continued for three decades -- until 1992, a pivotal year in Pittsburgh journalism.
Contract talks between Scripps Howard and the unions that printed and distributed both papers had dragged on without progress. Unions, led by the Teamsters, finally walked out when Scripps Howard tried to impose new working conditions. Because of its business relations with The Press, the Post-Gazette was forced to cease publication as well.
After many months of on-again, off-again negotiations, interspersed with a short-lived attempt to resume publication without unions, Scripps Howard threw in the towel. The Cincinnati-based corporation announced on Oct. 2, 1992, that The Press was for sale.
"Our family had been involved with the Post-Gazette since 1927. There was a great deal of sentiment connected with the decision [to buy The Press] as well as a challenge and ... an opportunity," Mr. Block said.
Blade Communications eventually did make its offer for The Press and, after the bid was accepted, managed to meet Scripps-imposed deadlines for reaching agreements with the Teamsters and other unions, arranging financing and obtaining U.S. Justice Department approval. The Press was closed in the process, although much of its staff was hired by the newly dominant Post-Gazette. The Block family ceded its paper in Monterey, Calif., to Scripps Howard as part of the deal.
Patron of the arts
Mr. Block lightheartedly described the image he held for himself and his paper on a 1986 evening that united two labors of love, the Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Symphony. The occasion was the world premier of "Classical Variations on Colonial Themes," a work by the composer Morton Gould, commissioned by the Blocks to commemorate the 200th year of the Post-Gazette. The paper, which long promoted itself as "The First Newspaper West of the Alleghenies" traces its lineage to the Gazette that John Scull published not far from the present printing plant of its corporate descendant.
From the Heinz Hall stage, Mr. Block gazed around at dignitaries from politics, business and the arts, and observed, "To avoid philosophical implications, you will note that the Republicans are seated on your left, the Democrats on your right, and I, like the Post-Gazette, am smack in the middle."
The symphony hall was a natural venue for the party. Mr. Block, a former vice president and for many years a board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, took a deep interest in that organization. He was a member of the search committee that lured conductor Andre Previn to the PSO in the mid-'70s.
One of the extra-curricular duties of which he was most fond was his role as a founder and president of Gateway to the Arts, originally, Gateway to Music, a program that started in 1957 to introduce students to classical music and the performing arts. Over the years, the program has expanded to add ballet, singers and visual arts.
Mr. Block also had an enduring interest in abstract art. He donated several works to the Carnegie Museum of Art including "Feb 18 -- 54 Azure," a 1954 oil on canvas by well-known English painter Ben Nicholson, and "Two Figures," a 1962 oil by Pittsburgh-born abstractionist Raymond Saunders, in 1974.
Mr. Block had helped Saunders attend The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and saw him become an important California painter. The Blocks acquired a half-dozen of Saunders' paintings as well as a number of works by other Pittsburgh artists.
In later years, Mr. Block began collecting contemporary glass art, a passion that put him on the path to creating another cultural institution in Pittsburgh.
In 1996 he and his wife gave four glass sculptures to the Carnegie Museum of Art and a year later his vision and financial support helped lay the groundwork for what was to become the Pittsburgh Glass Center.
The center, in Friendship, opened in 2003 and has helped re-create Pittsburgh as a center for glass, this time through a public access studio. A board member since the organization was formed, Mr. Block was named the first emeritus member of the center's board this month.
"Once we got started, it almost became an obsession," he said of his fascination with the medium.
Mr. Block had been an avid baseball fan since childhood, an enthusiasm fanned when his father bought the Newark Bears of the International League in 1929.
Though Paul Block Sr. later sold the Newark club, the circle of Mr. Block's interest in the game came round again when he approved the family's purchase of a small interest, later sold, in the Pittsburgh Pirates as part of the syndicate organized by current Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy.
The interim investment was the Block family's answer to the perennial question of whether the Pirates had a future in Pittsburgh.
For all of his professional successes and interests, however, Mr. Block said his greatest achievement was his six-decade marriage and "the fathering of four great children."
In addition to his wife, Mr. Block is survived by his children, William Jr., chairman emeritus of Block Communications; Karen Johnese, of Marshall, executive director of the Pittsburgh Glass Center; Barbara Block Burney, an actress and music teacher in Mill Valley, Calif.; and Donald, of O'Hara, the executive director of the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council.
He also is survived by eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Last month, on a day that Pittsburgh City Council had proclaimed "Bill Block Sr. Day," Mr. Block was recognized at a reception at the Andy Warhol Museum for his decades of support for Gateway to the Arts.
In a voice halting with emotion, his wife, Maxine, beside him, he told the appreciative crowd, "If you live long enough, good things happen."
Friends will be received from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday and 2 to 4 p.m. Friday at McCabe Brothers Funeral Home, 6214 Walnut St., Shadyside. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on July 20 at Heinz Chapel in Oakland.
The family suggests that memorial contributions may be made to Gateway to the Arts, 1400 South Braddock Avenue, Suite E, Pittsburgh, 15218; the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council, 100 Sheridan Square, Fourth Floor, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15206; and the Pittsburgh Glass Center, 5472 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, 15206.
Condolences also may be posted at an online guestbook at post-gazette.com.