Obituary: Harold W. McGraw Jr. / McGraw-Hill executive built it into $1 billion firm
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Harold W. McGraw Jr., who as leader of McGraw-Hill, his family's publishing business, helped build it into a billion-dollar enterprise in the 1970s and '80s, died March 24 at his home in Darien, Conn. He was 92.
His son, Harold W. McGraw III, who is now chief executive of the company, announced his father's death, attributing it to natural causes.
Mr. McGraw's leadership at McGraw-Hill was far from a simple matter of inheriting and minding the family store. He played a significant role in its growth and survival as an independent and diversified company in the last half of the 20th century, withstanding a bitter takeover attempt by American Express.
Though McGraw-Hill lacked the prestigious trade book department of rivals like Random House and Doubleday, it remained one of the largest publishing conglomerates in America when Mr. McGraw became chief executive in 1975, reporting gross revenue of about half a billion dollars. In Mr. McGraw's eight years in the post, McGraw-Hill's revenue more than doubled and its earnings per share more than tripled, the company said.
Self-effacing, formal in bearing and courteous in an old-fashioned way, Mr. McGraw seemed an unlikely candidate to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. He was the eldest son of the only second-generation member of the family who had never run the company. The man he worked for in the book division, Edward E. Booher, thought little of his abilities. "It just never occurred to me that Harold would one day be my boss," Mr. Booher told Fortune magazine.
Yet in 1968, Mr. McGraw succeeded Mr. Booher as president of McGraw-Hill Book Co., which had been founded in 1909 when Mr. McGraw's grandfather, James H. McGraw, and John A. Hill, owners of separate publishing companies, merged their book departments.
By the late 1960s, the house had become the top-ranked publisher of textbooks for colleges and elementary and secondary schools. Among its best-known texts is "Economics," by Paul A. Samuelson. In 1966, it acquired Standard & Poor's, the financial rating service, adding it to a number of companies.
While Mr. McGraw was running the book division, McGraw-Hill drew publicity when it paid a $765,000 advance for what was portrayed as a memoir by Howard R. Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, said to have been taped by Clifford Irving, a novelist. It turned out to be a fraud and was never published.
First Published April 4, 2010 12:00 am
