Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 19, 1993 TAG: 9308190247
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: OAKLAND, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
Maynard, who had battled prostate cancer for six years, died at his home Tuesday night, said Eric Newton, a friend and colleague.
"History will record Bob as a pioneer, as an innovator and as one of California's great newspaper publishers," California Gov. Pete Wilson said in a statement Wednesday. "In every way, Bob Maynard exemplified public service and a commitment to the community."
Maynard became editor of The Oakland Tribune in 1979, and he and his wife, Nancy Hicks Maynard, bought it from Gannett Co. Inc. four years later.
Until they sold it last year to the Alameda Newspaper Group, it was the nation's only black-owned major daily newspaper.
Under Maynard's leadership, The Oakland Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism for coverage of the 1989 earthquake. It was also highly praised for its coverage of the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, which destroyed 3,000 homes and burned to within a few feet of the Maynards' house.
But recession and Maynard's ill health took its toll.
The paper was $31.5 million in debt and within a week of closing in 1991 when it was rescued by a cash infusion from the nonprofit Freedom Forum, an Arlington-based media foundation.
After selling the paper in November, Maynard said, "The fact that we don't get to continue to own it is far less important than the fact that it will continue to exist."
Friends remembered Maynard as a man who tirelessly championed his cause of recruiting more minorities to the newsroom and never lost his enthusiasm for a challenge.
"He was brilliant, he had an incredible mind," recalled Newton, editor-in-residence at the West Coast office of the Freedom Forum.
Maynard was born in New York City's borough of Brooklyn on June 17, 1937, the son of an immigrant from Barbados.
School held little attraction for him: He recalled in an interview last November how he often ditched classes to visit the local courthouse.
"It was the real stuff," he said.
He dropped out of high school at age 16, but in 1965 he won a Nieman fellowship to Harvard, and he encouraged young people to stay in school.
In 1977, the Maynards founded the Institute for Journalism Education to train and promote minority journalists.
"He was able to show that a diverse newsroom certainly was not a newsroom lacking in quality, that diversity could lead to great things like winning a Pulitzer," said Pearl Stewart, a longtime friend of the Maynards who became editor of The Oakland Tribune after the sale.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.