Though White spent most of his career in MIssouri, he achieved national journalism fame in the early 1960s when the New York Herald Tribune shocked everyone by naming the small-town Missouri newsman as its publisher. It was an experiment that did not work out well, as detailed in Richard Kluger's book, "The Paper," a detailed history of the Herald Tribune.
I had the good fortune of meeting Mr. White in the early '90s at a Missouri Press Association Awards Banquet. Though I did not get to talk with him for more than a few minutes, I still came away with the impression of him as an old-fashioned gentleman.
His obituaryis featured in a post on the Missouri Press News blog:
“I think there’s nothing I would like better than to be remembered as a newspaperman. Period. And I could put an adjective in front of that. As a good newspaperman. And not try to define it further than that,” White said in 2005 as part of an oral history project excerpted in the upcoming documentary. “Yeah. A good newspaperman. … I would be pleased with that. You got a stone here? Let’s carve it.”
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