Edward H. Harte

SAN ANTONIO Edward H. Harte, an avid journalist and civic leader who grew up in San Angelo, and whose newspaper chain owned the San Angelo Standard-Times and other Texas dailies until the early 1997, died peacefully Wednesday, May 18, of natural causes in his retirement-community apartment outside Portland, Maine. He was 88. Born in Pilot Grove, Mo., and raised in San Angelo, Ed Harte came from a family steeped in journalism. His great-grandfather was a Washington correspondent for the New York Tribune, and his father, Houston, worked as a reporter as a young man and bought the San Angelo Standard-Times in 1920. Harte and his family owned Harte-Hanks Newspapers, which for many years dominated the media market in Texas until it bowed out of the newspaper business in the 1990s. His brother, Houston, former publisher of the Standard-Times and of the San Antonio Express and News, described Ed as "a newspaperman's newspaperman." His first job was working as a switchboard operator at the San Angelo Standard Times. He rose through the ranks and became publisher of the Caller-Times in 1962, where he served until his retirement in 1987. A champion of environmental causes before it was fashionable in the business world, Ed successfully advocated establishing part of North Padre Island, Texas, as a national park in 1962, and along with his brother, donated their 66,000-acre-ranch near Big Bend National Park to the Nature Conservancy so that it would be added to the park. He served as chairman of the National Audubon Society board in the 1970's and was awarded the society's highest award, the Audubon Medal, in 2002. In 2001, he was honored by American Farmland Trust with an endowment in his name. In 2000, he established the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi to promote an ecologically and economically sustainable Gulf of Mexico in cooperation with the other U.S. Gulf states and Mexico and Cuba. Ed was a 1939 graduate of San Angelo High School and a 1945 war class graduate of Dartmouth College where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He served in the Army Air Corps from 1943 until 1946. Ed married Janet Frey in 1947, in her hometown, Hanover, N.H. She died in 1999. He leaves his brother Houston of San Antonio, Texas; four children, Christopher (Katherine Pope) of Austin, Texas, Elizabeth Owens (Robert) of Boston, Mass., William of Austin, Texas, and Julia Widdowson (Nigel) of Millbrook, N.Y. He leaves nine grandchildren; two stepgrandchildren; and one great-grandchild.