Keith Power

1933 - 2021

Keith Edward Power

Keith Power, like many of history's toughest journalists, made a name for himself as an assistant city editor at the San Francisco Chronicle when the going got rough — or at least when it was really rainy outside.
When a downpour reached a certain crescendo, the dark, curly-haired newsman would stride ceremoniously to the windows on the third floor of the Chronicle building on Mission Street and train his binoculars on a puddle behind the old mint building. Peering out like a sea captain, he would gauge the size of the puddle to determine if a weather story needed to be assigned.
The puddle, dubbed "Lake Power" by the chagrined reporters who were given the unpopular assignments, is a lasting legacy of a writer and editor who embodied the swashbuckling style of the newspaper in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Keith Edward Power, a brilliant and exacting editor and one of the Chronicle's wittiest writers during the newspaper's heyday as the wild, irreverent home for funny, derring-do journalists, died September 4 of pneumonia and heart failure. He was 88.
Born March 29, 1933, in Toronto, Canada, he was one of three boys raised in an Irish Catholic family. His father was an official at the Bell Canada telephone company. As a teenager and high-school student, he romanticized journalists and dreamed about becoming an international reporter.
Eschewing college, Power worked for a number of provincial Canadian newspapers as a young man, honing his journalistic skills. He was a staff reporter for the venerable Globe and Mail in Toronto in the early 1950s and was hired in 1958 as an editor at the Reuters news agency in London where he flourished among the boisterous Fleet Street crowd of "ink-stained" writers, intellectuals and raconteurs.
As it happened, unbridled journalism was in vogue at the Chronicle, where executive editor Scott Newhall was building a talented and colorful staff of writers and columnists in an attempt to outflank the rival San Francisco Examiner. Power joined the "Voice of the West" in 1963 as a general assignment reporter – moving from London to the Bay Area – and helped win the circulation war with the Examiner.
He was recognized for his coverage of major local and international events, including reporting from Guyana on the Jim Jones mass-murder suicide, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Zodiac serial killer. The Chronicle twice nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the exoneration of Tokyo Rose and for his reporting on California's earthquake dangers.
As an editor, Power led a special team of journalists covering the emerging HIV-AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Among the reporters he supervised was Randy Shilts, famous for his coverage of the crisis and for his best-selling book "And the Band Played On." Shilts died of AIDS in 1994.
Power retired from the Chronicle in 1985 after 22 years and eventually moved to Sonoma County. A wine lover before it was trendy, he co-authored the book "The Wine Cellar Manual" with his wife, Joyce, of 60 years. The book, which likens wine to a living creature, is infused with Power's characteristic wit. Besides his wife Joyce, he is survived by his sons and daughters-in-law Gavin and Amber Power of Los Angeles, Brendan and Alexis Power of San Bruno, and his granddaughter, Quinn Cathleen Power. He is also survived by his brother Lawrence Power, MD, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and extended family and friends.