A total of $1,875,000 was contributed here tonight to the research fund of the Weizmann Institute of Science, at Rehovot, Israel. The contributions were announced by Arthur B. Krim, chairman of the annual Weizmann Institute dinner, held at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Abraham A. Feinberg, president of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute.

More than 1,500 guests attended the $250-per-plate event where the principal speaker was Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, President Kennedy’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology: Dr. Wiesner was elected an honorary fellow of the Weizmann Institute.

President Kennedy, in a message to the dinner “warmly applauded” the honor bestowed by the Weizmann Institute on Dr. Wiesner. He emphasized that Dr. Wiesner has been his “good friend and trusted adviser” and said: “It gives me particular pleasure that Dr. Wiesner is receiving this honor not only for his formidable accomplishments in science, but also, in the tradition of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, for his work in the public service.”

In presenting Dr. Wiesner with a citation, Dr. Dewey D. Stone, chairman of the Institute’s Board of Governors, lauded him for his contributions “to the general science of communication in various systems, as well as of his unique role in forming the link between his fellow scientists and the governing bodies of this nation.”

In his address, Dr. Wiesner deplored “the desperate need for scientists and engineers in the United States, the inadequacy of public understanding in areas of science and technology” and what he called “the backwardness” of scientific education in the United States. Scientific and technologic education in the universities, he said, is “500 years behind the times.”

Mr. Feinberg announced that the family of the late Herman H. Taubman, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has endowed a Chair of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. The following gifts were also announced: The Ullman Institute of Life Sciences donated by Mr. and Mrs. Siegfried Ullman of New York; the Esther and George Sagan Residence Hall for students of the Institute’s Graduate School in the Natural Sciences; the Louis J. Glickman Research Laboratory; the Lillian Persky Palais Fellowship; the Joseph C. Foster Research Grant; the Clara and Sam Silbert Research Fellowship; These gifts add up to $1,475,000.

[George Sagan (born 1895)], founder and former chairman of the New York Girl Coat Company and a dealer in Jewish philanthropy, died Tuesday in West Orange, N. J. He was 79 years old and hived in Verona, N. J.

Mr. Sagan, who retired as chairman in 1971 but continued as a consultant to the apparel company, was born in Russia and came to the United States in 1910. He founded the company in 1916.

He established the Sagan Foundation in Summit, N. J., and endowed a chair of performing arts at Brandeis University. He had been an overseer of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a director of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Mr. Sagan was an honorary alumnus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and had been active in support of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

A former co‐chairman of the United Jewish Appeal in Essex County, N. J., and former chairman of the Newark Placement of Immigrants Service, he had also been a member of the board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and received its award of merit.

[Surviving] are his widow, the former Esther Gooen; three sons, Eugene ([Eugene "Gene" Benjamin Sagan (born 1925)]), Eli ([Elias "Eli" Jacob Sagan (born 1927)]) and Bruce ([Bruce Lewis Sagan (born 1929)], and nine grandchildren.

The Omaha Sun, a weekly newspaper that at its peak reached about 50,000 homes in the city, has printed its final issue.

Ordinarily, the passing of a weekly newspaper like The Sun would not attract much attention, but The Sun was a little different. In 1972 it investigated the finances of Boys Town, the well- known home for orphans, and its work won a Pulitzer Prize, the first time that a weekly had been won that prestigious award.

In later years it followed the Boys Town story with new disclosures about the home's management, and it undertook investigations of other community problems, occasionally beating the city's only daily, The World-Herald. ''They were able to pick their targets and make an impact,'' said Harold W. Andersen, the president of The World- Herald.

The Sun had financial troubles, however. The family that had founded it in 1922 sold it to an Omaha investor, [Warren Edward Buffett (born 1930)], in 1968. Two years ago, he sold it to Bruce Sagan, who publishes The Southtown Economist in Chicago.

What had been separate editions aimed at seven specific areas of the city were consolidated into one newspaper. The editorial staff was cut, from 16 to 8, then a month ago to 4. There was little opportunity for complicated reporting projects.

Even with its demise, The Sun is continuing to get some special attention within the industry, however. Earlier this year it won a Federal court order temporarily blocking The World-Herald from operating a free weekly and a service that mails advertising materials to all the homes in the area, known as ''marriage mail.'' Charging violations of Federal antitrust laws, The Sun said it had lost $350,000 in advertising revenues after the daily began those operations in 1981.

Late last month, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said The World-Herald could continue its new line of business, and last Wednesday The Sun announced its closing, saying it was ''economically prohibitive to continue.'' But it said it would press its legal case, which is being followed by industry officials in other cities where daily newspapers have been considering ways to respond to the shift of advertising into neighborhood or suburban weeklies and to ''marriage mail'' operators.

New Look for The Monitor

The first issues of a redesigned Christian Science Monitor rolled off the presses this week, and top officials of the newspaper said the new look was a signal of other shifts that they hope will revitalize the 75-year-old newspaper.

The Monitor, a five-day-a-week tabloid, consistently wins high marks for its foreign news coverage and analysis. But its circulation, 240,000 a decade ago, is down to 150,000, and its advertising linage is slumping. Over all, it says it is losing $10 million a year.

Earlier this year, the newspaper hired a new editor, Katherine Fanning, who had been editor and publisher of The Anchorage Daily News. Despite some grumbling among the 150 editorial staff members, she has rearranged some of the national assignements and has created new features in areas such as cultural events, science and technology and leisure activities.

What had been four regional editions have been combined so that all advertising goes to all readers, adding to the size of the newspaper without increasing the cost to advertisers, and it has started a vigorous campaign to double its circulation in the next five years. The manager of The Monitor, John H. Hoaglund Jr., said it was important to find new readers, because the average age of current subscribers is 60.

In its first week, the revamped newspaper gave front-page display to a variety of life-style and human interest articles that would not have gained such prominence before.

A Washington Post Weekly

At the end of the month, The Washington Post will begin publishing a nationally circulated weekly edition that will repackage for readers outside of Washington some of The Post's day-to- day coverage of the Government and national political activity.

The editor of the weekly, Noel Epstein, said The Post was in many ways a trade paper for the industry of government, and thus required reading for the many Government aides, Congressional staff members, lobbyists, diplomats and other assorted political workers who make up ''official'' Washington. The new publication will give people outside the Washington area more access to detailed coverage that tends to be omitted even from the newspapers that use The Los Angeles Times- Washington Post News Service, he said.

The Post's weekly, a tabloid, will begin with a circulation of 30,000 copies, some to be sold on newsstands at $1 a copy and most to be delivered by mail on Mondays or Tuesdays. The subscription price is $39 a year.

Ads in Publishers Magazine

For the last four years the American Newspaper Publishers Association has been losing money in publishing a monthly trade magazine, presstime, that it sends to 5,000 subscribers, most of them its members. Last month the board of directors of A.N.P.A. hit upon a not-so-radical scheme to help the magazine pay its own way. Starting next year, it will accept advertising. The board said the informational content would ''enhance the value'' of the publication.

Pulitzer Publishing Co., the St. Louis media company, plans to expand its presence in the Chicago-area community newspaper market with the acquisition of Southtown Economist Inc.

Bruce Sagan, Southtown president and owner, said Friday that he has reached an agreement in principle to sell his company to Pulitzer Publishing. Terms of the cash transaction, which is expected to close shortly, weren`t disclosed.

One published report put the price at about $40 million.

Sagan`s firm publishes the Daily Southtown Economist, with a circulation of about 25,000, 18 weeklies and a group of shoppers. The publications, which circulate primarily in the south and southwest suburbs, have a total circulation of about 440,000, he said.

Southtown, with headquarters at 5969 S. Harlem Ave., also is a contract printer for Midwest editions of the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Defender and Lerner chain of Chicago and suburban community newspapers.

Lerner was acquired by Pulitzer Publishing last year.

Southtown also has contracted with the Levy Organization to print an afternoon Chicago business daily slated to debut later this month and to begin printing this spring an edition of Investor`s Daily.

Sagan said he will become chief executive officer of Pulitzer Community Newspapers Inc., the unit being formed to run Southtown. Sagan has owned Southtown since 1958.

In a telephone interview from St. Louis, Michael E. Pulitzer, vice chairman of Pulitzer Publishing, said Sagan ''will be the overall boss'' of both Southtown and Lerner, but there are no current plans to merge the two operations.

Sagan said that, with Southtown, Pulitzer Publishing will own daily and weekly papers with more than 700,000 circulation in the Chicago area.

He said Pulitzer Publishing plans to expand the reach of those publications. Both Sagan and Pulitzer said there are no plans to create a metropolitan daily to compete with The Tribune and the Sun-Times.

''We`ll stick with community newspapers,'' Pulitzer said.

Sagan said, ''Our feeling is that there is a great deal of growth possible in the community newspaper market here.''

Pulitzer Publishing is a family-owned company that also owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arizona Daily Star, seven television stations and two radio stations.

Pulitzer said the Southtown acquisition was approved unanimously by his company`s board of directors at a meeting last Monday.

HYDE PARK — Bruce Sagan was a teenager when he first saved a community’s newspaper.

As a tenth grader at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey, with three years experience editing his junior high’s newspaper, Sagan discovered the paper had folded at Summit High. He set out to revive it — and did just that.

Less than a decade later, in 1953, Sagan would take that experience to a bigger stage. He and his wife Judith scrounged up $2,500 to save the Hyde Park Herald from an already-announced closure

The purchase kicked off Sagan’s 69-year career at the Herald’s helm, as he shaped it into a paper with a penchant for detail, an activist bent and a dedication to the unique community it served.

After more than seven decades in the Chicago-area hyperlocal news business, 93-year-old Sagan retired last week and transferred the Herald to a new nonprofit led by the South Side Weekly.

The Herald and Weekly will remain standalone papers. The merger formalizes a partnership that’s put the outlets in close collaboration, including sharing an office, for more than two years already

The merger can best honor the years of work Sagan put into “Chicago’s oldest community newspaper” with one, not-so-simple task — “by being thoughtful about its journalism,” he said.

The front page of the Hyde Park Herald recognizes the retirement of Bruce Sagan at the South Side Weekly newsroom in Woodlawn on July 27, 2022.

A ‘Public Citizen’ Of Hyde Park

Sagan first moved to Hyde Park in 1946 as a 16-year-old University of Chicago enrollee

He entered the university’s undergraduate program — “I never finished,” he said. He’d later enter its law school — “I never finished,” he said.

A sociology professor once quipped that Sagan missed so many classes, it was only by reading Sagan’s writings for the university’s newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, that the professor could confirm he was an active student there.

Sagan entered professional journalism in 1951 at 22 years old, securing a job as a “copy boy” for the Hearst International News Service.

He then worked about two years an overnight editor for the legendary City News Bureau. His was a midnight-8 a.m. shift where staffers half-joked that they covered the Mafia assassinations beat, he said.

As Sagan sought a more sustainable reporting job in 1953, he was rejected for a position at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he would later return to serve as chairman.

Shortly afterward, a group of Hyde Parkers approached Sagan, who by then was a 24-year-old “public citizen” of the neighborhood who dedicated his time to block clubs and other community initiatives, he said.

The group wanted the budding reporter to consider buying the failing Herald, whose publisher had already announced the paper’s demise.

Given the Herald’s precarious finances, “the offer of Hyde Park was obviously scary, but very attractive,” Sagan said. The 24-year-old Sagan borrowed $2,500 from loved ones to take over the paper, which ran the next week without interruption.

Under Sagan’s leadership, the Herald “went into detail of an intimately small kind” as it covered pressing neighborhood issues, he said.

Hyde Park’s burgeoning “urban renewal” project — a controversial, decades-long redevelopment plan that followed widespread demolitions and saw hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the community — received particular attention from the paper in Sagan’s early years.

Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago

Mary Leonard, office manager of of South Side Weekly NFP, Jason Schumer, managing director of South Side Weekly NFP, and Hannah Faris, editor of the Hyde Park Herald, pose for a photo with copies of the Hyde Park Herald that recognize the retirement of Bruce Sagan at the South Side Weekly newsroom in Woodlawn on July 27, 2022.

The Herald printed the urban renewal plans that would be passed by City Council in 1958 “so the community could see them and discuss them”; wrote about neighborhood crime, “which was high on [neighbors’] list of concerns”; and promoted the Whistle Stop crime prevention program, Sagan said.

“This idea that you could re-plan an existing area, keep people in it and still do things to modernize that community, that was a new idea,” Sagan said. “It needed explaining … and it needed a vehicle which could communicate to the community its details that other journalistic enterprises wouldn’t do.

“A Downtown daily newspaper covering the entire metropolitan area was never going to do it,” he said.

The paper also covered race relations as the urban renewal project moved forward, including a 1958 proposal from socialist Ald. Leon Despres (5th) to ban racial discrimination in rental housing.

Hyde Park’s status as an interracial community in the years following urban renewal remains an issue worth covering, Sagan said

The Herald under Sagan’s watch “thrived on community conflict rather than merchandising consensus, and became a potent force,” former editor Lee Pavatiner said in a statement.

Detailed coverage of major social issues was no small task for a skeleton crew that at some points was just Sagan and an editor, with perhaps one other journalist, he said.

Sagan regularly spent “about 200 hours per week” putting the paper to print, he joked, distributing it and securing advertisements from local businesses and for the classifieds section.

In 1958, five years after taking over the Herald, Sagan purchased the Southtown Economist, which grew into a chain of 28 publications. The papers eventually merged into one daily paper in the south suburbs, which was a predecessor to the modern Daily Southtown. Sagan sold the Southtown in 1986 reportedly for $40 million and retired from it two years later.

The Lakefront Outlook — a small sister publication to the Herald started by Sagan in 1999 — won a prestigious George Polk Award in 2006 for its investigation into then-Ald. Dorothy Tillman and the Harold Washington Cultural Center. Tillman lost her re-election bid to Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd) the next year.

“His career had such a fundamental impact on newspapers and news in the city, as well as nationally,” South Side Weekly publisher Jason Schumer said. “The man at some point had [nearly] 30 community newspapers. … He was very interested in experimenting with various markets and how to get people the news they wanted.”

Beyond his journalism career, Sagan is an avid patron of the arts. He is one of the Joffrey Ballet’s inaugural board members, having served since it moved to Chicago from New York City in 1995.

Sagan is also on the board of the Steppenwolf Theatre. John Malkovich, a charter member of the theater, feted him with a script reading on his 80th birthday.

Sagan’s primary occupations of journalism and performance art sometimes overlap, with perhaps no clearer example than his ownership of the Harper Theater in Hyde Park.

When the rejuvenated Herald’s headquarters was set to be torn down as part of the neighborhood’s urban renewal project in 1960, Sagan began looking for new office space. He bought the Harper Theater in 1961 and moved the paper to the theater building’s upper floor.

Sagan made wholesale changes to the theater itself starting in 1964, cutting its capacity to 300. Inspired by New York City’s “off-Broadway” productions, he turned the Harper into an “off-Loop” theater where professional actors could perform for more intimate audiences.

The Harper Theater held an annual dance festival organized by the Sagans, hosted the Joffrey Ballet in 1965, and was home to other live theater and dance programs before it reverted to a movie theater around 1970, Sagan said. The Herald moved out of the building in the 1980s.

A Longtime Partnership, Made Formal

Though Sagan transferred the Herald to the Weekly on July 1, and the merger was made public Thursday, the two outlets have been closely linked for more than two years.

They’ve shared an office since June 2020 at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave., which technically makes the Hyde Park Herald a Woodlawn-based outlet. Schumer and the Weekly have overseen publishing and other day-to-day duties at the Herald since October of that year.

The Herald and the Weekly will continue to operate as standalone newspapers.

With the merger, the Weekly is essentially repeating what Sagan did 69 years ago — tagging in to stabilize Hyde Park’s longstanding paper, Schumer said.

“Our version of that is, let’s build an infrastructure to subsidize a lot of the cost and the work that it takes to start up a community newspaper,” Schumer said.

Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago

Jason Schumer, managing director of South Side Weekly NFP, Mary Leonard, office manager, and Hannah Faris, editor of the Hyde Park Herald, insert papers recognizing new ownership and the retirement of Bruce Sagan at the South Side Weekly newsroom in Woodlawn on July 27, 2022.

It’s a model he believes could be used to take on other existing hyperlocal papers and create new outlets down the line, he said.

“It’s a much leaner operation, it’s much cheaper, you’re also sharing a lot of resources and expertise — but still, importantly, having editorial independence that’s rooted in the neighborhood,” he said.

Sagan trusts the South Side Weekly with the future of the newspaper to which he dedicated nearly 70 years of his life. “We wouldn’t be having this announcement if I didn’t,” he said.

But this is no clean break. Sagan will remain available from his home in upstate New York, offering guidance and support to the paper’s leadership, he said.

“I’m never done,” Sagan said.

• Type : Weekly newspaper

• Founded : December 27, 1951

• Language : English

• Ceased publication : August 31, 1983

• Headquarters : Omaha, Nebraska

The Omaha Sun was a weekly newspaper that published from December 27, 1951 to August 31, 1983.^[1] It was formerly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, a company headed by investor [Warren Edward Buffett (born 1930)].^[2]

The staff of The Sun Newspapers of Omaha, Nebraska was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting in 1973 for uncovering the large financial resources of Boys Town, a Catholic youth care center and charity, leading to reforms in the organization's solicitation and use of funds contributed by the public.^[2][3]

Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought the newspapers in 1968. The company sold them in 1980 to Hyde Park Herald publisher Bruce Sagan. The Sun newspapers stopped publishing in 1983.^[1]

References

• ^{a b} Friendly, Jonathan (1983-10-09). "Costs Force Omaha Paper into Closing". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
• ^{a b} "Like many nonprofits, their mission started to drift -". Philanthropy Daily. 2017-10-31. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
• ^ The Pulitzer Prizes. "The 1973 Pulitzer Prize Winner". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2020-09-29.

From Large To XXL, The 1980s

In 1980 Berkshire spun off Illinois National Bank & Trust, a move required by the Bank Holding Company Act of 1969. A year later the company sold Sun Newspapers to Chicago publisher Bruce Sagan and began work on a rather unheard of practice. The next year, 1982, Berkshire instituted an unusual corporate philanthropy program that won praise from shareholders by allowing them to direct a portion of the company’s charitable contributions. With this policy, Buffett said he hoped to foster an “owner mentality” among shareholders. Shareholders responded enthusiastically, with more than 95 percent of eligible shares participating in each year since the program’s inception. The amount directed to charities of their choice was $2 a share in 1981 (the figure rose to $6 a share by 1989). Buffett’s own favorite causes included population control and nuclear disarmament.