Ex-Chronicle executive ‘loved newspaper business’
McDavid, a former Houston Chronicle executive and a lifelong newspaperman, died Friday after an illness. He was 88.
McDavid, who retired from the Chronicle in 1998, started out 40 years earlier in the composing room as a Linotype opsippi. erator. He worked his way through the ranks and in 1990 became the newspaper’s president.
“He loved the newspaper business — he loved its mission and its role in the world,” said his daughter, Carol McDavid, who lives in Houston.
McDavid, the son of a newspaperman, grew up in MissisGene By the time he was 19, he owned and published his own small paper, the WilkAmite Record in Gloster, Miss.
“He did everything at that paper,” Carol McDavid said. “He wrote the stories, he took the pictures, he set the type.”
In 1958, when he was 28, McDavid and his family moved to Houston, where he enrolled at the University of Houston and worked nights at the Chronicle. He earned his bachelor’s of business administration a few years later.
McDavid worked his way up the ladder. He became the Chronicle’s assistant production manager in 1964, vice president of operations in 1974, vice president and general manager in 1984 and president in 1990.
The 1990s were a remarkable time to lead a newspaper, said Tony Pederson, who spent 29 years at the Chronicle, becoming executive editor and senior vice president before he left in 2003.
Newspapers were teetering on the cusp of the digital age, and those years were “a precursor” to the rapid changes that would soon upend the field, Pederson said. The Houston Post shut down in 1995, ending a longtime rivalry and making Houston a one-newspaper town.
“It was a challenging time for newspapers,” said Pederson, who is now the Belo Foundation Endowed Distinguished Chair in Journalism at Southern Methodist University. “That really was the beginning of some extraordinary changes in journalism.”
But McDavid rolled with changes throughout his halfcentury in journalism. His daughter recalled McDavid talking about new computer systems being installed at the paper — even back when a single computer could fill an entire room.
When Jack Sweeney came to the Chronicle in 1980 as advertising director, he immediately recognized McDavid’s skill.
“He was a mastermind production guy,” Sweeney said, able to nimbly juggle all aspects of newspaper production, from printing and inserts to buying newsprint.
Back then, Sweeney said, the Chronicle was publishing 750,000 newspapers every Sunday, and 550,000 each weekday — and “Gene was the man who coordinated all that.”
Sweeney, who went on to become president and then publisher of the Chronicle after McDavid retired, considered McDavid a colleague, a golfing buddy and a friend.
“He was a smart man and a hardworking man,” Sweeney said.
Carol McDavid said her father always loved being a newspaperman.
“He relished life and he relished his work, and he loved the community aspect of his work,” she said. “He really loved the role that the Chronicle had as a Houston newspaper.”
McDavid spent decades volunteering for the American Red Cross and served on boards all over town, including the Houston Symphony and the University of Houston Board of Regents.
In his leisure time, McDavid’s great passion was golf.
“I played a lot of rounds of golf with Gene, and boy, was he a passionate golfer,” Pederson said. “He loved to play the game.”
In fact, in 2010 — when he was 79 — McDavid even made the newspaper for scoring two holes-in-one within a span of three weeks. “Those were just the pinnacles of his golfing career,” his daughter said, laughing.
McDavid liked to play golf when he traveled, his daughter said — and he and his wife, Betty Tinsley McDavid, traveled all over the world.
Her father loved to tell stories, Carol McDavid said. And he and her mother were “a real team” when it came to raising her and her sister, Martha Gene McDavid Newman.
“He was a committed dad and he was a supportive dad — he loved his family very much,” Carol McDavid said. “We spent a lot of good time together in recent years, and I’m very grateful for that.”
McDavid is survived by his wife and two daughters. Funeral arrangements have not yet been made.