Former Hearst newspaper chief and part-time Deerfield resident

Robert Danzig rose from parental abandonment at age 2 during the Great Depression to lead the seventh-largest U.S. newspaper company and then to retirement, part-time in Deerfield Beach. He died Wednesday in Cape Cod, Mass. He was 85.

With Danzig at the helm of the Hearst newspaper division from 1977 to 1997, the company acquired the Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and several community newspapers. Hearst gained a daily circulation of more than 1.3 million and a Sunday circulation of more than 2.5 million, the company said.

“Bob Danzig played a pivotal role in the dramatic growth of Hearst’s newspaper operations in a career that spanned more than 50 years,” Hearst President and CEO Steven Swartz said. “He was the rarest of executive talent, with equal measures of pragmatism and warmth, and his leadership lessons are part of Hearst’s DNA.”

The oldest of his five children, Mary Beth Hartfelder, recalled a father who took Wednesdays out of the office to feed the homeless and visit shut-ins, sometimes taking her along. The importance of reading a newspaper was drilled into her and each of her siblings, as they were asked to pick out a story and explain why it interested them.

“He was an intensely working-class person,” she said, recalling how he insisted to the staff for nothing, to tell them what they were doing for the children they could touch was so important,” she recalled.

The divorced Danzig had met Dianne Danzig when they accidentally collided at the Pavilion Grille in Boca Raton, as he prepared to leave the premises because it seemed like it was only couples milling about and dancing. That kind of magical happenstance is part of another book he wrote, “Angel Threads,” Dianne Danzig said.

“A quarter of a second earlier we wouldn’t have met,” she said. “In that very second, we bumped into each other and it changed our lives.”

In addition to his second wife, Danzig is survived by his five children and 10 grandchildren. He is also survived by his wife’s three daughters and their children and grandchildren.

Sun Sentinel staff writer Wayne Roustan and the Associated Press contributed to this report.