Samuel Hay Kauffmann Dead;
Led Washington Evening Star
President of Capital's Oldest Daily From '49 to '63 Also Headed Parent Company
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — Samuel Hay Kauffmann, president of The Evening Star News paper Company from 1949 to 1963, died last night in George Washington University Hospital after a long illness. He was 72 years old.
After retiring as president, Mr. Kauffmann was elected chairman of the board of directors. He resigned as chair man later because of ill health, but continued as a director.
Survivors include his widow, the former Miriam Georgia Hoy; 2 sons, Samuel Hay Kauffmann 3d of Palo Alto, Calif., and John Hoy Kauffmann, president of The Star; 2 daughters, Mrs. Rockwell Hollands of Palo Alto and Mrs. George E. Lamphere of Washington, and 20 grandchildren.
A funeral service will be held Friday at 11 A.M. in Washington Cathedral.
Management Innovator
Unlike any of his predecessors as the business head of a bulky afternoon newspaper that for years was known as “Washington's richest and dullest,” Sam Kauffmann was an innovator. Under his administration as president of the company from 1949 to 1963, The Star made a number of departures from custom—departures that have been widely credited in Washington with helping to give the newspaper new life at a time of extreme competitive pressure.
Like his son, John Hoy Kauffmann, Mr. Kauffmann was reared for family and corporate leadership almost from the day he was born in Washington on Feb. 24, 1898.
Paper Depicted as Bland
In 1920, when Mr. Kauffmann began a preordained succession of jobs at The Star, starting as a $20–a–week counter clerk, the family property was a huge financial success by any standard—and an artistic failure in the eyes of most newspaper critics. This apparently mattered little in the capital.
More than two decades later, despite the great events that had intervened in Washington and in the world, Fortune magazine, in applauding the rise of The Washington Post under the late Eugene Meyer, was still able to describe The Star as “the favorite advertising medium of the merchants and an unoffending compendium of local news.”
Always a businessman, Mr. Kauffmann had little direct responsibility for the editorial, blandness that characterized The Star's best financial years, and he exercised little influence over the editorial changes that have given the paper new acclaim.
These innovations have been the responsibility of other, journalistically inclined members of The Star family — largely the descendants of Crosby S. Noyes, a corporate founder with Mr. Kauffmann's grandfather, and an early and influential editor of The Star. The late Mr. Noyes also established a literary legacy.
Newbold Noyes Jr., his great grandson, has been editor of The Star since 1963, presiding over its boldest changes.
But it was Mr. Kauffmann's good–natured and aggressive business leadership that laid the solid financial base for The Star's circulation and advertising battle with The Washington Post, a morning newspaper.
Company Founded In 1868
Mr. Kauffmann's grandfather was a founder of the present family company in 1868 and was president when he died in 1906. His father, the late Victor Kauffmann, was for many years Sunday editor and treasurer of The Evening Star Company.
After his graduation from Lawrenceville, Mr. Kauffmann interrupted his sophomore year at Princeton to enlist in 1918 in the Naval Reserve Flying Corps. It was a duty cut short by the Armistice in November of that year, and he returned to Princeton, where he was an oarsman and a member of the Triangle, Cottage and University Clubs.
After six years of executive training in every business and mechanical department at The Star, Mr. Kauffmann became its assistant advertising manager in 1926. He rose quickly to be advertising manager in 1927, assistant business manager in 1929, treasurer in 1941, business manager in 1944, and vice president and treasurer
For many of those years he worked closely with Frank B. Noyes, president of The Star from 1910 to 1947 and president of The Associated Press from 1900 to 1938.
In the nineteen–thirties, when others in the company regarded radio as a passing and risky novelty, Mr. Kauffmann used his position as assistant business manager of The Star to persuade the family and the directors to buy station WMAL in Washington. The station is now a heavy contributor of profits to the parent company.
Mr. Kauffmann regarded the Washington station as special responsibility, and he made it a success. Since 1956, The Evening Star Broadcasting Company also has owned Station WSVA, an AM–FM and television affiliate of the National Broadcasting Company in Harrisonburg, Va.