Former publisher George Wilson dies

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Photo by Ken Williams / Monitor staff

George Wilson, former Concord Monitor publisher, in 1980. Wilson died on Wednesday.Purchase photo reprints at PhotoExtra »

George Wilson, the Concord Monitor’s former publisher, died last night of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 74.

Wilson, of Concord, also served as CEO of the family company that owns the Monitor and four other newspapers: the Valley News of Lebanon, the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript of Peterborough, The Recorder of Greenfield, Mass. and the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass.

Wilson’s first newspaper job was with the Washington Post, where he wrote for the women’s section. His long tenure at the Monitor began with a date with Marily Dwight, whose family owned the Monitor. They married in 1961 and a year later Wilson took a job selling ads for the Monitor. He went on to work in every department within the newspaper.

He covered the presidential campaigns in 1964 and 1968 and, in 1974, was named the Monitor’s publisher. He also served on the board of the Washington Post. Donald Graham, former Washington Post publisher and now chairman of the Washington Post Co., said Wilson had the talent to run the Post but cherished his role as a local newspaper publisher.

“I wish I could come to Concord and walk down the streets and stop people and tell them what a great guy George Wilson was,” Graham said in an interview this morning. “I think he was everything that a community would want in the publisher of its newspaper. And also everything that makes up the life of a good man. George was as smart as they come, and was also as principled as they come.”

Former Monitor editor Mike Pride came to work for Wilson in 1978 as managing editor. Pride was 31 and inherited a newsroom that had been without an editor for eight months. Pride said he was skeptical when Wilson assured him he’d have the freedom and the resources to turn the Monitor into the best local newspaper possible.

Pride said Wilson lived up to that promise and allowed Pride to have a larger news staff than most papers its size.

“I think George was a great supporter of reporting,” Pride said. “He was a great believer in the power of one reporter out reporting a big local story or getting underneath things using sources. What this was to me, was an immense curiosity in journalism but also an immense curiosity about how things were really working in the community. He thought the public should be interested in that at the same level.”

Wilson retired in 2005. He is survived by his wife, Marily Wilson of Concord; three children, Abigail Julien and her husband, Aaron, of Massachusetts; Geordie Wilson and his wife, Pilar Olivio, of Maryland; and Elizabeth Dutton and her husband, Christopher, of Vermont.