Herman Obermayer, who owned the Northern Virginia Sun newspaper for a quarter century and later was active in teaching free-press principles to the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, died of a heart attack May 11. He was 91 years old.
Known to friends as “Obe” (“oh-bee”), Obermayer purchased the daily newspaper in 1963 and served as editor and publisher until its sale in 1988. The Northern Virginia Sun, which traced its founding to 1935, was the predecessor of today’s Sun Gazette newspaper chain.
The Sun had been put up for sale at the dawn of the 1960s, but large chains were skittish because of labor troubles. Obermayer, already the owner of a newspaper – the Long Branch Daily Record – in New Jersey, was looking to pick up a paper in the South.
“I decided the Sun was close enough,” Obermayer said in an interview with the Sun Gazette. “I looked at some in Mississippi, but that was a little too far South.”
For nearly a decade, Obermayer commuted weekly to Northern Virginia while his wife Betty Nan and their children stayed in the Garden State. In 1971, the entire family moved to Northern Virginia, eventually settling into a home on the Arlington/McLean border. (For years thereafter, Betty Nan Obermayer would vote in Fairfax County, Herman Obermayer in Arlington.)
The Northern Virginia Sun gained notoriety in the 1960s for taking on the American Nazi Party, which was based in Arlington. While having a limited local membership – maybe 50 to 100 people – the white-supremacist group led by George Lincoln Rockwell was known for its efforts to seek publicity for its agenda of hate.
While the Washington Star and Washington Post newspapers had a hands-off policy, refusing to acknowledge the organization, Obermayer went after the neo-Nazis.
“If you expose the antics of a rogue to public scrutiny, the public will eventually repudiate it,” Obermayer said in a 2004 oral-history interview with Heather Crocetto for what is now the Center for Local History of the Arlington library system.
The American Nazi Party declined in the public consciousness after the murder of its leader Rockwell in Arlington in 1967, but the Sun – which published six days a week – had plenty of other issues to cover in the growing Northern Virginia area. At one point, the paper was cranking out 10,000 words of local copy per day, while also publishing wire-service reports of the state, national and international scenes.
At the same time, Obermayer used the paper’s printing facilities to carve out a niche, becoming the largest printer of foreign-language publications in the region. At its height, the firm was depositing 8 million copies of newspapers into the local mailstream per year.
In a 1989 oral-history with Edmund Campbell and Cas Conklin, conducted a year after he sold the newspaper, Obermayer said he had always been impressed by the governance of localities in the region.
“I think they’ve been very high-grade people here,” he said. “Brighter than others, and generally it’s been a clean political atmosphere.”
In a 2013 interview with the Sun Gazette, Obermayer – then 89 years old – said he decided to sell the newspaper and press operation in the late 1980s because the economic risk was beginning to outweigh the potential reward.
“I tried hard when I owned the paper, and sure, I miss some of it,” he said.
From 1990 to 2001, Herman and Betty Nan Obermayer represented the U.S. Department of State as consultants to newspapers in countries of the former Communist bloc. Herman Obermayer also was a lecturer in media at Harvard University and wrote several books, including a biography of his friend, William Rehnquist. (Obermayer and Rehnquist were on opposite sides when it came to the question of televising court proceedings; the newspaper publisher supported the concept, the chief justice opposed it.)
Herman Obermayer also was one of the first, if not the first, Jewish members of Washington Golf & Country Club. And in 2009, he was honored for 50 years of perfect attendance at the Rotary Club of Arlington.
Somewhat conservative politically, Obermayer wrote a weekly front-page column in the Sun, penned political endorsements and, with his wife, reported from both the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Betty Nan Obermayer died in January 2013; she was active in leadership of Temple Rodef Shalom, the Jewish Foundation for Group Homes and Arena Stage. The couple, married in 1955, had four daughters and 11 grandchildren.
A memorial service is slated for Tuesday, May 17 at 10:30 a.m. at Temple Rodef Shalom, 2100 Westmoreland Drive in Falls Church.
Additional reporting by Brian Trompeter and Dave Facinoli.
