Former Tribune Co. CEO Stanton R. Cook inherited an underperforming company and transformed it into a modern, diversified media corporation that broke with its conservative past, endured a lengthy union strike and bought a Major League Baseball team.
Cook, 90, died of natural causes on Thursday in his Kenilworth home, said his son, Doug.
“Stan Cook was a terrific leader and one of the pioneers in diversifying media companies,” Tony Hunter, publisher and CEO of Chicago Tribune Media Group, said. “He always talked about the joy he got from working with so many talented, good people.”
Cook’s son said he “was the quintessential Midwestern gentleman” who had a very strong moral compass.
It was perhaps that moral compass that led Cook to make a startling break with the company’s conservative Republican heritage in May 1974. About a month into his job as Tribune Co. CEO and president, Cook backed an editorial that called for President Richard Nixon to resign.
That move came a week after the paper became the first to publish the entire Watergate-related transcripts from Nixon’s scandal-plagued White House. In one day, the Tribune produced a 44-page special section that included the transcripts, an effort that TV commentator John Chancellor called at the time “a publishing miracle.”
On the corporate front, Cook made Tribune’s broadcasting unit a separate division. With the $510 million purchase of Los Angeles television station KTLA in 1985, the division became the country’s largest operator of independent TV stations.
Cook also helped lead the company from a closely held, private entity to a publicly traded company in 1983, a move that raised $206 million.
But labor problems arose in the mid-1980s. Union production workers at the Chicago Tribune and Tribune-owned New York Daily News fought the introduction of new technology and changes in work rules the company sought. In 1985,Tribune printers began a strike that would last for 40 months over company demands for more control of hiring and assignments.
In a 2008 interview, Cook said he had mixed emotions about that strike. His grandfather and uncle had been in the Chicago printing trades. Cook also knew many of the strikers from working alongside them in the production department, where he’d started his Tribune career in April 1951.
“It was very tough, particularly on the picket line,” Cook recalled. “I would see my friends on the picket line. Here I was crossing the picket line, something I never thought would happen. They would say, ‘You could end this thing, you could end it now.'”
Born in Chicago on July 3, 1925, Stanton Rufus Cook and a younger sister, Nancy, grew up in a Scottish-Norwegian household in Park Ridge, then a rural community where neighbors kept chickens and a young Cook could hunt for pheasants and squirrels. His father sold insurance and his mother was a homemaker.
He attended Maine Township High School (now Maine East), where he was on the rifle team and played the euphonium in the band. Cook later sold his brass instrument so he could buy a camera — photography became a lifelong hobby for him — but he took up the horn again in middle age.
In January 1944, six months after finishing high school, Cook entered the Army Air Forces cadet program and later gunnery school, serving mostly in Texas. A Christian Scientist like his mother, he later recalled that his Army physical was his first examination by a doctor.
Cook rose to the rank of second lieutenant by the time of his discharge in 1946. He then enrolled at Northwestern University. He graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Shell Oil Co. hired him as a trainee in Chicago and then a district salesman in Lake County.
In 1950, he married Barbara “Bobbie” Wilson, whom he had met on a blind date a year and a half earlier in Evanston. The couple eventually had five children and were together until her death, in 1994.
On a snowy and frigid morning in January 1951, Cook was overseeing a gas station in Waukegan that Shell had acquired when a call came from a family friend who was a Chicago Tribune purchasing agent. The caller asked whether Cook wanted to apply to be an engineer in the paper’s production department. Cook said yes, got the job and started that April.
“That turn of events, that fork in the road, that’s how I got started with the Tribune,” Cook recalled in a 2008 interview. “But I have never forgotten that cold morning in that gas station.”
In the production department, Cook became acquainted with all the paper’s mechanical operations and its workers, and he worked closely with editorial, advertising and marketing. He learned, he said in a 1996 interview, “what was in that great building, from the bottom, the lowest part of the boiler room, to the highest part of the Tower.”
The company had been in limbo since the death in 1955 of longtime Tribune Co. chief, Col. Robert McCormick. Management needed to be reorganized, financial practices standardized and editorial standards reconsidered. But many Tower executives clung to the old ways and biases of McCormick’s.
One agent of change was Harold Grumhaus. He had hired Cook and been his mentor in the production department. As Grumhaus rose up the ranks of Tribune Co. — he became chief executive officer in 1971 — so did his protege Cook.
Cook became director of operations in 1969 of the Tribune and its general manager in 1970. He was elected president of the newspaper and a director of the parent company in 1972. In 1973, he became publisher of the Tribune and a vice president of the parent company.
With the rise of Clayton Kirkpatrick to Tribune editor in 1969, the paper had begun to abandon the reflexive and often nasty Republican partisanship that had long marred its news coverage and dominated its editorial page. Kirkpatrick found an ally in Cook.
In a 2008 interview, John Madigan, who had been hired by Cook in 1975 and later became Tribune Co.’s president and chief executive, said Cook’s impact on the company was “profound.”
“He played an enormous role in leading it out of the control (of a family trust) to a company that was responsible to all shareholders,” Madigan said. “Unfortunately, Tribune was a severe underperformer when he took over. It took awhile to get the company on a much stronger footing.”
Tall, gray-haired and square-jawed, Cook “looked like a CEO from central casting,” wrote The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta in a 1998 article. But Cook was anything but standoffish. He enjoyed mixing with his employees, he eagerly joined editors and reporters on fact-finding trips abroad, and he once signed on as the Chicago Tribune’s photographer for coverage of an arduous, three-week tour of Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Baseball was “a huge passion of his” and the Chicago Cubs were the team he followed his entire life, Doug Cook said of his father. In 1981, Stanton Cook acted on that passion, when Tribune Co. bought the team and Wrigley Field for $20.5 million.
The move also had its strategic value. By acquiring the team, Tribune protected a valuable source of sports programming for its WGN TV and radio stations. Chairman of the Cubs until 1994, Cook relished overseeing the club and joining baseball’s inner circle.
In 2009, the company announced a sale of the Cubs, Wrigley Field and a 25 percent stake in Comcast SportsNet Chicago to the Ricketts family, a deal valued at $845 million.
Cook relinquished the CEO title in 1990, though he remained chairman of the company until January 1993 and a member of its board until 1996.
Throughout his career, Cook was active in industry associations and served on the boards of several Chicago museums and civic organizations. He was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from 1984 to 1985, a term dominated by the failure and federal takeover of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co.
He served as a Northwestern University trustee for decades. From 1989 to 1995, he co-chaired, with Lester Crown, a fundraising campaign to renovate the engineering school building. He contributed $2 million and helped persuade his fellow directors of the McCormick Tribune Foundation (now the Robert R. McCormick Foundation) to approve a $30 million gift.
“He was one of the more active and energetic trustees,” said former Northwestern University President and former Tribune Co. board member Arnold Weber in a 2008 interview. “And he never complained about the football team.”
In retirement, Cook split time between Kenilworth and the family summer home in Glen Lake, Mich. Always handy, he kept a shop at the Glen Lake home, and he built boathouses and other structures there.
He looked forward each summer to trips to Canada and fly-fishing for Atlantic salmon with former Tribune colleagues.
One fishing pal, John Houghton, recalled in 2008 that Cook “would get into camp with a grin and keep it, even if he didn’t catch anything.”
Once in camp, Cook would take a lot of ribbing from his friends about his thriftiness and the way he doted on his dogs.
“We used to say that if we were reborn, we’d like to come back as one of Stan’s dogs because he treated them so well,” said a former longtime Tribune Co. executive Byron Campbell, another fishing pal, in a 2008 interview.
In a 1996 interview, Cook summed up his career, though he could have been talking of his life: “It had its moments of peril, it had its moments of disappointment. But as I look back, this was all part of a mix that was wonderful.”
A dozen years later, Cook spoke of the special feeling he had each time he entered Tribune Tower.
“People say hello to you,” he said. “I really appreciate that. It tells you something about the place. I can get teary about it because it really means something to me. It always will.”
Cook also is survived by two other sons, Scott and David; two daughters, Nancy Cook and Sarah Shumway; and seven grandchildren.
A memorial service is set for 10 a.m. Wednesday at Kenilworth Union Church, 221 Kenilworth Ave., Kenilworth.
Gregory is a Tribune reporter; Storch and Reardon are former Tribune reporters.
