John C. Donahue Jr., 88, editor and publisher
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John C. Donahue Jr. discovered his career when he was 13 years old while crawling through a manhole in Northfield Falls, Vt., with his cousin. The duo found the typing tools used for printing in 1933 and created a summer weekly newspaper for the Northfield community that they ran for five years.
"You've heard of people being born with silver spoons in their mouths - there appears to have been some question about whether I was born with . . . a printer's ruler . . . in my mouth," Mr. Donahue wrote in his unpublished memoirs provided by his daughter Anne of Northfield. "It wasn't until I was 13 I discovered type and printing and newspapers - but once discovered, there was no turning back, I became addicted."
Mr. Donahue, editor and publisher of the Northfield News and Transcript, died of squamous cell cancer, a form of skin cancer, Saturday in his Northfield home. He was 88.
Mr. Donahue was born in Lynn and graduated from Pearl River High School in New York in 1938. He graduated in 1942 from Manhattan College, where he worked as a drama critic and editor of the Manhattan College Quadrangle newsletter. He enlisted in the Coast Guard after graduation and served a year in World War II before he was discharged after an injury.
In the five years following his service, Mr. Donahue worked as the sports editor of the Burlington Daily News in Vermont, was editor of Bostonian Magazine, and was a copy editor for the Quincy Journal.
"He believed journalism was the route for democracy," said Mr. Donahue's wife, Christiane de Vitry (d'Avaucourt), 81, of Northfield. "He said that was the only way to keep people informed."
In 1951, he moved to Paris to work for United Press International and met the woman who would become his wife on the voyage overseas. They were married in 1953 in Paris and settled in the United States shortly after.
Mr. Donahue returned to work as an editor at the Burlington Daily News for three years before he was named national editor for the
In 1963, he founded the Braintree Sunday News and served as the editor and publisher. The paper folded after three years, and Mr. Donahue began working as a copy editor for the Boston Evening Globe.
After leaving the Globe, Mr. Donahue was publisher of Suburban Trends in Riverdale, N.J., for 10 years. Mr. Donahue started and ran The Fall News, a weekly newspaper, out of his home for several years before it closed in 2001. He bought the Northfield News in 2007 and combined it with the Northfield Transcript to create the Northfield News and Transcript. He sold the paper in July, several months after he was diagnosed with cancer. "We all knew we had a different life growing up with a newspaper office in the living room," Anne said.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Donahue leaves three sons, John III of Denville, N.J., Pierre of Takoma Park, Md., and Marc of Monticello, Ind.; two other daughters, Christiane of Northfield and Mayalen of Tampa; three granddaughters; and four grandsons. Services have been held.
