Walter Burroughs, Ex-Publisher, Civic Leader, Dies

Walter Burroughs, former publisher of the Orange Coast Daily Pilot and co-founder of Bantam Books, has died in Newport Beach, family members said Monday. He was 88.

Burroughs, who was hospitalized for a stroke suffered Friday, died Sunday afternoon at Hoag Hospital, relatives said.

Considered by many to have been one of the most influential people in Orange County, Burroughs was said to have been a key figure in bringing UC Irvine to the county.

“Walter Burroughs, along with Joan Irvine Smith and the late (Edward J.) Brick Power, was one of the three people responsible for the Irvine campus being here,” UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason said Monday. “He was a great man and a great leader and continued to be a close friend to the campus.”

In 1958, Burroughs and Power founded Friends of the University of California in Orange County, later known as Friends of UCI, to support the movement to secure a UC campus in Irvine, a UCI spokesman said.

Burroughs was born in 1901 in Bridgewater, S.D. Eight years later he moved with his family to Tacoma, Wash., where at the age of 11 he printed 10 copies of his own neighborhood newspaper. After graduating from the University of Washington, Burroughs applied for active duty in the Marine Corps but was not accepted because of poor eyesight.

He went on to work for two years as a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before taking a job as director of campus publications at UC Berkeley.

Following a disagreement with higher authorities at the university, Burroughs decided to take a temporary leave from journalism and joined the Los Angeles-based H.S. Crocker Printing Co., where he spent the next 10 years and co-founded Bantam Books.

In 1942, Burroughs was activated from his reserve officer status into the Army with the rank of major and spent three years in ordnance procurement in San Francisco and Utah.

After the war, he and his wife, Hazel, moved from Los Angeles to Orange County, where he bought the Costa Mesa Globe-Herald in 1948 and later changed the newspaper’s name to the Orange Coast Daily Pilot.

During his tenure as publisher of the Pilot, Burroughs is credited with increasing the paper’s circulation from 500 to more than 40,000. He sold the paper to Times Mirror in 1962 but stayed on as publisher until 1964; he left because he had been told by doctors that he had cancer. He said he felt the condition would recur despite successful surgery to remove the cancerous tissue.

In the two decades after Burroughs sold the paper (which no longer is owned by Times Mirror), he involved himself in various county enterprises ranging from developing TV Channel 56 to the Western World Medical Foundation, whose application to build in Irvine led to the fight over whether a teaching hospital should be built on the UCI campus.

Burroughs was a member of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles. He was a prime mover in the incorporation of Costa Mesa in 1953. He was the 1981 winner of the Orange Coast College Outstanding Citizen award.

Burroughs’ first wife, Hazel, died in 1970; two years later he married Lucy Bell, editor of the Pilot’s Weekend section.

“All I can say is that the man who had so much energy and so much vision just finally ran out of steam,” Lucy Burroughs said Monday.

Burroughs also is survived by his only child, daughter Toni Doane, and three grandsons.

At Burroughs’ request, his body will be cremated and his ashes buried at sea without a memorial service, his wife said.