Martha Pulliam; Vice President’s Grandmother

Martha Pulliam, a retired newspaper publisher and the maternal grandmother of Vice President Dan Quayle, died Thursday at the Methodist Home.

Owen Hansen, managing editor of the Lebanon Reporter in nearby Lebanon, Ind., where Mrs. Pulliam was publisher emerita, said she was 100.

In a statement, Quayle said: “My grandmother was the matriarch of our family. She lived a long and beautiful life. . . . She died peacefully and with grace and dignity, just as she lived her life.”

During his October, 1988, debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle said his grandmother helped shape his political philosophy with this advice: “You can do anything you want if you just set your mind to it and go to work.”

On Election Day, Quayle visited Mrs. Pulliam at her nursing home and said she told him “to keep going in the right direction, but don’t do anything you shouldn’t do.”

In 1919, Mrs. Pulliam married Eugene C. Pulliam, who founded Central Newspapers Inc., which publishes newspapers in Indianapolis, Muncie and Vincennes, Ind., and in Phoenix. The couple, who had two daughters, including Quayle’s mother, divorced in 1940.

Mrs. Pulliam also was the stepmother of Eugene S. Pulliam, current publisher of The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News. She was publisher of the Lebanon Reporter from the early 1940s until December.

Funeral services were set for Saturday in Franklin.

Other survivors include her daughters Martha Corrinne Quayle and Suzanne Murphy, 10 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren.