Richard “Dick” T. Schlosberg III, a longtime publisher, philanthropist and business leader who flew numerous missions as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, died Wednesday at his Alamo Heights home, surrounded by family members, after a long battle with brain cancer. He was 79.
Schlosberg, who had undergone treatment for glioblastoma that was diagnosed in September 2022, is survived by his wife, Kathy Schlosberg; his son, Dr. Richard “Rich” T. Schlosberg IV; his daughter, Deb Rich Herczeg; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
“He impacted every community he lived in,” Rich Schlosberg said. “He was such a service guy — whether he was running a business or participating on a board, he always wanted to … bring service, honor, discipline, support people and lead with integrity.”
Her father’s “circle of impact” is difficult to put into words, Rich Herczeg said. “It’s just impossible to encompass everything about him and who he was. We’re just grateful for an enormously loving and supportive community here in San Antonio.”
Schlosberg was a publisher, president or CEO of three newspapers, a board member of more than a dozen for-profit and nonprofit companies and a driving force behind the creation of a foundation for the U.S. Air Force Academy. He also guided billions in philanthropic giving between 1999 and 2003 as president and CEO of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, one of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations.
“Never — and I really mean never — have I known a stronger community leader, a more devoted family man, a braver Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, or a more brilliant media executive than my friend Dick Schlosberg,” said Tom Johnson, a fellow media chief who preceded Schlosberg as publisher of the Los Angeles Times and would go on to lead CNN.
“His character, his intelligence, his integrity, his loyalty, his work ethic… . He was an overachiever in everything he undertook,” Johnson said. “He gave every assignment his very best.”
He served as the founding chairman of the nonprofit San Antonio Report, which co-founder Robert Rivard said was essential to the news organization’s early success in the community.
“Here I was in my early 60s learning the art of raising funds for a nascent nonprofit,” Rivard recalled, “and there was Dick delivering a master class in how to meet with people who hold the purse strings.”
Schlosberg was born April 6, 1944, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, to Helen and Richard Schlosberg II and graduated from high school in Seville, Spain, while his father, a World War II pilot, was stationed there. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in 1965. That same year, before he shipped off to the Vietnam War, he married Kathy, whom he met when they were both just 9 years old.
“By the time we married, at 21, we had already known each other for 12 years,” he told the Los Altos Town Crier in 1999.
“They’ve been childhood friends and lifetime partners,” said William Moll, a fellow former media executive.
While his professional accomplishments were numerous and international, his son said, “his greatest accomplishment is the family. He had pride in the family and he embarrassingly would overshare pictures and stories of kids and grandkids and soccer games.”
Just six weeks before he was diagnosed with cancer, Schlosberg officiated at the wedding of his granddaughter Melissa in Keystone, Colorado, with four generations of Schlosbergs in attendance.
“I think he would say that that’s probably one of his proudest moments,” his son said. During the ceremony, his father imparted advice on staying in love: “… It’s the little connections you have every day with your partner — the glance, the wink, the gesture — that only the two of you know about, but it means something to the two of you.”
Kathy Schlosberg, an educator who also serves on several boards, has been by her husband’s side almost constantly since he experienced a bout of seizures around Thanksgiving, Moll said.
“Dick calls her the commander,” he said. “The chairman of the board, controller of the schedule.”
During the Vietnam War, Schlosberg served two tours of duty, where he flew over 200 combat support missions as a KC-135 Stratotanker pilot,” according to Air Force Academy records.
The KC-135 is a tanker plane that would refuel fighter jets and bombers in the air — often near active combat zones, said Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Gould, president and CEO of the Air Force Academy Association of Graduates and Foundation, who got to know Schlosberg as he was fundraising for the academy.
“It requires tremendous skill and concentration and training and execution,” Gould said. “Dick did this as a 25-year-old captain. … He takes that same level of commitment and drive and turns it into such a successful business career. And throughout all that, he remains so humble and selfless in everything he’s done. That’s why we just admire the guy so much.”
After graduating with honors from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business Administration, Schlosberg went into newspaper publishing.
As he told the Town Crier in 1999, “my gravitation toward newspapers in the mid-1970s was a natural one for me” as it was a way to get involved in communities.
But ultimately it was family that led him to San Antonio, where he would lend his expertise to countless business and philanthropic enterprises.
“He used to say: ‘There are nine people in my life I care about,'” Kathy Schlosberg said. “‘You’re the first one, and the other eight [children and grandchildren] live in San Antonio.'”
Publishing and Packard days
He began his newspaper career with Harte-Hanks Communications, a media conglomerate that once owned the San Antonio Express-News. He served as president of The Corpus Christi Caller-Times, publisher and CEO of The Denver Post, and president, publisher and CEO of The Los Angeles Times, both owned at the time by the Times-Mirror company.
Under his leadership, the Los Angeles and Denver newspapers both received Pulitzer Prizes, the industry’s highest honor.
“We were a band of brothers in a corporate, business sense,” recalled Moll, who worked with Schlosberg at Harte-Hanks. “He was always focused, he would cut to the chase, he would see almost instantly what was essential to solving a problem … and he communicated clearly.”
That’s a skill he likely picked up from being an “Air Force brat,” moving around so much and being in the military himself, said Moll, former president of KLRN-TV and Clear Channel Television.
“If you walk into Dick’s closet — I don’t think I have ever seen anything so orderly,” he said. “There was a focused, limited number of dress shirts, one inch apart. … He saw things in an orderly way, wanted to live an orderly life, and he did so.”
Schlosberg’s leadership style was direct, but he also had a healthy sense of humor and fun, said Charles “Shelby” Coffey, who was editor of the LA Times when Schlosberg became president.
One year in the mid-1990s, the Los Angeles newspaper raked in more than $800 million in advertising revenue (for perspective, the paper’s overall revenue was $350 million in 2020) and to celebrate, the executives threw a blowout party for the staff at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip.
They hired the Los Angeles Lakers’ Laker Girls to dance and a live band to play while Schlosberg and Coffey sang “Wild Thing” from the stage.
Schlosberg left the Times in 1997, long before controversial Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell purchased the paper in 2007. Zell would go on to slash staff, put staff’s pension at risk and ultimately file for bankruptcy in 2008.
The heyday of highly profitable newspaper publishing that extended from the 1970s into the early 2000s was soon enough disrupted by the advent of the internet, and other online enterprises.
Schlosberg always reminded friends like Moll and Rivard how fortunate they were to work for leading media organizations during the “golden era of journalism.”
Long after he had left the Los Angeles Times, Schlosberg helped fight for his and other employees’ compensation related to their stock ownership plan.
“It was not like [that money] was going to radically affect his lifestyle,” Moll said, but the cuts devastated many other employees’ retirement plans. “… It triggered the ‘fight’ impulse, and he said: ‘Sam can’t get away with that.'”
Employees filed a lawsuit in 2008 and the Times’ parent company paid a $32 million settlement a few years later.
In 1999, Schlosberg was named president and CEO of the California-based David and Lucile Packard Foundation, focusing its support for charitable projects around the globe in education, art, family planning and conservation. Over the next five years, he would oversee the distribution of more than $2 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations.
“Schlosberg … led the foundation through what many observers believe were its most trying times,” according to Philanthropy News Digest. “When he took the helm in 1999, the foundation had nearly $13 billion in assets, primarily in Hewlett-Packard Co. stock, but by the end of 2002, the stock market collapse had slashed that amount to $4.8 billion.”
The job took Schlosberg and his wife “all over the world,” including to African countries and India, Moll said. “It connected them with … billionaires like Bill Gates — and they shared common interests in philanthropy and in solving the world’s health problems, the world’s education problems.”
Schlosberg understood the great responsibility and privilege of his work at Packard.
Moll recalled one of Schlosberg’s quips during that time: “When you have a $12 billion corpus, everybody wants to take you to dinner and everybody laughs at your jokes.”
Schlosberg left the foundation and moved to San Antonio in 2004 to live closer to his children; his son is a pediatrician and business administrator, and his daughter teaches at a middle school in Boerne.
Strong school ties
In 2003, Schlosberg was recognized by the Air Force Academy and its association of graduates as a distinguished graduate. Only two or three graduates are selected each year and a 4-foot marble obelisk topped with a bronze likeness and inscription is installed for each honoree in the academy’s Heritage Trail.
“In every endeavor, Mr. Schlosberg left institutions stronger than when he arrived, was a mentor to emerging leaders and was revered by those who worked for him,” his plaque reads. “Throughout a lifetime of leadership and service, he exemplified the highest ideals and core values of the Air Force Academy.”
In 2007, Schlosberg was at the forefront of establishing the first endowment for the Air Force Academy.
For decades, military academies didn’t need private philanthropic support, Gould said. “The government paid for everything.”
But that public funding started to become less stable under different White House administrations, he said. “The defense budget will grow or shrink, depending on the perspective of the commander-in-chief. … When a defense budget would shrink, training and education would be at the tail end of that whip.”
The service academies recognized this trend in the 1990s and started forming endowments or foundations to pick up the slack, Gould said. “It was extremely hard to get our graduate community, who would form the donor base, to understand why Uncle Sam wasn’t picking up the tab for whatever our academy needed.”
Enter Schlosberg.
He understood the need, and using his extensive philanthropic experience and understanding of politics and policy, he led the charge, Gould said.
“He was that leader who convinced others who had the means to join in with the foundation’s efforts and really change that culture at the Air Force Academy,” he said. “He had such a reputation as being an upstanding, honest broker that when Dick Schlosberg was at the helm, everybody said: ‘I’m in.'”
Over his lifetime, Schlosberg had several careers and accumulated many achievements, but he was most proud of — though still fairly quiet about — being an Air Force Academy graduate, Moll said.
The feeling was mutual.
Schlosberg’s 60th class reunion was scheduled to take place in 2025 in Washington, D.C., but when other members of the class learned of his brain tumor, they moved the reunion to April 2023 in San Antonio.
“Dick asked me to help organize the event,” Rivard recalled of the spring celebration. “We made the Hotel Emma our base, and arranged a private dinner at the Alamo’s new Exhibition Hall as well as a private, behind-the-curtains tour for Dick’s fellow grads and their spouses.”
Rivard and Joint Base San Antonio Brig. Gen. Russell D. Driggers worked to put together a morning session on the history and contemporary relationship of the military and the city of San Antonio.
“I think there were about 16 other surviving members of Dick’s class, and they and their spouses all looked up to Dick and Kathy as lifelong friends, more like family,” Rivard said. “Being there, mostly as an observer, was a very personal and emotional experience. Gen. Driggers, also an academy graduate, honored the group with his presence. He treated them like they were his commanding officers. One had the sense that the next reunion would count even fewer members of the Class of ‘65.”
Board and community service
Schlosberg was far from retired when he left Packard and moved to San Antonio. He still served on Packard’s board and several others, including eBay and the National Air and Space Museum at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, and served as a lead independent director of Edison International, a California-based public utility holding company.
Over the years, Schlosberg served on many boards, including at The Smithsonian Institution, Kaiser Family Foundation, for two United Way campaigns in Denver and Los Angeles, BAE Systems, Pomona College and the United Service Organizations (USO).
Soon after he moved to San Antonio, he was recruited to participate in the inaugural class of the Masters Leadership Program of Greater San Antonio, which exposes retired or about-to-retire leaders to “all the major elements in our city so they can become volunteers and get involved in nonprofits and boards and commissions,” said Wayne Alexander, the retired president of SBC Southwestern Bell, who met Schlosberg through the program.
Schlosberg became a founding director of The Bank of San Antonio, Bandera First State Bank and San Antonio Capital Management. He also served on the boards of the San Antonio Area Foundation, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and the San Antonio Medical Foundation with Alexander, who now serves on the San Antonio Report board.
“I got some great board experience because of Dick Schlosberg, who was always in high demand for any board … because he is such a remarkable human being in terms of giving back, having tremendous business acumen [and is] blessed with so much common sense,” Alexander said.
Schlosberg and Alexander both served on the board of LiftFund, which makes loans to small business owners who don’t qualify for traditional financing. But even before he was on the board, Schlosberg helped re-train and reinvigorate the nonprofit’s board, LiftFund founder Janie Barrera said.
Even though a nonprofit board seat is often a volunteer position, board members need to have ownership of the organization, said Barrera, who also sits on the San Antonio Report board. Schlosberg helped “reassure our board what their role is … and it’s not just coming to meetings, it’s also making sure you have the passion” to fundraise and advocate for the organization.
“He has had many honors and has served in many capacities, but that’s not the way he saw himself,” she said “He saw himself more as a servant leader.”
While Schlosberg was undergoing cancer treatment earlier this year, Barrera attended a small gathering with him and other friends just to connect.
“He wanted to make sure that we were comfortable with him and he just wanted to spend time with us,” she said. “Like there was nothing else that was bothering him. … He’s a man that wanted to be in the moment and engage with people.”
While on the board of Texas Biomed, Schlosberg was part of the effort to recruit Dr. Larry Schlesinger from Columbus, Ohio, to head the research institute.
“He was a terrific mentor and coach,” Schlesinger said. “My entire career was [in] academia and medical schools, and here I was moving into a nonprofit, private institute space.”
Once Schlesinger was hired, Schlosberg was “was one of the earliest adopters [of] my vision and became my ally, my supporter and in a sense, my comrade.”
Schlesinger described Schlosberg as “an action-oriented leader” for whom punctuality was paramount.
“When you scheduled a meeting with Dick … at 2 p.m., if you arrived at 2 p.m., you were five minutes late,” Schlesinger said. “He expected a lot from those he worked with.”
But Schlosberg also had a humane way of handling conflict, Alexander said: “He didn’t suffer fools — but he wouldn’t make them suffer.”
All of Schlosberg’s family, friends and colleagues described his keen, often dry sense of humor.
“He was always able to do a good job of keeping things in perspective with humor,” Alexander said. “He always had a quip.”
“Even toward the end,” Rich Schlosberg said, “he would joke that he’s just created a five-star nursing home at his condo.”
His father used humor to bring people together and make them “feel equal,” his son said. “In his position, being a high-powered executive, he would meet people who he probably terrified. And would meet a famous person or a head of state. … [So humor] was always just a great icebreaker for him. Because everyone can communicate through humor and be put at ease.”
In his spare time, Schlosberg was an avid golfer and runner, pursuing those activities in a way typical of his competitive nature, Coffey said.
“Like a lot of long-distance runners, you’re really competing with yourself,” he said. Schlosberg would keep a log in a notebook documenting each run. “He never missed a day.”
A few months ago during a trip to Colorado Springs, Schlosberg wasn’t feeling well, but still managed to crack jokes, Gould said.
“I said ‘Dick, how’s your golf game?'” he recalled.
Schlosberg replied: “You know, Mike, when I got cancer, my golf clubs got cancer, too. … I got rid of them and bought some new ones.”
San Antonio was lucky to have Schlosberg and his passing is a “big loss” to the city, Schlesinger said.
“This is someone who was nationally renowned for his efforts prior to selecting to live with his family in San Antonio,” he said. “We’ve had some of these jewels, leaders in the city that have come in for various reasons, but contributed much to our culture and our city.
“Dick was one of them.”
A funeral service will take place at Concordia Lutheran Church on Friday, Jan. 19, at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, the family requested that donations be made to the Texas Biomedical Research Foundation, the San Antonio Report, the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts or to a charity of the donor’s choice.
