William Loeb III - Later Life

Later Life

Loeb continued to see Nackey. In 1949, he fired the print staff at his Vermont newspapers when they attempted to unionize. Nackey was initially placed in charge of printing, but the couple left the state in 1952 in the wake of his mother's lawsuit, and moved to Reno, Nevada, where Loeb sued for divorce from McAllister and then married Nackey Gallowhur. The Vermont papers flailed in the absence of Loeb's attention, and also suffered from negative reader and advertiser reaction to his opinionated absentee editorials. The Daily News ceased operations in 1959. Loeb did not visit the St. Albans paper offices again until 1973.

In 1950, Loeb repeated his baptismal certificate stunt, this time on the Union Leader front page. He again hoped to dispel gossip about his Jewish heritage, this time in the wake of controversy surrounding his political endorsements.

Loeb moved to Pride's Crossing outside Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1955 to be closer to his New England newspaper operations. In 1957 he attempted to launch a paper in nearby Haverhill, the Haverhill Journal, but the publication proved to be a drain on the staff and presses shared with his other newspapers. The Journal folded in 1965, and Loeb blamed union activity for the closure. During a newspaper strike in Boston, he imported copies of the Union Leader into the city, but stopped after incorrect sports information in the publication led to threats from figures in the city's crime world. Loeb purchased the rights to the Connecticut Sunday Herald name (but not its presses), and relaunched it from Bridgeport, Connecticut, but once again his editorial stances alienated readers, and the paper closed.

Loeb's mother, Katherine Dorr-Loeb, died on November 24, 1968. Her will acknowledged Loeb's siblings, ex-wife Eleanore McAllister, and his daughter Katharine Penelope, but left him nothing. He filed suit, beginning a five-year legal battle that lasted through 1973 and rose to the Vermont Supreme Court, claiming that he had reconciled with his mother and that she had promised him 75% of her estate. He settled for less than 10%, after her estate had been drained of the bulk of its funds through his legal maneuvering. Loeb separated himself from Eleanore and Katharine Penelope. When his daughter suffered a near-fatal injury in an equestrian accident the next year and lost a kidney, Loeb refused to speak to her.

Loeb's journalism resume was the subject of skepticism in 1974, when he claimed in a front-page editorial to have worked for the Hearst conglomerate, as a reporter for the New York World for eight years before buying his St. Albans paper. Hearst Corporation denied he had ever been employed there, and the World had actually ceased operations eight years before Loeb said he had started work there. Toledo Blade chairman Paul Block, Jr. also denied ever seeing Loeb on the assignments he claimed to have worked.

William Loeb died in 1981 and left control of the Union Leader to his wife, Nackey. She suffered partial paralysis in a 1977 automobile accident, but continued to publish the paper until her death in 2000, when control fell to Bernard McQuaid's son, Joseph McQuaid. The Union Leader now operates several weekly community papers under the Neighborhood News, Inc. name in southern New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Mirror, a biweekly women's magazine, and the NewHampshire.Com website.