Joseph R Knowland Jr.

WALNUT CREEK — Known as “Mighty Joe Knowland” to colleagues and simply “Papa” to his family, Joseph W. Knowland, the former Oakland Tribune editor and publisher, died earlier this week at the age of 88, his son said Saturday.
Knowland, whose grandfather purchased the paper in 1915, was the last independent publisher of the Tribune, before his family sold the daily in 1977 to the Combined Communications Corporation. At 24, after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Knowland got his start in the newspaper business working for the Tribune as a cub reporter, before being trained in every department within the business, his son, Bill Knowland said.
After the death of his father, William Knowland, in 1974, Joe Knowland stepped into the role of editor-in-chief and publisher of the paper, earning the designation of Publisher of the Year from the California Press Association just a year later, in 1975.
Bill Knowland said that honor was earned partly because of his father’s creativity and his ability to help bring new ideas to the newspaper business. Joe Knowland also loved to have fun. At the centennial celebration of the Tribune, he organized an event in which a magician replicating Harry Houdini dangled from the Tribune Tower.

“He was inspirational to me in terms of his creativity and also his mentor-ship in the joys of life,” Bill Knowland said. “He liked to have a positive outlook on life and to have fun.”Knowland also took a stand, as editor of the Tribune, for press freedom when he refused to publish in the paper communications from the Symbionese Liberation Army word-for-word, as the militant group had wanted, which he detailed in a March 1974 editorial.

Paul Hertelendy, a music writer who worked under Knowland, remembered his former boss as “the best editor-in-chief ever.”
Knowland was “receptive to new ideas, supportive of imaginative writers,” Hertelendy said in an email. He added, “He is and will be sorely missed.”
But Joe Knowland’s real passion was performing, not publishing. When the paper was sold in 1977, he had already been performing in dozens of plays and skits at the Bohemian Club and Bohemian Grove, his son said, and then went on to a career in modeling and acting, where he had roles in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Escape from Alcatraz, among other feature films, made-for-television movies, short films and commercials. He also starred as a salty old sea captain in “San Francisco — Great Adventure,” which ran at Pier 39 for five years.

“He enjoyed physical comedy. He was a vaudevillian at heart,” Bill Knowland said of his father.
He added that his family will best remember his father for his personal creative endeavors, including elaborate treasure hunts and haunted houses.
Between acting gigs, Joe Knowland served on the boards of the Screen Actors Guild in San Francisco, the Oakland Coliseum, Mills College and the California College of Arts & Crafts. He and his wife, Dolores “Dee” Faye Beall, co-chaired a fundraising campaign to restore the art deco-era Paramount Theater in Oakland, which is now a national historic landmark.
Knowland leaves behind his wife, sister, two children, daughter-in-law and grandson, and is pre-deceased by his daughter and another sister. At the time of his death, he was living in the Rossmoor neighborhood of Walnut Creek.