Daniel J Warner's Obituary
Daniel J. Warner, a truth-seeker, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, husband, father, and mentor to numerous award-winning journalists, died of cancer April 25 at Larsen Health Center in Fort Myers, Florida. He was 88.
His passion for providing news of meaning to the everyday person led him to bring a small, family-owned newspaper in North Andover, Massachusetts to national prominence when he led his staff in exposing a program supported by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis that allowed first-degree murderers to be furloughed on weekends. On one such furlough, an inmate named William Horton fled to Maryland, broke into a couple’s home and repeatedly assaulted both before fleeing and being captured by police.
The series of nearly 200 stories about the furlough program won a Pulitzer Prize for The Eagle-Tribune and is widely thought to have contributed to the result of the 1988 presidential race between Dukakis and George H. W. Bush, who won.
But his greatest accomplishment, Warner said from his hospital chair a few weeks before his death, was talking to ordinary people and making sure their stories were told.
Born Aug. 16, 1936 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, Warner was the youngest of five children born to Helen (Warner) and Charles Mulholland. After his mother contracted pneumonia when he was about 18 months old, the family was separated and he was sent to live with his grandmother, Anna Warner, and his aunt, Bernice Warner, in Worthington, Ohio.
His newspaper career began when he was eight years old, delivering the Columbus Dispatch to residents of Worthington, where he attended local public schools, graduating high school in 1954 and spending a semester at Ohio State University School of Journalism.
He was a young stringer for a local newspaper when he covered an event at Elyria (Ohio) High School and was smitten with a student he met while there. He and Janet (Kostyo) Warner wed in 1959 in Lansing, Michigan, and had two children. They were married 64 years before her death in 2023.
Warner worked as a journalist for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1959 to 1969, starting as a junior reporter and leaving as managing editor. He went on to become managing editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for three years, and editor of The Eagle-Tribune for 27 years. While at the Eagle-Tribune, he also participated in a CBS television series, Meet the Editors, and taught a news reporting class at Boston University’s School of Journalism. He and his wife later owned and operated Mt. Blue Publishing in Maine from 1998 to 2002. In retirement, he wrote a column for 17 years at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida.
Many of the reporters he mentored at The Eagle-Tribune went on to award-winning careers at newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times, while others excelled closer to home.
He was “truly a man who had ink in the blood,” said Gretchen M. Grosky, who worked as a reporter under Warner at The Eagle-Tribune and later became its managing editor, shepherding the staff to another Pulitzer for the paper.
Maura Casey, an editorial writer for The Eagle-Tribune who went on to write for The Day in New London, Connecticut, and then The New York Times, remembered Warner advising, “’The best stories will make you feel mad, sad or glad, and make you think.’ How’s that for summarizing all of journalism in one sentence?”
Apart from work, Warner and his late wife were active volunteers, founding and supervising a soup kitchen for years at Church of the Cross in Fort Myers, Florida, and leading workshops for Marriage Encounter, a faith-based marriage enrichment program.
He died after a brief battle with diffuse large B cell lymphoma, a particularly aggressive form of cancer. Funeral services and burial will be held on Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 11a.m. at Fort Myers Memorial Gardens. A celebration of life will be held later this year in the greater Lawrence (MA) area.
Warner is survived by two adult children, Melinda S. Warner of Salem, Massachusetts, a pediatric neuropsychologist in private practice, and Daniel A. Warner of Easton, Pennsylvania, vice-provost of Admissions & Financial Aid at Lehigh University.
In addition to his parents, he is predeceased by his siblings, Anthony, Richard, Thomas and Mary Anne Mulholland. At the time of his death, he was living with his much-beloved dog, Lily.
In lieu of flowers the family ask that you consider donating to the Farmington (ME) Rotary club in support of the Dan and Janet Warner Rotary Pajama Drive to provide needy children pajamas for Christmas morning. Donations can be mailed to: Farmington Rotary, P.O. Box 864, Farmington, ME.
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