Longtime journalist Chuck Kramer, who began at the Arizona Daily Star as a sports copy editor and retired as assistant managing editor 36 years later, died Sunday at home in hospice care. He was 74.
Kramer was surrounded by his wife, two daughters and a granddaughter. Kramerโs son spent a week with him before his death.
He died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his wife, Cindy Kramer.
Kramer, whose father was in the Navy, was born in Honolulu nine months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, said Cindy Kramer. Before the attack, Kramerโs family was shipped to San Diego, where he grew up and attended San Diego City College from 1959 to 1961. He and Cindy married in 1962.
While in college, Kramer worked at the San Diego Tribune. He later was hired at the Culver City (California) Evening Star News as a sports reporter covering high school and college sports. He also covered the Los Angeles Dodgers, and was a sports columnist by 1963.
In the mid-1960s, he worked in public relations for Pacific Bell Telephone Co. in the Los Angeles-area, and later was a publicist for Disneyland and Lion Country Safari, a wildlife preserve near Irvine, California, said Cindy Kramer.
In 1970, Kramer was hired by the Star as a sports copy editor. He then worked as a sports columnist and managed the sports department from 1985 to 1990.
โChuck was ever-ready to learn something new but held fast to the core values of journalism,โ said Star Editor Bobbie Jo Buel. โThat is to say, be fair and get the facts right.โ
โHe also had a wonderful wit and he used it to help lift the weight on days when there was far too much bad news to report,โ Buel said.
Kramer โcreated the Starโs design department and led the transition from paper and pencil to computer-generated pages,โ wrote Debbie Kornmiller in a 2006 reader advocate column about Kramerโs retirement, mentioning an error database he created in 2000. Kramer was recognized nationally for his accuracy efforts, Kornmiller wrote.
In addition to his wife, Kramer is survived by daughters, Kiarah Morgan and Michele Kramer; son, Jeffrey Kramer; and two granddaughters.
The family asks that donations be made in Kramer’s memory to the Arizona Daily Star Sportsmen’s Fund, a charity that sends children to camp. Credit-card donations can be made at azsendakidtocamp.org/donations or send checks payable to Send a Kid to Camp. The address is Send a Kid to Camp, P.O. Box 16141, Tucson, AZ 85732-6141.
There will be no services for Kramer.
