Portrait of Robert Maynard, the former owner of the Oakland Tribune, in his office on the 47th floor of the Tribune Building. He is sitting on a table and in the background is a newspaper mural or collage created for the 1974 Tribune centennial. Excerpt from "Current Biography," June 1986: "In 1983 a black high school dropout with little money bought a major metropolitan United States newspaper serving an ethnically diverse city and a farflung network of wealthy white suburbs. The purchase of the Tribune of Oakland, California was merely the latest in a string of seemingly impossible feats accomplished by Robert C. Maynard, a journalist with a national reputation as reporter, editor, and social critic. ...Robert Clyve Maynard was born on June 17, 1937 in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in the mostly black Bedford-Stuyvesant section. His parents, Samuel C. Maynard, a part-time lay preacher who owned a small trucking firm, and Robertine Isola (Greaves) Maynard, had immigrated to the United States from Barbados in 1919. ...in 1967...he was offered a position with the Washington Post...becoming its first black national correspondent. ...in April 1983, Maynard demonstrated his commitment to Oakland and to the paper when he bought the Oakland Tribune Inc. from Gannett, becoming the first black person in the United States to own a controlling interest in a general-circulation city daily, and the first big-city editor in recent times of any race to buy out his paper." From the Oakland Tribune, February 1, 1993, article titled "Oakland has rich history of black-owned media" by Donna Birch and Craig Staats: "...Robert C. Maynard, the nation's only African-American publisher of a major daily, struggled against incredible financial odds to keep the Oakland Tribune publishing for a decade. Under Maynard, the paper won a coveted Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and numerous other awards. The Tribune developed a national reputation as a scrappy paper that reflected its diverse community. However, the national recession and Oakland's stalled economic development, combined with Maynard's personal battle with cancer, forced him to sell the paper to the Alameda Newspaper Group in 1992." Information on the wall mural provided by Steve Lavoie, librarian Oakland Tribune. This photo was not used in the Oakland Tribune, but might possibly have been used by the Tribune for Maynard's syndicated column.