John H Burlingame

Born in Milwaukee on April 27, 1933, the son of Leroy James Burlingame and Mary Janet Burchard, he was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and obtained his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin in 1960 and 1963 respectively. For 4 years in the late 1950s, he served in the U.S. Navy as a pilot. Mr. Burlingame began a distinguished legal career spanning 40 years by joining BakerHostetler in 1963 and was elected a partner in the firm in 1971. He was appointed to the Managing Committee in 1979 and served as the firm's executive partner from 1982 to 1997. He continued the national expansion with a 1990 merger with the 80-attorney firm McCutcheon, Black, Verleger & Shea in Los Angeles and Houston. Today the firm has more than 900 lawyers in 14 offices, and while Cleveland remains its largest office. A corporate lawyer, Mr. Burlingame served as the firm's relationship partner for one of its oldest clients, The Edward W. Scripps Trust (the "Trust") and the public companies it controlled, The E.W. Scripps Company (the EWSCo) and Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. (SNI). He served as one of three trustees of the Trust alongside Scripps family members from 1987 to 2014, as a director of EWSCo from 1988 to 2012, and as a director of SNI from 2008 following its spin-off from the EWSCo until 2014. Mr. Burlingame was active in civic and philanthropic affairs, especially in Cleveland during the four decades that he lived there. He served on the board of the Cleveland Orchestra, as well as on the executive committee of the Cleveland Play House. In 1999, the John H. Burlingame Distinguished Lecture series was established in his honor at the University of Cincinnati Law School.. There is now a John H. Burlingame Scholarship Fund at the University of Cincinnati Law School. In 2014, a scholarship in his honor was established at the University of Wisconsin School of Law at Madison. Mr. Burlingame is survived by his wife of 34 years, Dorcas (Dee) of Sayner and North Lake, WI; six children, Carolyn Burmedi of Heidelberg, Germany, Dr. Janet Burlingame of Kailua, Hawaii (Thomas Wilson), Amy Kritz of Kensington, MD (David), Alexander Burlingame of Bay Village, OH (Jennifer), Rebecca Baird Stiff of Sarasota, FL (Robert), and Meredith Baird Wootters of Conway, AR, 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.