Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg

Sister of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was the publisher of The Chattanooga Times for 28 years, before taking on the position of Chairman of Times Printing Company, which published The Chattanooga Times. She served as a director of Association Press [The Associated Press], the American Press Institute, and was the director of The New York Times Company, and The New York Times Foundation for 30 years. Holmberg received the Smith College Medal in 1988, the Kiwanis Distinguished Service Award in 1989, the Liberty Bell Award in 1990, and the Bravo Award from Allied Arts in 2006. She received a B.A. degree from Smith College and was named an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law by the University of the South. She was a granddaughter of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought The Chattanooga Times in 1878 and The New York Times in 1896, and the second of four children of Iphigene Ochs and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961. Her brother, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who died in 2012, became publisher of The New York Times and chairman and chief executive of the Times Company. One sister, Marian Sulzberger Heiskell, became a New York civic and philanthropic leader. Another, Judith P. Sulzberger, who died in 2011, became a doctor affiliated with the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. Mrs. Holmberg (her name from a second marriage) was a 25-year-old Sulzberger heiress when she and her first husband, Ben Hale Golden, arrived in Chattanooga in 1946 — not to take over her family’s newspaper but to begin Mr. Golden’s career on it. Mr. Golden resigned in 1964 and was succeeded by his wife. The couple, who had four children, were divorced in 1965. In 1972, she married Albert William Holmberg Jr., who oversaw the production, advertising and circulation departments at the paper. He was later named its president. Mrs. Holmberg is survived by the four children from her first marriage: Stephen Golden, a retired lawyer who was president of the Times Company’s forest products group; Michael Golden, who recently retired as vice chairman of the Times Company; Lynn G. Dolnick, a Ph.D biologist and retired associate director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo; and Arthur Sulzberger Golden, author of the best-selling 1997 novel “Memoirs of a Geisha.” Their father died in 1970. Mrs. Holmberg is also survived by her sister Ms. Heiskell; her stepdaughters, Jeanne Johnson, Meg Duckworth and Elin Holmberg-Rowland; seven grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, seven step-grandchildren and a number of step-great-grandchildren. Mr. Holmberg died in 2005. Her nephew Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is publisher of The New York Times and chairman of the Times Company. One of her grandsons, Sam Dolnick, is an assistant editor of The Times.