Richard “Dick” Tobin Thieriot was born into the newspaper profession, and he loved it. His great-grandfather co-founded the Chronicle in 1865, he learned the business from the time he could write, and the day before he died on Sept. 27, he was working hard in his office. Like any go-getter editor would.
In his 82 years of life, Thieriot was also many other things: an environmentalist, a rancher, a farmer, a combat Marine, a wrestler on his college team at Yale. But it was all rooted in that ink-stained trade his family blessed him with, and when he ran the San Francisco Chronicle as editor and publisher from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, he left his imprint on every corner.
Under Thieriot’s reign, the Chronicle’s print circulation rose to 600,000, its peak.
