George Chaplin, retired editor-in-chief of The Honolulu Advertiser, died this morning in Arlington, Va. Advertiser library photo

Family members said he had suffered a fall and broke his shoulder Jan. 27 at his home in McLean, Va. After undergoing surgery last week, Chaplin succumbed today to pneumonia around 8:30 a.m. EST.

Chaplin, who retired in 1986 as Advertiser editor-in-chief, was the only Hawai'i journalist ever to reach the pinnacle of his profession as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, a post he held in 1976.

Upon hearing of Chaplin's death, former colleague John Griffin described him as "one of the leading editors in Hawai'i of the last century."

"Not only was he often seen as one of the top outstanding figures in Hawai'i, he had great national and international recognition," said Griffin, who served under Chaplin as editorial page editor.

Former Star-Bulletin editor Bill Ewing was once quoted as saying: "Statehood, Henry J. Kaiser, jet airplanes and George Chaplin hit Hawai'i at about the same time. I'm not sure where to list them in order of importance.''

Chaplin was a transplanted South Carolinian who never lost his drawl or his courtly demeanor. He was at home in a newsroom, at community meetings and lunches, or at a podium telling folksy stories.

He was organized enough to meet daily deadlines through a 51-year career in journalism, yet his desk was the messiest in town and his office crammed floor to ceiling with thousands of books. Only he could understand his filing system.

He relished beating the competition but was most concerned about being fair and accurate.

He was perennially excited and curious about change and technology, one of the state's first "futurists." Yet years after the newsroom outside his office converted to computer word processors, he still typed stories and editorials with four fingers on a second-hand, 1958 Underwood Standard Model typewriter.

Chaplin was a prolific writer. Give him 10 days in China and he'd produce a 12-part series of stories. In fact, the sheer volume of his prose often caused his newsroom colleagues to roll their eyes skyward and chuckle.

"I take a lot of ribbing for the length of what I write,'' he once admitted. "But there are always requests for reprints."

And many of his efforts won awards in Hawai'i and nationally.

When Chaplin arrived in Hawai'i in 1958, circulation of The Advertiser was 47,000 and the paper was being badly beaten by the rival Star-Bulletin. By the time he left the newsroom 28 years later, the circulation had grown to 90,000 and a few months later the once-struggling Advertiser became Hawai'i's largest newspaper.

In the 1970s, Honolulu Magazine called him one of the city's 10 most influential men. He was named Hawai'i's "Salesman of the Year" in 1977 by the Sales and Marketing Executives of Honolulu.

The Advertiser's former city editor, Sanford Zalburg, said, "He's a helluva reporter and editor and a damn genius with a pencil."

The son of East European immigrants who came to the United States through New York's Ellis Island gateway, Chaplin was born and grew up in South Carolina.

He was a chemistry major at Clemson College during the Depression, but liked to tell with a chuckle about a chemistry professor who suggested gently that he consider another line of work. Chaplin became editor of the school paper and a journalist was born.

He talked the publisher of the Greenville Piedmont, a small newspaper in South Carolina, into hiring him at $10 a week. Two years later, Chaplin was city editor.

By 1940, at age 26, he was appointed a Nieman Fellow at Harvard — at the time, the youngest journalist ever to receive the prestigious annual award. He studied race relations, feeling that it was heating up as the major issue in his native South.

In 1942, World War II found Chaplin in Tennessee writing Army field manuals about barrage balloons. He asked for reassignment overseas and was sent to Honolulu to establish the Stars and Stripes, an Army-run newspaper for troops in the Pacific.

On Chaplin's second day here, a colonel ordered him and another officer-journalist to write a guide book about Honolulu for servicemen. He wrote the book in three days and 250,000 copies were printed.

Over the years, Chaplin wrote reams of copy about local issues — and about China, the Soviet Union, Japan, Korean, Taiwan, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, Israel, Spain and the Philippines — with the same promptness and dispatch.

After World War II, Chaplin's career hit a rough road. He suffered through a three-month newspaper strike as managing editor of the Courier-Post in Camden, N.J. Then the paper was sold. He switched to managing editor of the San Diego Journal and it was sold.

Next he became editor of the New Orleans Item for nine years. In spite of crusades and awards, the Item also was sold out from under him.

Advertiser publisher Lorrin Thurston contacted Chaplin because he needed an editor and knew of pro-statehood editorials Chaplin had written in New Jersey, California and Louisiana. So Chaplin came back to Honolulu in 1958.

The Advertiser hadn't made money since World War II. Why attach himself to another failing newspaper?

"I had a great empathy for the people here,'' he said. "I'm a first-generation American — my parents came as teenagers from Europe. And there was the dream of statehood. People in Hawai'i were suffering from taxation without representation. That's what the Boston Tea Party was all about.''

At age 44, Chaplin hit Honolulu with the enthusiasm of a cub reporter. The late Buck Buchwach, then city editor, said, "He never missed a civic dinner.''

Chaplin's return to the Islands was a reunion for the two men. Buchwach, as an Army corporal, had been the star of Chaplin's staff on Stars and Stripes during World War II and had never left the Islands.

The two were like brothers, though they made an odd Mutt-and-Jeff team — Chaplin was tall and Buchwach short; both were solid journalists but Chaplin was the serious one and Buchwach had the flair for the promotional side of the business.

Chaplin immediately set about to improve the struggling Advertiser. He dumped ultraconservative editorial columnists and added those in tune with the times. He conducted a campaign to raise $250,000 for the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, a project which later won him a citation from the Navy League of the U.S.

Chaplin found Honolulu an exciting place in spite of the newspaper's meager editorial budget. He watched statehood come in, the first jets arrive, the biggest economic boom in Hawai'i's history.

"There was tremendous exuberance here,'' he recalled.

"We could swim any ocean, climb any mountain. This is a great place with very special people. It would be a tragedy for us to settle for anything less than the best.''

The Advertiser turned the corner financially when Thurston Twigg-Smith took over the publisher's chair from his uncle, Lorrin Thurston, and in 1962 negotiated a joint operating agreement with the Star-Bulletin under which both newspapers retained independent ownerships and editorial voices while combining business and production operations.

Herbert Cornuelle, a long-time friend and former trustee of Campbell Estate, said: "George Chaplin is a caring, public-spirited grandfather who made it possible for Twigg to operate a financially successful paper.''

Chaplin came from the civic-activist school of newspaper editors. He chaired the Governor's Committee on the Year 2000, headed a committee to search for a new University of Hawai'i president and chaired the East-West Center Board of Governors. He devoted time to many community groups and state commissions, many of them having to do with international understanding.

He was decorated by the governments of Japan, Italy and Israel and received honorary doctorates from Clemson University and Hawaii Loa College.

His prominent position also made him the frequent target of barbs from Mayor Frank Fasi during the mayor's long-running feud with Honolulu's newspapers. When election year came around, Chaplin would spend hours crafting voluminous editorials endorsing whichever candidate was running against Fasi.

Chaplin harvested awards, citations of achievement, chairmanships of civic organizations and national acclaim. A scholar-in-residence program named for him at the East-West Center (where he had been president of the Board of Governors) brings an outstanding journalist to Hawai'i each year.

But he characteristically spread the praise around to the paper's staff.

"We've always had talented writers and editors,'' he said. "This team can hold its own with any in the country. I take pride in that.''

What does he regret during his editorship? It isn't backing a losing political candidate but rather something that caused heartache on a personal level.

"We have to make judgment calls at great speed,'' he said. I regret running a photo of an emotionally disturbed girl on a ledge at the courthouse. The day after it ran, I was sorry."

Chaplin retired as editor-in-chief in 1986 and was succeeded by Buchwach, who had been his right-hand-man for 28 years. Despite his everyday, hands-on involvement with the paper for nearly three decades, Chaplin walked away from the job and didn't second-guess his successors — though he occasionally would offer a story idea that he had stumbled on.

But Chaplin at 72 wasn't ready to sit in his rocking chair. He spent countless hours as an organizer and leader of the Coalition for a Drug-Free Hawaii. And he worked hard on a book recounting the history of the paper he loved and helped save from economic disaster.

All his life, he used to say, he tried to live by his father's credo: "Love this country. Treat other people the way you'd like to be treated. Work hard. Try to amount to something."