Marion Poynter, widow of former Times owner Nelson Poynter, dies at 97

Marion Poynter, the widow of longtime St. Petersburg Times owner Nelson Poynter and champion of his legacy in St. Petersburg, died April 3 in her longtime home of Warrenton, Virginia.

Poynter, a former Times director who helped the newspaper remain independent by voting to stave off a hostile takeover attempt in the late 1980s, was two weeks shy of her 98th birthday. Her family said she died of natural causes.

Raised in a small town in New York’s Hudson River Valley, the former Marion Knauss held an array of jobs in and around publishing after graduating from Vassar College, including helping to print comic books, selling phone book ads and working in Time magazine’s photo library, according to the 1993 Poynter biography “A Sacred Trust.”

She joined the St. Petersburg Times — now called the Tampa Bay Times — as a reference clerk before moving to the editorial department, where Nelson Poynter took note of her writing and asked her out. They married in 1970, two years after the death of Nelson’s second wife.

For several years in the 1970s, Marion wrote a feature column dubbed Another Look, offering an often philosophical and reflective take on topics like culture, memory, customs and language.

“Words, for all their imperfect expression, can bring the human equation closer to solving what otherwise might require political put-ons, sensual takeoffs, personal pretensions,” she once wrote.

When Nelson Poynter died in 1978, he bequeathed ownership of most of the Times’ stock to a nonprofit journalism institute he’d founded in St. Petersburg — as well as a few hundred nonvoting shares to Marion, who joined the company’s board of directors. In the years that followed, she took a broader interest in education, receiving an appointment to a state commission on improving the public university system, and watching the media school expand into what is now known as the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

In 1988, a Texas billionaire named Robert Bass attempted a hostile takeover of the Times, starting with the purchase of 40% of the company’s voting stock inherited by two of Nelson’s nieces. Bass then offered to purchase all other outstanding shares for $270 million. Marion stood to make $36 million.

Instead, she joined with the rest of the board in rejecting the offer.

“Nelson spent the better part of his lifetime assembling defenses against such assaults as these,” she said in 1990. “Just because the attacks have become more sophisticated and the weapons gold-plated there is no reason to give up the battle for the independence, integrity and commitment to the larger community.”

She played “a very important role” in preserving Tampa Bay’s media landscape as we now know it, former Tampa Bay Times CEO and chairperson Paul Tash said.

“She kept her allegiance to the company and to her husband’s wish that it remain local and independent, which is his great legacy,” Tash said.

Before retiring in 1991, Marion sold her shares back to the Times for $13.2 million. The Times also agreed to pay about $1 million per year into a trust bearing her name. In 2018, the trust sued the company, alleging it owed $7.8 million in payments, plus interest. The suit settled for an undisclosed amount weeks later.

After leaving Florida for Virginia, Marion operated a horse breeding business on a historic 47-acre farm, where she adopted numerous stray dogs and cats. In 2013, she put that land into a trust, granting an easement to an environmental group to ensure its protection long after her passing. She also funded a scholarship in her name at a local community college.

“She played piano; she sang,” said John Glass, Nelson Poynter’s grandson from a previous marriage, who considered Marion Poynter his grandmother. “She enjoyed the arts. She collected paintings. She was passionate about journalism, and she was passionate about the Times her entire life.”

Nelson Poynter and his first wife had two adopted girls, Sally Poynter and the late Nancy Cameron, that Marion saw as family. Their children — John Glass, Catherine Dunik and the late Sarah Linde — thought of Marion Poynter as a grandmother, calling her “Grandmari.”