Former NY Daily News editor F. Gilman Spencer, 85, dies

F. Gilman Spencer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of the New York Daily News, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 85.

Spencer died at New York University Hospital. He had been undergoing treatment for a persistent infection.

He last served as editor of the Denver Post from 1989 to 1993, capping a four-decade career at newspapers in Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York. His editorials on political corruption in New Jersey for The Trentonian won a Pulitzer in 1974.

"You cannot believe the prose he used in describing the politicians we were chasing, the machines we were trying to break up," said Herbert Stern, a lawyer who was U.S. attorney prosecuting several of New Jersey's political machines at the time. It was Stern who nominated Spencer for the Pulitzer.

Spencer served as an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News for nine years, and in 1984 he moved to the New York Daily News.

"The biggest Spencer legacy might have been that at a time when the paper was sort of wandering, he came in and gave it a much better sense of being a working-class paper for New York," said Jim Willse, who was Spencer's managing editor in New York. "He was the right guy at the right time. He was part comedian, part chaplain, part cheerleader."

Spencer joined the Post in 1989, convinced by William Dean Singleton, chief executive of Media News Group, to come West at a time when the newspaper's circulation lagged behind the Rocky Mountain News.

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Spencer was born Dec. 8, 1925, in Philadelphia. He attended Swarthmore High School and served in the Navy during World War II. He was a copy boy at The Inquirer and held reporting and editing jobs at The Chester Times in Pennsylvania; The Mount Holly Herald in New Jersey; The Main Line Times of Ardmore, Pa.; and The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. Spencer was a writer and editorialist at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia before becoming editor of The Trentonian in 1967.

He received the 2003 George Polk Award for career achievement.

Spencer, who lived in New York City, is survived by his wife, Isabel; sons Gilman, of Media, Pa., and Jonathan, of Pennington, N.J.; daughters Amy Becker, of Media, Pa., Elizabeth Mergel, of Dorchester, Mass., and Isabel Spencer, of Amherst, Mass.; 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A service was being planned at the Church of the Ascension in Manhattan.-- -- AP