Nan Tucker McEvoy, last of founding family to run Chronicle, dies

Nan Tucker McEvoy, the last member of The San Francisco Chronicle’s founding family to run the 150-year-old newspaper and a prominent olive oil producer, philanthropist and Democratic Party activist, died Thursday morning at age 95.

The granddaughter of M.H. de Young, co-founder of The Chronicle, Mrs. McEvoy was the longtime chair of the board of Chronicle Publishing, which included the morning daily, KRON-TV, Chronicle Books and other media holdings.

Whether she was helping get the Peace Corps program off the ground, overseeing The Chronicle or building one of the best olive oil companies in the country, Nan always did things at full speed.

While she never held a day-to-day management job at any of the family media companies, Mrs. McEvoy had been a cub reporter and was a reassuring force when turbulence hit the newspaper industry in the 1990s.

The joint operating agreement that had made business partners of the morning Chronicle and afternoon Examiner, which was owned by Hearst Corp., was rocked by diminishing revenue and labor strife that led to a short strike in 1994.

Shortly afterward, various branches of the de Young family heirs became interested in selling Chronicle Publishing.

[...] Mrs. McEvoy held the largest single share of the company and moved from her longtime home in Washington, D.C., to oversee the company while announcing that it was not for sale.

To see her in the publisher’s suite or moving through the newsroom was a morale booster to the staff and, though she did not prevail against the sale of the company in the end, she put up a good fight.

After Chronicle Publishing was sold to the Hearst Corp. in 1999, Mrs. McEvoy turned her prodigious energy to ranching with the goal of producing the finest olive oil possible.

A founding staff member of the Peace Corps, and special assistant to its first director, Sargent Shriver, she was committed to public service and philanthropy, later serving as a board member of UCSF, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Symphony and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

“Nan McEvoy was a trailblazing, entrepreneurial woman — whose courage, generosity, and wisdom reminded us of our responsibility to improve our communities and our world,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Years later, Mrs. McEvoy took business courses at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to prepare herself for a more active role on The Chronicle’s board of directors.

During the war, Mrs. McEvoy worked at The Chronicle in San Francisco, winning her first reporting job there when she staged a sit-down protest in the office of her uncle, Chronicle Publisher George Cameron.

William German, the late editor of The Chronicle, was then directing the paper’s coverage of the United Nations and recalled that Mrs. McEvoy scored many journalistic scoops from her access to the diplomats who invited her to social functions where insiders negotiated some of the difficult issues involved in the organization’s birth.

Mrs. McEvoy immersed herself in Democratic politics and was a close friend of Illinois Democratic senator and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.

In 1971, Mrs. McEvoy and a group of friends and colleagues she had come to know in the Peace Corps founded a pioneering clinic in Washington called Preterm to provide the first abortion services in the region for low-income women.

Wade decision legalizing abortion, served as a model for similar clinics under Planned Parenthood auspices in many other cities.

In 1993, after she had moved back to San Francisco, Mrs. McEvoy sold her Georgetown home and thereafter divided her time between an apartment in a Montgomery Street high-rise, across from the Transamerica Pyramid, and her ranch in Petaluma.