Remembering Rolfe Neill, the legendary Observer publisher

The newspaper's publisher from 1975-1997 is remembered as a smart and strong-willed leader who was one of Charlotte's biggest champions; he died July 14 at age 90

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In the heyday of newspapers, he led The Charlotte Observer to 2 Pulitzer Prizes — and helped shape the city; ‘the smartest and most strong-willed person I’ve known’

Rolfe Neill, who passed away Friday at age 90. (Photo from the Charlotte Observer Collection via Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.)

by Ken Garfield

Back in the glory days of newspapers, publisher Rolfe Neill, who died from cancer Friday at 4 a.m. in his home on Lake Norman, ruled The Charlotte Observer. There was a swagger in his step as he patrolled the fortress-like building at 600 S. Tryon St. uptown, not because he thought he was anything special, but because he knew this was the coolest, most essential business going.

His shirt sleeves rolled up, he’d check to see what the newsroom had cooking for the next day. He made a point of saying hey to whoever passed him on the escalator. From the vice presidents to the third-shift press guys, he knew everyone’s name. In between meetings with editors and advertisers, he’d bang out his Sunday column, musing on everything from God to Jim and Tammy (the Bakkers, for those too young to know). More on that part of his career in a bit, and the Pulitzer. 

When the titans of Charlotte met privately to talk about how to build a more vibrant center city, Neill would hold his tongue until the end. Then he’d speak up for progress, weighing what role the paper could play. As Neill told Business North Carolina magazine in 2021, he wasn’t afraid to be caught loving his community.

Publisher of The Observer from 1975-97, and a significant figure in American journalism, Rolfe Neill had charisma, power and a love of newsprint that lasted until the day he died.

Cancer of the abdomen took him at age 90. He was lucid until the end. There was no pain. His daughter and her husband, Ashley and Jay Flair, were with him. He nearly died last October in the ER, but he didn’t. And so he had these nine months to read The Observer every morning (in print) and cut out articles that interested him. To walk by the lake. And best of all, to visit in person and virtually with family, friends and seemingly a zillion former colleagues. They’d laugh over old stories, and he’d draw strength for what he knew was soon to come.

No public funeral: That’s why there will be no public funeral, no soaring eulogies. Instead, there will be a private gathering to celebrate his remarkable life. As for a gift in his memory, he loved Charlotte and hopes that those who want to honor him will make a contribution to a righteous cause in our city.

“He got to hear from his family and friends, their love and admiration,” his daughter, Ingrid Ebert of Huntersville, said Friday morning as she called people who needed to know the news. “That meant a great deal to him. It was a gift.

“He did it the best way possible, at the lake house,” Ebert said of his death. “We couldn’t have written a better script for it.”

Emails were flying on the morning of his death, July 14 — many from journalists who got to appreciate his larger-than-life persona up close. Editors and reporters from back in the day can still see him coming their way. That shock of white hair was hard to miss. He might have had a news tip he picked up on the street, worth a story in tomorrow’s paper as he “hinted” to the suddenly motivated newshound. With Neill, there was always another story.

“Rolfe was the smartest and most strong-willed person I’ve known,” said former Observer editor Rich Oppel, now retired in Austin, Texas. “He was a publisher fiercely determined to achieve accuracy and fairness in every story on every page and to have his newspaper serve the common good of the Southern Piedmont.”

McColl’s recollections: Former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr. was in the ER with his friend of 50 years the day they thought Neill might not make it. “It’s not a very pleasant thing to say, ‘See you on the other side,’” McColl said. Neill outlasted expectations, allowing McColl to reflect on a newsman’s legacy.

“All writers who worked with him and for him wanted to emulate the seeking of the truth,” McColl told The Ledger.

Neill is survived by four children, two stepchildren, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

N.C. native: He was born on Dec. 4, 1932, in Mount Airy. He might as well have arrived with ink stains on his hands, for he was hooked from the get-go. The summer after high school, he worked for the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Ga. His weekly pay of $20 covered paper delivery. At UNC Chapel Hill, he made $25 a month as editor of The Daily Tar Heel while earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

After two years in the U.S. Army, he was off and running. His career began in 1956 at The Franklin (N.C.) Press, where he filled the weekly with whatever qualified as news in that small mountain town. Franklin couldn’t hold him. In 1957, The Observer hired him to open a bureau in Gastonia, then a year later named him business editor. His first wife, Rosemary Boney, was incredulous, given how little Neill knew about business. Didn’t matter. He knew how to write so that the average guy could understand. Until he turned off his desktop for the last time, that was his gift.

‘Sexiest man’: Neill worked in various roles at newspapers up and down the East Coast: Coral Gables (Fla.). Miami Beach. In New York, where he was assistant managing editor of The Daily News, then the nation’s largest newspaper. From 1970-75, he was executive editor of The Philadelphia News, a tabloid afternoon paper known for splashy headlines and wall-to-wall sports coverage. Neill became something of a celebrity in Philly, a city that has never lacked for sass. One year, Neill was named Philadelphia’s Sexiest Man, chosen by the local magazine. Neill said then-Charlotte Mayor John Belk would mention the “honor” when he’d introduce Neill, to which Neill would respond, “All that tells you is about the sorry state of sex in Philadelphia.”

When The Ledger asked Neill to confirm this story and others last year, he read through a draft of this article and emailed: “Fun to relive the thrills of yesteryear! Hi yo, Silver!”

In 1975, Knight Ridder called him home to North Carolina to lead The Observer. Over 22 years, partnering with a newsroom packed with savvy veterans and aggressive newcomers, he helped build it into one of the nation’s best regional newspapers. He led the charge into cities and towns around Charlotte, opening bureaus and launching so-called zoned sections that covered nearly everything that moved in such communities as Monroe, Concord and Rock Hill, S.C. He oversaw a left-of-center editorial page that stressed the exchange of ideas. Cartoonist Doug Marlette was rankling many readers at the time — enough that one Observer corporate executive wondered whether Neill was afraid to get rid of the guy. Neill’s answer spoke to his defense of free debate: “Afraid of Marlette? Then it is I who should be fired and not he.” Marlette went on to win a Pulitzer.

As publisher of The Charlotte Observer for more than two decades, Neill championed uptown development. The Observer headquarters on South Tryon Street, pictured here in 2014, was demolished in 2016. It is the current site of the Legacy Union development. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Mark Ethridge, managing editor under Neill, said Neill’s legacy includes helping transform Charlotte from a big Rock Hill to what the chamber of commerce types like to call a world-class city. Ethridge says four men are credited with spurring the growth that spawned skyscrapers and sports teams: Neill, McColl, Duke Power CEO Bill Lee and First Union CEO Ed Crutchfield. “Rolfe’s tool,” Ethridge said, “was the paper.”

Booming business, booming city: This was the 1980s and 1990s, when Charlotte was beginning to boom. It was a time before the internet, when The Observer was the main source of news and advertising. Under Neill, the newsroom swelled to 260 journalists. Circulation rose to around 300,000. Neill said the profit margin was 15% of pretax earnings when he arrived and between 25% and 30% pretax when he retired in 1997.

Neill’s (and a cast of hundreds’) crowning moment came when The Observer won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service. Twice.

In 1981, at a time when textiles ruled the Carolinas, the paper wrote about the deadly danger of cotton dust and brown lung disease to those thousands who worked in the mills.

PTL takedown: In 1988, The Observer earned the same honor for uncovering the sex-and-money scandal that toppled the Bakkers and their PTL ministry. It was the paper, and reporter Charles E. Shepard, who broke the story that Jessica Hahn was paid $279,000 from PTL followers’ contributions to keep quiet about her sexual encounter with Jim Bakker. There were many more stories of PTL greed and malfeasance, which sparked the Bakkers’ “Enough Is Enough” TV campaign against The Observer. PTL  went up in flames. Jim Bakker went to prison. Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner) divorced him and transformed herself into a gay icon before she died of cancer in 2007.

Here’s what Neill wrote in his Sunday column after Bakker resigned:

Let us concede that under Jim Bakker, PTL built a Christian theme park that delights and satisfies millions. The Bakker ministry has brought sunshine to some dark spots, be it the loneliness of a pregnant teenager or the bitterness of a man behind bars. … The issue isn’t whether Bakker does good — he does — but whether it’s morally permissible to occasionally flimflam folks in the name of higher purpose. My King James version says no.

Neill often wrote about religion, more from a curiosity-seeker’s perspective than a believer’s.

Neill is gone but the stories endure.

Ethridge said Neill was smart as a tack and didn’t mind telling editors what he thought, especially on a story as huge as PTL. Ethridge remembers meetings with Oppel and Neill that lasted until 9 p.m., such were Neill’s questions about the coverage and backlash the paper was getting from many in the community. This was, after all, a popular Christian empire the paper was investigating. Once, when it was just Oppel and Ethridge, Oppel’s desktop computer began to smoke, then burst into flames. “Must be another message from Rolfe,” Ethridge recalled Oppel saying.

Neill relished interacting with advertisers, newsmakers and especially readers. Having devoured the paper cover to cover each morning, he’d arrange for enlarged slicks (pages) of flattering profiles to be mailed to the subject of the story. Who knows how many slicks still hang on walls, a moment of attention preserved.

One year, Joan Zimmerman, whose family ran the Southern Spring Show among others, complained to Neill that her ads were running on the obituary page. “I thought this was a depressing place to be promoting the joys of spring,” she said. “Joan,” he responded, “you are wrong, this is the most read page in the newspaper.” Guess who was right? “It got more response than previous ads,” Zimmerman said. “He understood newspapers and its readers.”

Bryan Downey was 27 when Neill hired him in 1987 to work in marketing. He became Downey’s mentor and friend. It was not unusual for Downey and other colleagues to have memos returned with Neill’s edits. “He was notoriously curious,” Downey said. “He was restless, and he had no interest in bench-sitters or injustice.” Downey remembers their meetings in Neill’s office. “I was in a tie and white shirt sitting straight up, and Rolfe was leaning back and eating an apple smeared with peanut butter.”

Neill’s later years, as they are for many of his age, were bittersweet.

Charitable backer: He was careful to keep a low profile so as not to cast a shadow over the Observer publishers who followed him. He read voraciously. He rode a stationary bike at the Cornwell Center at Myers Park Baptist Church. It was good exercise, when he wasn’t stopping to talk to whoever got within earshot. He chose his charitable causes carefully. When he did, he was all in. He helped found TreesCharlotte, a nonprofit that grows and preserves the city’s tree canopy. The Knight Foundation, the charitable arm of Knight Ridder (The Observer’s owner way back when), was a huge supporter.

Jen Rothacker, a former Observer staffer, ran TreesCharlotte’s communications. “Rolfe always was the final editor on our quarterly magazine, and he wasn’t afraid to share suggestions,” she said. “His biggest editorial peeve: Photos of people bending over, planting trees. ‘Show me faces!’ he’d say.” Around the time he nearly died in the ER — with his friend McColl by his side — Neill returned Rothacker’s call inviting him to lunch. He said he nearly died a few days ago but promised her exclusive rights to his harrowing tale once he was well.

There was heartbreak as well.

Ann Marshall Neill, his wife of 28 years, died in 2016 at age 80. Neill wrote her obituary, which explains its eloquence: “Ann’s foundation was strong, and her indomitable strength conquered some major tests on life’s journey.”

Dana Baker of Davidson, the third of his five children from his first marriage, died in 2021 after a struggle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). She was 61. On the way home after visiting, Neill would sometimes stop for a late breakfast at Waffle House. His family agreed he ate like a teenage boy. Knowing Neill, he probably struck up a conversation with the wait staff and cook with whom he shared part of the night. If he were still running The Observer and needed a Sunday column, he probably would have taken notes.

Freelance writer/editor Ken Garfield worked for The Observer from 1985 to 2006. Reach him at garfieldken3129@gmail.com.

Rolfe Neill, 1932-2023. (Photo from the Charlotte Observer Collection via Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.)

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