Robert Wick, who guided Wick Communications for nearly six decades, died Thursday. He was 86 years old.
Wick Communications is an owner partner of River City Newspapers, which operates Today’s News-Herald in Lake Havasu City and the Parker Pioneer.
Soft-spoken but sharp, Wick was as passionate about battling a foundry in Douglas as he was about hand-watering thousands of seedlings he had planted on his remote lands in the Mule Mountains of southeastern L. ‘Arizona – the latter’ a cathartic process that drew me more intensely to nature, its magic and its wonders.
family affair
Wick and his brother, Walter, bought their uncle’s stake in Wick Communications in 1965, after his death. Their father, Milton Wick, and uncle, James Wick, started the business when they acquired the family’s first newspaper in 1926 in Niles, Ohio.
Family members remain active in the business, with Robert’s son, Francis Wick, serving as president and CEO, and Walter’s daughter, Rebecca Rogers, serving on the board.
Walter and Robert Wick assumed full ownership of the business, which grew to 27 publications, in 1981, following the death of their father. Wick Communications today has interests in 11 western states, including Arizona, Washington, Oregon and Colorado.
In 1995, they partnered with Prescott-based Western News & Info to create River City Newspapers, merging two Lake Havasu City newspapers to create Today’s News-Herald.
Western News & Info owner Joe Soldwedel hailed Wick as a “fantastic ally”.
“Bob’s passing hits my family and our business hard,” he said. “Bob was a kind, intelligent gentleman with a keen sense of humor. His family and ours teamed up with Parker and Havasu in the mid-1990s. The Wicks have been a fantastic ally – and friend – all along. , largely thanks to Bob’s involvement.
Robert and Walter Wick were inducted into the Arizona Newspaper Association Hall of Fame in 2004. Walter Wick died in 2016 of pancreatic cancer.
Early start
It was a family business and Robert Wick learned it from the bottom up. He and his brother swept the floors of the newspaper office in Niles, Ohio, then worked in various departments to learn the ropes.
He followed the family tradition and studied journalism at Kent State University, where he also played baseball and dreamed of playing professionally. At the same time, he falls in love with art and discovers a talent for it.
He recounted his first serious venture into art in a 2019 newspaper article as he prepared for an exhibit at the Tucson Botanical Gardens.
Wick said his aunt was visiting over Christmas during his freshman year in college and noticed him doodling with Play-Doh. “Carving a portrait of my husband,” she asked.
He said he couldn’t do it, but she insisted. He took pictures of his uncle, then went back to school and asked the art department for advice. They taught him how to make an armature, the framework of a sculpture, and he got to work. “It came out better than anything in the class,” he said. “I was so stunned, I didn’t know I had that in me.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. At 5 years old, “my father taught me to draw with volume”, he says. “In first grade I was drawing in three dimensions, and in fourth grade I was aware of Frank Lloyd Wright and trying to design ‘futuristic architecture’.”
As a teenager, he put art aside until he rediscovered it in college. Wick earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and fine arts from Kent State University and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of the nation’s top art schools.
He then taught sculpture and drawing at Kent State and the State University of New York, Fredonia. He and Walter Wick opened the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State in 1984 in memory of their sons.
Robert’s 17-year-old son Stanley was killed by a drunk driver on June 30, 1980. In a tragic coincidence, Stanley’s death came seven years to the day after Walt’s son Tom Wick, was also killed in a car accident.
For over 50 years, Wick has used a combination of bronze sculptures infused with living plants to convey his message of our oneness with the Earth. He had first experimented with plants in art in the late 60s.
“I put a piece of ivy in the crack,” he said of a mask he was making. “I saw ivy as a sign of creativity, others saw it as death, others as life. I liked how he created another layer of meaning to the head, the artwork. From then on, I could no longer imagine creating sculptures without living plants, trees or any kind of vegetation.
The technique has turned heads in the art world and he has exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, Austin Museum of Art, and Tucson Museum of Art, among others. But her favorite place was to show her art in the botanical gardens “because of the scenery and the wonderful flora. The sculptures really seem to belong to such environments with the trees and plants growing from the sculpture.
“We tend to think of evolution as biological, but it’s a process toward greater complexity,” he said. “This art is trying to show that we are connected to nature, and we need to know that, be aware of that and what that means to us.”
But art has never ousted the journalist in it. He found himself producing the editorial pages of the Williston (ND) Herald in the 1960s, and in the 1980s was instrumental in closing the Phelps Dodge foundry in Douglas and limiting expansion from the foundry in Cananea, Mexico. He also pushed to reduce sulfur dioxide production by 90% at a new smelter in Nacosari, Mexico. “We were able to change the skies over southern Arizona to be the cleanest in 100 years,” he said. “It would have been the most polluted landscape in North America without these changes.”
