David Wagner, who helped lead the 1977 newspaper strike in Madison, died on Tuesday, Feb. 21, in Tempe, Arizona. He was 78.
Born on July 3, 1944, he spent his early years with his widowed grandmother in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, at the heart of Amish country, wrote Paul Buhle for The Progressive.
Wagner graduated from high school in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He became poetry editor of the underground newspaper Connections, and a short-time editor of the alternative weekly, Madison Kaleidoscope. He worked at The Capital Times from 1966 to 1972, as a protege of former editor Elliott Maraniss.
While at newspaper, he rose from the police beat to become a widely admired cultural critic on films, music, and theater for the newspaper, wrote Buhle. After leaving Madison for a year to teach in Boston, he returned to The Capital Times, where he worked until the newspaper’s historic strike, provoked by “the dispoal of the pressmen and and the determination of the local Newspaper Guild chapter to take a stand for fairness and labor solidarity,” Buhle wrote for The Isthmus. “Wagner would be regarded by all as a leader of the strike.”
Following the strike, Wagner went on to work as editorial page editor of the The Waukesha Freeman and as an editor at The Arizona Republic until his early retirement for health reasons.
