Longtime Daily Register Editor Arthur Z. Kamin Dies

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Arthur Z. Kamin, a baker’s son who rose to become the president and editor of The Daily and Sunday Register of Shrewsbury and chairman of the Rutgers University board of trustees, died Tuesday, at The Atrium in Red Bank. He was 84 years old and had lived in Fair Haven since 1957 until recently.
The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease and progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease, said his wife of more than 60 years, Virginia P. Kamin.
He was a member of Congregation B’nai Israel in Rumson, one-time director of the Bayshore Development and a former president of the New Jersey Press Association.
But his best-known role was the shepherd of The Register. As editor, a position he held from 1965 to the mid-1980s, Kamin nurtured such talents as Brian Kelly, now editor of U.S. News & World Report, and guided the newspaper through a 1980 New Jersey Supreme Court case that applied the state’s then-new journalist shield law.
In that landmark case, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a reporter did not have to surrender two letters she received from a prospective witness in an organized crime trial.
Under his leadership, the Register responded to postwar growth, which transformed central New Jersey farms into residential subdivisions. The Register’s editorial page championed the expansion of the Monmouth County Library system and the establishment of what became known as Brookdale Community College.
“I think we were, in many respects, ever-vigilant, so to speak, which is the role a newspaper should play,” Mr. Kamin told oral history interviewer Flora Higgins in 2000. “We were watchdogs in the public interest.”
Kamin was born in South River in 1930, the son of an immigrant baker. When he was old enough he would help his father prepare the bread and other baked goods.
After a stint at Fort Monmouth, where he was a Signal Corps information officer, Kamin joined the Register, then known as the Red Bank Register, as a reporter in 1956. At the time, the newspaper was a weekly and reflected the county’s small-town identity. One column, “Treated at Riverview,” chronicled the injuries of patients at Red Bank’s River view Hospital, including a man who fell off a barstool in Sea Bright, Virginia Kamin recalled.
But as Monmouth County changed, so did the Register.
Kamin helped spearhead the paper’s 1959 transition from a weekly to a daily. He led the paper as it coped with the aftermath of a 1970 Christmas Eve fire that destroyed its plant at 105 Chestnut St. in Red Bank.
“He really worked it and made it a premier daily newspaper,” when he took it from a weekly to a daily, said Little Silver Mayor Robert C. Neff Jr.
Growing up, Neff’s family lived around the corner from the Kamins, with Neff attending high school with Kamin’s daughter, Brooke. “I remember him with his glasses and his pipe, being a real fixture in the community,” Neff said. “Art was always very community-minded and nice to everyone.”
Kamin gave Neff his first after-college job, first as an intern, writing obituaries and then a short time later as a fulltime reporter. “It was so much fun,” recalled Neff, who left the newspaper to attend law school and is now an attorney. “And it was just about the coolest thing I could image doing after college.”
The Register introduced a Sunday edition in 1976, thrived and brought strong local voices to the forefront. Columnist Doris Kulman humorously pondered inequalities between the sexes and Dr. George Sheehan turned out a weekly column about running and philosophy on an old manual typewriter.
“Art was an independent voice,” who welcomed the challenge of competing against the larger daily newspapers in the area, remembered Sherry Figdore, who was a general assignment reporter for Kamin from 1964 to 1982.
Kamin was ahead of other men his age by being receptive to allowing women in what had been a male-dominated business, with Figdore as a young mother given the ability to do the job and the flexibility of caring for her young children.
Elizabeth Sheehan, who is a contributing writer at The Two River Times, was another of those women with young families who found their way into Kamin’s newsroom.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” Sheehan recalled of those days. “He treated everyone in the building with the same respect, no matter what their job was.”
“He encouraged, inspired and nurtured the careers of many, many young writers and reporters, of whom I was just one,” said Eileen Moon, a veteran journalist who had worked at the Register and is the longtime former managing editor of The Two River Times. Moon called Kamin a “mentor, role model and standard-bearer for the cause of ethical journalism.”
“He believed in making the world a better, fairer, kinder place,” Moon recalled, “and he tried with all his might to make it one.”
Hildy Fontaine Marx, of Little Silver, who worked at the Register from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s doing a number of jobs including news reporter and Sunday edition feature writer, remembered Kamin as “A taskmaster in the newsroom. He was demanding.”
“But outside, he was a caring soul,” Marx added. And in the final analysis, she said, “He was an icon in those halcyon days of local journalism.”
Things changed in the 1980s when the Block family of Pittsburgh and Toledo sold the Register to Capital Cities, a large communications firm. Battered by a series of corporate owners and staff layoffs, the newspaper ceased publication in 1991. The Two River Times opened a year later.
Kamin contributed articles to the New Jersey section of The New York Times and penned opinion pieces for many New Jersey papers and taught journalism at Rutgers, Monmouth University and Brookdale.
A 1954 Rutgers graduate, Kamin met his future wife who attended the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass Residential College). He was on the university’s board of trustees in the 1970s and 1990s, and served as chairman from 1982-1985.
Survivors include his wife; a son, Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune; a daughter, Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the Martin Friedman senior curator at the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City; five grandsons; and a sister, Ceil Rubin of Long Island, N.Y.
Memorial services will be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Fair Haven First Aid Squad and the Arthur Z. and Virginia P. Kamin Fund for Journalism Innovation at Harvard, care of the Niemen Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.