In his commencement address to the Syracuse University Class of 2016, Donald Newhouse spoke highly of two things: the importance of his wife and the importance of an education.

Newhouse, whose father is the namesake and founder of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, serves as president of Advance Publications, which, among other things, holds the largest privately-owned newspaper chain in the United States.

After attending SU as a freshman in 1947 and dropping out in 1948, Newhouse eagerly went on to join his father’s budding newspaper empire.

Newhouse described his father as “one of those young people … who through brilliance and drive, hard work, luck and a keen eye for opportunity went from being an apprentice lawyer to a successful publisher of newspapers.”

“Too impatient” to make his way to commencement, Newhouse said he got to work right away at The Press, a paper in Long Island, New York where production began every day at 4 a.m. He loved it, and to this day, he said he struggles to start his workday any later than 5 a.m.

Soon after, Newhouse’s mentor and uncle, Teddy, set Newhouse up with a gal — Susan Marley was her name, and she “had a dazzling smile and was charming and alive, intelligent and boundlessly kind,” Newhouse said. He was taken with her immediately, and they married only five days after she graduated college.

“With my marriage to Suzy, I began a half-century that was cloudless and happy in more ways than I can recount,” Newhouse said.

However, in 2003, Susan was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a type of dementia and cognitive impairment that robs its victims of the ability to speak and eventually — in Susan’s case — the ability to understand it. In 2010, Newhouse said Susan became incapable of taking care of herself.

“Before her dementia, my Suzy and I were as one. As the disease progressed, Suzy would change and plateau, change and plateau, change and plateau,” Newhouse said. “And with each change, our worlds diverged a little more.”

As a result, Newhouse’s life focus changed from work to something “intensely personal, but absolutely essential,” he said. He began to immerse himself in learning anything and everything necessary to make his wife’s life bearable. Despite his efforts, Susan passed away a year ago.

And although Newhouse received an honorary degree from SU alongside the Class of 2016, he stressed how, in the darkest of times, he wished he hadn’t missed out on an education that could have given him the tools to better combat the dementia-sized curveball life threw his way.

“From the vantage point of 86 years, I can say with some degree of confidence that many of you, sooner or later, will face the seemingly unexpected, the mysterious, serious events and moments in time that you hadn’t figured into your plans,” Newhouse said. “And when the time comes, you will have had one advantage that I did not.

“Your education here and the education that I hope will be a continuing process in your lives is an essential part of the equipment you will need both to contribute as professionals to the greater community and also to help you live your lives — your personal lives — in a thoughtful, productive and decent way,” Newhouse said.

He went on to task those who studied humanities and sciences to consider working for those affected financially and psychologically by the burdens of caring for diseased loved ones.

“Because life is never cloudless,” he said “… Even for the very lucky.”

Published on May 15, 2016 at 2:11 pm

Contact Brigid: brkenned@syr.edu