William F. Woo, the first Asian-American to be the editor of a major daily American newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the first person outside the Joseph Pulitzer family to be at the editorial helm at that paper, died Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto. He was 69.
The cause was colorectal cancer, said his wife, Martha Shirk.
From 1962 to 1996, Woo held a variety of posts at the Post-Dispatch: feature writer, roving foreign correspondent, Washington bureau chief, columnist and editorial page editor.
After he became editor in 1986, he wrote a weekly column, "A Reflection," intertwining international and national issues with accounts of his family.
Woo was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in three categories: national reporting, foreign correspondence and commentary.
After leaving the Post-Dispatch, Woo went to Stanford University, becoming its Lorry I. Lokey visiting professor of journalism and last year the interim director of its graduate journalism program.
Woo was born in Shanghai on Oct. 4, 1936, to Kyatang Woo and Elizabeth Hart. His parents met as journalism students at the University of Missouri and eloped to Illinois because it was illegal to marry across racial lines in Missouri. They moved to Shanghai, where his father edited a newspaper.
As a child, Woo was interred with his mother in Shanghai by the Japanese during World War II, and moved with her to Kansas City, Mo., after the war and his parents' divorce. He graduated from the University of Kansas and joined the Kansas City Times in 1957 as a clerk.
His marriages to Sonia Flournoy and Tricia Ernst Woo ended in divorce. In 1981, he married Shirk, then a reporter with the Post-Dispatch, who now writes books.
