John Kluge

John Werner Kluge was born Sept. 21, 1914, in Chemnitz, Germany. His father died in World War I. After his mother remarried, John was brought to America by his German-American stepfather to live in Detroit. The stepfather, Oswald Leitert, put him to work as a boy in the family contracting business. Mr. Kluge was the creator of Metromedia, the nation’s first major independent broadcasting entity, a conglomerate that grew to include seven television stations, 14 radio stations, outdoor advertising, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Ice Capades, radio paging and mobile telephones. He made his first billion — it was actually almost two billion — in 1984, when he took Metromedia private in a $1.1 billion leveraged buyout and then liquidated the company, more than tripling his take. He sold the television stations, including WNEW in New York, for more than $2 billion to Rupert Murdoch, who was expanding his communications empire. In 1986, Forbes magazine listed Mr. Kluge as the second-richest man in America (after Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores). By this year, after a bankruptcy of the Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale restaurant chains in 2008, Mr. Kluge had dropped to 109th on the Forbes list with a fortune of $6.5 billion Mr. Kluge graduated from Columbia in 1937 and went to work for a small paper company in Detroit. Within three years he went from shipping clerk to vice president and part owner. His philanthropy was prodigious. About a half-billion dollars went to Columbia alone, mainly for scholarships for needy and minority students. One gift, of $400 million, was to be given to the university by his estate when he died. Mr. Kluge also contributed to the restoration of Ellis Island and in 2000 gave $73 million to the Library of Congress, which established the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities. Married three times, he is survived by his son, John W. Kluge II; a daughter, Samantha Kluge, from his second marriage, to Yolanda Galardo Zucco; three stepchildren— Joseph Brad Kluge, whom he adopted, and Diane Townsend Zeier, Jeannette Townsend Brophy and Peter Townsend, the children of Mr. Kluge's first wife, Theodora Thomson Townsend; and a grandson.