Robert Roy Metz, Media Executive
Robert Roy Metz, who had been the president and C.E.O. of United Media, a licensing and newspaper-syndication company that launched and syndicated the “Garfield” and “Dilbert” comic strips under his leadership, died of pneumonia on Sunday at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton. He was 86.
United Media also syndicated such popular comic strips as Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” and distributed hundreds of features, among them “Marmaduke,” “Nancy,” “The Born Loser,” “Miss Manners” by Judith Martin, columns by Jack Anderson and Alan Dershowitz, and editorial cartoons by Mike Peters and others. The company’s Pharos Books division also published “The World Almanac,” among other nonfiction titles, and a subsidiary, TV Data, sold TV listings to newspapers.
The comic strips were “not only enormously successful on the comics pages but on a wide array of licensed products,” his family wrote. He “led the company into a major international expansion,” they said, opening offices in Toronto, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. He also established a joint venture with Lee Mendelson that produced children’s animated television programs.
In 1992, United Media donated the Robert Roy Metz Collection of more than 83,000 original cartoons by over 100 cartoonists to Ohio State University’s Cartoon Library and Museum. Mr. Metz retired in 1994.
He was born in Richmond Hill, Queens, on March 23, 1929, to Robert R. Metz Sr. and the former Mary Kissel. His family wrote that he was “proud of being a native New Yorker” and of never having lived anywhere but Queens, Manhattan, Babylon, and East Hampton, where he lived part time in a house on Swamp Road for 30 years. He was a full-time resident for 12 years.
Mr. Metz graduated from Richmond Hill High School and from Wesleyan University “and all his life seemed somewhat amazed that through scholarships and assistance from his beloved older sister, Edith, he had been able to attend such a good school.” He supported Wesleyan as an alumnus, taking part in a number of fund-raising campaigns, and was the agent for the class of 1950.
Mr. Metz began his career as a copy boy at The New York Times in 1951 and was promoted to the foreign news desk the next year. He worked for five years as a reporter and editor with the International News Service until it merged with United Press in 1958, at which time he became an assistant news editor at the Newspaper Enterprise Association. He went on to become its president in 1972 and became a vice president in 1976 of United Feature Syndicate, which merged to form United Media.
“History, politics, and the news were his lifelong passions, and he read nonfiction and biography voraciously,” his family said. In his younger years, he had considered a career in the ministry, and after choosing journalism would say that he was “spreading the word of man rather than the word of God,” they wrote.
He was an enthusiastic traveler, with a particular love of England, France, and Italy, and he and his wife had rented houses in New York and London and for two extended periods in France and Italy. He loved the theater and enjoyed good food and wine, doing the meal planning, shopping, and cooking at home until recent years.
Mr. Metz was a member of the Union League Club in New York and a former trustee of Goodspeed Opera in East Haddam, Conn., and the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. He also was a member of the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor.
Mr. Metz’s first marriage, to Beth Blossom, with whom he had two sons, ended in divorce. He was married to Susan Blair on May 18, 1984. She survives, as do his sons, Robert Metz of New York City and Christopher Metz of Olympia, Wash., and a stepson, Allen Hahn of Bloomington, Ind. Three grandchildren also survive. Edith Metz Magee, his sister, died before him.
Visiting hours will be on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. A funeral service is planned for Monday at noon at the Old Whalers Church.
Mr. Metz’s family has suggested contributions to the Wesleyan Fund, Wesleyan University, 318 High Street, Middletown, Conn. 06459, to the Group for the East End, P.O. Box 1792, Southold 11971, or the Old Whalers Church, P.O. Box 1241, Sag Harbor 11963.