Roland Weeks Jr. was a leader among leaders, a man who cared deeply about the Mississippi Gulf Coast and helped shape the region through his 33-year stewardship as publisher of the regional newspaper, The Daily Herald and its successor, the Sun Herald.

Weeks died Saturday at age 89.

Weeks, who lived in Biloxi with wife Sharon Weeks, retired in 2001 as publisher, president and general manager of the Sun Herald. He remained active in the community, continued his adventures as a pilot and served for many years as a volunteer for the Salvation Army in Gulfport, showing up weekly to wash clothes for the homeless.

“He was just this unflinching friend to so many people,” said Ricky Mathews of Biloxi, who spent many years working under Weeks and succeeded him in the publisher’s job before his own retirement. “He loved people. I don’t know that we’ll ever meet anyone like him again.”

“Community leader is an understatement,” said Henry Laird of Pass Christian, who worked closely with Weeks as longtime attorney for the Sun Herald. “He unified the Coast.

“He ran the newspaper much like he lived his life. He was independent. He just stood up for what was right.”

Newspaper publishing in a hurricane

Weeks graduated from high school in Charleston, South Carolina, then attended The Citadel, followed by the executive program at Stanford Business School. He received his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Clemson University before joining the U.S. Air Force, where he served as a first lieutenant.

Weeks worked briefly as an engineer in the private sector but found his calling in the newspaper business. He started out at Columbia Newspapers in Columbia, South Carolina, where he worked as a management trainee.

He came to Mississippi Coast in 1968 — one year before Hurricane Camille — when the State Record Co., which owned the Columbia newspaper, bought The Daily Herald, then headquartered in Gulfport.

Weeks, his trusted editor Bob McHugh and several others rode out the Category 5 hurricane in The Daily Herald’s building. When water rose in the first floor, they moved upstairs.

“My car, as a matter of fact, was washing around in the water outside of several windows as we worked here,” Weeks said in a 2019 Sun Herald video. Weeks and McHugh called Columbia and got an agreement that The Daily Herald would publish there.

The Coast newspaper never missed a day of publication, a tradition that has continued through the years, including for the unprecedented Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the industry’s highest honor.

The morning after Camille, The Daily Herald building was covered in debris. Weeks and McHugh cleared the front door. Employees began showing up to see how they could help.

Weeks said one of the first sights was a large sail boat washed up from the Gulf. “That told us what we could expect to find in other parts of the Gulf Coast,” Weeks said.

Weeks strove for excellence

Weeks oversaw construction of a new building on the Gulfport-Biloxi line, where the newspaper operated from 1970-2021. The building was made of concrete with narrow rectangular windows along both sides and large plate-glass windows that could be boarded up only in front.

Staff rode out subsequent storms, including Katrina, in that building.

As publisher, Weeks also set about modernizing the operation and transforming the newspaper from a community publication to a statewide force.

For the first time, he hired local columnists and photographers. He believed strongly in giving the news staff the editorial independence needed to gather and report the news.

“We became who we are because of Roland,” said Kat Bergeron, who worked full time for the Sun Herald for 32 years as a columnist and feature writer, and still writes her Gulf Coast Chronicles column for the newspaper. “He had the wherewithal to hire editors who brought us into the 21st century before we were really in the 21st Century.”

Bergeron said she was given the freedom to get to know the Coast and its history for her column.

“We took off and ran,” she said.

Weeks also brought a morning newspaper to the Coast, as The Daily Herald was an afternoon publication. The Sun and The Daily Herald eventually merged into The Sun Herald.

Publisher leaves strong legacy

Like any good leader, Weeks had the courage of his convictions, publishing news even when it was disagreeable to those in power.

He also had a long-range vision for the Coast, promoting consolidation of government services to increase efficiency and cut waste. He played a key role in consolidating five chambers into the Gulf Coast Chamber of Commerce.

“Roland was a giant in both of his principal capacities — newspaper publisher and community leader,” said Stan Tiner of Gulfport, who was executive editor when Weeks retired. “He was a visionary who recognized that the Coast would be more prosperous as a unified region, while giving great credit to each of the unique communities that were vital to his new home.

“As a publisher, he created a legacy of fairness and public service journalism that served the Coast and South Mississippi with distinction throughout his decades of leadership.”

Over the years, Weeks won many awards for his service to the community, including the John S. Knight Gold Medal, the top honor awarded an employee of the newspaper when it was owned by media company Knight Ridder, the Alvah Chapman Award for best-performing newspaper in Knight-Ridder, United Way of South Mississippi Philanthropist of the Year and the Gulf Coast Chamber’s Spirit of the Coast Award.

Weeks also was one of the major fundraisers and promoters of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, home to the works of renowned ceramist George Ohr and a replica of the home of Pleasant Reed, a former enslaved person who built his family’s original home in 1887.

“He had so many different causes over the years that he threw himself into,” said Jeff O’Keefe, son of deceased museum founder and former Biloxi Mayor Jerry O’Keefe. “We will be forever grateful for his work with the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art.”

Weeks was humble about his accomplishments. As a publisher, he created a culture of customer service. He considered his employees internal customers. Even after he retired, Weeks frequently stopped by the newspaper office to visit, encourage employees and tell them what a good job they were doing.

“His legacy?” Mathews wrote in a Facebook tribute. “It’s in the bridges he built between people, the resilience he instilled in our institutions, and the way he turned challenges into opportunities.”

Weeks stayed in touch with employees

His enthusiasm for the newspaper and news was contagious.

“I count myself very, very lucky to have worked for him,” said Pam Firmin, a former Sun Herald staff writer. “He made it fun. He made things exciting.

“He was so quick to be understanding and caring and to see the big picture. It was something that seemed to come natural to him.”

Firmin had taken a break from the newspaper when her husband, Pic Firmin, served as executive editor under Weeks. After his retirement, Pic Firmin had cancer. Weeks regularly picked up Firmin to take him for coffee and visited Firmin daily in the last weeks of his life.

“He was so quick to be understanding and caring and to see the big picture,” Pam Firmin said. “It was something that seemed to come natural to him. He did help make the Gulf Coast what it is, but he is so much more than it.”

Flying was one of his passions

After retirement, Weeks faithfully volunteered at the Salvation Army in Gulfport, where for years he washed clothes for the homeless alongside Pam Firmin, who said he was also “an awesome laundry mechanic.”

Weeks also found more time in retirement for his favorite hobby, flying airplanes. He was known as somewhat of a daredevil, but real talent accompanied his rolls and aeronautical stunts.

“I’ve got so many stories,” said Joe Pevey of Gulfport, who became a close friend of Weeks after they met at an airport. Pevey described himself at the time as a Cessna pilot with a Top Gun attitude. He bought a high-performance plane that he really didn’t know how to fly. Weeks studied the book where Pevey had logged his experience and told the younger man, “’Joe, you’re going to kill yourself with this plane.’”

Instead, Weeks taught Pevey to fly the plane. “Roland quite literally saved my life,” Pevey said. Pevey considers himself a technical aerobatics pilot who thinks through his moves ahead of time, while Weeks was a natural.

“He wasn’t a pilot,” Pevey said. “He was an aviator.”

Weeks once corralled Mathews to deliver newspapers from the plane to customers who had chartered Weeks’ boat for fishing at Chandeleur Island. Weeks tested Mathews’ seatbelt strap before they started their mission in Weeks’ twin-engine plane. Mathews was positioned in a seat facing the back of the plane, where the door had been removed.

They located the fishermen on skiffs deployed from the big boat and each time they approached a skiff, Weeks dipped sideways so Mathews could angle a newspaper toward them.

Mathews promised himself, “If I ever make it back to the airport, I’m never getting in an airplane with Roland again. And I didn’t.”

Weeks lived to see the internet change the newspaper business. His belief in a community’s need for strong journalism never wavered, a tradition he helped build on the Coast.

The building whose construction he had overseen came down in the spring, the Sun Herald having moved to quarters more suited to an online operation. He was moving slowly, but Weeks showed up to see some of his former employees for one last photograph on the front steps of the building.

“You’re wonderful people,” he told the group. “You just can’t imagine the excitement that I feel and the love that I feel for all of you.”