Thomas Butson



S. of Vivian Butson & Elizabeth Baird

Thomas Butson
Born in 1931 at Winton, South Island, New Zealand
Occ. Journalist/Author
Marr. Elizabeth Margaritis in 1967 at Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died 3rd Jan. 2000 at New York, New York, USA (Cancer)


NOTE

Tom Butson left his native New Zealand at the age of 19 where he was working as a reporter for The Truth, a weekly paper he later described as “a political scandal sheet.” He looked for newspaper work in London but learned that the Thompson papers in Canada were hiring so there he went to work for the Thompson paper in Guelph, Ont. By the time he was 28 he was assistant managing editor of the Toronto Star. He met Elizabeth Margaritis, a photojournalist who later joined Philip Morris, and they married in 1967. He joined the Times in 1968, working on the Week in Review section of the Sunday paper and as assistant news editor of the daily main news section. Three years after purchasing The Villager, the Butsons acquired a second local paper, Downtown Express, covering Tribeca and Lower Manhattan. Tom Butson’s declining health prompted the sale in 1999 of The Villager and Downtown Express, at the time a biweekly, to John Sutter, who had recently sold a chain of Long Island newspapers he had been running for 10 years. In 1995 Sutter moved to Tribeca. (The Villager - May 28 - June 3, 2003)


Elizabeth (also a Journalist/Photojournalist) before she was publisher of The Villager in the 1990s, as a young photojournalist, took photos of and reported on the Fuerzas Armadas Rebelde, a rebel group in the mountains of Guatemala. She was the first female journalist the rebels let visit their mountain stronghold. (Also SEE 'The Villager' Volume 73, Number 33 | December 17 - 23, 2003).

Tom Butson, former Mercury employee, dies in New York

Born in New Zealand, Mr. [Tom Butson] worked there as a reporter for several years. He arrived in Canada in 1951 and worked at the Guelph Mercury, the Winnipeg Free Press, the old Hamilton Daily News and the Windsor Star. He joined The Star in 1959. Mr. Butson wrote two books on Russian politics, including one on Mikhail Gorbachev. (Daily Mercury. Guelph, Ont.: Jan 6, 2000. pg. A.4)

SEE Picture

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