Jerry Hale Owens, the son of a small-town West Virginia newspaper publisher who grew up to travel the world working on high-stakes newspaper acquisition deals, died Saturday after a long bout with a rare lung disease. The Sewickley man was 51.

How small of a town is St. Marys? When Mr. Owens, a lawyer, left for Pittsburgh to join Kirkpatrick & Lockhart in 1984, the Green Tree apartment building he lived in housed more people than his entire hometown along the Ohio River. He had spent his teen years working at his father's weekly newspaper -- the St. Marys Oracle -- and a decade after arriving in Pittsburgh would work on the $180 million sale of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the nation's biggest daily papers.

"He grew up loving the sounds, the pace and the smell of a newsroom, and managed to carry that love into a really remarkable career serving as counsel to newspapers around the United States," said his friend and fellow attorney Charlie Kelly.

He spent much of his career working as an outside counsel to American Publishing Co., a subsidiary of Canadian firm Hollinger Inc., which Mr. Owens incorporated. In the 1980s and 1990s it would buy more than 200 small-town newspapers -- just like his father's -- around the U.S.

With Mr. Owens' assistance, the group also bought the Jerusalem Post in 1989. (Mr. Owens had stopped working for Hollinger by the time head Conrad Black was charged with defrauding the firm in 2004.)

"I could not have asked for a more professionally capable nor cheerier outside counsel than Jerry," Charles Cowan, American Publishing's former in-house lawyer, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday.

When Mr. Owens would speak on newspaper business matters at industry conferences, Mr. Kelly said, the budget-conscious conferees would go hush like an old E.F. Hutton ad.

" I saw people who owned publications hanging on every word of what Jerry thought on the market and the pricing in the market. He was as much a businessman as he was a lawyer, and he knew that newspaper market inside and out," he said.

Mr. Owens had his first troubles breathing some eight years ago, suffering from a debilitating condition initially thought to be pulmonary hypertension. It was later diagnosed as pulmonary veno-occlusive disease, a rare disorder without a known cause or cure. The only treatment is a double lung transplant, a procedure he went through in 2004.

Growing up, Mr. Owens was a fanatic for the Duke University basketball team, for which he rooted throughout the 1970s, leading him to attend the school in 1976 after graduating as St. Marys High School valedictorian. He graduated in 1980 -- the year future college Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski replaced Bill Foster as Blue Devils coach -- and then from Duke Law in 1983.

Mr. Owens spent his teen years and college summers working at his father Roy's newspaper -- shooting photos, writing and editing copy -- and Duke fandom, along with humor, was another thing they had in common. As a college freshman he missed an early-season game while studying, and when his father found out he told him he didn't "know where your priorities are" and would not speak to his son for a week.

"He never missed a home game after that," his former wife Aileen Owens, a fellow St. Marys native, said Tuesday.

An average life expectancy for those receiving double-lung transplants is five years, and Mr. Owens began going through rejection problems from his 2004 surgery last year and became terminally ill before he could get on the list for a new transplant. His hospital rooms were often decorated with Duke basketball memorabilia.

This also gave him a lot of time in his last months with UPMC nurses and his two college-aged children. During one stay, a nurse mentioned -- while wheeling Mr. Owens on the long bridge linking UPMC Montefiore and UPMC Presbyterian -- how she'd often thought of rolling a bowling ball down the span. Later, Mr. Owens told his daughter, he had a bowling ball delivered to Presby.

He is survived by his son Andrew and daughter Christa of Mt. Lebanon and sister Barbara Lee Owens of Philadelphia.

A funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. today at St. Marys Presbyterian Church. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. April 24 at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, 801 Beaver St., Sewickley.

Contributions may be made to the Roy G. Owens Scholarship Fund, c/o Guy H. Stewart, Pocahontas Avenue, Morgantown, WV 26503.

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