Charles Dolan, media pioneer and Cablevision founder, dies at 98

Charles F. Dolan, a media and telecommunications pioneer who founded Cablevision Systems Corp., has died, a family spokesman said Saturday. He was 98.

Dolan first changed the television landscape in the 1960s when he laid cable in lower Manhattan, betting that people would pay for programs that were better than those broadcast over the airwaves for free. He went on to found Home Box Office Inc., later known as HBO, American Movie Classics and launched the nation’s first 24-hour local news cable channel, News12.

“He’s one of the pioneers of cable television and one of the most brilliant people around when it comes to programming and seeing what’s ahead,” said Ted Turner, the founder of CNN , for Newsday in 1990.

On Saturday, the Dolan family said in a statement sent by a spokesman: “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved father and patriarch, Charles Dolan, the visionary founder of HBO and Cablevision.”

Dolan died Saturday of natural causes and was surrounded by loved ones at the time of his death, according to family.

“Remembered as both a pioneer in the television industry and a devoted family man, his legacy will live on,” the family said.

Cablevision purchased Newsday Media Group in 2008. Newsday is now owned by Dolan’s son, Patrick Dolan.

The elder Dolan, whose primary home was in Cove Neck Village in Oyster Bay Town, expanded beyond television, owning a controlling stake in companies that owned Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers. The teams and sports and entertainment venues are now owned by The Madison Square Garden Company, whose CEO is Charles Dolan’s son James L. Dolan.

At the center of Charles Dolan’s holdings was Cablevision of Bethpage, which he founded in 1973 and built into one of the nation’s largest television companies.

Dolan turned day-to-day control of Cablevision over to son James in 1995. But the senior Dolan remained chairman until the company was sold to Altice in 2015 for nearly $18 billion.

Dolan had a reputation for being soft-spoken and reserved. He rarely gave interviews. And for years he avoided chauffeurs and drove his own car, despite being one of the richest men in America.

He was married for 73 years to Helen Ann Dolan, who died last year. They have six grown children and lived on a 5-acre waterfront estate where for decades they hosted annual Fourth of July fireworks shows that drew hundreds of spectators watching from boats in Long Island Sound.

Despite his courtly demeanor—he spoke so softly in meetings that people sometimes couldn’t hear him—Dolan had a reputation for pursuing deals with patient but intense fervor, sometimes taking years to get what he wanted. Competitors said he waited decades for a chance to buy Madison Square Garden. When the opportunity came, he jumped with abandon.

“I call him Bulldog Dolan,” former Univision chairman Andrew Jerrold “Jerry” Perenchio told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.

Dolan was born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, one of four boys and the grandson of Irish immigrants. His father, David J. Dolan, was an inventor who created a steering wheel lock to deter would-be thieves from making off with Model T Fords. He died of cancer in 1943 when Charles was 16, leaving him and his brothers to be raised by their mother.

At that time, Charles Dolan was already breaking into the media business. He earned $2 a week writing a column about the Boy Scouts for the Cleveland Press.

Dolan worked at a radio station in high school, served briefly in the Air Force in the waning days of World War II, and returned to Ohio and enrolled at John Carroll University. It was there, in logic class, that he met his future wife, Helen Burgess.

Dolan dropped out of college before graduating and started a sports newspaper business out of the couple’s apartment. Using their kitchen as a studio, Dolan and his wife taped negatives to cabinets and spliced ​​together highlight film, which they would sell to stations across the country.

However, the operation yielded little money. Dolan sold the company to a competitor, Telenews, in 1952, essentially trading his clients for a job with the company in New York City. The Dolans moved east.

In 1954, Dolan took a job at Sterling Television, where he helped launch a project to connect Manhattan by coaxial cable to deliver news and tourism programming.

In the mid-1960s, cable television was a media backwater, limited to rural areas too remote for over-the-air signals. The conventional wisdom was that no one in a city or suburb would pay for television programs when they came free with an antenna.

“No one except Chuck Dolan ever thought cable would be anything outside of poor reception areas,” said Perenchio, the former Univision executive.

In 1965, Dolan persuaded the New York City Board of Estimate—which at the time governed the five boroughs—to award him the franchise to wire the southern half of Manhattan. Dolan lost Time Inc. and others to support, then began the massive task of installing underground cable amid the waves of buildings. Once that was in place, Dolan’s company, Sterling Manhattan Cable, had to find a way to attract subscribers. He turned to sports.

In 1967, he made a deal with Madison Square Garden to offer Knicks and Rangers playoff games. At the time, home games were blacked out by mainstream television. So the only way to watch was to have a seat in the garden – or subscribe to Dolan’s system.

“I remember walking down Third Avenue and every bar was packed,” Dolan said in Wired to Win, a 2003 book about cable’s early days. “They were all connected to cable and showed the games people couldn’t see on regular TV. It was wonderful.”

But profits were far from over, and more than sports were needed to keep the cable afloat. Dolan, deeply in debt, needed more money to develop programming with broader appeal. Then in 1972, while aboard the Queen Elizabeth II on a family vacation, Dolan holed up in his cabin with an old typewriter and started writing.

As the ship steamed east toward France, he hatched the plan for a national pay-TV channel that he hoped would convince Time Inc. – who already owned 20% of Sterling Manhattan Cable – to invest more money and take the company to the next level. He called it “The Green Channel.” America would come to know it as HBO.

The idea was to broadcast a mix of movies and sporting events and syndicate to other cable systems around the country. Time Inc. was impressed and the channel was launched in November 1972.

Nevertheless, Dolan’s company struggled to turn a profit. His relationship with Time Inc. got mad. In 1973, Time Inc. bought the company out, including HBO. In exchange for giving up control, Dolan walked away with Time’s new cable system in Nassau County with 1,500 subscribers.

“That was the beginning of Cablevision Systems Corporation,” Dolan said in the book “Wired to Win.”

Over the next decades, Dolan built his subscriber base, launched affiliates and developed programs including SportsChannel, American Movie Classics, Bravo and others. He expanded to Brooklyn, the Bronx, Connecticut, New Jersey and elsewhere.

He took Cablevision public in 1986 but retained a majority stake.

“I have to admire the way Chuck has built his company and maintained control,” Liberty Media Corporation Chairman John C. Malone told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “It’s truly miraculous.”

In 1998, Dolan helped found The Lustgarten Foundation in Uniondale after Cablevision vice chairman Marc Lustgarten was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at age 51. The foundation is now the nation’s largest private supporter of pancreatic cancer research.

Dolan also served as an administrator for Fairfield University in Connecticut, where the business school is named after him. And despite never graduating from John Carroll University, he gave the school $20 million in 2000 to build a science and technology center.

Dolan is survived by sons Patrick Dolan, Thomas Dolan and James Dolan; daughters Marianne Dolan-Weber, Kathleen Dolan and Deborah Dolan-Sweeney; and 19 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were pending.

With James T. Madore, Joe Ryan and Dandan Zou