Having adapted his own life to a career he didn’t foresee, Richard K. Warren saw the Bangor Daily News through four decades of changes and helped his hometown reshape itself after the closure of Dow Air Force Base. The longtime publisher of the BDN and tireless community supporter and volunteer died Friday at the age of 87.

After earning a Bachelor of Science degree from Yale University, Mr. Warren, a native of New York City, began a career in chemistry at General Chemical Co. in New Jersey. He enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943, the same year he married Joanne Jordan, whose family owned the Bangor Daily News. He served as a gunnery officer on the USS Jack W. Wilke, a destroyer escort that helped guard the convoy carrying American troops and equipment to Europe during World War II.

Shortly after he was released from active duty, his father-in-law, Fred Jordan, publisher of the BDN, became ill. Mr. Warren, then “a great reader of newspapers,” became a great leader of newspapers.

After learning the trade at the Hartford Times, he came to Bangor to work closely with his mother-in-law, Lillis Jordan, who became the BDN’s publisher when her husband died in 1947. Mr. Warren served as assistant publisher and treasurer until 1955, when he was elected publisher of the paper, a position he held until 1986, when his son, Richard J. Warren, took the paper’s helm.

“Dick Warren was a quiet man with a terrific sense of humor, who also was very serious about his newspaper’s editorial policy,” BDN Executive Editor Mark Woodward recalled. “As publisher, he was a man of strong conviction about what was right for the community and the state, and he wanted his paper to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues of the day. He was always approachable, very thoughtful and totally unafraid.”

He brought that lack of fear to a changing industry. “Some said that the newspaper’s days were numbered with the advent of television, but, of course that didn’t happen,” he said in 1986. “It is because newspapers [have] attributes lacking in other media.” Local news and photographs were the greatest of those attributes.

A lack of fear also helped Mr. Warren reshape Bangor after the closure of Dow Air Force Base. He agreed to serve on an advisory committee on the reuse of the military post, which was closed in 1968. He saw the closure, which many feared was Bangor’s death knell, as an opportunity for new development in the city.

Mr. Warren was also active in community and volunteer groups, serving as a director of the Chamber of Commerce, YMCA, Bangor Symphony Orchestra and other organizations.

Mr. Warren commented to friends that you don’t know where life will take you. Bangor is a better place for his life having taken him here.