Harry G. Toland, 89, longtime Bulletin editor

Harry G. Toland, 89, of Wallingford, a reporter and editor at the Bulletin who was widely admired for his journalistic integrity, died Tuesday, Jan. 31, of congestive heart failure at his home.

"I considered Harry Toland to be the conscience of the Bulletin," Peter Binzen, one of the newspaper's most respected reporters and editors, said Thursday.

"It was his great morality. He was a guy you could trust."

Mr. Toland made his mark covering labor unions, then as an editorial writer, and finally as deputy to metro editor Binzen in the late 1970s, when they were in charge of news coverage for the region.

The Bulletin published its last issue on Jan. 29, 1982.

George Packard, executive editor of the Bulletin in the early and mid-1970s after reporting from Washington for Newsweek, said Mr. Toland "was one of the most excellent journalists I've ever known."

In a Thursday interview from San Francisco, Packard said "his writing was clear . . . and straightforward, and his integrity was unquestioned."

At a time when the Bulletin newsroom was rife with "lots of politics, pro- and anti-Rizzo, he rose above all that stuff," staying fair-minded about Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, Packard said. "I loved Harry Toland."

Packard is now president of the United States-Japan Foundation, which seeks to promote understanding between the two nations.

The Bulletin had a reputation for blanketing the news close to home rather than sending its reporters far afield. But, as Mr. Toland's wife, Harriet, recalled, Packard esteemed him enough to send him to cover a Rome conference on world hunger and then on to India to write about hunger's effects on the poorest of the poor.

Mr. Toland enjoyed a post-Bulletin career, his wife said, as a writer of six books, two self-published.

One of three published by Heritage Books was A Sort of Peace Corps: Wilfred Grenfell's Labrador Volunteers (2001).

"Harry Toland spent the summer [before] his freshman year at Yale doing manual labor at the Grenfell medical mission station in Cartwright, Labrador," a note at Amazon.com states. Grenfell, an English surgeon, had founded a medical mission "to serve the impoverished people of Labrador and northern Newfoundland."

Mr. Toland's wife recalled that he spent that summer helping build a road because "when supplies came in on a boat, all they had was a dirt road up to the hospital."

Born in Chestnut Hill, Mr. Toland graduated from Episcopal Academy in 1940 and earned a bachelor's degree in English literature at Yale in 1944.

His wife said that after serving as a Marine officer in the South Pacific, he began his journalistic career with a two-year stint as a Pottstown Mercury reporter.

In 1949, she said, he began his 33-year career with what was then the Evening Bulletin.

"He was terribly proud just to be at the Bulletin," his wife said. "He was on the labor beat for years and years. That was a tough beat; the hours were very difficult."

And not just the hours. "There were times that I was really frightened for him," she said, "but he would say, 'It's just a matter of how you treat people.' "

Besides his wife of 64 years, Mr. Toland is survived by a son, Robert 2d; three daughters, Margaret Kingham, Deborah, and Phoebe, two brothers, two sisters, six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

A funeral service was set for 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 5, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 301 N. Chester Rd., Swarthmore. Burial is to be at a later date in the Trinity memorial garden.