Art Schreiber

Art Schreiber died of natural causes on Saturday 7 November 2026 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, aged 98 and five days before his 99th birthday, his son Mark Schreiber told the Albuquerque Journal. His family asked that donations be made to the Arthur A. Schreiber Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation in place of flowers, and said a celebration of his life would be announced later.

Arthur A. Schreiber was born on 12 November 1927 and was raised on a farm near East Liverpool, Ohio. He started listening to the radio at the age of eight, often with his father in the mornings, and resolved that one day the voice coming over the airwaves would be his own. He served two years in the United States Army and earned a college degree before landing his first broadcasting job in 1951 as an announcer at WOHI in East Liverpool.

Schreiber's career in radio lasted fifty years and spanned almost every role in a newsroom: reporter, anchor, news director, national correspondent, bureau chief and finally vice president and general manager. He travelled with John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign and reported on his election and his funeral, and he interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. and covered the civil rights movement.

In 1964, as news director of KYW in Cleveland, he was chosen as one of a handful of journalists to accompany the Beatles on their first tour of North America, a 32 day, 25 city trip. With Westinghouse Broadcasting he ran the company's national and international news service in Washington, D.C., and managed stations in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, where he was general manager of KFWB, and New York. He then joined Hubbard Broadcasting in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

In 1981 Hubbard sent him to Albuquerque to run KOB-AM and its FM sister station. In 1985 he travelled to New York to accept the Broadcast Pioneers Golden Mike Award on behalf of KOB-AM. He was inducted into the New Mexico Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2010.

In 1982, months after arriving in New Mexico, Schreiber woke on the last morning of a holiday near Santa Fe to find he could not see; both retinas had detached. After twelve operations and seven months of training in living and working as a blind person, he returned to manage KOB. He credited the National Federation of the Blind with turning his life around.

He retired from broadcasting in 1993 to run for mayor of Albuquerque. He was not elected, but treated the campaign as a message to blind people about what was possible. He used his contacts to help create the New Mexico Commission for the Blind in 1986 and chaired its board from 1986 to 1995 under four governors, during which New Mexico became the third state to offer Newsline, a telephone talking newspaper service. He was president of the National Federation of the Blind of New Mexico, later its President Emeritus, and chaired the State Rehabilitation Council. In 2014 he published the memoir Out of Sight: Blind and Doing All Right. He married Alice in 1946; she and their daughter Amy died before him.

Schreiber is remembered both as a newsman with a front row seat to the 1960s and as a champion of blind New Mexicans. "I guess the thing that stands out to me is just how open he was to everybody," said Fred Schroeder, former executive director of the New Mexico Commission for the Blind. His son said his legacy was that he wanted to help people and did not let anything stop him.