Ex-Publisher Dale Named President of Music Center

Former Los Angeles Herald Examiner Publisher Francis L. Dale was named today to the newly created post of president of the Music Center of Los Angeles County, the board of governors of the downtown performing-arts complex announced.

Citing a six-month “leadership vacuum” at the center, Dale, 64, told a morning news conference at the center that he will release in two months a report outlining plans to assure Los Angeles’ position as the artistic “capital of the world” by the end of the century.

“The Music Center is the centerpiece of the musical and theatrical life of Southern California,” Dale said. “It will surely be America’s foremost performing arts center before the year 2000.”

Since resigning last year from his Herald Examiner post, he has served as commissioner of the Major Indoor Soccer League. Dale’s three-year Music Center appointment, made along with a partial reorganization of the two organizations charged with operating, fund raising and policy-making at the complex, fills a management void at the center resulting from the dual resignations of Performing Arts Council President Michael Newton in March and Music Center Operating Co. President Allan H. Colman in January.

Dale declined to characterize his new role as a merging of the two organizations. He insisted, however, that the arts council and the operating company will be more closely allied than in the past.

“The level of cooperation will take a quantum leap,” Dale said, “even if I’m the only one doing the leaping.”

Dale, a one-time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is an attorney who formerly served as president of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team and as president and publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper.