Frederick Gleason, who as grandson of The New York Sun’s publisher represented a vital link between the newspaper’s new incarnation and its 130-year history, was killed Monday in what appears to be a botched robbery, police in Savannah, Ga., said. He was 64.

The assailant and an accomplice allegedly followed Gleason’s wife as she drove her 1997 white Mercedes-Benz to the Gleason’s new home in the exclusive Ardsley Park neighborhood of Savannah, according to Megan Matteucci, a reporter for the Savannah Evening News, who interviewed Mrs. Gleason. Gleason had already given the gunman the car keys and was giving him his wife’s purse when he was shot three times. He died soon after in a nearby hospital, police said.

The Savannah Chatham Metropolitan Police Department’s spokesman, Bucky Bernson, said police were seeking two young men as suspects in the crime, but had made no arrests as of last night.

As the grandson of William Dewart, the Sun’s publisher in the 1930s and 1940s, Gleason was brought up to revere the Mergenthaler linotype. As a young man, he had spent time in the old Sun newsroom, and treasured a proprietary feeling toward the paper despite the fact that the Dewart family sold the paper in 1950. The Sun ceased publishing as an independent entity at that time and its name was added to that of its purchaser, the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram.

Gleason was heir to various Sun memorabilia – portraits of editors, old issues of the paper, the odd citation – and also to a trove of newspaper lore. On semiannual trips to New York, he would prowl the newsroom, his distinctive white shock of hair bobbing as he buttonholed reporters and editors to share an old tale or an idea he had for a story. On one recent visit, he informed his interlocutor that an obituary editor needed a “mind like a trash can.” On another visit, he announced to a columnist that he was the “ghost of Christmas past,” perhaps an allusion to the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter, which appeared in the Sun in 1897. He was notorious for phoning reporters to congratulate them on a scoop, or sometimes to amplify upon their shortcomings. His voice was unmistakable, somehow combining the Connecticut patrician with a Georgia planter’s drawl.

Gleason was raised on the Upper East Side and in Rye, N.Y., where his family had a summer home. His father, Frederick Brockway Gleason II, was a printing ink executive and later served as treasurer of Vermouth Industries of America. Gleason was fond of telling stories of attending sumptuous regattas and other gatherings as a youngster with the Social Register set.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Gleason went on to earn an MBA at Wharton in 1970, and began a career in investment banking. He worked for several firms, including Daiwa Securities and the Sterling Grace Corporation, Gleason’s friend, Thomas Lipscomb, said. He later moved to Savannah, where he took a job teaching history to underprivileged students. He also occasionally worked as a stringer for Reuters. He liked stories with an edge. He covered a news conference convened by Senator Thurmond’s illegitimate daughter, a soldier at nearby Fort Stewart convicted of desertion, and heavyweight boxer David Rickman, who died in 2004 after being knocked out in a prize fight.

He also contributed occasional items to the Sun, especially in the early days of its revival in the spring of 2002. From a Paris party, he wrote, “In Paris on April 19th last, Les Jeunes de la Noblesse Francaise, which sounds like just what it is, gave a benefit, with the Catholic Knights of Malta, for the French Old Soldiers Home, otherwise Les Invalides. The names on the committee were a veritable parade of the Gotha. From de Mortmont to de Ligouyer to de Castries, the Ancient Regime of France was well represented.”

Gleason took titles and trappings and heritage quite seriously, or more accurately found them to be serious fun. He was a member of many patriotic organizations, including the Sons of the Revolution, the Society of Colonial Wars, and the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. He owned a closet full of Civil War uniforms and was proud to have appeared as an extra in “Glory,” in which he played a corpse.

In a letter to the editor in 2002, Gleason recalled the old Sun’s ultimate demise, when it had been combined with no less than four other papers, in 1967: “The biggest train wreck of great 19th-century newspapers ever seen.” He savored the paper’s successes of the late 1940s, when Gleason first roamed the newsroom and the paper garnered Pulitzers for Rube Goldberg’s cartooning and for an investigative series that became the basis for the film “On the Waterfront.”

He added, “Since 1950, the Sun’s flag has lain in the dust. That flag is now in the hands of those who have boldly taken it up, and I have no doubt it will be carried forward so that it will again be said of the Sun, ‘It Shines For All.'”

Frederick Brockway Gleason III

Born November 15, 1941, in Manhattan; died November 28 at Memorial Health University’s Trauma Unit in Savannah, Ga.; survived by his wife, the former Ann Powell Lackey, and his daughter, Ann Powell Dewart Gleason, a fashion designer in New York. Funeral arrangements were not announced.