One of the sad but inevitable functions of our website is to report the deaths of those who for most of us were close friends and colleagues. There is some compensation for us because in looking at the lives of those who died we learn anew what an especially talented and interesting collection of people we were privileged to work with at Time Inc.
Here are pictures and scroll down for written tributes to former colleagues who died recently.
Here are pictures and scroll down for written tributes to former colleagues who died recently.
Architect of the AOL Fiasco
• Gerald Levin, 84, the Time Inc. CEO who engineered the most disastrous deal in the company’s 100-year history—the merger with AOL—died in Long Beach in March.
What could go wrong with the merger between the world’s largest publishing company and the leader in Internet communications? Well, just about everything. When the deal was announced in 2000, the Dotcom market was about to collapse. AOL’s clunky Internet portal was being pushed aside by better models. AOL’s books were not as good as the company claimed. Time Inc. had already lost the weekly Life and was just starting to figure out how to deal with the new digital world. The AOL people and the Time Inc. people didn’t understand each other.
The $342 billion deal soon turned into a $127 billion deal. For 2001, the company posted a loss of $98.7 billion—a record for the US. Time Inc. employees who counted on profit sharing and share grants to finance a comfortable retirement, found there was almost nothing there. Ted Turner who had sold his CNN to Time Inc., reported that his $8 billion fortune had shrunk to $2 billion. He was livid.
Before AOL, Levin had established brilliant reputation at Time Inc. He was CEO of a regional cable TV company, HBO, owned by Time Inc. and persuaded the company to use satellite transmissions to distribute HBO content, which made it available all over the US. HBO was the first to use satellites, and according to The New York Times obituary, Levin’s daring gambit “helped change the television landscape.” Success was assured when Americans all over the country were able to watch Mohammed Ali’s “Thrilla in Manila” live at lunchtime. HBO became the most successful element in Time. The series it developed over the years, from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones were hugely successful. Levin was undoubtedly a great visionary, but not a good manager of people.
Levin grew up in Philadelphia in a Jewish household but he also became interested in other religions. At Haverford College he studied biblical literature and Christian philosophy and then earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. After nearly 10 years working in various organizations he landed a job at Sterling Communications a small cable company and there he found his true calling.
Levin was married and divorced three times and had five children. One of them Jonathan, a popular 31-year-old high school teacher in the Bronx, was murdered in his apartment in Manhattan by one of his students. (Adapted partly from the New York Times obituary March 13.)
Fortune’s Expert on the Auto Industry
• Alex Taylor III, 79; Fortune’s much-recognized expert on the auto industry for nearly three decades, died in February in Lakeville, Connecticut where he had lived with his wife for many years. He suffered complications from Parkinson’s disease. Alex grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. His father owned the Alex Taylor & Company sporting goods store in midtown Manhattan. Alex graduated from Kent school and Middlebury College and then earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.
He entered journalism through a radio station in Indiana and then had a variety of assignments at WZZM13-TV in Grand Rapids. Time hired him as a reporter and then he moved on to Fortune, where he established himself as a meticulous and knowledgeable reporter on the auto industry. He was also a good storyteller.
Alex’s many awards included “Journalist of the Year” from the Washington Automotive Press Association and in 2000 he was named one of the 100 notable business journalists of the 20th century. He was an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He was a member of the International Motor Press Association and served on its jury for the North American Car of the Year Award. Alex poured his three decades experience into 60 to Zero: An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors—and the Detroit Auto Industry, a book that appeared to positive reviews in 2010. Alex enjoyed family, friends, nonfiction books, tennis and wore Brooks Brothers suits.
Two of The First at People
• Rossiter J. (Ross) Drake Jr., 83, one of the founders of People magazine, an editor known for his kindness and encouragement towards novice writers, died in November of Parkinson’s disease at a senior living home in Connecticut. (The obituary of another founding staffer at People follows)
In 1974 Ross joined a small cadre of Time Incers who would found People, which became the most successful magazine startup in history. Ross served as a senior editor and then as assistant managing editor. A colleague, Jim Seymour writes that Ross was the “gold standard” of what an editor should be, “thoughtful, kind, helpful, and generous. He nurtured an untold number of novice writers.”
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Ross grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts and Westport, Connecticut. His father sold textbooks for McGraw-Hill and his mother was a high school teacher. After high school, Ross attended Amherst College, graduating in 1962. He started his career in journalism with jobs at small newspapers and moved up to the Hartford Courant and then TV Guide. His enjoyment of pranks came out when he published a review of a nonexistent movie called The Brain That Ate Hot Dogs. He was not fired.
He met a language arts teacher, Enes Bucciarelli and married her in 1968. About that time he appeared on the TV game show Jeopardy and won enough money to take his bride to Europe and buy their first house. They had a daughter and a son also named Rossiter, always known as Little Ross who also became a journalist. The family had a tradition of spending summers at a cottage at the Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor, Maine. Father and son became croquet enthusiasts and sometimes won the summer tournament at the hotel. The two were also enthusiastic Braves and Patriot fans. Little Ross interned at Entertainment Weekly and then became a movie critic in San Francisco. He died of a heart attack at 34 at about the time that Ross was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Colin Durkee remembers that when he was a young writer he sometimes came into Ross’s office and stretched out on his couch. While a sports program played silently on the TV, Ross continued editing and kept up an affable conversation with Durkee. Durkee says that someone pointed out to him that “People had rivalries, politics, etc—No one ever said a bad word about Ross.” —posted 2/17/24
• Mary Dunn, 76, was on board as the picture editor when the first issue of People appeared and later became director of photography at Entertainment Weekly died in July, as we learned recently. Mary was a picture researcher at Time when she was picked to be a founding member of the People staff.
Mary grew up in Camden, North Carolina and graduated from Ashley Hall in Charleston. With a perfect score of 1600 in her SATs she was accepted at Radcliffe, but her father insisted on a college further south so she went to Sweet Briar in Virginia. She majored in military and diplomatic history.
She had an entrancing junior year in Paris at the Sorbonne. She loved the food, fashion, beauty and art, wore mini dresses, smoked Gauloises and was briefly engaged to an Englishman.
New York beckoned and she got a job as an ad trafficker for NBC, where she met an executive in Grey Advertising, Toby Dunn. They were married for 53 years. She left NBC to be a picture editor at Time and then was chosen for the cadre of editors who created People. She proved to be superb at assigning photographers, imaginative at creating picture stories, patient in getting good cover pictures out of difficult subjects and skilled at the many other tasks required of a picture editor. At a picture session in the layout room in 1985 when a photo of Mel Gibson was shown on the screen she exclaimed, “that’s the handsomest man alive.” So began an annual feature in the magazine.
For the last decade of her 30-year career at Time Inc., Mary applied the same talents as director of photography at Entertainment Weekly. Soon after her retirement she suffered a brain aneurysm in 1999 which handicapped her at times. Nevertheless she spent the next 24 years enjoying a quieter life, traveling and wintering in the Bahamas. She and Toby lived in Essex, Connecticut and Vero Beach, Florida.
Lanny Jones, who worked with her when he was managing editor of People, writes “we loved Mary and all she represented—smarts, charm, high spirits, and a kind heart.” (Adapted from a formal obituary) —posted 2/17/24
Time Correspondent, Fortune editor
• Harold Burton (“Burt”) Meyers, 99; a former Time correspondent in the Washington Bureau and later a member of the Board of Editors at Fortune, died October 6 in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he and his late wife had gone to live since his retirement from Time Inc. In 1987.
Burt was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1924. His parents were both teachers in the US Indian Service. He was mostly home-schooled on reservations in Pima, Maricopa, Zuni and Navajo in Arizona and New Mexico. At the age of 13 he entered the Wasatch Academy a Presbyterian boarding school in Mount Pleasant, Utah.
During World War II Burt served on Guam in the Navy Seabees. After the war he enrolled at the University of Colorado on the G.I. Bill and graduated with high honors in 1948. He started his career in journalism at newspapers in Williston, North Dakota, and Grand Junction, Colorado, he also had spells of teaching at Fort Lewis College and the University of Kansas.
His work caught the eyes of Time editors and he was hired in 1960 to work in the Chicago Bureau at Time and then moved to the Washington Bureau. He covered school desegregation stories in the South and the political stories leading to JFK’s presidency.
Burt transferred to Fortune in New York where he made a specialty of tracking election finances. When he joined the Board of Editors he became a story editor. Before and after retiring in 1987, Burt published four novels set in Indian reservations. Two of them, Geronimo’s Pony and The Death at Awahi won literary prizes.
All those years in the East had not deprived Burt of the easy warmth of the West. Burt got married as a teenager and the marriage lasted 70 years until the death of his wife, Jean, in 2013. He is survived by four sons, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. One of his sons, Terry lives in Williamsburg and is a retired professor of English at William & Mary.
Minor League Pitcher; Major League Sports Writer
• Gary Ronberg, 82, whose brief career as a minor league pitcher morphed into a long career writing for Sports Illustrated and other major league publications, died in St. Louis in April.
Gary grew up in New Haven, Indiana, and attended Michigan State University where he pitched for the Spartans and majored in journalism. In his first season as a starting pitcher, he had a 10-3 record, and in the MSU record book, he has the second highest number of games worked as a pitcher in the team’s history.
Years later Gary told SI that he was getting a big head and wondered why the scouts weren’t coming around. “When they did it was not encouraging,” he said. ”One scout told me to put on 10 pounds, another told me to lose 10 pounds. I got the message. I was marginal either way.”
He pitched in the minors at Kitchener, Ontario team and after a 14-3 season he was promoted to the higher minors in Sherbrooke, Québec, but he got no further. He said. “When your good pitch comes screaming back at you by your ear, that feels bad.” He didn’t want that for his future.
Gary was a gifted storyteller and writer and he took to sportswriting, first at UPI and then at SI, where he was known for his geniality and for his skill at a tabletop hockey game, which occupied writers during slack times. He soon had a slot as a regular hockey and football writer.
In New York he moved into a large apartment building known as the “Stew Zoo”, inhabited by 300 airline stewardesses. He married one of them, Christine, and remained happily married for 55 years.
After some years at SI in the late 1960s and early '70s, Gary worked in the front office of the St. Louis Blues, wrote for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Philadelphia Inquirer, authored three books on hockey and with Christine produced a guide to Philadelphia. At one point he became interested in car racing and joined the public relations firm of FleishmanHillard as VP for auto racing.
The Youngest VP
• Kelso Sutton, 84, described in the company history as “one of Time Inc.’s most upwardly mobile young men”—at 32 the youngest vice president since Roy Larson’s promotion in 1927—died in New York in June.
The World of Time Inc., Volume 3, by Curtis Prendergast and Geoffrey Colvin, described Kelso on his appointment as publisher of Sports Illustrated this way: “shortish and rather bumptious, looking as if he had just got out of college campus, Sutton had a sharp mind and breezy approach that had propelled him through a variety of company posts since his arrival 17 years earlier just out of Harvard.”
Kelso was born in Boston, grew up in Falmouth, Maine, graduated from the Mount Hebron Academy in 1957 with a prize for the best academic record, and then attended Harvard. He graduated in 1961, but his senior thesis was stolen and the job of rewriting it t seemed so overwhelming to him that he put off going to graduate school and instead took a stop-gap job as a corporate trainee at Time Inc . He stayed there for the rest of his career.
From trainee he moved up rapidly to become Time’s assistant business manager, then business manager and then general manager of the magazine. When he became a corporate VP in 1972 he had a particularly busy year. He worked with a small group that decided to shut down the weekly Life and he headed up a new corporate circulation department. In 1974 he worked on the launch of Sports Illustrated and then became the magazine’s publisher. Kelso was elected to the corporate Board of Directors in 1983, in 1984 became vice president of the magazine group and in 1987 became CEO of Time Life Books.
Kelso served on the boards of trustees of the Smithsonian Institution and of the South Street Seaport. He retired in 1983 to do a lot of traveling and reading, living in homes on eastern Long Island and Florida. In 2020 he bought a $7.7 million condo in Palm Beach.
SI’s Olympic Champion
• Anita Verschoth, 90; who covered every winter and summer Olympics from 1964 through 1996 for Sports Illustrated—that’s 18 Olympics--died in New York in January, as we learned recently. As SI’s Olympic expert, Anita had an uncanny skill for handicapping winners and had sources deep into the Olympic committees.
Born in Germany, Anita emigrated to the United States in 1962. She soon joined SI as a secretary and won promotion rapidly to reporter and then associate editor. Fluent in English, German and French, Anita developed excellent sources inside the somewhat opaque world of Olympic sports. She described herself as “the world’s greatest lobby lurker”, who skulked behind the potted palms at the Lausanne Palace Hotel waiting to pounce on Olympic officials emerging from committee meetings. Her best source (and close friend) was Monique Berlioux, the executive director to a succession of IOC presidents.
In Olympic preview issues of SI, Anita would pick the winners in every sport with a remarkable accuracy. According to a publisher’s letter in 1985, among SI staffers Anita was “definitely first in mileage on land, sea and in the air, first in jet lag, first in exotic places visited—and six weeks behind in her expense account.” She had just returned from an Odyssey that took her to 22 cities in 11 countries.
Anita had her own trophy. She was the first winner of the Cappy Petrash Greenspan Foundation award for outstanding achievement among women in the sports media, which came with a shining crystal trophy and a banquet. Along with SI‘s William Oscar Johnson she was co-author of a book about an East German discus thrower.
Anita’s final years at Time Inc. were difficult. In a cost-cutting move in 1988, her employment status was changed from staffer to contributor, which meant she had no benefits. She sued the company for discrimination and won reinstatement as a staffer in 1996. But she had a contract for only two years and after that she retired—presumably with some sort of settlement. (Thanks to Jerry Kirshenbaum for this information.) No picture was available at this time.
A Fortune Activist
• Wilton Woods,79; a Fortune researcher for 27 years and a popular activist in the New York Newspaper Guild, died of a heart attack on July 14 at the nursing home in New York where he was living.
Wilton was born in the small Texas city of Seguin, which lies between San Antonio and Houston, and attended Southwestern University, where he was vice president of the student body and an active member of the young Democrats.
Like Willie Morris, Wilton left his hometown “for the stimulation, opportunities and freedom in the big city.” That freedom started in the basement of the Time-Life building working as a mail clerk. He was promoted quickly to the clip desk and then became a reporter at the weekly Life. When that magazine shut down in 1972, he became a reporter at Fortune, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.
Wilton loved to travel and in his office he had a world map dotted with little flags to mark the many countries he had visited. He went to Ghana where he had many friends every year. He arranged for several young Ghanaians to move to the United States. He took a sabbatical in Brazil where he also had friends and he spoke some Portuguese. He traveled by car to many of the 48 states with his mother, Virginia Woods, who died only last year at the age of 107.
He enjoyed New York’s culture, especially the Alvin Ailey dance troupe. He worked hard for the Newspaper Guild and while he was at Fortune he was most helpful to young reporters. For a time he served with VISTA volunteers. When he retired he retained his apartment near Central Park and continued to bicycle in the park until disability slowed him down.
—(Thanks to Darienne Dennis for this information.) [No picture was found]
The Founder of the People Website
• Stephen Silverman, 71, a prolific author and beloved founding editor of the People website, died in New York in July. Silverman came to People in 1995 after working for 11 years as the Broadway and Hollywood correspondent for The New York Post.
He would often come to work at the People office before 6 a.m. with a friendly greeting for the other early birds at the news desk, which he ran. “He was a loving paternal figure to so many of us who had moved to New York City at a young age, away from our families and seeking such a connection. On holidays he’d invite colleagues over to share a meal, he threw fabulous Super Bowl parties,” a People memorial note said, “he was a magician with words, a grammar genius, the person we all turned to for advice on a perfect lead, a better headline, a little tweak in our text.”
Silverman was born in Los Angeles, earned a bachelor’s’ degree in history from the University of California at Irvine and then came to New York to get a master’s degree from the journalism school at Columbia.
In addition to his work for the People website, he wrote articles for many other publications, taught at the journalism school at Columbia and published 13 books, mostly about personalities in the entertainment world. He also wrote a book about the Catskills, which he knew well, and another about the history of entertainment parks going back 900 years. His most notable book was a biography of David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia, a notoriously closed mouth character who had refused for decades to cooperate with writers. Slverman’s biography of Stephen Sondheim will appear this fall.
Long Time Downunder
• Paul Montague 86; who joined Time Life International in Sydney Australia in the 1960s, died recently at his home on the North Beaches of Sydney. Paul worked in the finance department. He was a francophile and soccer fan and recently gave his two sons and their families a trip to France. It was a great success but on their return to Australia they learned that Paul had died. Time Life Alumni in Australia, who seem to have retained more enthusiasm than the stateside alumni, gathered for drinks on June 23 to celebrate his life. They also plan to hold their annual lunch in December.
A Stylish Writer and the Boston Slugger
• John Underwood, 88, a stylish writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of many best-selling books about sports, died in Miami in April. John was one of those wonderful SI writers, such as Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins, who made the magazine so admired in its heyday. He was best known for his intimate and up close writing about the great Boston hitter, Ted Williams.
John got through to the irascible and well-insulated Williams, who had little use for reporters, by suggesting a Tarpon fishing expedition in the Florida Keys. The Boston slugger said come on down. In the resulting four-piece series in SI John wrote Williams “brings to fishing the same hard-eyed intensity, the same unbounded capacity for scientific inquiry that he brought to hitting a baseball.”
That Tarpon fishing expedition led to a long partnership with Williams in many hunting and fishing expeditions around the world. Perhaps it was the intensity and focus that John shared with great athletes that won the confidencc of Williams and the other athletes he wrote about.
So successful were the articles that they lead to a ghostwritten book My Turn At Bat and that led to another book by the two The Science Of Hitting, which became a Bible for baseball players. John went on to write other books, including a biography of Bear Bryant, which he also ghosted.
John grew up in Miami, where his father was a tourist boat captain, and he began writing sports regularly for the Miami News while studying English at the University of Miami. He became a staff writer while still in college and then spent five years with the newspaper before joining SI in 1961.
Although baseball got most of his attention John also specialized in college football and wrote about boxing, golf, and professional football. He covered the darker side of sports too, including the widespread use of cocaine among professional baseball players, about how violence and injuries created a crisis in football and how gambling, big money and TV had taken the fun out of sports.
He quit SI in 1985 complaining the editing “was the worst I’ve ever seen” and took up freelancing
(Adapted from excellent and lengthy obituaries in the Washington Post and the New York Times.)
A Photo Editor for Many TL Books
• Blaine Marshall, 80, a native of Washington and a former photo editor at Time-Life Books, died in March in Maine, where she had retired with her husband, Elliott Marshall, a former news writer for Science magazine.
Blaine graduated from the Stoneridge School of the Sacred Heart in Rockville, Maryland, attended the University of Pennsylvania, the Corcoran School of Art and earned a BA in English from the American University in Washington.
While at Time-Life Books, Blaine worked on series about space exploration, gemstones, fitness, gardening, photography and planet Earth. Later she worked at the Library of Congress and conceived, co-wrote an illustrated guidebook to the architecture of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.
Blaine had many passions, including civil rights, music (particularly Sam Cooke, Wagner and Elvis), the Baltimore Orioles and dogs, among others. She inherited her first name from an ancestor, James G. Blaine, twice a Secretary of State and unsuccessful candidate for the White House in 1884. —Adapted from The Washington Post —posted 4/18/23
He Managed Editors
• Sheldon Czapnik, 75, former director of editorial operations at Time Inc., died in February of pancreatic cancer. He never had a byline in any of the magazines, but he had a key role in the lives of editors and writers for several decades.
A note about him in Sports Illustrated in 1985, when he was assistant managing editor for administration said “he manages our editorial budget, handles personnel matters and helps keep tabs on new technology. In short he frees the editors and writers to concentrate primarily on editing and writing”
The son of two Holocaust survivors who came to America after the end of World War II, Sheldon grew up in New York. His family reports that while his peers were studying The Talmud at the Yeshiva he played hooky and explored the city to discover what his interests were. He loved literature, theater, music and art. He managed literary magazines at school and at the CCNY, where he was an undergraduate. He earned a master’s degree in English at NYU and later went on to Columbia for an MBA. He loved Shakespeare and all his life could quote lengthy passages and poems from the literature he knew so well.
Sheldon was a certified scuba diver—the only one at SI at the time – and loved diving off Ocho Rios in Jamaica. He was also a runner and one day in 1971 on vacation in the Catskills he overtook another serious runner, Tobie Rabinowitz. They were married for 51 years until her recent death, had two children and lived in Leonia, New Jersey.
Sheldon began working as an editor at Prentice-Hall. After that is entire career was spent in the magazine business. His first job in editorial operations was at Newsweek. After a brief stay there, he moved to SI. Eventually he became director of editorial operations for Time Inc. Finally he became responsible for digitizing the entire Life photo collection, which is an enormous source of classic photos of the 20th century. —posted 3/16/23
From Fortune to Global Headhunter
• Putney Westerfield, 93, the publisher of Fortune from 1968 to 1973 and later president of Boyden International, a global executive search firm, died last August at his home in a retirement community in Portola, California.
He was a tall, handsome, well-tailored man-of-the-world who was successful in several fields and whose sociability got him many friends and club memberships. He played the piano well with a range that went from Broadway musicals to ragtime and beyond.
Putney was born in New Haven, where his father was an economics professor. He went to the Choate school and joined the class of 1951 at Yale. He became an editor of the Yale Daily News. The CIA recruited him right out of Yale and sent him to Hong Kong and South Korea for three years.
During a spell at home in Washington in 1954 he married Anne Montgomery of Hillsborough, California. The next year the CIA sent the newlyweds to Saigon, where Putney’s job was to help organize the new government of South Vietnam, created after the partition of the country.
Putney left the CIA in 1957 and the couple settled in Greenwich, Connecticut. He joined the circulation department of Time magazine. He became head of the department and later ruefully admitted that it was his group which invented those loose circulation cards that flutter out of magazine and irritate so many people.
Putney went on to become assistant publisher of Time, then assistant publisher of Life, and finally publisher of Fortune in 1968. He arrived at Fortune at a time when dwindling advertising made it necessary to cut costs. The magazine, printed on opulent oversized pages since 1929, reduced its size and paper quality to something closer to ordinary magazines.
In 1973 Putney left Time Inc. to become president of Chase World Information Corp. Three years later Boyden International hired him as its West Coast manager and the couple moved to Hillsborough. A few years later Boyden’s global partners elected him chairman and president. During his working life and after retirement Putney undertook many volunteer tasks, for his school alumni, for Vietnam orphans and several foundations.
(Thanks to Larry Crutcher for help with this item.) —posted 3/3/23
The Saigon Bureau’s Factotum
• Tran Thi Nga, 95, the unflappable, charming office manager of Time’s Saigon bureau during the war in Vietnam, died February 5 at her home in Casselberry, Florida.
Madame Nga, as a long succession of Time bureau chiefs and correspondents called her, sat at the front desk of the Time bureau at the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, greeting visitors with a smile, doing the bookkeeping, handing out cash advances, giving advice and solving problems.
Mme.Nga was born in China where her Vietnamese father had been sent as a teacher. but the family returned home and she grew up in Hanoi. When the country was partitioned in 1954 the family packed up and flew south in an American airliner to Saigon.
At this point she was a young widow with three children to raise. To earn a living she learned English and Time hired her as a bookkeeper. She soon became the bureau’s much admired office manager.
When the end came in Saigon, Time Inc. organized a massive effort to evacuate not only the American staffers but all the Vietnamese employees and their families. With Roy Rowan arranging buses and pushing through difficult Vietnamese guards. Time evacuated 38 Vietnamese employees and their families. Time settled them all in the US with jobs and places to live.
Mme.Nga went to work in the news bureau in New York and then spent years at the news desk. She also co-authored a memoir of her experiences in Vietnam and in the US called Shallow Graves. She managed to preserve Vietnamese customs while adapting to the US. She was particularly proud of the achievements of her children and grandchildren.
(Thanks to Suzanne Davis for this information.) —posted 2/18/2023
(Thanks for the notes about the previous picture which was clearly identified as Tran Thi Nga on Google pictures and thanks to Suzanne Davis for providing this correct picture)
Our Man in Moscow
• Jerrold Schecter, 90, the Time bureau chief in Moscow who acquired the Khrushchev memoirs, spirited them out of Russia, published them in the United States, died in February in Washington, where he lived with his wife Leona, his collaborator and agent. The terrors of the Stalin regime revealed by Khrushchev helped put an end to the Soviet regime.
After his ouster in 1964, living in a fenced compound outside Moscow, Khrushchev spent hundreds of hours dictating his memoirs to his son Sergei. Jerry secretly acquire the documents and carefully checked their authenticity of the memoirs. At first New York was suspicious but intrigued. The memoirs became a top-secret Time Inc. project carefully examined by top management and codenamed “Jones.” Among other checks the recordings were subject to a spectographic test which verified that they were indeed in Khrushchev’s voice.
The job of organizing and translating an “unholy mess” of transcriptions was given to Strobe Talbott, another Time correspondent who later became a Deputy Secretary of State and then president of the Brookings Institute. Life published four installments of the first volume of memoirs towards the end of 1970. After the weekly Life shutdown Time took over and published two installments of the second volume. Little Brown, then owned by time Inc, published the entire two volumes.. Jerry was born in New York City in 1932, graduated from high school in the Bronx and then chose the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he worked on the campus newspaper alongside Leona Protas. They were married in 1954 after he graduated. She survives him.
After college, while serving in the Navy in Japan, Jerry also worked as a Time stringer. That led to a staff job as a correspondent for Time in various parts of Southeast Asia. Time made him Moscow bureau chief in 1968 and in 1970 he left Russia to become Time’s White House and diplomatic correspondent in Washington. He later became vice president for public affairs for the Occidental Petroleum Company.
Over the years he produced several more books mostly related to Russia and intelligence operations. He was co-author with Peter Deriaabin, a defector from the KGB, of The Spy Who Saved The World. Most controversial was Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness — a Soviet Spymaster, written with a high-ranking KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatov, his son Anatoli and wife Leona. Sudoplatov claimed that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and three of his top colleagues, had betrayed secrets to the Russians. A subsequent FBI investigation of the claim denied that this it happened. Jerry stood by the claim.
Marvin Kalb, a journalist and Russia scholar, said he regarded Schecter’s work on the Khrushchev memoir as “a masterful feat on his part, working in that terribly restrictive environment, to be able to get to Khrushchev, to people around Khrushchev, to get to his memoir, and actually to be able to publish it.”
(Adapted from the Time Inc. official history and The Washington Post.) —posted 2/18/2023
Our Popular Lawyer
• Walter Censor, 87, who worked in Time Inc.’s legal office for two decades, died in New York in November. Under General Counsel Harry Johnston, Walter dealt mainly with real estate and administrative services matters. Born in Antwerp, Walter came to the US with his parents as a child and eventually graduated from Columbia University and the Harvard Law School. He was a witty popular man well-liked around Time Inc. On his 20th anniversary with the company Harry gave him a celebratory party at the Tribeca Grill. After leaving the company, Walter went into private practice.
He met his wife, the late Linda Censor, while serving in the Army reserves and they were married in 1961. Linda was one of the stalwart volunteers who kept the TLAS office going for many years until her death in 2019. —posted 12/14/2022
SI’s Soccer Star
• Grant Wahl, 48; Described as “the greatest soccer writer of our generation” by Sports Illustrated where he covered the sport for 37 years, collapsed and died in the press box while covering the quarterfinal between Argentina and the Netherlands during the World Cup playoffs in Qatar in December.
Earlier in the tournament Wahl had complained of chest pains, but had been found free of Covid and was feeling better after antibiotic treatment. But he was working very hard and making frequent podcasts. When he collapsed all efforts to revive him in the press box and at the Qatar hospital failed.
Wahl grew up in Mission, Kansas and attended Princeton University where he covered soccer for The Daily Princetonian. He grew to love the sport although he had no ability himself to kick a ball. During a summer break he traveled to Argentina and watched the Boca Juniors play and saw the passion for the sport that existed in so many countries other than the United States.
He graduated from Princeton in 1996 and came to Sports Illustrated the following year bringing with him his enthusiasm for soccer which at the time others at the magazine found strange. He covered the 1998 World Cup series in France and he soon established himself as an authority on soccer and a graceful writer on the human side of the sport. He also did work for Fox and CBS. He followed women’s soccer with the same enthusiasm.
The new owners at SI fired him in 2019 over a pay dispute and he swiveled quickly to his own newsletter and semi daily podcasts. They were both successful. Qatar was the seventh World Cup he had covered. Another side of him was evident there when he showed up at the stadium in a rainbow shirt. A security guard at the entrance refused to let him with that shirt, but after a standoff that lasted some time a supervisor came down, apologized and let him in—with the shirt still on. —JM
—posted 12/12/2022
Founder of The Swimsuit Issue
• Jule Campbell. 96, the doyenne for 32 years of the popular, profitable and sometime controversial annual Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated, died in November in New Jersey where she had lived since childhood on a family farm in Flemington.
The annual SI Swimsuit Issue was born when managing editor Andre LaGuerre decided the magazine needed spicing up during the midwinter lull in sports. As its editor for 32 years, Jule traveled around the world looking for exotic spots for shoots and looked for the models to grace them. She favored California girls as they look healthy and happy and had some muscle on their legs—in contrast to the skeletal Twiggy style then popular. Some of her finds such as Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs became supermodels.
One of Jule’s tasks was to assure the mothers of the girls they would be safe from predatory photographers and journalists. (As it happened, writer Jack Olsen and model Sue Peterson fell in love at Cabo San Lucas in Baja California. And they were happily married for 38 years, until Jack died of a heart attack.)
Jule graduated from Stephens College in Missouri and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She began her career as an assistant at Glamour magazine but moved to SI in 1960 as a fashion writer. Laguerre put her in charge of the swimsuit issue in 1964 and what started out as a photo spread, she turned into a cultural phenomenon. After organizing more than 50 shoots and working with 154 models, Jule retired in 1996. She was married to Ron Campbell, Fortune’s long-time art director. He died in 2015
The relatively modest two-piece bathing suits featured early on caused some scandal. Nuns banned it from the classroom and some libraries would not carry it. Today’s annual issue is popular and widely accepted even though today’s models and swimsuits can raise a teenager’s blood pressure. The bikinis are skimpy enough to fit one definition: that they can be pulled through a wedding ring. The models are not so skimpy. (Excellent obituaries about Jul can be found in The New York Times December 8 and on the SI website.) —JM —posted 12/12/2022
Southern Correspondent
• Gail Cameron Wescott, 90, former Southeastern correspondent for People, died in September in Atlanta where she had lived many years. Raised in Scarsdale, New York, she graduated from Smith College. Gail went to work for Life but over the years contributed feature articles to many magazines, including the Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s and the Reader’s Digest. Then she became well established as People’s Southeastern correspondent based in Atlanta. —posted 11/20/2022
David Beckwith, who Infuriated a President and a Chief Justice.
• David Beckwith. 79, then a new correspondent in Time’s Washington Bureau who published two major scoops on the same day in 1973 that made enemies of both President Richard Nixon and Chief Justice Warren Burger, died of lung cancer in October in Austin, TX.
In the case of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, David had advance knowledge of the decision but agreed to hold it back until the next Monday, when Time appeared and the decision was to be announced. But at the last minute Burger delayed the announcement, which he opposed. But it was too late to stop Time from publishing the story. When he found out, Berger stormed into the Washington Bureau calling David a spy and demanding that he be fired. Of course he wasn’t.
That same issue of Time carried David’s interview with Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA officer who organized the Watergate break-in. Hunt identified the two advisors to President Nixon who had helped him in the plot. This major leak infuriated Nixon who gave the order that no one talk to Time without his permission. Of course leaks continued.
David was born in Seattle, went to high school in Chicago and majored in history at Carleton College in Minnesota. In 1964 he earned a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. He broke into journalism with stints at the Minneapolis Star and the Houston Chronicle. While in Houston he earned a law degree from the University of Texas. Then Time brought him into its Washington Bureau.
He left Time in 1978 to become the founding editor of Legal Times, the first publication to cover the activities of the big law firms, which therefore drew a lot of readers from the Washington lobby fraternity. He returned to Time in 1981 and covered law, economics and the Reagan White House.
Later in the 1980s David served as an advisor to several Republican politicians, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. In 1988 he got the difficult job of press secretary to vice president Dan Quayle. A tall thin man with a booming voice and strong feelings, David defended Quayle vigorously. But after four years he couldn’t change the popular view that Quayle was one of the most ridiculed figures in Washington.
In the years after Quayle, he served as director of communications for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and was a vice president of communications for the National Cable and Communications Association, and briefly as a spokesman for the George W. Bush campaign in 2000. He was fired from that job being deemed too friendly with the Washington press.
—posted 10/14/2022
Founder of Money, ME of Fortune
• Bill Rukeyser, 83, the founding editor of Money and later the managing editor of Fortune, died of lung cancer in August in Knoxville where he had lived since retiring from Time Inc.
At 29, Bill became the impossibly young founder of Money magazine and pulled it through its first difficult years. He then took over Fortune at a time when TV advertising and the Internet were undermining the economics of magazines.
Bill was part of a family of wordsmiths. His father Merryl had produced seven financial columns a week for the Hearst newspapers. His aunt Muriel Rukeyser was a prominent liberal poet. His older brother, Louis, hosted “Wall Street Week”, for years—the most popular program on Public TV. Both went to Princeton, Lou in the class of 1954 and Bill in the class of 1961. Both learned their journalism as members of the University Press Club, a group of undergraduate correspondents for metropolitan newspapers and news agencies. Bill also studied English at Cambridge for a year.
Bill started his career with a promising first job as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Europe. After two years the Journal brought him home to be a reporter in New York. Fortune’s editors spotted his work and brought them over to be an associate editor. The top brass at Time Inc. in turn also spotted his work early on and asked him to start a new monthly about personal finance.
He put out the first issue of Money in the fall of 1972 with a staff of mostly young journalists and ruled them with a mixture of humor and stern discipline. Working late into the night became normal . After a shaky beginning with the ads not coming in the future looked grim, but Money took off and became an extremely successful monthly.
In 1980 Bill became managing editor of the larger and more prestigious Fortune, and remained there until his retirement from Time Inc. in 1988, when he accepted an offer to become the head of Whittle Communications. That job involved a move to Knoxville, where Bill and his wife Elisabeth settled and made their marks.. Bill served as chairman of the University of Tennessee Health System and Elisabeth as Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Mental Health.
In Knoxville, Bill found much more to do. He edited books, advised magazine publishers, and was chairman of the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He also kept a foot in New York as an active member of the Overseas Press Club. He served on the board the OPC Foundation and organized its finances. For the annual luncheon for winners of the OPC scholarships, he always bought a table and filled it up with members of Princeton’s University Press Club.
This summer Bill complained of difficulty breathing which he attributed to a long-standing backache. But when he went to a doctor for help he was found to have cancer in his lungs and other organs. Doctors offered surgery but Bill declined and soon after died in a hospice. —JM —posted 9/30/2022
• Jack Neely, the Knoxville historian, writes in an elegant e-mail tribute to Bill that people were surprised that this “publishing titan” from New York should settle happily in Knoxville to run Chris Whittle’s iffy book publishing venture while Whittle himself (and other top executives) did not move there.
Neely writes: “But after landing here, he and his English-born wife Elisabeth looked around with an open mind and got involved in a broad spectrum of worthwhile community efforts, including UT Medical Center, of which Rukeyser was chairman of the board; Knoxville Museum of Art, of which he also served as a director; and the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, of which he was a major benefactor, and one of its most regular attendees. Despite his button-down demeanor, he loved jazz, and was impressed with what Knoxville had to offer, especially through UT’s jazz program.
“His preference for Knoxville first puzzled his colleagues in New York, but he explained it by citing its beauty—from his high office he could see ‘the mist rising off the river and the mountains in the distance’—and the city’s unusual openness to newcomers and new ideas. He and Elisabeth lived in Rocky Hill and convinced his old urban neighbors that life in Knoxville was an ‘acceptable eccentricity.’
“In Knoxville he remained a formal New Yorker of another era, always in a dark suit, always with a bon mot worthy of Thurber. He loved humor, and always seemed to be restraining a pun, but somehow, I believe, got Knoxville to take itself more seriously as a worthwhile project.“--—posted 10/16/2022
The World Was His Beat
• Christopher Ogden, 77, a former White House and diplomatic correspondent for Time and the author of several successful biographies, died in August after taking a fall. He had lived in Hawaii in retirement.
Chris joined Time in 1973 in Moscow, where he was the correspondent for United Press International. That was the start of a brilliant career at Time which saw him traveling around the world with presidents and secretaries of State, including Carter, Ford and Kissinger. He headed magazines bureaus in Moscow, London and Chicago.
He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father was managing editor of the Providence Journal. When Chris was seven, his father took the family on a year-long sabbatical in post-World War II Europe and that experience kindled his interests the world at large. He graduated from Yale in 1966 and became an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam.
After his start with Time in Moscow, Chris spent many years in the Washington Bureau, at different times chief diplomatic correspondent, chief political correspondent and chief White House correspondent. He covered the Carter and Mondale presidential campaigns and President Bush and Secretaries of State Kissinger and Vance.
Chris was the principal contributor to more than 80 cover stories and had the unique distinction, as a reporter rather than a photographer, of taking a cover picture for Time of the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn. That photo was displayed in the National Portrait Gallery.
The books he wrote include Maggie, a biography of Margaret Thatcher, and The Life of The Party, a biography of Pamela Harriman. In his last act Chris wrote a column for Time. He appeared frequently on the Washington talk shows.
When he retired, he and his second wife Linda Fuselier sold their historic house in Alexandria and set off traveling, starting with a trip on the Queen Elizabeth, which had him aboard as a lecturer. Eventually they settled in Kauai. —posted 9/17/2022
From Scotland to Time Inc.
• Jean Wilma Patterson Jeffreys, 81, who had worked almost her entire career at Time Inc. as a secretary and executive assistant, died in her sleep at home in Clayton, North Carolina, after a long illness.
Willie, as she was known, grew up in Edinburgh where her parents ran an exclusive hotel and restaurant. When she was 19 an American couple with contacts at Time Inc. stayed at the hotel and persuaded her to emigrate to the US. She went to work as a secretary at Time Life Books, and when Books moved to Washington she went with them. Then for two years she worked at General Learning, the ill-fated joint project between Time Inc. and General Electric.
She returned to New York and became assistant to Charles Bear, group vice president in charge of administration. When he retired she put her hotel-restaurant experience to work helping design and run the cafeteria and the private dining rooms on the eighth floor until all that was outsourced. Willie is survived by her husband Brant Jeffreys who she married when he was a widower with four children. —posted 8/15/2022
An Enthusiastic Alumnus
• Gene Light, 90, who had the unique experience of working three sides of Life: ad sales, promotion and editorial died at his home in White Plains in August. His special skill was in designing covers, both for magazines and books.
Gene was born in Brooklyn, attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, graduating in 1949. After spending a year at the Cooper Union, he signed up to work on an oil tanker which took him around the world. When he landed back in the US the Army drafted him.
He joined Life in 1958, moving from ad sales to promotion to editorial. In the final issue of the weekly in December 1972 he was listed as an art director in the layout department. He worked on the final cover and said he had inserted word “goodbye” half concealed under the logo
With the magazine gone, he moved over to Warner Books where he figured he designed some 3000 book covers. But the revival of Life as a monthly brought him back and he designed some of the big coffee table books, drawing on the vast quantity of material in the Life archives.
After retiring from Time Inc., he dabbled in abstract art and went to Los Angeles, which he loved, with the hope of moving there and with some vague ideas about what to do. He got a bus driver’s license to take tourists around Disneyland and thought of becoming night manager at the Peninsula Hotel, but his wife Beverly refused to leave their home in White Plains, so Gene settled back in New York.
He became a particularly enthusiastic and active member the Time Life Alumni Society, serving on the board and creating a newsletter. His great affection for the company showed when the company changed hands. He wrote to us: “the photos of the Time Inc. sign being replaced by the Meredith sign in the last newsletter were heartbreaking. It brought back many memories: 1958—waiting at the Fishbowl to go to lunch at the 3Gs restaurant with coworkers; The 60s—working with the acclaimed Carky Rubens and all the gregarious Life ad salesmen. Those who were there those years will know what I’m trying to say. It was a wondrous era sadly never to be repeated. Now in my 80s, I think back of those years and count myself truly lucky to have been part of it.” —posted 8/14/2022
Two World War II Veterans
• Martha Goolrick, 98, a senior editor at Time-Life Books for many years, died in June in Manhattan where she had lived much of her life. During World War II, Martha spent two years in the Navy as a aerial gunnery instructor. She then obtained a degree in journalism from Syracuse University. (No picture available)
Martha became a reporter for various publications and moved up to Life as a researcher for many years and then was a chief researcher at Time-Life Books. She worked on series of books such as the Nature Library and the Library of Art.
She was married for 44 years to the late Bill Goolrick, a Life editor and writer. Bill spent 5 1/2 years in the Army during World War II rising to the rank of major. During the Battle of the Bulge he volunteered to go on a reconnaissance mission. He was shot by a sniper and spent 2 ½ years in hospitals emerging finally with serious handicaps. After he died in 2012, Martha was rummaging through his sock drawer and found a Silver Star and other decorations. He had never mentioned them.
Three Decades at SI
• Thomas J. Hickey Jr, 84, whose three-decade career at Sports Illustrated took him from sales to associate publisher at the magazine, died in June in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had lived many years. (no picture available)
Tom was born in Queens, had served in the Marines and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brooklyn College. As a sales executive for SI he worked in the magazine’s offices in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. He became advertising sales director and eventually associate publisher.
He was also Olympic director for the magazine and a lifelong fan of the Rangers, Giants, Mets and Knicks. The most memorable event in his life as a sports fan came in 1980 at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when he watched the young American hockey team defeat the more experienced Soviets.
He played golf and enjoyed swimming in the ocean and body surfing. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity and A Better Chance. (From a note posted by the family)
Lifetime LIFEer
• Eleanor Graves, 95, a former assistant managing editor of Life and former president of the TLAS, died in July in Sarasota, where she had lived for many years.
Like her late husband, Ralph Graves, she had worked all her career at Life. A confirmed New Yorker, Eleanor went to Spence School and Barnard College. After some years toiling as a researcher at the magazine, she became an associate editor. In that job she supervised the production of a successful series called “Great Dinners from Life”. The dinners were actually prepared and photographed in her Manhattan apartment. The series, published in the late 1960s, led to the publication of Eleanor’s bestseller cookbook of the same name.
After the weekly Life was suspended in 1972, she remained with the company. She first was given the task of developing a magazine to be called Woman. But tests of the pocket-sized magazine did not go well and the project was dropped. All along the idea of reviving Life in some form kept percolating. In 1978 Time Inc. introduced the new monthly Life with Phil Kunhardt as managing editor and Eleanor as assistant managing editor.
Eleanor and Ralph both graduated from college in 1948, she from Barnard and he from Harvard. They met that September when both became researchers at Life. They married other people but realized after working together for seven years that they were in love. They divorced their spouses and married in 1958. While she continued to work for Time Inc. Ralph wrote several books including a history of Martha’s Vineyard, where they spent many summers, and a loving story of their marriage, Objects of Desire, A Story of Love and Marriage. (“The object of desire” were the meaningful things one acquired in a lifetime, such as a house or particular painting.)
From Bottom to Top in 40 Years
• Donald Barr, 87, a genial executive vice president at Time Inc. and an expert in the production and distribution of magazines, died in July. His career at Time Inc.stretched for 40 years and the company was his only employer.
Don, the youngest of four children, grew up in Chicago and graduated from high school there in 1953. He spent summers caddying at the North Shore Country Club in Glenview, Illinois. A member told him about Evans scholarships for deserving caddies. Don applied and won a place at Notre Dame. He played basketball and on graduating in 1957 as class vice president he had the memorable experience of introducing the speaker, Senator Jack Kennedy.
When Don graduated, Time Inc. hired him in Chicago and his first job was to sort out old metal printing plates used for magazine covers. He moved through various production jobs and became European director of production and then in 1975 went to Paris, where he ran operations for Europe and Africa. Don attended the Harvard executive MBA program when he returned to US and became general manager of Time.
Next came an assignment as associate publisher and ad sales director for Sports Illustrated. He is credited with conceiving the idea of Sports Illustrated for Kids. In 1994 he was named Executive VP of the Corporation and on his way to and from his new office on the 34th floor he could see those metal plates for magazine covers that he had picked out back in 1957. They were hung on the wall next to the elevators.
Don, like many Time Inc. executives, lived for many years in Greenwich, Connecticut. He served on many boards and supported many causes, but focused on his role as chairman of the board of the Connecticut Chapter of The First Tee, which develops the interest of young people in golf. (Adapted from a family death notice.)
A Most Discreet Administrative Assistant
• Jane Nelson, 74, the charming and most discreet administrative assistant to three successive editors-in-chief at Time Inc., died in July in Ardsley-on-Hudson where she had for many years lived with her husband that late Ed Magnuson, one of Time’s top writers.
When Jane left her home in New Jersey for New York she worked first at an ad agency, but soon moved to Time magazine to begin a long career at the company. She became administrative assistant to the managing editor, Henry Grunwald. When Henry moved up to the 34th floor as editor-in-chief of all the magazines, she accompanied him. When Jason McManus succeeded Henry she became his administrative assistant, and she continued in the same position when Norman Pearlstein followed Jason.
Katie McNevin, who worked next to Jane for many years, writes that she was “the best administrative assistant I ever came across in my 40 years with the company. “She was organized, had amazing skills, was unfailingly polite and perhaps most important was beyond discreet (sometimes maddeningly so).”
Another colleague, Sally Proudfit, said the two of them would have animated lunchtime conversations about politics and the theater. They both attended classes on global politics at the 92nd Street Y. They both followed New York theater closely and Sally writes that Jane was always able to get early tickets to Broadway shows worth seeing.
Jane and Ed, who at one time held the record for the most covers written for the magazine, married in the 1980s and moved from Manhattan to Ardsley-on-Hudson. They became avid dog lovers and trained a series of golden retrievers they took on long walks along the Hudson. Jane unfailingly attended the annual Westminster Dog Show in New York.
A Conservative Columnist With a Light Touch
• John Leo, 86, a columnist for Time magazine in the days when magazines mattered (see What’s News Section), died in the Bronx in May. He was a conservative with a light touch and a sense of humor and played an important role in the cultural debates of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
John moved around among many publications but his stint at Time, from 1974 to 1988, was the longest.. Before that he had written a column for the Village Voice and after that he took his column to U.S. News & World Report.
The New York Times had hired him as its first reporter on intellectual matters, and that set the course of his career. He analyzed the intense debates about sexuality and free speech and the like. While he adopted a mildly conservative view, he had no use for the extreme liberalism found on campus.
For his Time column, John created a couple, the conservative curmudgeon Ralph and his feminist wife Wanda, whose arguments were a means, he wrote, of dealing quickly and lightly “with the decade’s deluge of weird therapies and odd self-realization manuals.” When Wanda updates Ralph on the new sexual vocabulary, Leo says “swingers had become ‘many friended’ and group sex had turned into ‘sharing.’ It was fun skewering all the gassy euphemisms.”
On another occasion he wrote, “many psychiatrists now doubt they are engaged in a legitimate profession. Some are beginning to wonder if they have any more healing powers than a good bartender.” He wrote that the three greatest thinkers of all time were Aristotle, Freud, and Groucho Marx.
John took on his own bosses in the 1990s when he joined others in criticizing Time-Warner for its ownership of Interscope records, a major producer of gangsta rap. Time-Warner sold off Interscope.
John was born in Hoboken New Jersey but as a teenager commuted to Manhattan to attend Regis High School an elite Jesuit institution on the Upper East Side. After graduating in 1952 he studied philosophy and English at the University of Toronto, where he also edited the campus newspaper. He then started his peripatetic career at newspapers and Catholic publications.
He found his niche when The New York Times hired him to cover intellectual matters. The columns at Time and U.S. News followed. In between stints of journalism he somehow fitted in four years as a Deputy Commissioner in New York’s Environmental Protection Administration. He retired from journalism in 2005 and became a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, where he focused on campus culture
John was one of a group of Time writers and editors who met on Thursdays for lunch at a round table at Joe Allen’s on 46th Street. The group included Stefan Kanfer, Roger Rosenblatt, Chris Porterfield, Paul Gray and Ron Sheppard. Sometimes they would be joined by Chris’s friend and Yale roommate Dick Cavett. It was not the place for the slow witted.
—JM —posted 5/17/2022
A Champion on the Track and at SI
• Kenny Moore, 78, an Olympic-level distance runner and one of Sports Illustrated’s top writers for many years, died in May in Hawaii, where he had lived since retiring from SI in 1995.
Kenny grew up in Portland, Oregon where he was an undistinguished but ambitious miler in high school. He arrived at the University of Oregon “desperately” wanting to succeed as a distance runner. Under the guidance of Oregon’s famous track and field coach Bill Bowerman he became three-time All-American. He also tested Bowerman’s experimental running shoes. Bowerman went on to become the cofounder of Nike, which in turn honored Kenny with the Kenny Moore Collection of running shoes half a century later.
Moving on to Stanford to study law on a scholarship, he continued running. He won the 1967 AAU cross country championship. He moved to Lake Tahoe to train at high altitude for the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. He placed second in the marathon trials but in the final race tape around his feet came unstuck and turned into painful “bridges of fire.” He finished 14th.
Kenny dropped out of law school and joined the Army, which gave runners the opportunity to compete internationally. The Army sent him to run in the Fukuoka Marathon in 1969 and 1970, He placed second and set a new American record.
After the Army service Kenny returned Oregon to study creative writing in 1972. His writing and running flourished. He signed up as a contract writer for SI, then a showcase for fine sports writing, and he won the US Marathon title in record time. Between 1968 and 1973 he won the “San Francisco Bay to Breakers” race six straight years, establishing records twice. He wrote a series of profiles of famous runners such as Roger Bannister and they were collected in the book Best Efforts in 1982.
He also became active in sports issues. He worked to break the controlling power of the Amateur Athletic Union over athletes and to push the Amateur Sports Act which allowed each sport to govern itself. He chaired a committee which funded talented young athletes. In the 1980s Kenny worked as both a consultant and actor in documentaries about running.
In 1995 Kenny left SI to concentrate on his major work, the biography of his old coach Bill Bowerman. In his final years in Hawaii he continued to write profiles for Runners World. (Adapted from Runner’s World) —posted 05/07/2022
Cosmopolitan Reporter, Critic, Author and Editor
• Lawrence Malkin, 91, a versatile Time correspondent and a successful author, co-author and editor of books, died at home in New York in April. His ashes will be placed in a citrus grove in Mallorca, where the family has a summer house.
Larry was at home in New York, London, Paris and India, among Wall Street bankers and with former East Bloc agents. He worked with former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker on his memoirs and edited the memoirs of former Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin. He covered the Six-Day War in Israel and the 1968 revolution in Afghanistan.
Larry grew up in Queens and earned BA degrees from both the University of Chicago and Columbia. After serving in the infantry during the Korean War, he started his long career in journalism by joining the Associated Press bureau in San Francisco. He covered several major stories there and when the Six-Day War broke out in Israel the AP sent him to the Middle East.
He next moved to Time’s Washington Bureau where he was assigned to cover economics. This assignment led to unexpected excitement when he followed the money trail in the Watergate scandal. At his request he went to London as the magazine’s European cultural correspondent. He left to go to India where he covered the defeat of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. When another military coup next door upended the Pakistan government, he hiked across the closed border on foot carrying a bag and his typewriter in 100° heat.
Back in Europe Larry spent seven years as chief European correspondent for Time as the European Union started to take shape. He was especially moved by Spain’s successful effort to return to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco.
Finally settled in his hometown, New York, he became the U.S. correspondent for the Paris Herald Tribune, covering mainly finance. This is when he also started writing and editing books and memoirs. His most challenging subject was Marcus Wolf, East Germany’s former spymaster. This elegant, well-spoken elderly gentleman could not be persuaded to reveal anything he didn’t want to. Larry nevertheless ghost wrote his memoir, published as The Man Without a Face.
He spent five years researching and writing a book about a Nazi scheme to flood Europe with fake British pound notes during World War II. The Nazis collected a team of Jewish printers and artists from death camps added a master counterfeiter, ordering them to make the fake. Their goal was to convince their Nazi boss that they were making progress but to go slowly because once they were finished they thought they would be sent back to the death camps. They succeeded and survived, but the fake pounds were never circulated. Larry’s book, Krueger’s Men, became a bestseller and a movie. —JM —posted 5/1/22
A Long, Full Career at Life
• Marion Steinmann, 92, who worked at Life from the time she graduated college in 1950 until the weekly closed in 1972, died in April in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, where she lived many years. She rose from researcher to writer and editor and specialized in science and medicine
Marion edited her high school newspaper in Rochester, New York, and at Cornell was the “women’s editor” at the Daily Sun. She majored in microbiology at the university’s College of Agriculture. She went directly from Cornell to Life in 1950 and remained there from its greatest days to its end as a weekly magazine. The masthead of the final issue dated December 29, 1972, listed her as an associate editor.
She rose from researcher and reporter to writer and editor in 1963. In 1971 she won an American Medical Association award for an article on genetics. In addition to science and medicine, she wrote about history and archaeology. In an article about Vinlanda she chided: “the Vikings had a notoriously poor eye for their own place in history as the discoverers of the New World. When they set foot on the strange shore, it simply never entered their horn-helmeted heads to build a monument to attest to the fact.”
After she retired, her articles appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Smithsonian and other publications, she wrote books about childhood diseases and allergies and back care. Her most notable work was about her 181 women classmates at Cornell, Women at Work, Demolishing the Myth of the 1950s. Her survey found that 44% of the respondents worked outside the home or attended graduate school.
At the age of 40, Marion climbed atop Mount Kilimanjaro. At 50, she married Charles Joiner, author and professor of political science at Temple University. The couple lived in Chestnut Hill but kept her apartment in New York for outings to the theater and museums. He died in 2015 and she suffered a stroke the same year. Since then she has lived in a nursing home. (Adapted from the Philadelphia Inquirer)
A Renowned Photojournalist
• Dirck Halstead, 85, one of Time’s most famous photographers, died in March in Boquete, Panama, where he lived. He was the magazines White House photographer through five presidencies and he covered the beginning and the end and much in the middle of the war in Vietnam
“Dirck Halstead was one of the great news photographers of his generation,” said Don Carleton, Executive Director of the Briscoe Center for American history in Austin, which now holds his collection or more than 500,000 photos. He won many awards including the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club.
Dirck accompanied Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972 and photographed the chaotic scene at the attempted assassination of Reagan. When the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998 he vaguely remembered a picture he’d taken in 1996 and a search of his files produced a photo showing Clinton embracing Monica Lewinsky. It became one of the 47 photos by Dirk that appeared on Time covers. He was there (for United Press International Photos) when the first Marines landed at Da Nang in 1965 and he was there when Saigon fell in 1975 and escaped by helicopter.
Dirck was born on Long Island and grew up in Westchester County. When he was 15 his parents gave him a Kodak Duaflex camera and darkroom equipment which got him hooked on photography. He took his camera to school and became its unofficial photographer. He started shooting for the local newspaper at $5 a photo. When the paper’s owner acquired seven other local newspapers, he was taking pictures for all of them at $5 a shot.
When he was 17 he went on a student trip to Guatemala and found himself in the middle of the civil war set off by the CIA’s successful plot to oust the left-wing president. Life advanced him $1000 and made him a war correspondent (perhaps not realizing what a young war correspondent he was). He happily accepted the assignment.
Dirck attended Haverford College but the pull of photography proved too strong and he dropped out after a year. The Army drafted him and turned him into an official Army photographer who could pretty much roam where he wanted for two years.
Once again a civilian, he worked for UPI in several bureaus in the US before being sent to Vietnam to open a photo bureau there. He recalled later that of the 10 photographers in the original group in 1965 in Vietnam, only four had survived by 1972.
Soon after arriving in Vietnam, he began shooting for Time as well as UPI and that relationship grew until he became a staff photographer. He was Time’s White House photographer from the 1970s until the 1990s. He covered five presidents—Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton—and two attempted assassinations. He also covered other major assignments, such as Diana’s wedding in London, and later branched out teaching, lecturing and taking still pictures for major movie productions.
Although he worked most of his life with film cameras, he became interested in promoting digital photography and founded and edited an online magazine called Digital Journalism. He used it to promote the work of many other photographers.
He was a generous friend to his colleagues and to neophytes. Diana Walker recalled that when Time gave her a freelance contract, Dirck invited her to share his office and became very helpful. This was a time when other photographers did not particularly welcome women photographers.
He was cool under fire. David Hume Kennerly, a close friend who also covered Vietnam and the White House and won a Pulitzer Prize, remembers being pinned down with Dirck during an intense firefight in Vietnam. Dirck looked at him and said, “Can’t wait to have a drink at the Melody Bar tonight.” Kennerly said, “Dirck wasn’t afraid to take chances. His legacy of published photos was extraordinary, as were the lengths he would go to get a picture. He was someone who really appreciated life, and lived it well.” He was regarded as the photo journalist who told stories, rather than simply a photographer
In his memoir, Moments in Time published in 2006, he remembered he looked down from the helicopter that was taking them out of Saigon and thought, “I realize that I’m feeling as though a vital part of my life is coming to a close. . . . How can it be that in a place of war, I find the happiest times I have ever known? How could I possibly explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it how much more alive I feel returning to Saigon at the end of the day, and living and enduring in a place where I’m not even sure I will survive?”
He was married and divorced three times. --JM
(Adapted from several long obituaries, Time publisher’s letters and Briscoe Center website.) —posted 4/4/2022
Shnayerson: A Rapid Rise
• Robert Shnayerson, 96, a writer and senior editor at Time and later the much admired editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine, died in March at home in Hillside, New York.
Bob’s mother was a nightclub singer and his father a novelist. He attended several schools, including an experimental school in Pawling, New York, where he learned to drive a tractor and do farm chores. He finished high school at the DeWitt Clinton school in New York and graduated when World War II was breaking out.
He joined the Navy and became a quartermaster aboard an oiler which serviced ships in the North Atlantic. After the war he attended Dartmouth on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1950. Bob launched his career in journalism as a junior reporter on The New York Daily News. Very soon he joined Life and rose to became its Seattle bureau chief.
He returned to New York as a writer for Time, where he distinguished himself by writing 60 cover stories during the tumultuous news years of the 1960s. He created two special issues of the magazine titled “Black America” and “To Heal a Nation.” He also persuaded Time’s management to start two new sections, on the environment and the law. For many years he had the custom of running five miles every day, unusual at the time. A reader wrote to the editor saying he had noticed Bob practicing the sport of “jogging”.
When Willie Morris resigned as editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine in 1971, Bob was chosen as his successor after many candidates had been vetted. He was known as a steady, thoughtful editor of the magazine who brought in a number of distinguished writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Simone de Beauvoir, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer.
Bob left Harper’s in 1976 to found Quest magazine, devoted to quality in all its forms. It lasted for five years. In retirement Bob wrote a book about the Supreme Court and served as a consultant to magazines. The family spent many summers on Long Island. He continued the custom of five-mile runs but also took to swimming long distances some way offshore—but parallel to the shore. Two of his four children became journalists. Maggie wrote for Time and was also an editor at Gawker. Michael was a writer for Vanity Fair and wrote several books including a biography of Irwin Shaw.
A publisher’s letter in Time in 1968 reported Bob was so fed up with the cost of keeping a car in Manhattan and the difficulty of finding parking spaces, that he drove it to the Sanitation Department and asked the men there to destroy it. Since the car was in good condition, they tried to persuade him keep it, but he insisted and he watched them squash it into a compact cube of metal.—posted 3/23/22
A “Transformational” Photo Editor
• Michelle McNally, 66, photo editor at Fortune in the 1980s and then photo editor at The New York Times until her retirement in 2018, died in February in New York, where she had lived all her life. Dean Baquet, executive editor of The Times, said in the obituary the newspaper ran, “she was a transformational figure in photojournalism. She walked into a newsroom where photography had taken a backseat for too long and forced it into the fore.” Michelle was the first director of photography at The Times to become an assistant managing editor, which put her in the top echelon of the newspaper’s management.
“She has pushed a reluctant newsroom, hired an all-star staff and made The Times the finest visual report in the country,” Baquet said. “Along the way she displayed tremendous humanity when Times photographers found themselves in harm’s way.”
A previous boss said the 5-foot tall Michelle was “a giant in a tiny body—very blunt, very fast, very street smart, a bundle of energy.” Michelle herself recalled, “once, during a disagreement, my old boss told me, 'you’re small, you just don’t know it.'”
Michelle was born in Brooklyn, graduated from high school in Canarsie and studied mass communications at Queens College and at Brooklyn College. She worked briefly for the Brooklyn Public Library and then as a sales representative for Sigma Photo News agency.
She joined Time Inc.’s magazine development group in the early 1980s and served as Fortune’s picture editor from 1986 until 2004. Meaghan Looram, who was hired by Michelle and succeeded her at Fortune, said according to The Times, “she proceeded to teach me everything I know about visual editing, about the art of making an inspired match between photographer and story, about coaching photographers and editors into discovering their own excellence, and about managing people with empathy and compassion.”
Several Times photographers won Pulitzer Prizes during her watch. She herself won the Editor of The Year Award for photojournalism of the National Press Photographers Association.
[Time Inc. was always been a fruitful recruiting ground for The New York Times. Back in the 1970s, Michiko Kakutani, who became the chief book reviewer for The Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner, reviewed books for Time. John Noble Wilford wrote about science for Time before starting his long career as science editor of The Times, where he won two Pulitzer prizes. Dennis Overbye and Natalie Angier both worked at Discover before becoming science writers at The Times. Denise Grady also from Discover, became a medicine writer at The Times. Reed Abelson, a Fortune reporter, covered health news for The Times. Joe Nocera, a Fortune writer and editor, went on to write op-ed pieces for The Times and Gretchen Morgensen went from Money magazine to The Times business section.]
A Popular Kentucky Sports Columnist
• Billy Reed, 78, a well-known and popular Kentucky sports journalist and a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, died at the beginning of February in Kentucky. He was a must read for Kentucky sports fans, says a former sports editor, and “he could make fans smile one day and infuriate them the next.”
Reid was inducted into the US Basketball Writers Hall of Fame in 1996, he won the National Headliner Award for column writing in 1982 and was named Kentucky sportswriter of the year eight times.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, played Little League baseball with Billy and says he “always enjoyed reading his takes on Kentucky’s sports teams.”
Billy grew up in Louisville and Lexington and graduated in 1966 from Transylvania University where he was manager of the basketball teams. He began writing for the Lexington Herald Leader 1959 and got his first byline the age of 15. He left to join the Louisville Courier Journal in 1966.
Sports Illustrated hired him two years later in 1968 to cover basketball and football and he adopted what he thought was the more dignified byline William F. Reed. But Billy Reed returned to the Courier-Journal in 1972. He became a columnist in 1974 and sports editor in 1977. He went back to the Herald Leader in 1987 and became a senior writer at SI in 1990.
When Billy saw his first Kentucky Derby he swore he would never miss one and over the years he attended 50 running of the race.
Jim Drake, Star SI Photographer During Four Decades
• James A. Drake, 89, a long-time award-winning photographer for Sports Illustrated, who trotted the globe and produced some of his era’s most indelible images, died January 10 of lung cancer at his home in Philadelphia.
Starting in 1959, Drake spent nearly four decades publishing some of the most iconic sports photographs ever taken. SI devoted 79 of its famous covers to his pictures, and his list of subjects is a who’s who of the sports scene throughout the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Assigned to cover some of the world’s most important games, matches, meets, fights, tournaments, and races, Drake photographed superstars in practically every sport. Joe Namath, Nadia Comaneci, Bobby Orr, Arnold Palmer, Richard Petty, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, Larry Bird, Joe Paterno, Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, and countless others grace his portfolio.
His action photo of Palmer at the 1964 U.S. Open was even used in 2020 on a U.S. postage stamp. A lifelong Philadelphian and die-hard fan of the Eagles, Phillies, and 76ers, Drake said some of his favorite photos were of Reggie White, Jerome Brown, Randall Cunningham, Mike Schmidt, Pete Rose, Wilt Chamberlain, Maurice Cheeks, and Julius Erving. He also created images of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan; Vice President Hubert Humphrey; and actor Steve McQueen.
Drake was in Augusta in 1963 when Jack Nicklaus won his first Masters tournament with a dramatic 3-foot putt on the final hole. He was at Madison Square Garden in 1971 when Joe Frazier beat Ali in the first of their three famous fights. And he was at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich when Palestinian terrorists took nine Israelis hostage.
“Jim was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word,” said fellow photographer Neil Leifer, who, along with. Drake and Walter Iooss Jr., anchored the SI photo department for years. “I considered Jim the best photographer among the three of us during that era, and in my opinion he was the best golf photographer ever.”
In addition to SI, Drake’s photos appeared in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and other publications. He left SI in 1980 to become picture editor at Inside Sports magazine. He returned to SI in 1986 and stayed until 1990, when he left to freelance for ABC Sports. He retired in 1994. Former SI publisher Donald J. Barr, in describing a 1986 photo essay on baseball, praised Drake for seeking a “subtler means of expressing the pressures and frustrations” of the players. One of his favorite photos in the display, Drake said then, was of an old pitcher trudging off the field toward the locker room, “so expressive of the old-timer, yanked out, disappointed, bent and fatigued.”
Drake lived in Philadelphia with his wife, Jean, and sons Patrick (left) and Chris. He was a star sprinter and hurdler in high school at William Penn Charter School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism in 1955 from the University of Pennsylvania, spent two years in the Army, and honed his eye at the Trentonian newspaper in Trenton and the Bucks County Traveler magazine. (A longer version of this obituary appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.) —Posted 2/4/2022
Fred Painton and his Time Inc. Family
• Frederick Painton, 95, a former Time writer and editor in Paris where he and his family lived for 32 years, died in December in Charleston, South Carolina, his second wife’s hometown.
Fred was a handsome, dapper-man-about Europe, who loved to dance, could sing French folk songs and find his way through the peculiarities of European politics, according to his daughter Priscilla, who became a Time editor. He knew how to have fun. He got drunk with Humphrey Bogart at the Plaza Athenee and chased playboy Porfirio Rubirosa around the Riviera to record his exploits.
He grew up in Westport, Connecticut, attended the Hotchkiss school on a scholarship, served in the Army in Europe and went to Yale on the G.I. Bill. After he graduated, United Press sent him to cover the war in Korea, where he was credited with coining the name “Pork Chop Hill,” scene of one of the fiercest battles of the war.
After the war the news agency sent him across the Atlantic and he began his long love affair with Europe. U.S. News & World Report, then the number three newsmagazine in the US, hired him as its Rome bureau chief. From there he reached out to cover the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the war in Algeria. The magazine moved him to Paris which became the family home for the rest of his career. When Time started a European edition it hired him as editor, reporter and writer, still based in Paris. He retired in 1991.
Time Inc. has also been home to other Paintons. Fred’s first wife, Patricia, who died in 1997, was a Fortune researcher in New York and then after the move to Paris, a contributor from there to Fortune and other business magazines. Their daughter Priscilla, grew up bilingual in Paris, she gravitated towards Time after earning her credentials at the Berkshire Eagle, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Constitution. She became a Time correspondent and covered major stories, including Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the early age of 30 she became Time’s business editor and later nation editor.
Fred’s father, also named Fred, opened the family’s path to journalism. He was a well-known pulp writer and columnist before World War II. Although well into middle age, Fred senior signed up to cover the war for the Reader’s Digest. He was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, accompanied Patton’s tanks in France and landed at Iwo Jima. He often found himself with Ernie Pyle, a famous World War II columnist, and they became good friends. As the war was ending Fred died of a heart attack on Guam. Soon after, Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper, a final column was found in his pocket—a tribute to Fred Senior.
—Posted 12/27/2021
“A friend, mentor and a boon companion"
• Peter Bird Martin, 92, a founding editor of Money from its inception in 1972 and a senior editor at Time before that, died in November in Hanover, New Hampshire where for 27 years he had served as executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs( (ICWA) which flourished under his leadership.
Former managing editor Bill Rukeyser, who founded Money with Peter at his side, writes “Any room Peter Martin occupied was alive with professional journalism, virtuosity with words, kindness and laughter. Two headlines that exemplify the virtuosity: On a Money comparison of the costs of building a Ford out of replacement parts to buying it whole, “The Princely Sum of the Parts;” on an analysis of the economics of second incomes in our first issue, “The Half-a- Loaf Life of the Working Wife.” Peter was essential to the launch and growth of Money. He was a friend, mentor and a boon companion.”
Peter was born in Philadelphia, where his father “Pete” Martin (actually William Thornton Martin), was a well-known columnist for The Saturday Evening Post. For years it featured his lighthearted interviews with celebrities, who were happy to talk to him.
Peter attended Dartmouth—you could not know him without knowing how much he loved Dartmouth—and started his career at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The piece he wrote about how the Anheuser-Busch company was working secretly to oppose the fluoridation of the city’s water supply caught the eye of the director of the ICWA. The Institute, then as now, awards fellowships to promising young people to travel and report from abroad.
The ICWU sent Peter to Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe) for two years (1953-1955) with rather vague instructions to write home about what he was seeing “when he had something to say.” Soon after arriving, Peter wrote to Godfrey Huggins, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, who surprised Peter by inviting him to lunch at his club. The youngster obviously impressed Huggins who made a deal with him: if Peter would meet him periodically to tell him what he had learned on his travels, Huggins would give him letters of introduction to his counterpart in Northern Rhodesia and other influential people.
For two years Peter traveled widely in sub-Saharan Africa reporting home “when he had something to say” about decolonization then in progress and other matters. On his return from Africa, Time hired him to write about Latin American affairs. Eight years later he became a senior editor and supervised the sections on medicine, law, science, press and the performing arts.
Peter joined a magazine development group at Time Inc. in 1971. Out of a swarm of ideas the group considered, the strongest candidate was a magazine about personal finance. The first issue of Money arrived in the fall of 1972, with Bill Rukeyser as managing editor and Peter as his deputy.
Peter never lost his affection for the ICWA but by 1978 it was moribund, with just one fellow overseas. Nevertheless Peter agreed to become its Executive Director and rebuild the program. He moved its headquarters to Hanover, New Hampshire to be near Dartmouth and he set about raising funds and finding scholars. Over the years he appointed 77 scholars and sent them abroad with the same instructions he’d had: to write to him when they felt they learned enough to have something to say.
He also established the South—North News Service in 1985 to help reporters from developing countries. After retiring in 2007, Peter established the John Hazard Institute, which sends young American lawyers overseas to learn about foreign law and practices.
The current director of ICWA is Gregory Feifer, who Peter had sent to Russia as a fellow in 1999.
(Much of the material in this obituary was published on icwa.org.) —Posted 12/2/2021
Scholar, Writer, Storyteller
• Stuart Schoffman, 73, a renowned Jewish scholar and one-time writer for Fortune and Time, died in November in Israel where he had lived since 1988.
Schoffman grew up in Brooklyn, got his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a master’s degree from Yale. In the late 1970s he went to work for Time Inc. in the days when the magazines’ “pages of polished prose were read by everybody,” as one obituary wrote. He started at Fortune and then went on to Time. Fred Golden, Time’s science editor then, said that Stuart “didn’t seem to know much about science but he quickly produced an article on astronomy that was very impressive.”
In the 1980s, Schoffman spent years writing movie scripts in Hollywood but by the end of the decade he had decided that Jerusalem was his real home and he moved there permanently. He became well-known for his translations of Jewish literature and for his profound scholarship. He was also known as a great and funny lecturer and storyteller.
Caricature courtesy Jewish Review of Books —posted 11/12/2021
“Scrupulous, Sympathetic, Measured”
• James Christopher Porterfield, 84, a cultural critic, influential editor at Time magazine and Emmy-nominated producer of The Dick Cavett Show, died at his home in New York City on October 22.
He was born in Weston, WV, the son of James Herman Porterfield and Irene Smith Porterfield. Chris graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1958 from Yale University. There he organized the Chris Porterfield Big Band, a 13-piece jazz orchestra that played at Carnegie Hall on Thanksgiving weekend in 1957. Upon graduation, he abandoned a promising music career for another passion, writing. He became a reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he met his wife, Stephanie “Stevie” Brown, a star reporter who, at first impression, thought he was “cocky.”
In 1963 he was hired away by Time Magazine, serving in its bureaus in Washington and Chicago. He covered the Beatles’ first U.S. tour, the Kennedy assassination and an Alaskan earthquake before becoming the weekly’s music critic. While working full-time, he obtained a master’s degree in modern British and American literature from Columbia University.
He moved to London in 1969 to become European cultural correspondent. One of his biggest scoops there was to convince Australian-born writer Robert Hughes, once described in The New York Times as “the most famous art critic in the world,” to join him at the newsmagazine. “Scrupulous, sympathetic, measured,” Hughes said of Chris shortly afterward. “Time is bloody lucky to have him.”
Chris was made a senior editor in 1972 but left Time two years later to co-author the autobiography of his longtime friend and Yale roommate, Dick Cavett. That collaboration led to a five-year stint as executive producer of The Dick Cavett Show, earning the program two Emmy nominations. Over the years, the duo produced three other books. “His two best traits,” Cavett wrote of Chris in The New York Times in 2008: “are (a) he is smarter than I am and (b) despite this, he generally treats me as an equal.”
Returning to Time in 1980 from what he jokingly called his “apostasy in television,” Chris went on to write or edit more than 100 cover stories, took on increasingly senior editing roles and became a mentor to countless young journalists.
By the time Chris retired in 2003, he had become executive editor, the magazine’s second-in-command. Five years later, his former employer tapped him to edit the 2008 book, TIME: 85 Years of Great Writing. Bruce Handy, a former Time writer and editor now at Vanity Fair, described Chris’ management style, unusual in the high-pressure world of magazine journalism, as “a rare combination of kindness, grace, wit, humility and high standards.”
Richard Zoglin, a TV critic of the Porterfield era, writes “Chris was my North Star at Time, the embodiment of the magazine’s traditions and high standards: the love of language, the passion for clarity and concision, and the sense of a journalistic mission that superseded any single writer’s ego. He taught me how to write, how to edit, and how to behave.”
In addition to Stephanie, his loving wife of 59 years, Chris is survived by son Christopher and his children Maya and Christopher, of Hermosa Beach, CA; and son Kevin and his wife Bridget, and their children Wren and Scott, of Chicago. A daughter, Tessa Porterfield, died in 2017. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the National Endowment for the Arts (arts.gov) or the Alzheimer's Association (alz.org). --Donald Morrison --Posted 11/3/2021
• Ralph Spielman reports on a memorial held for Chris in New York on December 4 attended by some 100 friends and colleagues from as far away as the West Coast. His old friend Dick Cavett described Chris in these words, “so able, so friendly, so. . . perfect”. The gathering heard the recording of Loose Walk, a jazz piece played by Chris and his band at Carnegie Hall on November 30, 1957. Chris’s son Kevin related how Chris would always come home for dinner even on closing nights and then on a Friday night would drive five hours overnight to their place in upstate New York. —posted 12/05/2021
An SI Golfer
• David Leo Long, 75, who capped a 35-year career at Time Inc. by serving as publisher of Sports Illustrated, died in September in Lake Forest. David grew up in Milwaukee and Chicago and worked for Time Inc. in Chicago as well as New York.
He graduated from college but said that he got his best education in the US Army. He served as a tank commander the 2d Infantry Division in Korea. During the crisis over the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968 his unit was deployed to the front to stand as the first defense had the North Koreans attacked.
David worked for both People and Life, but the bulk of his career was spent at Sports Illustrated. Golf played a huge part in his life both for sport and business. He played some of the best courses in the world and helped oversee the care, renovation, and improvement of the courses he loved so much.
A Star Correspondent
• Joseph Kane, 84, a star Time correspondent in Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, Washington and Los Angeles over a period of more than 20 years, died of lung cancer in Atlanta in August, 2021.
Joe grew up in Washington and graduated from Georgetown University. His first job at Time was as a messenger for the Washington Bureau. Then he spent a spell in the Army as a second lieutenant commanding a howitzer battery in Germany. On his return home, Time hired him as a correspondent in Detroit.
In the 1970s Joe served as bureau chief in Miami and Atlanta for three years. He moved to the Washington Bureau where for four years he was the Time Pentagon correspondent. In his final act in the 1980s Joe became Los Angeles bureau chief.
Over the years he reported on many cover subjects and other major stories including the rise of Jimmy Carter, the magazine’s look at the New South, race riots in Detroit, Cassius Clay (then Mohammed Ali), and the space program. He covered the return of the Columbia space ship to Edwards Air Force Base after its first flight in 1981.
Joe was one of seven siblings and he and his wife had four sons. He was a devout Catholic and an active member of the Knights of Columbus. He was well known among friends and colleagues for his sharp wit.
A leader in Time Inc’s expansion
• Rhett Austell Jr., 96, a former group vice president at the Time Inc., died at home in Sentry Hill in York, Maine in August.
Rhett grew up in Middletown, New York, and graduated from the Hotchkiss School in 1943. Soon after entering Williams College he was inducted in the Army. He served the 84th Division in Europe handling a Browning automatic rifle. He was taken prisoner in November 1944 and used his college freshman German to become a translator for fellow prisoners.
When he returned home he resumed his education at Williams, graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa student. He went on to the Harvard Business School as a Baker scholar and graduated in 1950. He joined the Time Inc. then and rose through a series of management positions over 24 years.
He was general manager of Time magazine and then in 1964 became supervisor of all book operations. His responsibilities expanded as the company moved also into film, TV and records. He became a group vice president and the people under him included two future CEOs, Gerald Levin and Dick Munro. The film operation was not successful but it did produce one hit, Fort Apache, the Bronx with Paul Newman.
He was also involved in the early, shaky beginnings of HBO but left the company in 1974 before HBO took off. He joined American Heritage as president and publisher and in the last decade of his working career was a partner in the executive search firm, Ward Howell international.
In retirement Rhett served as president of the Hotchkiss and Williams alumni societies and as a trustee of the New York Public Library. He and his first and second wives traveled all over the world— Patagonia, Namibia, Tibet and Antarctica and all the usual places in Europe. During his working life he lived in Briarcliff Manor and then New York City. In retirement he first moved to Portsmouth. New Hampshire, then Kittery, Maine and finally York, Maine.
A TLAS Stalwart
• Doris Laffan, 96, who worked in human relations at Time Inc. for 31 years and was a stalwart volunteer in the TLAS office for years after retiring, died in July in Derry, New Hampshire, where she had lived in recent years.
Doris was one of four volunteers—the others being Loretta Geissler, Mary Piper Placko and Helen Hiltbrand—who kept the TLAS office functioning for many years. They arranged luncheons and dinners, dealt with caterers, made our group travel plans, handled the mail and phone calls to our office in the Time & Life Building and helped with our newsletter. While the Society’s presidents and board members would come and go, the four ladies were always there. Doris was a member of the Society’s board and its treasurer.
She graduated from the College of Mount St. Vincent in 1947 with a degree in mathematics. There being little demand for mathematicians she took classes in typing and stenography and went to work for the US Rubber Company. Doris soon moved over to Time Inc, where she enjoyed her 31-year career. She always worked on the corporate side, handling human relations and employee compensation. In the final years of her career she tracked stock options from an office on the 34th floor.
Doris never married but was very close to a large family of four brothers and sisters and 21 nieces and nephews. Her house in Flushing was the center for family festivities at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Her nieces and nephews were welcome to live with her when they were in college or starting new careers in the city. She helped them with their college fees. She took her nieces and nephews individually on travel to Disneyland and other places when they were young.
A devout Catholic, Doris attended the canonization of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in the Vatican in 1975. She lived in Flushing for 83 years but in her last decade moved to Derry, New Hampshire, to be near family. Her twin sister Grace Kimball moved to the same senior residence in Derry.—posted 7/21/21
Editor, Author, Musician
• Peter A. Young, 87, a former Life correspondent in Moscow and longtime editor-in-chief of Archaeology magazine, died July 12 at a nursing center in Rye, New York. Peter was educated at Deerfield Academy and at Princeton University. He had a graduate degree from the Journalism School at Columbia University.
In the late 1960s, Peter developed the special coverage that Life gave to the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. During his 2½ years in Moscow, he traveled widely in Russia and reported extensively on Russia’s rich artistic, literary and cultural life. Then as bureau chief in Vienna he reported on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a correspondent based in Paris he reported extensively on Arab-Israeli relations. He also interviewed Chile’s Salvador Allende and former president George H. W. Bush when he was at the UN.
From Life, Peter went to the Saturday Review as managing editor in the 1970s and then became editor-in-chief of Archaeology magazine, a post he held for 23 years. The magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, is a serious scientific publication that Peter made appeal also to the nonscientific reader. He also led the development of a TV series on archaeology, which further expanded interest in the subject. He received a special achievement award from the Society of Professional Archaeologists and his magazine won a gold medal from the National Arts Club.
After retiring, Peter wrote three books: Mission to Moscow, A Cold War Look at the Warmth of the Russian People; My Storybook Life: A Journey Through the Pages of Time, and A Walk in the Woods (a book of his poetry). In addition to writing poetry, Peter was an accomplished musician on the piano and the harpsichord, specializing in Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart and Beethoven. He also had a fine baritone voice which he contributed to the Greenwich Choral Society and the choir at Christ’s Church in Rye. He led poetry and literary reading groups at the Osborne House in Rye and performed at various nursing homes. He lived in Port Chester with his wife, Mary Luehrsen, who survives him. —posted 7/18/21Three Decades at SI
• Thomas J. Hickey Jr, 84, whose three-decade career at Sports Illustrated took him from sales to associate publisher at the magazine, died in June in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had lived many years. (no picture available)
Tom was born in Queens, had served in the Marines and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brooklyn College. As a sales executive for SI he worked in the magazine’s offices in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. He became advertising sales director and eventually associate publisher.
He was also Olympic director for the magazine and a lifelong fan of the Rangers, Giants, Mets and Knicks. The most memorable event in his life as a sports fan came in 1980 at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when he watched the young American hockey team defeat the more experienced Soviets.
He played golf and enjoyed swimming in the ocean and body surfing. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity and A Better Chance. (From a note posted by the family)
Lifetime LIFEer
• Eleanor Graves, 95, a former assistant managing editor of Life and former president of the TLAS, died in July in Sarasota, where she had lived for many years.
Like her late husband, Ralph Graves, she had worked all her career at Life. A confirmed New Yorker, Eleanor went to Spence School and Barnard College. After some years toiling as a researcher at the magazine, she became an associate editor. In that job she supervised the production of a successful series called “Great Dinners from Life”. The dinners were actually prepared and photographed in her Manhattan apartment. The series, published in the late 1960s, led to the publication of Eleanor’s bestseller cookbook of the same name.
After the weekly Life was suspended in 1972, she remained with the company. She first was given the task of developing a magazine to be called Woman. But tests of the pocket-sized magazine did not go well and the project was dropped. All along the idea of reviving Life in some form kept percolating. In 1978 Time Inc. introduced the new monthly Life with you Phil Kunhardt as managing editor and Eleanor as assistant managing editor.
Eleanor and Ralph both graduated from college in 1948, she from Barnard and he from Harvard. They met that September when both became researchers at Life. They married other people but realized after working together for seven years that they were in love. They divorced their spouses and married in 1958. While she continued to work for Time Inc. Ralph wrote several books including a history of Martha’s Vineyard, where they spent many summers, and a loving story of their marriage, Objects of Desire, A Story of Love and Marriage. (“The object of desire” were the meaningful things one acquired in a lifetime, such as a house or particular painting.)
From Bottom to Top in 40 Years
• Donald Barr, 87, a genial executive vice president at Time Inc. and an expert in the production and distribution of magazines, died in July. His career at Time Inc.stretched for 40 years and the company was his only employer.
Don, the youngest of four children, grew up in Chicago and graduated from high school there in 1953. He spent summers caddying at the North Shore Country Club in Glenview, Illinois. A member told him about Evans scholarships for deserving caddies. Don applied and won a place at Notre Dame. He played basketball and on graduating in 1957 as class vice president he had the memorable experience of introducing the speaker, Senator Jack Kennedy.
When Don graduated, Time Inc. hired him in Chicago and his first job was to sort out old metal printing plates used for magazine covers. He moved through various production jobs and became European director of production and then in 1975 went to Paris, where he ran operations for Europe and Africa. Don attended the Harvard executive MBA program when he returned to US and became general manager of Time.
Next came an assignment as associate publisher and ad sales director for Sports Illustrated. He is credited with conceiving the idea of Sports Illustrated for Kids. In 1994 he was named Executive VP of the Corporation and on his way to and from his new office on the 34th floor he could see those metal plates for magazine covers that he had picked out back in 1957. They were hung on the wall next to the elevators.
Don, like many Time Inc. executives, lived for many years in Greenwich, Connecticut. He served on many boards and supported many causes, but focused on his role as chairman of the board of the Connecticut Chapter of The First Tee, which develops the interest of young people in golf. (Adapted from a family death notice.)
A Most Discreet Administrative Assistant
• Jane Nelson, 74, the charming and most discreet administrative assistant to three successive editors-in-chief at Time Inc., died in July in Ardsley-on-Hudson where she had for many years lived with her husband that late Ed Magnuson, one of Time’s top writers.
When Jane left her home in New Jersey for New York she worked first at an ad agency, but soon moved to Time magazine to begin a long career at the company. She became administrative assistant to the managing editor, Henry Grunwald. When Henry moved up to the 34th floor as editor-in-chief of all the magazines, she accompanied him. When Jason McManus succeeded Henry she became his administrative assistant, and she continued in the same position when Norman Pearlstein followed Jason.
Katie McNevin, who worked next to Jane for many years, writes that she was “the best administrative assistant I ever came across in my 40 years with the company. “She was organized, had amazing skills, was unfailingly polite and perhaps most important was beyond discreet (sometimes maddeningly so).”
Another colleague, Sally Proudfit, said the two of them would have animated lunchtime conversations about politics and the theater. They both attended classes on global politics at the 92nd Street Y. They both followed New York theater closely and Sally writes that Jane was always able to get early tickets to Broadway shows worth seeing.
Jane and Ed, who at one time held the record for the most covers written for the magazine, married in the 1980s and moved from Manhattan to Ardsley-on-Hudson. They became avid dog lovers and trained a series of golden retrievers they took on long walks along the Hudson. Jane unfailingly attended the annual Westminster Dog Show in New York.
• Gerald Levin, 84, the Time Inc. CEO who engineered the most disastrous deal in the company’s 100-year history—the merger with AOL—died in Long Beach in March.
What could go wrong with the merger between the world’s largest publishing company and the leader in Internet communications? Well, just about everything. When the deal was announced in 2000, the Dotcom market was about to collapse. AOL’s clunky Internet portal was being pushed aside by better models. AOL’s books were not as good as the company claimed. Time Inc. had already lost the weekly Life and was just starting to figure out how to deal with the new digital world. The AOL people and the Time Inc. people didn’t understand each other.
The $342 billion deal soon turned into a $127 billion deal. For 2001, the company posted a loss of $98.7 billion—a record for the US. Time Inc. employees who counted on profit sharing and share grants to finance a comfortable retirement, found there was almost nothing there. Ted Turner who had sold his CNN to Time Inc., reported that his $8 billion fortune had shrunk to $2 billion. He was livid.
Before AOL, Levin had established brilliant reputation at Time Inc. He was CEO of a regional cable TV company, HBO, owned by Time Inc. and persuaded the company to use satellite transmissions to distribute HBO content, which made it available all over the US. HBO was the first to use satellites, and according to The New York Times obituary, Levin’s daring gambit “helped change the television landscape.” Success was assured when Americans all over the country were able to watch Mohammed Ali’s “Thrilla in Manila” live at lunchtime. HBO became the most successful element in Time. The series it developed over the years, from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones were hugely successful. Levin was undoubtedly a great visionary, but not a good manager of people.
Levin grew up in Philadelphia in a Jewish household but he also became interested in other religions. At Haverford College he studied biblical literature and Christian philosophy and then earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. After nearly 10 years working in various organizations he landed a job at Sterling Communications a small cable company and there he found his true calling.
Levin was married and divorced three times and had five children. One of them Jonathan, a popular 31-year-old high school teacher in the Bronx, was murdered in his apartment in Manhattan by one of his students. (Adapted partly from the New York Times obituary March 13.)
Fortune’s Expert on the Auto Industry
• Alex Taylor III, 79; Fortune’s much-recognized expert on the auto industry for nearly three decades, died in February in Lakeville, Connecticut where he had lived with his wife for many years. He suffered complications from Parkinson’s disease. Alex grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. His father owned the Alex Taylor & Company sporting goods store in midtown Manhattan. Alex graduated from Kent school and Middlebury College and then earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.
He entered journalism through a radio station in Indiana and then had a variety of assignments at WZZM13-TV in Grand Rapids. Time hired him as a reporter and then he moved on to Fortune, where he established himself as a meticulous and knowledgeable reporter on the auto industry. He was also a good storyteller.
Alex’s many awards included “Journalist of the Year” from the Washington Automotive Press Association and in 2000 he was named one of the 100 notable business journalists of the 20th century. He was an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He was a member of the International Motor Press Association and served on its jury for the North American Car of the Year Award. Alex poured his three decades experience into 60 to Zero: An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors—and the Detroit Auto Industry, a book that appeared to positive reviews in 2010. Alex enjoyed family, friends, nonfiction books, tennis and wore Brooks Brothers suits.
Two of The First at People
• Rossiter J. (Ross) Drake Jr., 83, one of the founders of People magazine, an editor known for his kindness and encouragement towards novice writers, died in November of Parkinson’s disease at a senior living home in Connecticut. (The obituary of another founding staffer at People follows)
In 1974 Ross joined a small cadre of Time Incers who would found People, which became the most successful magazine startup in history. Ross served as a senior editor and then as assistant managing editor. A colleague, Jim Seymour writes that Ross was the “gold standard” of what an editor should be, “thoughtful, kind, helpful, and generous. He nurtured an untold number of novice writers.”
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Ross grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts and Westport, Connecticut. His father sold textbooks for McGraw-Hill and his mother was a high school teacher. After high school, Ross attended Amherst College, graduating in 1962. He started his career in journalism with jobs at small newspapers and moved up to the Hartford Courant and then TV Guide. His enjoyment of pranks came out when he published a review of a nonexistent movie called The Brain That Ate Hot Dogs. He was not fired.
He met a language arts teacher, Enes Bucciarelli and married her in 1968. About that time he appeared on the TV game show Jeopardy and won enough money to take his bride to Europe and buy their first house. They had a daughter and a son also named Rossiter, always known as Little Ross who also became a journalist. The family had a tradition of spending summers at a cottage at the Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor, Maine. Father and son became croquet enthusiasts and sometimes won the summer tournament at the hotel. The two were also enthusiastic Braves and Patriot fans. Little Ross interned at Entertainment Weekly and then became a movie critic in San Francisco. He died of a heart attack at 34 at about the time that Ross was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Colin Durkee remembers that when he was a young writer he sometimes came into Ross’s office and stretched out on his couch. While a sports program played silently on the TV, Ross continued editing and kept up an affable conversation with Durkee. Durkee says that someone pointed out to him that “People had rivalries, politics, etc—No one ever said a bad word about Ross.” —posted 2/17/24
• Mary Dunn, 76, was on board as the picture editor when the first issue of People appeared and later became director of photography at Entertainment Weekly died in July, as we learned recently. Mary was a picture researcher at Time when she was picked to be a founding member of the People staff.
Mary grew up in Camden, North Carolina and graduated from Ashley Hall in Charleston. With a perfect score of 1600 in her SATs she was accepted at Radcliffe, but her father insisted on a college further south so she went to Sweet Briar in Virginia. She majored in military and diplomatic history.
She had an entrancing junior year in Paris at the Sorbonne. She loved the food, fashion, beauty and art, wore mini dresses, smoked Gauloises and was briefly engaged to an Englishman.
New York beckoned and she got a job as an ad trafficker for NBC, where she met an executive in Grey Advertising, Toby Dunn. They were married for 53 years. She left NBC to be a picture editor at Time and then was chosen for the cadre of editors who created People. She proved to be superb at assigning photographers, imaginative at creating picture stories, patient in getting good cover pictures out of difficult subjects and skilled at the many other tasks required of a picture editor. At a picture session in the layout room in 1985 when a photo of Mel Gibson was shown on the screen she exclaimed, “that’s the handsomest man alive.” So began an annual feature in the magazine.
For the last decade of her 30-year career at Time Inc., Mary applied the same talents as director of photography at Entertainment Weekly. Soon after her retirement she suffered a brain aneurysm in 1999 which handicapped her at times. Nevertheless she spent the next 24 years enjoying a quieter life, traveling and wintering in the Bahamas. She and Toby lived in Essex, Connecticut and Vero Beach, Florida.
Lanny Jones, who worked with her when he was managing editor of People, writes “we loved Mary and all she represented—smarts, charm, high spirits, and a kind heart.” (Adapted from a formal obituary) —posted 2/17/24
Time Correspondent, Fortune editor
• Harold Burton (“Burt”) Meyers, 99; a former Time correspondent in the Washington Bureau and later a member of the Board of Editors at Fortune, died October 6 in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he and his late wife had gone to live since his retirement from Time Inc. In 1987.
Burt was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1924. His parents were both teachers in the US Indian Service. He was mostly home-schooled on reservations in Pima, Maricopa, Zuni and Navajo in Arizona and New Mexico. At the age of 13 he entered the Wasatch Academy a Presbyterian boarding school in Mount Pleasant, Utah.
During World War II Burt served on Guam in the Navy Seabees. After the war he enrolled at the University of Colorado on the G.I. Bill and graduated with high honors in 1948. He started his career in journalism at newspapers in Williston, North Dakota, and Grand Junction, Colorado, he also had spells of teaching at Fort Lewis College and the University of Kansas.
His work caught the eyes of Time editors and he was hired in 1960 to work in the Chicago Bureau at Time and then moved to the Washington Bureau. He covered school desegregation stories in the South and the political stories leading to JFK’s presidency.
Burt transferred to Fortune in New York where he made a specialty of tracking election finances. When he joined the Board of Editors he became a story editor. Before and after retiring in 1987, Burt published four novels set in Indian reservations. Two of them, Geronimo’s Pony and The Death at Awahi won literary prizes.
All those years in the East had not deprived Burt of the easy warmth of the West. Burt got married as a teenager and the marriage lasted 70 years until the death of his wife, Jean, in 2013. He is survived by four sons, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. One of his sons, Terry lives in Williamsburg and is a retired professor of English at William & Mary.
Minor League Pitcher; Major League Sports Writer
• Gary Ronberg, 82, whose brief career as a minor league pitcher morphed into a long career writing for Sports Illustrated and other major league publications, died in St. Louis in April.
Gary grew up in New Haven, Indiana, and attended Michigan State University where he pitched for the Spartans and majored in journalism. In his first season as a starting pitcher, he had a 10-3 record, and in the MSU record book, he has the second highest number of games worked as a pitcher in the team’s history.
Years later Gary told SI that he was getting a big head and wondered why the scouts weren’t coming around. “When they did it was not encouraging,” he said. ”One scout told me to put on 10 pounds, another told me to lose 10 pounds. I got the message. I was marginal either way.”
He pitched in the minors at Kitchener, Ontario team and after a 14-3 season he was promoted to the higher minors in Sherbrooke, Québec, but he got no further. He said. “When your good pitch comes screaming back at you by your ear, that feels bad.” He didn’t want that for his future.
Gary was a gifted storyteller and writer and he took to sportswriting, first at UPI and then at SI, where he was known for his geniality and for his skill at a tabletop hockey game, which occupied writers during slack times. He soon had a slot as a regular hockey and football writer.
In New York he moved into a large apartment building known as the “Stew Zoo”, inhabited by 300 airline stewardesses. He married one of them, Christine, and remained happily married for 55 years.
After some years at SI in the late 1960s and early '70s, Gary worked in the front office of the St. Louis Blues, wrote for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Philadelphia Inquirer, authored three books on hockey and with Christine produced a guide to Philadelphia. At one point he became interested in car racing and joined the public relations firm of FleishmanHillard as VP for auto racing.
The Youngest VP
• Kelso Sutton, 84, described in the company history as “one of Time Inc.’s most upwardly mobile young men”—at 32 the youngest vice president since Roy Larson’s promotion in 1927—died in New York in June.
The World of Time Inc., Volume 3, by Curtis Prendergast and Geoffrey Colvin, described Kelso on his appointment as publisher of Sports Illustrated this way: “shortish and rather bumptious, looking as if he had just got out of college campus, Sutton had a sharp mind and breezy approach that had propelled him through a variety of company posts since his arrival 17 years earlier just out of Harvard.”
Kelso was born in Boston, grew up in Falmouth, Maine, graduated from the Mount Hebron Academy in 1957 with a prize for the best academic record, and then attended Harvard. He graduated in 1961, but his senior thesis was stolen and the job of rewriting it t seemed so overwhelming to him that he put off going to graduate school and instead took a stop-gap job as a corporate trainee at Time Inc . He stayed there for the rest of his career.
From trainee he moved up rapidly to become Time’s assistant business manager, then business manager and then general manager of the magazine. When he became a corporate VP in 1972 he had a particularly busy year. He worked with a small group that decided to shut down the weekly Life and he headed up a new corporate circulation department. In 1974 he worked on the launch of Sports Illustrated and then became the magazine’s publisher. Kelso was elected to the corporate Board of Directors in 1983, in 1984 became vice president of the magazine group and in 1987 became CEO of Time Life Books.
Kelso served on the boards of trustees of the Smithsonian Institution and of the South Street Seaport. He retired in 1983 to do a lot of traveling and reading, living in homes on eastern Long Island and Florida. In 2020 he bought a $7.7 million condo in Palm Beach.
SI’s Olympic Champion
• Anita Verschoth, 90; who covered every winter and summer Olympics from 1964 through 1996 for Sports Illustrated—that’s 18 Olympics--died in New York in January, as we learned recently. As SI’s Olympic expert, Anita had an uncanny skill for handicapping winners and had sources deep into the Olympic committees.
Born in Germany, Anita emigrated to the United States in 1962. She soon joined SI as a secretary and won promotion rapidly to reporter and then associate editor. Fluent in English, German and French, Anita developed excellent sources inside the somewhat opaque world of Olympic sports. She described herself as “the world’s greatest lobby lurker”, who skulked behind the potted palms at the Lausanne Palace Hotel waiting to pounce on Olympic officials emerging from committee meetings. Her best source (and close friend) was Monique Berlioux, the executive director to a succession of IOC presidents.
In Olympic preview issues of SI, Anita would pick the winners in every sport with a remarkable accuracy. According to a publisher’s letter in 1985, among SI staffers Anita was “definitely first in mileage on land, sea and in the air, first in jet lag, first in exotic places visited—and six weeks behind in her expense account.” She had just returned from an Odyssey that took her to 22 cities in 11 countries.
Anita had her own trophy. She was the first winner of the Cappy Petrash Greenspan Foundation award for outstanding achievement among women in the sports media, which came with a shining crystal trophy and a banquet. Along with SI‘s William Oscar Johnson she was co-author of a book about an East German discus thrower.
Anita’s final years at Time Inc. were difficult. In a cost-cutting move in 1988, her employment status was changed from staffer to contributor, which meant she had no benefits. She sued the company for discrimination and won reinstatement as a staffer in 1996. But she had a contract for only two years and after that she retired—presumably with some sort of settlement. (Thanks to Jerry Kirshenbaum for this information.) No picture was available at this time.
A Fortune Activist
• Wilton Woods,79; a Fortune researcher for 27 years and a popular activist in the New York Newspaper Guild, died of a heart attack on July 14 at the nursing home in New York where he was living.
Wilton was born in the small Texas city of Seguin, which lies between San Antonio and Houston, and attended Southwestern University, where he was vice president of the student body and an active member of the young Democrats.
Like Willie Morris, Wilton left his hometown “for the stimulation, opportunities and freedom in the big city.” That freedom started in the basement of the Time-Life building working as a mail clerk. He was promoted quickly to the clip desk and then became a reporter at the weekly Life. When that magazine shut down in 1972, he became a reporter at Fortune, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.
Wilton loved to travel and in his office he had a world map dotted with little flags to mark the many countries he had visited. He went to Ghana where he had many friends every year. He arranged for several young Ghanaians to move to the United States. He took a sabbatical in Brazil where he also had friends and he spoke some Portuguese. He traveled by car to many of the 48 states with his mother, Virginia Woods, who died only last year at the age of 107.
He enjoyed New York’s culture, especially the Alvin Ailey dance troupe. He worked hard for the Newspaper Guild and while he was at Fortune he was most helpful to young reporters. For a time he served with VISTA volunteers. When he retired he retained his apartment near Central Park and continued to bicycle in the park until disability slowed him down.
—(Thanks to Darienne Dennis for this information.) [No picture was found]
The Founder of the People Website
• Stephen Silverman, 71, a prolific author and beloved founding editor of the People website, died in New York in July. Silverman came to People in 1995 after working for 11 years as the Broadway and Hollywood correspondent for The New York Post.
He would often come to work at the People office before 6 a.m. with a friendly greeting for the other early birds at the news desk, which he ran. “He was a loving paternal figure to so many of us who had moved to New York City at a young age, away from our families and seeking such a connection. On holidays he’d invite colleagues over to share a meal, he threw fabulous Super Bowl parties,” a People memorial note said, “he was a magician with words, a grammar genius, the person we all turned to for advice on a perfect lead, a better headline, a little tweak in our text.”
Silverman was born in Los Angeles, earned a bachelor’s’ degree in history from the University of California at Irvine and then came to New York to get a master’s degree from the journalism school at Columbia.
In addition to his work for the People website, he wrote articles for many other publications, taught at the journalism school at Columbia and published 13 books, mostly about personalities in the entertainment world. He also wrote a book about the Catskills, which he knew well, and another about the history of entertainment parks going back 900 years. His most notable book was a biography of David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia, a notoriously closed mouth character who had refused for decades to cooperate with writers. Slverman’s biography of Stephen Sondheim will appear this fall.
Long Time Downunder
• Paul Montague 86; who joined Time Life International in Sydney Australia in the 1960s, died recently at his home on the North Beaches of Sydney. Paul worked in the finance department. He was a francophile and soccer fan and recently gave his two sons and their families a trip to France. It was a great success but on their return to Australia they learned that Paul had died. Time Life Alumni in Australia, who seem to have retained more enthusiasm than the stateside alumni, gathered for drinks on June 23 to celebrate his life. They also plan to hold their annual lunch in December.
A Stylish Writer and the Boston Slugger
• John Underwood, 88, a stylish writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of many best-selling books about sports, died in Miami in April. John was one of those wonderful SI writers, such as Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins, who made the magazine so admired in its heyday. He was best known for his intimate and up close writing about the great Boston hitter, Ted Williams.
John got through to the irascible and well-insulated Williams, who had little use for reporters, by suggesting a Tarpon fishing expedition in the Florida Keys. The Boston slugger said come on down. In the resulting four-piece series in SI John wrote Williams “brings to fishing the same hard-eyed intensity, the same unbounded capacity for scientific inquiry that he brought to hitting a baseball.”
That Tarpon fishing expedition led to a long partnership with Williams in many hunting and fishing expeditions around the world. Perhaps it was the intensity and focus that John shared with great athletes that won the confidencc of Williams and the other athletes he wrote about.
So successful were the articles that they lead to a ghostwritten book My Turn At Bat and that led to another book by the two The Science Of Hitting, which became a Bible for baseball players. John went on to write other books, including a biography of Bear Bryant, which he also ghosted.
John grew up in Miami, where his father was a tourist boat captain, and he began writing sports regularly for the Miami News while studying English at the University of Miami. He became a staff writer while still in college and then spent five years with the newspaper before joining SI in 1961.
Although baseball got most of his attention John also specialized in college football and wrote about boxing, golf, and professional football. He covered the darker side of sports too, including the widespread use of cocaine among professional baseball players, about how violence and injuries created a crisis in football and how gambling, big money and TV had taken the fun out of sports.
He quit SI in 1985 complaining the editing “was the worst I’ve ever seen” and took up freelancing
(Adapted from excellent and lengthy obituaries in the Washington Post and the New York Times.)
A Photo Editor for Many TL Books
• Blaine Marshall, 80, a native of Washington and a former photo editor at Time-Life Books, died in March in Maine, where she had retired with her husband, Elliott Marshall, a former news writer for Science magazine.
Blaine graduated from the Stoneridge School of the Sacred Heart in Rockville, Maryland, attended the University of Pennsylvania, the Corcoran School of Art and earned a BA in English from the American University in Washington.
While at Time-Life Books, Blaine worked on series about space exploration, gemstones, fitness, gardening, photography and planet Earth. Later she worked at the Library of Congress and conceived, co-wrote an illustrated guidebook to the architecture of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.
Blaine had many passions, including civil rights, music (particularly Sam Cooke, Wagner and Elvis), the Baltimore Orioles and dogs, among others. She inherited her first name from an ancestor, James G. Blaine, twice a Secretary of State and unsuccessful candidate for the White House in 1884. —Adapted from The Washington Post —posted 4/18/23
He Managed Editors
• Sheldon Czapnik, 75, former director of editorial operations at Time Inc., died in February of pancreatic cancer. He never had a byline in any of the magazines, but he had a key role in the lives of editors and writers for several decades.
A note about him in Sports Illustrated in 1985, when he was assistant managing editor for administration said “he manages our editorial budget, handles personnel matters and helps keep tabs on new technology. In short he frees the editors and writers to concentrate primarily on editing and writing”
The son of two Holocaust survivors who came to America after the end of World War II, Sheldon grew up in New York. His family reports that while his peers were studying The Talmud at the Yeshiva he played hooky and explored the city to discover what his interests were. He loved literature, theater, music and art. He managed literary magazines at school and at the CCNY, where he was an undergraduate. He earned a master’s degree in English at NYU and later went on to Columbia for an MBA. He loved Shakespeare and all his life could quote lengthy passages and poems from the literature he knew so well.
Sheldon was a certified scuba diver—the only one at SI at the time – and loved diving off Ocho Rios in Jamaica. He was also a runner and one day in 1971 on vacation in the Catskills he overtook another serious runner, Tobie Rabinowitz. They were married for 51 years until her recent death, had two children and lived in Leonia, New Jersey.
Sheldon began working as an editor at Prentice-Hall. After that is entire career was spent in the magazine business. His first job in editorial operations was at Newsweek. After a brief stay there, he moved to SI. Eventually he became director of editorial operations for Time Inc. Finally he became responsible for digitizing the entire Life photo collection, which is an enormous source of classic photos of the 20th century. —posted 3/16/23
From Fortune to Global Headhunter
• Putney Westerfield, 93, the publisher of Fortune from 1968 to 1973 and later president of Boyden International, a global executive search firm, died last August at his home in a retirement community in Portola, California.
He was a tall, handsome, well-tailored man-of-the-world who was successful in several fields and whose sociability got him many friends and club memberships. He played the piano well with a range that went from Broadway musicals to ragtime and beyond.
Putney was born in New Haven, where his father was an economics professor. He went to the Choate school and joined the class of 1951 at Yale. He became an editor of the Yale Daily News. The CIA recruited him right out of Yale and sent him to Hong Kong and South Korea for three years.
During a spell at home in Washington in 1954 he married Anne Montgomery of Hillsborough, California. The next year the CIA sent the newlyweds to Saigon, where Putney’s job was to help organize the new government of South Vietnam, created after the partition of the country.
Putney left the CIA in 1957 and the couple settled in Greenwich, Connecticut. He joined the circulation department of Time magazine. He became head of the department and later ruefully admitted that it was his group which invented those loose circulation cards that flutter out of magazine and irritate so many people.
Putney went on to become assistant publisher of Time, then assistant publisher of Life, and finally publisher of Fortune in 1968. He arrived at Fortune at a time when dwindling advertising made it necessary to cut costs. The magazine, printed on opulent oversized pages since 1929, reduced its size and paper quality to something closer to ordinary magazines.
In 1973 Putney left Time Inc. to become president of Chase World Information Corp. Three years later Boyden International hired him as its West Coast manager and the couple moved to Hillsborough. A few years later Boyden’s global partners elected him chairman and president. During his working life and after retirement Putney undertook many volunteer tasks, for his school alumni, for Vietnam orphans and several foundations.
(Thanks to Larry Crutcher for help with this item.) —posted 3/3/23
The Saigon Bureau’s Factotum
• Tran Thi Nga, 95, the unflappable, charming office manager of Time’s Saigon bureau during the war in Vietnam, died February 5 at her home in Casselberry, Florida.
Madame Nga, as a long succession of Time bureau chiefs and correspondents called her, sat at the front desk of the Time bureau at the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, greeting visitors with a smile, doing the bookkeeping, handing out cash advances, giving advice and solving problems.
Mme.Nga was born in China where her Vietnamese father had been sent as a teacher. but the family returned home and she grew up in Hanoi. When the country was partitioned in 1954 the family packed up and flew south in an American airliner to Saigon.
At this point she was a young widow with three children to raise. To earn a living she learned English and Time hired her as a bookkeeper. She soon became the bureau’s much admired office manager.
When the end came in Saigon, Time Inc. organized a massive effort to evacuate not only the American staffers but all the Vietnamese employees and their families. With Roy Rowan arranging buses and pushing through difficult Vietnamese guards. Time evacuated 38 Vietnamese employees and their families. Time settled them all in the US with jobs and places to live.
Mme.Nga went to work in the news bureau in New York and then spent years at the news desk. She also co-authored a memoir of her experiences in Vietnam and in the US called Shallow Graves. She managed to preserve Vietnamese customs while adapting to the US. She was particularly proud of the achievements of her children and grandchildren.
(Thanks to Suzanne Davis for this information.) —posted 2/18/2023
(Thanks for the notes about the previous picture which was clearly identified as Tran Thi Nga on Google pictures and thanks to Suzanne Davis for providing this correct picture)
Our Man in Moscow
• Jerrold Schecter, 90, the Time bureau chief in Moscow who acquired the Khrushchev memoirs, spirited them out of Russia, published them in the United States, died in February in Washington, where he lived with his wife Leona, his collaborator and agent. The terrors of the Stalin regime revealed by Khrushchev helped put an end to the Soviet regime.
After his ouster in 1964, living in a fenced compound outside Moscow, Khrushchev spent hundreds of hours dictating his memoirs to his son Sergei. Jerry secretly acquire the documents and carefully checked their authenticity of the memoirs. At first New York was suspicious but intrigued. The memoirs became a top-secret Time Inc. project carefully examined by top management and codenamed “Jones.” Among other checks the recordings were subject to a spectographic test which verified that they were indeed in Khrushchev’s voice.
The job of organizing and translating an “unholy mess” of transcriptions was given to Strobe Talbott, another Time correspondent who later became a Deputy Secretary of State and then president of the Brookings Institute. Life published four installments of the first volume of memoirs towards the end of 1970. After the weekly Life shutdown Time took over and published two installments of the second volume. Little Brown, then owned by time Inc, published the entire two volumes.. Jerry was born in New York City in 1932, graduated from high school in the Bronx and then chose the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he worked on the campus newspaper alongside Leona Protas. They were married in 1954 after he graduated. She survives him.
After college, while serving in the Navy in Japan, Jerry also worked as a Time stringer. That led to a staff job as a correspondent for Time in various parts of Southeast Asia. Time made him Moscow bureau chief in 1968 and in 1970 he left Russia to become Time’s White House and diplomatic correspondent in Washington. He later became vice president for public affairs for the Occidental Petroleum Company.
Over the years he produced several more books mostly related to Russia and intelligence operations. He was co-author with Peter Deriaabin, a defector from the KGB, of The Spy Who Saved The World. Most controversial was Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness — a Soviet Spymaster, written with a high-ranking KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatov, his son Anatoli and wife Leona. Sudoplatov claimed that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and three of his top colleagues, had betrayed secrets to the Russians. A subsequent FBI investigation of the claim denied that this it happened. Jerry stood by the claim.
Marvin Kalb, a journalist and Russia scholar, said he regarded Schecter’s work on the Khrushchev memoir as “a masterful feat on his part, working in that terribly restrictive environment, to be able to get to Khrushchev, to people around Khrushchev, to get to his memoir, and actually to be able to publish it.”
(Adapted from the Time Inc. official history and The Washington Post.) —posted 2/18/2023
Our Popular Lawyer
• Walter Censor, 87, who worked in Time Inc.’s legal office for two decades, died in New York in November. Under General Counsel Harry Johnston, Walter dealt mainly with real estate and administrative services matters. Born in Antwerp, Walter came to the US with his parents as a child and eventually graduated from Columbia University and the Harvard Law School. He was a witty popular man well-liked around Time Inc. On his 20th anniversary with the company Harry gave him a celebratory party at the Tribeca Grill. After leaving the company, Walter went into private practice.
He met his wife, the late Linda Censor, while serving in the Army reserves and they were married in 1961. Linda was one of the stalwart volunteers who kept the TLAS office going for many years until her death in 2019. —posted 12/14/2022
SI’s Soccer Star
• Grant Wahl, 48; Described as “the greatest soccer writer of our generation” by Sports Illustrated where he covered the sport for 37 years, collapsed and died in the press box while covering the quarterfinal between Argentina and the Netherlands during the World Cup playoffs in Qatar in December.
Earlier in the tournament Wahl had complained of chest pains, but had been found free of Covid and was feeling better after antibiotic treatment. But he was working very hard and making frequent podcasts. When he collapsed all efforts to revive him in the press box and at the Qatar hospital failed.
Wahl grew up in Mission, Kansas and attended Princeton University where he covered soccer for The Daily Princetonian. He grew to love the sport although he had no ability himself to kick a ball. During a summer break he traveled to Argentina and watched the Boca Juniors play and saw the passion for the sport that existed in so many countries other than the United States.
He graduated from Princeton in 1996 and came to Sports Illustrated the following year bringing with him his enthusiasm for soccer which at the time others at the magazine found strange. He covered the 1998 World Cup series in France and he soon established himself as an authority on soccer and a graceful writer on the human side of the sport. He also did work for Fox and CBS. He followed women’s soccer with the same enthusiasm.
The new owners at SI fired him in 2019 over a pay dispute and he swiveled quickly to his own newsletter and semi daily podcasts. They were both successful. Qatar was the seventh World Cup he had covered. Another side of him was evident there when he showed up at the stadium in a rainbow shirt. A security guard at the entrance refused to let him with that shirt, but after a standoff that lasted some time a supervisor came down, apologized and let him in—with the shirt still on. —JM
—posted 12/12/2022
Founder of The Swimsuit Issue
• Jule Campbell. 96, the doyenne for 32 years of the popular, profitable and sometime controversial annual Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated, died in November in New Jersey where she had lived since childhood on a family farm in Flemington.
The annual SI Swimsuit Issue was born when managing editor Andre LaGuerre decided the magazine needed spicing up during the midwinter lull in sports. As its editor for 32 years, Jule traveled around the world looking for exotic spots for shoots and looked for the models to grace them. She favored California girls as they look healthy and happy and had some muscle on their legs—in contrast to the skeletal Twiggy style then popular. Some of her finds such as Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs became supermodels.
One of Jule’s tasks was to assure the mothers of the girls they would be safe from predatory photographers and journalists. (As it happened, writer Jack Olsen and model Sue Peterson fell in love at Cabo San Lucas in Baja California. And they were happily married for 38 years, until Jack died of a heart attack.)
Jule graduated from Stephens College in Missouri and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She began her career as an assistant at Glamour magazine but moved to SI in 1960 as a fashion writer. Laguerre put her in charge of the swimsuit issue in 1964 and what started out as a photo spread, she turned into a cultural phenomenon. After organizing more than 50 shoots and working with 154 models, Jule retired in 1996. She was married to Ron Campbell, Fortune’s long-time art director. He died in 2015
The relatively modest two-piece bathing suits featured early on caused some scandal. Nuns banned it from the classroom and some libraries would not carry it. Today’s annual issue is popular and widely accepted even though today’s models and swimsuits can raise a teenager’s blood pressure. The bikinis are skimpy enough to fit one definition: that they can be pulled through a wedding ring. The models are not so skimpy. (Excellent obituaries about Jul can be found in The New York Times December 8 and on the SI website.) —JM —posted 12/12/2022
Southern Correspondent
• Gail Cameron Wescott, 90, former Southeastern correspondent for People, died in September in Atlanta where she had lived many years. Raised in Scarsdale, New York, she graduated from Smith College. Gail went to work for Life but over the years contributed feature articles to many magazines, including the Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s and the Reader’s Digest. Then she became well established as People’s Southeastern correspondent based in Atlanta. —posted 11/20/2022
David Beckwith, who Infuriated a President and a Chief Justice.
• David Beckwith. 79, then a new correspondent in Time’s Washington Bureau who published two major scoops on the same day in 1973 that made enemies of both President Richard Nixon and Chief Justice Warren Burger, died of lung cancer in October in Austin, TX.
In the case of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, David had advance knowledge of the decision but agreed to hold it back until the next Monday, when Time appeared and the decision was to be announced. But at the last minute Burger delayed the announcement, which he opposed. But it was too late to stop Time from publishing the story. When he found out, Berger stormed into the Washington Bureau calling David a spy and demanding that he be fired. Of course he wasn’t.
That same issue of Time carried David’s interview with Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA officer who organized the Watergate break-in. Hunt identified the two advisors to President Nixon who had helped him in the plot. This major leak infuriated Nixon who gave the order that no one talk to Time without his permission. Of course leaks continued.
David was born in Seattle, went to high school in Chicago and majored in history at Carleton College in Minnesota. In 1964 he earned a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. He broke into journalism with stints at the Minneapolis Star and the Houston Chronicle. While in Houston he earned a law degree from the University of Texas. Then Time brought him into its Washington Bureau.
He left Time in 1978 to become the founding editor of Legal Times, the first publication to cover the activities of the big law firms, which therefore drew a lot of readers from the Washington lobby fraternity. He returned to Time in 1981 and covered law, economics and the Reagan White House.
Later in the 1980s David served as an advisor to several Republican politicians, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. In 1988 he got the difficult job of press secretary to vice president Dan Quayle. A tall thin man with a booming voice and strong feelings, David defended Quayle vigorously. But after four years he couldn’t change the popular view that Quayle was one of the most ridiculed figures in Washington.
In the years after Quayle, he served as director of communications for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and was a vice president of communications for the National Cable and Communications Association, and briefly as a spokesman for the George W. Bush campaign in 2000. He was fired from that job being deemed too friendly with the Washington press.
—posted 10/14/2022
Founder of Money, ME of Fortune
• Bill Rukeyser, 83, the founding editor of Money and later the managing editor of Fortune, died of lung cancer in August in Knoxville where he had lived since retiring from Time Inc.
At 29, Bill became the impossibly young founder of Money magazine and pulled it through its first difficult years. He then took over Fortune at a time when TV advertising and the Internet were undermining the economics of magazines.
Bill was part of a family of wordsmiths. His father Merryl had produced seven financial columns a week for the Hearst newspapers. His aunt Muriel Rukeyser was a prominent liberal poet. His older brother, Louis, hosted “Wall Street Week”, for years—the most popular program on Public TV. Both went to Princeton, Lou in the class of 1954 and Bill in the class of 1961. Both learned their journalism as members of the University Press Club, a group of undergraduate correspondents for metropolitan newspapers and news agencies. Bill also studied English at Cambridge for a year.
Bill started his career with a promising first job as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Europe. After two years the Journal brought him home to be a reporter in New York. Fortune’s editors spotted his work and brought them over to be an associate editor. The top brass at Time Inc. in turn also spotted his work early on and asked him to start a new monthly about personal finance.
He put out the first issue of Money in the fall of 1972 with a staff of mostly young journalists and ruled them with a mixture of humor and stern discipline. Working late into the night became normal . After a shaky beginning with the ads not coming in the future looked grim, but Money took off and became an extremely successful monthly.
In 1980 Bill became managing editor of the larger and more prestigious Fortune, and remained there until his retirement from Time Inc. in 1988, when he accepted an offer to become the head of Whittle Communications. That job involved a move to Knoxville, where Bill and his wife Elisabeth settled and made their marks.. Bill served as chairman of the University of Tennessee Health System and Elisabeth as Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Mental Health.
In Knoxville, Bill found much more to do. He edited books, advised magazine publishers, and was chairman of the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He also kept a foot in New York as an active member of the Overseas Press Club. He served on the board the OPC Foundation and organized its finances. For the annual luncheon for winners of the OPC scholarships, he always bought a table and filled it up with members of Princeton’s University Press Club.
This summer Bill complained of difficulty breathing which he attributed to a long-standing backache. But when he went to a doctor for help he was found to have cancer in his lungs and other organs. Doctors offered surgery but Bill declined and soon after died in a hospice. —JM —posted 9/30/2022
• Jack Neely, the Knoxville historian, writes in an elegant e-mail tribute to Bill that people were surprised that this “publishing titan” from New York should settle happily in Knoxville to run Chris Whittle’s iffy book publishing venture while Whittle himself (and other top executives) did not move there.
Neely writes: “But after landing here, he and his English-born wife Elisabeth looked around with an open mind and got involved in a broad spectrum of worthwhile community efforts, including UT Medical Center, of which Rukeyser was chairman of the board; Knoxville Museum of Art, of which he also served as a director; and the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, of which he was a major benefactor, and one of its most regular attendees. Despite his button-down demeanor, he loved jazz, and was impressed with what Knoxville had to offer, especially through UT’s jazz program.
“His preference for Knoxville first puzzled his colleagues in New York, but he explained it by citing its beauty—from his high office he could see ‘the mist rising off the river and the mountains in the distance’—and the city’s unusual openness to newcomers and new ideas. He and Elisabeth lived in Rocky Hill and convinced his old urban neighbors that life in Knoxville was an ‘acceptable eccentricity.’
“In Knoxville he remained a formal New Yorker of another era, always in a dark suit, always with a bon mot worthy of Thurber. He loved humor, and always seemed to be restraining a pun, but somehow, I believe, got Knoxville to take itself more seriously as a worthwhile project.“--—posted 10/16/2022
The World Was His Beat
• Christopher Ogden, 77, a former White House and diplomatic correspondent for Time and the author of several successful biographies, died in August after taking a fall. He had lived in Hawaii in retirement.
Chris joined Time in 1973 in Moscow, where he was the correspondent for United Press International. That was the start of a brilliant career at Time which saw him traveling around the world with presidents and secretaries of State, including Carter, Ford and Kissinger. He headed magazines bureaus in Moscow, London and Chicago.
He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father was managing editor of the Providence Journal. When Chris was seven, his father took the family on a year-long sabbatical in post-World War II Europe and that experience kindled his interests the world at large. He graduated from Yale in 1966 and became an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam.
After his start with Time in Moscow, Chris spent many years in the Washington Bureau, at different times chief diplomatic correspondent, chief political correspondent and chief White House correspondent. He covered the Carter and Mondale presidential campaigns and President Bush and Secretaries of State Kissinger and Vance.
Chris was the principal contributor to more than 80 cover stories and had the unique distinction, as a reporter rather than a photographer, of taking a cover picture for Time of the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn. That photo was displayed in the National Portrait Gallery.
The books he wrote include Maggie, a biography of Margaret Thatcher, and The Life of The Party, a biography of Pamela Harriman. In his last act Chris wrote a column for Time. He appeared frequently on the Washington talk shows.
When he retired, he and his second wife Linda Fuselier sold their historic house in Alexandria and set off traveling, starting with a trip on the Queen Elizabeth, which had him aboard as a lecturer. Eventually they settled in Kauai. —posted 9/17/2022
From Scotland to Time Inc.
• Jean Wilma Patterson Jeffreys, 81, who had worked almost her entire career at Time Inc. as a secretary and executive assistant, died in her sleep at home in Clayton, North Carolina, after a long illness.
Willie, as she was known, grew up in Edinburgh where her parents ran an exclusive hotel and restaurant. When she was 19 an American couple with contacts at Time Inc. stayed at the hotel and persuaded her to emigrate to the US. She went to work as a secretary at Time Life Books, and when Books moved to Washington she went with them. Then for two years she worked at General Learning, the ill-fated joint project between Time Inc. and General Electric.
She returned to New York and became assistant to Charles Bear, group vice president in charge of administration. When he retired she put her hotel-restaurant experience to work helping design and run the cafeteria and the private dining rooms on the eighth floor until all that was outsourced. Willie is survived by her husband Brant Jeffreys who she married when he was a widower with four children. —posted 8/15/2022
An Enthusiastic Alumnus
• Gene Light, 90, who had the unique experience of working three sides of Life: ad sales, promotion and editorial died at his home in White Plains in August. His special skill was in designing covers, both for magazines and books.
Gene was born in Brooklyn, attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, graduating in 1949. After spending a year at the Cooper Union, he signed up to work on an oil tanker which took him around the world. When he landed back in the US the Army drafted him.
He joined Life in 1958, moving from ad sales to promotion to editorial. In the final issue of the weekly in December 1972 he was listed as an art director in the layout department. He worked on the final cover and said he had inserted word “goodbye” half concealed under the logo
With the magazine gone, he moved over to Warner Books where he figured he designed some 3000 book covers. But the revival of Life as a monthly brought him back and he designed some of the big coffee table books, drawing on the vast quantity of material in the Life archives.
After retiring from Time Inc., he dabbled in abstract art and went to Los Angeles, which he loved, with the hope of moving there and with some vague ideas about what to do. He got a bus driver’s license to take tourists around Disneyland and thought of becoming night manager at the Peninsula Hotel, but his wife Beverly refused to leave their home in White Plains, so Gene settled back in New York.
He became a particularly enthusiastic and active member the Time Life Alumni Society, serving on the board and creating a newsletter. His great affection for the company showed when the company changed hands. He wrote to us: “the photos of the Time Inc. sign being replaced by the Meredith sign in the last newsletter were heartbreaking. It brought back many memories: 1958—waiting at the Fishbowl to go to lunch at the 3Gs restaurant with coworkers; The 60s—working with the acclaimed Carky Rubens and all the gregarious Life ad salesmen. Those who were there those years will know what I’m trying to say. It was a wondrous era sadly never to be repeated. Now in my 80s, I think back of those years and count myself truly lucky to have been part of it.” —posted 8/14/2022
Two World War II Veterans
• Martha Goolrick, 98, a senior editor at Time-Life Books for many years, died in June in Manhattan where she had lived much of her life. During World War II, Martha spent two years in the Navy as a aerial gunnery instructor. She then obtained a degree in journalism from Syracuse University. (No picture available)
Martha became a reporter for various publications and moved up to Life as a researcher for many years and then was a chief researcher at Time-Life Books. She worked on series of books such as the Nature Library and the Library of Art.
She was married for 44 years to the late Bill Goolrick, a Life editor and writer. Bill spent 5 1/2 years in the Army during World War II rising to the rank of major. During the Battle of the Bulge he volunteered to go on a reconnaissance mission. He was shot by a sniper and spent 2 ½ years in hospitals emerging finally with serious handicaps. After he died in 2012, Martha was rummaging through his sock drawer and found a Silver Star and other decorations. He had never mentioned them.
Three Decades at SI
• Thomas J. Hickey Jr, 84, whose three-decade career at Sports Illustrated took him from sales to associate publisher at the magazine, died in June in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had lived many years. (no picture available)
Tom was born in Queens, had served in the Marines and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brooklyn College. As a sales executive for SI he worked in the magazine’s offices in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. He became advertising sales director and eventually associate publisher.
He was also Olympic director for the magazine and a lifelong fan of the Rangers, Giants, Mets and Knicks. The most memorable event in his life as a sports fan came in 1980 at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when he watched the young American hockey team defeat the more experienced Soviets.
He played golf and enjoyed swimming in the ocean and body surfing. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity and A Better Chance. (From a note posted by the family)
Lifetime LIFEer
• Eleanor Graves, 95, a former assistant managing editor of Life and former president of the TLAS, died in July in Sarasota, where she had lived for many years.
Like her late husband, Ralph Graves, she had worked all her career at Life. A confirmed New Yorker, Eleanor went to Spence School and Barnard College. After some years toiling as a researcher at the magazine, she became an associate editor. In that job she supervised the production of a successful series called “Great Dinners from Life”. The dinners were actually prepared and photographed in her Manhattan apartment. The series, published in the late 1960s, led to the publication of Eleanor’s bestseller cookbook of the same name.
After the weekly Life was suspended in 1972, she remained with the company. She first was given the task of developing a magazine to be called Woman. But tests of the pocket-sized magazine did not go well and the project was dropped. All along the idea of reviving Life in some form kept percolating. In 1978 Time Inc. introduced the new monthly Life with Phil Kunhardt as managing editor and Eleanor as assistant managing editor.
Eleanor and Ralph both graduated from college in 1948, she from Barnard and he from Harvard. They met that September when both became researchers at Life. They married other people but realized after working together for seven years that they were in love. They divorced their spouses and married in 1958. While she continued to work for Time Inc. Ralph wrote several books including a history of Martha’s Vineyard, where they spent many summers, and a loving story of their marriage, Objects of Desire, A Story of Love and Marriage. (“The object of desire” were the meaningful things one acquired in a lifetime, such as a house or particular painting.)
From Bottom to Top in 40 Years
• Donald Barr, 87, a genial executive vice president at Time Inc. and an expert in the production and distribution of magazines, died in July. His career at Time Inc.stretched for 40 years and the company was his only employer.
Don, the youngest of four children, grew up in Chicago and graduated from high school there in 1953. He spent summers caddying at the North Shore Country Club in Glenview, Illinois. A member told him about Evans scholarships for deserving caddies. Don applied and won a place at Notre Dame. He played basketball and on graduating in 1957 as class vice president he had the memorable experience of introducing the speaker, Senator Jack Kennedy.
When Don graduated, Time Inc. hired him in Chicago and his first job was to sort out old metal printing plates used for magazine covers. He moved through various production jobs and became European director of production and then in 1975 went to Paris, where he ran operations for Europe and Africa. Don attended the Harvard executive MBA program when he returned to US and became general manager of Time.
Next came an assignment as associate publisher and ad sales director for Sports Illustrated. He is credited with conceiving the idea of Sports Illustrated for Kids. In 1994 he was named Executive VP of the Corporation and on his way to and from his new office on the 34th floor he could see those metal plates for magazine covers that he had picked out back in 1957. They were hung on the wall next to the elevators.
Don, like many Time Inc. executives, lived for many years in Greenwich, Connecticut. He served on many boards and supported many causes, but focused on his role as chairman of the board of the Connecticut Chapter of The First Tee, which develops the interest of young people in golf. (Adapted from a family death notice.)
A Most Discreet Administrative Assistant
• Jane Nelson, 74, the charming and most discreet administrative assistant to three successive editors-in-chief at Time Inc., died in July in Ardsley-on-Hudson where she had for many years lived with her husband that late Ed Magnuson, one of Time’s top writers.
When Jane left her home in New Jersey for New York she worked first at an ad agency, but soon moved to Time magazine to begin a long career at the company. She became administrative assistant to the managing editor, Henry Grunwald. When Henry moved up to the 34th floor as editor-in-chief of all the magazines, she accompanied him. When Jason McManus succeeded Henry she became his administrative assistant, and she continued in the same position when Norman Pearlstein followed Jason.
Katie McNevin, who worked next to Jane for many years, writes that she was “the best administrative assistant I ever came across in my 40 years with the company. “She was organized, had amazing skills, was unfailingly polite and perhaps most important was beyond discreet (sometimes maddeningly so).”
Another colleague, Sally Proudfit, said the two of them would have animated lunchtime conversations about politics and the theater. They both attended classes on global politics at the 92nd Street Y. They both followed New York theater closely and Sally writes that Jane was always able to get early tickets to Broadway shows worth seeing.
Jane and Ed, who at one time held the record for the most covers written for the magazine, married in the 1980s and moved from Manhattan to Ardsley-on-Hudson. They became avid dog lovers and trained a series of golden retrievers they took on long walks along the Hudson. Jane unfailingly attended the annual Westminster Dog Show in New York.
A Conservative Columnist With a Light Touch
• John Leo, 86, a columnist for Time magazine in the days when magazines mattered (see What’s News Section), died in the Bronx in May. He was a conservative with a light touch and a sense of humor and played an important role in the cultural debates of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
John moved around among many publications but his stint at Time, from 1974 to 1988, was the longest.. Before that he had written a column for the Village Voice and after that he took his column to U.S. News & World Report.
The New York Times had hired him as its first reporter on intellectual matters, and that set the course of his career. He analyzed the intense debates about sexuality and free speech and the like. While he adopted a mildly conservative view, he had no use for the extreme liberalism found on campus.
For his Time column, John created a couple, the conservative curmudgeon Ralph and his feminist wife Wanda, whose arguments were a means, he wrote, of dealing quickly and lightly “with the decade’s deluge of weird therapies and odd self-realization manuals.” When Wanda updates Ralph on the new sexual vocabulary, Leo says “swingers had become ‘many friended’ and group sex had turned into ‘sharing.’ It was fun skewering all the gassy euphemisms.”
On another occasion he wrote, “many psychiatrists now doubt they are engaged in a legitimate profession. Some are beginning to wonder if they have any more healing powers than a good bartender.” He wrote that the three greatest thinkers of all time were Aristotle, Freud, and Groucho Marx.
John took on his own bosses in the 1990s when he joined others in criticizing Time-Warner for its ownership of Interscope records, a major producer of gangsta rap. Time-Warner sold off Interscope.
John was born in Hoboken New Jersey but as a teenager commuted to Manhattan to attend Regis High School an elite Jesuit institution on the Upper East Side. After graduating in 1952 he studied philosophy and English at the University of Toronto, where he also edited the campus newspaper. He then started his peripatetic career at newspapers and Catholic publications.
He found his niche when The New York Times hired him to cover intellectual matters. The columns at Time and U.S. News followed. In between stints of journalism he somehow fitted in four years as a Deputy Commissioner in New York’s Environmental Protection Administration. He retired from journalism in 2005 and became a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, where he focused on campus culture
John was one of a group of Time writers and editors who met on Thursdays for lunch at a round table at Joe Allen’s on 46th Street. The group included Stefan Kanfer, Roger Rosenblatt, Chris Porterfield, Paul Gray and Ron Sheppard. Sometimes they would be joined by Chris’s friend and Yale roommate Dick Cavett. It was not the place for the slow witted.
—JM —posted 5/17/2022
A Champion on the Track and at SI
• Kenny Moore, 78, an Olympic-level distance runner and one of Sports Illustrated’s top writers for many years, died in May in Hawaii, where he had lived since retiring from SI in 1995.
Kenny grew up in Portland, Oregon where he was an undistinguished but ambitious miler in high school. He arrived at the University of Oregon “desperately” wanting to succeed as a distance runner. Under the guidance of Oregon’s famous track and field coach Bill Bowerman he became three-time All-American. He also tested Bowerman’s experimental running shoes. Bowerman went on to become the cofounder of Nike, which in turn honored Kenny with the Kenny Moore Collection of running shoes half a century later.
Moving on to Stanford to study law on a scholarship, he continued running. He won the 1967 AAU cross country championship. He moved to Lake Tahoe to train at high altitude for the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. He placed second in the marathon trials but in the final race tape around his feet came unstuck and turned into painful “bridges of fire.” He finished 14th.
Kenny dropped out of law school and joined the Army, which gave runners the opportunity to compete internationally. The Army sent him to run in the Fukuoka Marathon in 1969 and 1970, He placed second and set a new American record.
After the Army service Kenny returned Oregon to study creative writing in 1972. His writing and running flourished. He signed up as a contract writer for SI, then a showcase for fine sports writing, and he won the US Marathon title in record time. Between 1968 and 1973 he won the “San Francisco Bay to Breakers” race six straight years, establishing records twice. He wrote a series of profiles of famous runners such as Roger Bannister and they were collected in the book Best Efforts in 1982.
He also became active in sports issues. He worked to break the controlling power of the Amateur Athletic Union over athletes and to push the Amateur Sports Act which allowed each sport to govern itself. He chaired a committee which funded talented young athletes. In the 1980s Kenny worked as both a consultant and actor in documentaries about running.
In 1995 Kenny left SI to concentrate on his major work, the biography of his old coach Bill Bowerman. In his final years in Hawaii he continued to write profiles for Runners World. (Adapted from Runner’s World) —posted 05/07/2022
Cosmopolitan Reporter, Critic, Author and Editor
• Lawrence Malkin, 91, a versatile Time correspondent and a successful author, co-author and editor of books, died at home in New York in April. His ashes will be placed in a citrus grove in Mallorca, where the family has a summer house.
Larry was at home in New York, London, Paris and India, among Wall Street bankers and with former East Bloc agents. He worked with former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker on his memoirs and edited the memoirs of former Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin. He covered the Six-Day War in Israel and the 1968 revolution in Afghanistan.
Larry grew up in Queens and earned BA degrees from both the University of Chicago and Columbia. After serving in the infantry during the Korean War, he started his long career in journalism by joining the Associated Press bureau in San Francisco. He covered several major stories there and when the Six-Day War broke out in Israel the AP sent him to the Middle East.
He next moved to Time’s Washington Bureau where he was assigned to cover economics. This assignment led to unexpected excitement when he followed the money trail in the Watergate scandal. At his request he went to London as the magazine’s European cultural correspondent. He left to go to India where he covered the defeat of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. When another military coup next door upended the Pakistan government, he hiked across the closed border on foot carrying a bag and his typewriter in 100° heat.
Back in Europe Larry spent seven years as chief European correspondent for Time as the European Union started to take shape. He was especially moved by Spain’s successful effort to return to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco.
Finally settled in his hometown, New York, he became the U.S. correspondent for the Paris Herald Tribune, covering mainly finance. This is when he also started writing and editing books and memoirs. His most challenging subject was Marcus Wolf, East Germany’s former spymaster. This elegant, well-spoken elderly gentleman could not be persuaded to reveal anything he didn’t want to. Larry nevertheless ghost wrote his memoir, published as The Man Without a Face.
He spent five years researching and writing a book about a Nazi scheme to flood Europe with fake British pound notes during World War II. The Nazis collected a team of Jewish printers and artists from death camps added a master counterfeiter, ordering them to make the fake. Their goal was to convince their Nazi boss that they were making progress but to go slowly because once they were finished they thought they would be sent back to the death camps. They succeeded and survived, but the fake pounds were never circulated. Larry’s book, Krueger’s Men, became a bestseller and a movie. —JM —posted 5/1/22
A Long, Full Career at Life
• Marion Steinmann, 92, who worked at Life from the time she graduated college in 1950 until the weekly closed in 1972, died in April in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, where she lived many years. She rose from researcher to writer and editor and specialized in science and medicine
Marion edited her high school newspaper in Rochester, New York, and at Cornell was the “women’s editor” at the Daily Sun. She majored in microbiology at the university’s College of Agriculture. She went directly from Cornell to Life in 1950 and remained there from its greatest days to its end as a weekly magazine. The masthead of the final issue dated December 29, 1972, listed her as an associate editor.
She rose from researcher and reporter to writer and editor in 1963. In 1971 she won an American Medical Association award for an article on genetics. In addition to science and medicine, she wrote about history and archaeology. In an article about Vinlanda she chided: “the Vikings had a notoriously poor eye for their own place in history as the discoverers of the New World. When they set foot on the strange shore, it simply never entered their horn-helmeted heads to build a monument to attest to the fact.”
After she retired, her articles appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Smithsonian and other publications, she wrote books about childhood diseases and allergies and back care. Her most notable work was about her 181 women classmates at Cornell, Women at Work, Demolishing the Myth of the 1950s. Her survey found that 44% of the respondents worked outside the home or attended graduate school.
At the age of 40, Marion climbed atop Mount Kilimanjaro. At 50, she married Charles Joiner, author and professor of political science at Temple University. The couple lived in Chestnut Hill but kept her apartment in New York for outings to the theater and museums. He died in 2015 and she suffered a stroke the same year. Since then she has lived in a nursing home. (Adapted from the Philadelphia Inquirer)
A Renowned Photojournalist
• Dirck Halstead, 85, one of Time’s most famous photographers, died in March in Boquete, Panama, where he lived. He was the magazines White House photographer through five presidencies and he covered the beginning and the end and much in the middle of the war in Vietnam
“Dirck Halstead was one of the great news photographers of his generation,” said Don Carleton, Executive Director of the Briscoe Center for American history in Austin, which now holds his collection or more than 500,000 photos. He won many awards including the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club.
Dirck accompanied Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972 and photographed the chaotic scene at the attempted assassination of Reagan. When the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998 he vaguely remembered a picture he’d taken in 1996 and a search of his files produced a photo showing Clinton embracing Monica Lewinsky. It became one of the 47 photos by Dirk that appeared on Time covers. He was there (for United Press International Photos) when the first Marines landed at Da Nang in 1965 and he was there when Saigon fell in 1975 and escaped by helicopter.
Dirck was born on Long Island and grew up in Westchester County. When he was 15 his parents gave him a Kodak Duaflex camera and darkroom equipment which got him hooked on photography. He took his camera to school and became its unofficial photographer. He started shooting for the local newspaper at $5 a photo. When the paper’s owner acquired seven other local newspapers, he was taking pictures for all of them at $5 a shot.
When he was 17 he went on a student trip to Guatemala and found himself in the middle of the civil war set off by the CIA’s successful plot to oust the left-wing president. Life advanced him $1000 and made him a war correspondent (perhaps not realizing what a young war correspondent he was). He happily accepted the assignment.
Dirck attended Haverford College but the pull of photography proved too strong and he dropped out after a year. The Army drafted him and turned him into an official Army photographer who could pretty much roam where he wanted for two years.
Once again a civilian, he worked for UPI in several bureaus in the US before being sent to Vietnam to open a photo bureau there. He recalled later that of the 10 photographers in the original group in 1965 in Vietnam, only four had survived by 1972.
Soon after arriving in Vietnam, he began shooting for Time as well as UPI and that relationship grew until he became a staff photographer. He was Time’s White House photographer from the 1970s until the 1990s. He covered five presidents—Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton—and two attempted assassinations. He also covered other major assignments, such as Diana’s wedding in London, and later branched out teaching, lecturing and taking still pictures for major movie productions.
Although he worked most of his life with film cameras, he became interested in promoting digital photography and founded and edited an online magazine called Digital Journalism. He used it to promote the work of many other photographers.
He was a generous friend to his colleagues and to neophytes. Diana Walker recalled that when Time gave her a freelance contract, Dirck invited her to share his office and became very helpful. This was a time when other photographers did not particularly welcome women photographers.
He was cool under fire. David Hume Kennerly, a close friend who also covered Vietnam and the White House and won a Pulitzer Prize, remembers being pinned down with Dirck during an intense firefight in Vietnam. Dirck looked at him and said, “Can’t wait to have a drink at the Melody Bar tonight.” Kennerly said, “Dirck wasn’t afraid to take chances. His legacy of published photos was extraordinary, as were the lengths he would go to get a picture. He was someone who really appreciated life, and lived it well.” He was regarded as the photo journalist who told stories, rather than simply a photographer
In his memoir, Moments in Time published in 2006, he remembered he looked down from the helicopter that was taking them out of Saigon and thought, “I realize that I’m feeling as though a vital part of my life is coming to a close. . . . How can it be that in a place of war, I find the happiest times I have ever known? How could I possibly explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it how much more alive I feel returning to Saigon at the end of the day, and living and enduring in a place where I’m not even sure I will survive?”
He was married and divorced three times. --JM
(Adapted from several long obituaries, Time publisher’s letters and Briscoe Center website.) —posted 4/4/2022
Shnayerson: A Rapid Rise
• Robert Shnayerson, 96, a writer and senior editor at Time and later the much admired editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine, died in March at home in Hillside, New York.
Bob’s mother was a nightclub singer and his father a novelist. He attended several schools, including an experimental school in Pawling, New York, where he learned to drive a tractor and do farm chores. He finished high school at the DeWitt Clinton school in New York and graduated when World War II was breaking out.
He joined the Navy and became a quartermaster aboard an oiler which serviced ships in the North Atlantic. After the war he attended Dartmouth on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1950. Bob launched his career in journalism as a junior reporter on The New York Daily News. Very soon he joined Life and rose to became its Seattle bureau chief.
He returned to New York as a writer for Time, where he distinguished himself by writing 60 cover stories during the tumultuous news years of the 1960s. He created two special issues of the magazine titled “Black America” and “To Heal a Nation.” He also persuaded Time’s management to start two new sections, on the environment and the law. For many years he had the custom of running five miles every day, unusual at the time. A reader wrote to the editor saying he had noticed Bob practicing the sport of “jogging”.
When Willie Morris resigned as editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine in 1971, Bob was chosen as his successor after many candidates had been vetted. He was known as a steady, thoughtful editor of the magazine who brought in a number of distinguished writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Simone de Beauvoir, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer.
Bob left Harper’s in 1976 to found Quest magazine, devoted to quality in all its forms. It lasted for five years. In retirement Bob wrote a book about the Supreme Court and served as a consultant to magazines. The family spent many summers on Long Island. He continued the custom of five-mile runs but also took to swimming long distances some way offshore—but parallel to the shore. Two of his four children became journalists. Maggie wrote for Time and was also an editor at Gawker. Michael was a writer for Vanity Fair and wrote several books including a biography of Irwin Shaw.
A publisher’s letter in Time in 1968 reported Bob was so fed up with the cost of keeping a car in Manhattan and the difficulty of finding parking spaces, that he drove it to the Sanitation Department and asked the men there to destroy it. Since the car was in good condition, they tried to persuade him keep it, but he insisted and he watched them squash it into a compact cube of metal.—posted 3/23/22
A “Transformational” Photo Editor
• Michelle McNally, 66, photo editor at Fortune in the 1980s and then photo editor at The New York Times until her retirement in 2018, died in February in New York, where she had lived all her life. Dean Baquet, executive editor of The Times, said in the obituary the newspaper ran, “she was a transformational figure in photojournalism. She walked into a newsroom where photography had taken a backseat for too long and forced it into the fore.” Michelle was the first director of photography at The Times to become an assistant managing editor, which put her in the top echelon of the newspaper’s management.
“She has pushed a reluctant newsroom, hired an all-star staff and made The Times the finest visual report in the country,” Baquet said. “Along the way she displayed tremendous humanity when Times photographers found themselves in harm’s way.”
A previous boss said the 5-foot tall Michelle was “a giant in a tiny body—very blunt, very fast, very street smart, a bundle of energy.” Michelle herself recalled, “once, during a disagreement, my old boss told me, 'you’re small, you just don’t know it.'”
Michelle was born in Brooklyn, graduated from high school in Canarsie and studied mass communications at Queens College and at Brooklyn College. She worked briefly for the Brooklyn Public Library and then as a sales representative for Sigma Photo News agency.
She joined Time Inc.’s magazine development group in the early 1980s and served as Fortune’s picture editor from 1986 until 2004. Meaghan Looram, who was hired by Michelle and succeeded her at Fortune, said according to The Times, “she proceeded to teach me everything I know about visual editing, about the art of making an inspired match between photographer and story, about coaching photographers and editors into discovering their own excellence, and about managing people with empathy and compassion.”
Several Times photographers won Pulitzer Prizes during her watch. She herself won the Editor of The Year Award for photojournalism of the National Press Photographers Association.
[Time Inc. was always been a fruitful recruiting ground for The New York Times. Back in the 1970s, Michiko Kakutani, who became the chief book reviewer for The Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner, reviewed books for Time. John Noble Wilford wrote about science for Time before starting his long career as science editor of The Times, where he won two Pulitzer prizes. Dennis Overbye and Natalie Angier both worked at Discover before becoming science writers at The Times. Denise Grady also from Discover, became a medicine writer at The Times. Reed Abelson, a Fortune reporter, covered health news for The Times. Joe Nocera, a Fortune writer and editor, went on to write op-ed pieces for The Times and Gretchen Morgensen went from Money magazine to The Times business section.]
A Popular Kentucky Sports Columnist
• Billy Reed, 78, a well-known and popular Kentucky sports journalist and a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, died at the beginning of February in Kentucky. He was a must read for Kentucky sports fans, says a former sports editor, and “he could make fans smile one day and infuriate them the next.”
Reid was inducted into the US Basketball Writers Hall of Fame in 1996, he won the National Headliner Award for column writing in 1982 and was named Kentucky sportswriter of the year eight times.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, played Little League baseball with Billy and says he “always enjoyed reading his takes on Kentucky’s sports teams.”
Billy grew up in Louisville and Lexington and graduated in 1966 from Transylvania University where he was manager of the basketball teams. He began writing for the Lexington Herald Leader 1959 and got his first byline the age of 15. He left to join the Louisville Courier Journal in 1966.
Sports Illustrated hired him two years later in 1968 to cover basketball and football and he adopted what he thought was the more dignified byline William F. Reed. But Billy Reed returned to the Courier-Journal in 1972. He became a columnist in 1974 and sports editor in 1977. He went back to the Herald Leader in 1987 and became a senior writer at SI in 1990.
When Billy saw his first Kentucky Derby he swore he would never miss one and over the years he attended 50 running of the race.
Jim Drake, Star SI Photographer During Four Decades
• James A. Drake, 89, a long-time award-winning photographer for Sports Illustrated, who trotted the globe and produced some of his era’s most indelible images, died January 10 of lung cancer at his home in Philadelphia.
Starting in 1959, Drake spent nearly four decades publishing some of the most iconic sports photographs ever taken. SI devoted 79 of its famous covers to his pictures, and his list of subjects is a who’s who of the sports scene throughout the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Assigned to cover some of the world’s most important games, matches, meets, fights, tournaments, and races, Drake photographed superstars in practically every sport. Joe Namath, Nadia Comaneci, Bobby Orr, Arnold Palmer, Richard Petty, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, Larry Bird, Joe Paterno, Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, and countless others grace his portfolio.
His action photo of Palmer at the 1964 U.S. Open was even used in 2020 on a U.S. postage stamp. A lifelong Philadelphian and die-hard fan of the Eagles, Phillies, and 76ers, Drake said some of his favorite photos were of Reggie White, Jerome Brown, Randall Cunningham, Mike Schmidt, Pete Rose, Wilt Chamberlain, Maurice Cheeks, and Julius Erving. He also created images of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan; Vice President Hubert Humphrey; and actor Steve McQueen.
Drake was in Augusta in 1963 when Jack Nicklaus won his first Masters tournament with a dramatic 3-foot putt on the final hole. He was at Madison Square Garden in 1971 when Joe Frazier beat Ali in the first of their three famous fights. And he was at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich when Palestinian terrorists took nine Israelis hostage.
“Jim was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word,” said fellow photographer Neil Leifer, who, along with. Drake and Walter Iooss Jr., anchored the SI photo department for years. “I considered Jim the best photographer among the three of us during that era, and in my opinion he was the best golf photographer ever.”
In addition to SI, Drake’s photos appeared in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and other publications. He left SI in 1980 to become picture editor at Inside Sports magazine. He returned to SI in 1986 and stayed until 1990, when he left to freelance for ABC Sports. He retired in 1994. Former SI publisher Donald J. Barr, in describing a 1986 photo essay on baseball, praised Drake for seeking a “subtler means of expressing the pressures and frustrations” of the players. One of his favorite photos in the display, Drake said then, was of an old pitcher trudging off the field toward the locker room, “so expressive of the old-timer, yanked out, disappointed, bent and fatigued.”
Drake lived in Philadelphia with his wife, Jean, and sons Patrick (left) and Chris. He was a star sprinter and hurdler in high school at William Penn Charter School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism in 1955 from the University of Pennsylvania, spent two years in the Army, and honed his eye at the Trentonian newspaper in Trenton and the Bucks County Traveler magazine. (A longer version of this obituary appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.) —Posted 2/4/2022
Fred Painton and his Time Inc. Family
• Frederick Painton, 95, a former Time writer and editor in Paris where he and his family lived for 32 years, died in December in Charleston, South Carolina, his second wife’s hometown.
Fred was a handsome, dapper-man-about Europe, who loved to dance, could sing French folk songs and find his way through the peculiarities of European politics, according to his daughter Priscilla, who became a Time editor. He knew how to have fun. He got drunk with Humphrey Bogart at the Plaza Athenee and chased playboy Porfirio Rubirosa around the Riviera to record his exploits.
He grew up in Westport, Connecticut, attended the Hotchkiss school on a scholarship, served in the Army in Europe and went to Yale on the G.I. Bill. After he graduated, United Press sent him to cover the war in Korea, where he was credited with coining the name “Pork Chop Hill,” scene of one of the fiercest battles of the war.
After the war the news agency sent him across the Atlantic and he began his long love affair with Europe. U.S. News & World Report, then the number three newsmagazine in the US, hired him as its Rome bureau chief. From there he reached out to cover the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the war in Algeria. The magazine moved him to Paris which became the family home for the rest of his career. When Time started a European edition it hired him as editor, reporter and writer, still based in Paris. He retired in 1991.
Time Inc. has also been home to other Paintons. Fred’s first wife, Patricia, who died in 1997, was a Fortune researcher in New York and then after the move to Paris, a contributor from there to Fortune and other business magazines. Their daughter Priscilla, grew up bilingual in Paris, she gravitated towards Time after earning her credentials at the Berkshire Eagle, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Constitution. She became a Time correspondent and covered major stories, including Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the early age of 30 she became Time’s business editor and later nation editor.
Fred’s father, also named Fred, opened the family’s path to journalism. He was a well-known pulp writer and columnist before World War II. Although well into middle age, Fred senior signed up to cover the war for the Reader’s Digest. He was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, accompanied Patton’s tanks in France and landed at Iwo Jima. He often found himself with Ernie Pyle, a famous World War II columnist, and they became good friends. As the war was ending Fred died of a heart attack on Guam. Soon after, Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper, a final column was found in his pocket—a tribute to Fred Senior.
—Posted 12/27/2021
“A friend, mentor and a boon companion"
• Peter Bird Martin, 92, a founding editor of Money from its inception in 1972 and a senior editor at Time before that, died in November in Hanover, New Hampshire where for 27 years he had served as executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs( (ICWA) which flourished under his leadership.
Former managing editor Bill Rukeyser, who founded Money with Peter at his side, writes “Any room Peter Martin occupied was alive with professional journalism, virtuosity with words, kindness and laughter. Two headlines that exemplify the virtuosity: On a Money comparison of the costs of building a Ford out of replacement parts to buying it whole, “The Princely Sum of the Parts;” on an analysis of the economics of second incomes in our first issue, “The Half-a- Loaf Life of the Working Wife.” Peter was essential to the launch and growth of Money. He was a friend, mentor and a boon companion.”
Peter was born in Philadelphia, where his father “Pete” Martin (actually William Thornton Martin), was a well-known columnist for The Saturday Evening Post. For years it featured his lighthearted interviews with celebrities, who were happy to talk to him.
Peter attended Dartmouth—you could not know him without knowing how much he loved Dartmouth—and started his career at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The piece he wrote about how the Anheuser-Busch company was working secretly to oppose the fluoridation of the city’s water supply caught the eye of the director of the ICWA. The Institute, then as now, awards fellowships to promising young people to travel and report from abroad.
The ICWU sent Peter to Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe) for two years (1953-1955) with rather vague instructions to write home about what he was seeing “when he had something to say.” Soon after arriving, Peter wrote to Godfrey Huggins, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, who surprised Peter by inviting him to lunch at his club. The youngster obviously impressed Huggins who made a deal with him: if Peter would meet him periodically to tell him what he had learned on his travels, Huggins would give him letters of introduction to his counterpart in Northern Rhodesia and other influential people.
For two years Peter traveled widely in sub-Saharan Africa reporting home “when he had something to say” about decolonization then in progress and other matters. On his return from Africa, Time hired him to write about Latin American affairs. Eight years later he became a senior editor and supervised the sections on medicine, law, science, press and the performing arts.
Peter joined a magazine development group at Time Inc. in 1971. Out of a swarm of ideas the group considered, the strongest candidate was a magazine about personal finance. The first issue of Money arrived in the fall of 1972, with Bill Rukeyser as managing editor and Peter as his deputy.
Peter never lost his affection for the ICWA but by 1978 it was moribund, with just one fellow overseas. Nevertheless Peter agreed to become its Executive Director and rebuild the program. He moved its headquarters to Hanover, New Hampshire to be near Dartmouth and he set about raising funds and finding scholars. Over the years he appointed 77 scholars and sent them abroad with the same instructions he’d had: to write to him when they felt they learned enough to have something to say.
He also established the South—North News Service in 1985 to help reporters from developing countries. After retiring in 2007, Peter established the John Hazard Institute, which sends young American lawyers overseas to learn about foreign law and practices.
The current director of ICWA is Gregory Feifer, who Peter had sent to Russia as a fellow in 1999.
(Much of the material in this obituary was published on icwa.org.) —Posted 12/2/2021
Scholar, Writer, Storyteller
• Stuart Schoffman, 73, a renowned Jewish scholar and one-time writer for Fortune and Time, died in November in Israel where he had lived since 1988.
Schoffman grew up in Brooklyn, got his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a master’s degree from Yale. In the late 1970s he went to work for Time Inc. in the days when the magazines’ “pages of polished prose were read by everybody,” as one obituary wrote. He started at Fortune and then went on to Time. Fred Golden, Time’s science editor then, said that Stuart “didn’t seem to know much about science but he quickly produced an article on astronomy that was very impressive.”
In the 1980s, Schoffman spent years writing movie scripts in Hollywood but by the end of the decade he had decided that Jerusalem was his real home and he moved there permanently. He became well-known for his translations of Jewish literature and for his profound scholarship. He was also known as a great and funny lecturer and storyteller.
Caricature courtesy Jewish Review of Books —posted 11/12/2021
“Scrupulous, Sympathetic, Measured”
• James Christopher Porterfield, 84, a cultural critic, influential editor at Time magazine and Emmy-nominated producer of The Dick Cavett Show, died at his home in New York City on October 22.
He was born in Weston, WV, the son of James Herman Porterfield and Irene Smith Porterfield. Chris graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1958 from Yale University. There he organized the Chris Porterfield Big Band, a 13-piece jazz orchestra that played at Carnegie Hall on Thanksgiving weekend in 1957. Upon graduation, he abandoned a promising music career for another passion, writing. He became a reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he met his wife, Stephanie “Stevie” Brown, a star reporter who, at first impression, thought he was “cocky.”
In 1963 he was hired away by Time Magazine, serving in its bureaus in Washington and Chicago. He covered the Beatles’ first U.S. tour, the Kennedy assassination and an Alaskan earthquake before becoming the weekly’s music critic. While working full-time, he obtained a master’s degree in modern British and American literature from Columbia University.
He moved to London in 1969 to become European cultural correspondent. One of his biggest scoops there was to convince Australian-born writer Robert Hughes, once described in The New York Times as “the most famous art critic in the world,” to join him at the newsmagazine. “Scrupulous, sympathetic, measured,” Hughes said of Chris shortly afterward. “Time is bloody lucky to have him.”
Chris was made a senior editor in 1972 but left Time two years later to co-author the autobiography of his longtime friend and Yale roommate, Dick Cavett. That collaboration led to a five-year stint as executive producer of The Dick Cavett Show, earning the program two Emmy nominations. Over the years, the duo produced three other books. “His two best traits,” Cavett wrote of Chris in The New York Times in 2008: “are (a) he is smarter than I am and (b) despite this, he generally treats me as an equal.”
Returning to Time in 1980 from what he jokingly called his “apostasy in television,” Chris went on to write or edit more than 100 cover stories, took on increasingly senior editing roles and became a mentor to countless young journalists.
By the time Chris retired in 2003, he had become executive editor, the magazine’s second-in-command. Five years later, his former employer tapped him to edit the 2008 book, TIME: 85 Years of Great Writing. Bruce Handy, a former Time writer and editor now at Vanity Fair, described Chris’ management style, unusual in the high-pressure world of magazine journalism, as “a rare combination of kindness, grace, wit, humility and high standards.”
Richard Zoglin, a TV critic of the Porterfield era, writes “Chris was my North Star at Time, the embodiment of the magazine’s traditions and high standards: the love of language, the passion for clarity and concision, and the sense of a journalistic mission that superseded any single writer’s ego. He taught me how to write, how to edit, and how to behave.”
In addition to Stephanie, his loving wife of 59 years, Chris is survived by son Christopher and his children Maya and Christopher, of Hermosa Beach, CA; and son Kevin and his wife Bridget, and their children Wren and Scott, of Chicago. A daughter, Tessa Porterfield, died in 2017. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the National Endowment for the Arts (arts.gov) or the Alzheimer's Association (alz.org). --Donald Morrison --Posted 11/3/2021
• Ralph Spielman reports on a memorial held for Chris in New York on December 4 attended by some 100 friends and colleagues from as far away as the West Coast. His old friend Dick Cavett described Chris in these words, “so able, so friendly, so. . . perfect”. The gathering heard the recording of Loose Walk, a jazz piece played by Chris and his band at Carnegie Hall on November 30, 1957. Chris’s son Kevin related how Chris would always come home for dinner even on closing nights and then on a Friday night would drive five hours overnight to their place in upstate New York. —posted 12/05/2021
An SI Golfer
• David Leo Long, 75, who capped a 35-year career at Time Inc. by serving as publisher of Sports Illustrated, died in September in Lake Forest. David grew up in Milwaukee and Chicago and worked for Time Inc. in Chicago as well as New York.
He graduated from college but said that he got his best education in the US Army. He served as a tank commander the 2d Infantry Division in Korea. During the crisis over the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968 his unit was deployed to the front to stand as the first defense had the North Koreans attacked.
David worked for both People and Life, but the bulk of his career was spent at Sports Illustrated. Golf played a huge part in his life both for sport and business. He played some of the best courses in the world and helped oversee the care, renovation, and improvement of the courses he loved so much.
A Star Correspondent
• Joseph Kane, 84, a star Time correspondent in Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, Washington and Los Angeles over a period of more than 20 years, died of lung cancer in Atlanta in August, 2021.
Joe grew up in Washington and graduated from Georgetown University. His first job at Time was as a messenger for the Washington Bureau. Then he spent a spell in the Army as a second lieutenant commanding a howitzer battery in Germany. On his return home, Time hired him as a correspondent in Detroit.
In the 1970s Joe served as bureau chief in Miami and Atlanta for three years. He moved to the Washington Bureau where for four years he was the Time Pentagon correspondent. In his final act in the 1980s Joe became Los Angeles bureau chief.
Over the years he reported on many cover subjects and other major stories including the rise of Jimmy Carter, the magazine’s look at the New South, race riots in Detroit, Cassius Clay (then Mohammed Ali), and the space program. He covered the return of the Columbia space ship to Edwards Air Force Base after its first flight in 1981.
Joe was one of seven siblings and he and his wife had four sons. He was a devout Catholic and an active member of the Knights of Columbus. He was well known among friends and colleagues for his sharp wit.
A leader in Time Inc’s expansion
• Rhett Austell Jr., 96, a former group vice president at the Time Inc., died at home in Sentry Hill in York, Maine in August.
Rhett grew up in Middletown, New York, and graduated from the Hotchkiss School in 1943. Soon after entering Williams College he was inducted in the Army. He served the 84th Division in Europe handling a Browning automatic rifle. He was taken prisoner in November 1944 and used his college freshman German to become a translator for fellow prisoners.
When he returned home he resumed his education at Williams, graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa student. He went on to the Harvard Business School as a Baker scholar and graduated in 1950. He joined the Time Inc. then and rose through a series of management positions over 24 years.
He was general manager of Time magazine and then in 1964 became supervisor of all book operations. His responsibilities expanded as the company moved also into film, TV and records. He became a group vice president and the people under him included two future CEOs, Gerald Levin and Dick Munro. The film operation was not successful but it did produce one hit, Fort Apache, the Bronx with Paul Newman.
He was also involved in the early, shaky beginnings of HBO but left the company in 1974 before HBO took off. He joined American Heritage as president and publisher and in the last decade of his working career was a partner in the executive search firm, Ward Howell international.
In retirement Rhett served as president of the Hotchkiss and Williams alumni societies and as a trustee of the New York Public Library. He and his first and second wives traveled all over the world— Patagonia, Namibia, Tibet and Antarctica and all the usual places in Europe. During his working life he lived in Briarcliff Manor and then New York City. In retirement he first moved to Portsmouth. New Hampshire, then Kittery, Maine and finally York, Maine.
A TLAS Stalwart
• Doris Laffan, 96, who worked in human relations at Time Inc. for 31 years and was a stalwart volunteer in the TLAS office for years after retiring, died in July in Derry, New Hampshire, where she had lived in recent years.
Doris was one of four volunteers—the others being Loretta Geissler, Mary Piper Placko and Helen Hiltbrand—who kept the TLAS office functioning for many years. They arranged luncheons and dinners, dealt with caterers, made our group travel plans, handled the mail and phone calls to our office in the Time & Life Building and helped with our newsletter. While the Society’s presidents and board members would come and go, the four ladies were always there. Doris was a member of the Society’s board and its treasurer.
She graduated from the College of Mount St. Vincent in 1947 with a degree in mathematics. There being little demand for mathematicians she took classes in typing and stenography and went to work for the US Rubber Company. Doris soon moved over to Time Inc, where she enjoyed her 31-year career. She always worked on the corporate side, handling human relations and employee compensation. In the final years of her career she tracked stock options from an office on the 34th floor.
Doris never married but was very close to a large family of four brothers and sisters and 21 nieces and nephews. Her house in Flushing was the center for family festivities at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Her nieces and nephews were welcome to live with her when they were in college or starting new careers in the city. She helped them with their college fees. She took her nieces and nephews individually on travel to Disneyland and other places when they were young.
A devout Catholic, Doris attended the canonization of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in the Vatican in 1975. She lived in Flushing for 83 years but in her last decade moved to Derry, New Hampshire, to be near family. Her twin sister Grace Kimball moved to the same senior residence in Derry.—posted 7/21/21
Editor, Author, Musician
• Peter A. Young, 87, a former Life correspondent in Moscow and longtime editor-in-chief of Archaeology magazine, died July 12 at a nursing center in Rye, New York. Peter was educated at Deerfield Academy and at Princeton University. He had a graduate degree from the Journalism School at Columbia University.
In the late 1960s, Peter developed the special coverage that Life gave to the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. During his 2½ years in Moscow, he traveled widely in Russia and reported extensively on Russia’s rich artistic, literary and cultural life. Then as bureau chief in Vienna he reported on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a correspondent based in Paris he reported extensively on Arab-Israeli relations. He also interviewed Chile’s Salvador Allende and former president George H. W. Bush when he was at the UN.
From Life, Peter went to the Saturday Review as managing editor in the 1970s and then became editor-in-chief of Archaeology magazine, a post he held for 23 years. The magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, is a serious scientific publication that Peter made appeal also to the nonscientific reader. He also led the development of a TV series on archaeology, which further expanded interest in the subject. He received a special achievement award from the Society of Professional Archaeologists and his magazine won a gold medal from the National Arts Club.
After retiring, Peter wrote three books: Mission to Moscow, A Cold War Look at the Warmth of the Russian People; My Storybook Life: A Journey Through the Pages of Time, and A Walk in the Woods (a book of his poetry). In addition to writing poetry, Peter was an accomplished musician on the piano and the harpsichord, specializing in Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart and Beethoven. He also had a fine baritone voice which he contributed to the Greenwich Choral Society and the choir at Christ’s Church in Rye. He led poetry and literary reading groups at the Osborne House in Rye and performed at various nursing homes. He lived in Port Chester with his wife, Mary Luehrsen, who survives him. —posted 7/18/21Three Decades at SI
• Thomas J. Hickey Jr, 84, whose three-decade career at Sports Illustrated took him from sales to associate publisher at the magazine, died in June in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had lived many years. (no picture available)
Tom was born in Queens, had served in the Marines and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brooklyn College. As a sales executive for SI he worked in the magazine’s offices in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. He became advertising sales director and eventually associate publisher.
He was also Olympic director for the magazine and a lifelong fan of the Rangers, Giants, Mets and Knicks. The most memorable event in his life as a sports fan came in 1980 at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when he watched the young American hockey team defeat the more experienced Soviets.
He played golf and enjoyed swimming in the ocean and body surfing. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity and A Better Chance. (From a note posted by the family)
Lifetime LIFEer
• Eleanor Graves, 95, a former assistant managing editor of Life and former president of the TLAS, died in July in Sarasota, where she had lived for many years.
Like her late husband, Ralph Graves, she had worked all her career at Life. A confirmed New Yorker, Eleanor went to Spence School and Barnard College. After some years toiling as a researcher at the magazine, she became an associate editor. In that job she supervised the production of a successful series called “Great Dinners from Life”. The dinners were actually prepared and photographed in her Manhattan apartment. The series, published in the late 1960s, led to the publication of Eleanor’s bestseller cookbook of the same name.
After the weekly Life was suspended in 1972, she remained with the company. She first was given the task of developing a magazine to be called Woman. But tests of the pocket-sized magazine did not go well and the project was dropped. All along the idea of reviving Life in some form kept percolating. In 1978 Time Inc. introduced the new monthly Life with you Phil Kunhardt as managing editor and Eleanor as assistant managing editor.
Eleanor and Ralph both graduated from college in 1948, she from Barnard and he from Harvard. They met that September when both became researchers at Life. They married other people but realized after working together for seven years that they were in love. They divorced their spouses and married in 1958. While she continued to work for Time Inc. Ralph wrote several books including a history of Martha’s Vineyard, where they spent many summers, and a loving story of their marriage, Objects of Desire, A Story of Love and Marriage. (“The object of desire” were the meaningful things one acquired in a lifetime, such as a house or particular painting.)
From Bottom to Top in 40 Years
• Donald Barr, 87, a genial executive vice president at Time Inc. and an expert in the production and distribution of magazines, died in July. His career at Time Inc.stretched for 40 years and the company was his only employer.
Don, the youngest of four children, grew up in Chicago and graduated from high school there in 1953. He spent summers caddying at the North Shore Country Club in Glenview, Illinois. A member told him about Evans scholarships for deserving caddies. Don applied and won a place at Notre Dame. He played basketball and on graduating in 1957 as class vice president he had the memorable experience of introducing the speaker, Senator Jack Kennedy.
When Don graduated, Time Inc. hired him in Chicago and his first job was to sort out old metal printing plates used for magazine covers. He moved through various production jobs and became European director of production and then in 1975 went to Paris, where he ran operations for Europe and Africa. Don attended the Harvard executive MBA program when he returned to US and became general manager of Time.
Next came an assignment as associate publisher and ad sales director for Sports Illustrated. He is credited with conceiving the idea of Sports Illustrated for Kids. In 1994 he was named Executive VP of the Corporation and on his way to and from his new office on the 34th floor he could see those metal plates for magazine covers that he had picked out back in 1957. They were hung on the wall next to the elevators.
Don, like many Time Inc. executives, lived for many years in Greenwich, Connecticut. He served on many boards and supported many causes, but focused on his role as chairman of the board of the Connecticut Chapter of The First Tee, which develops the interest of young people in golf. (Adapted from a family death notice.)
A Most Discreet Administrative Assistant
• Jane Nelson, 74, the charming and most discreet administrative assistant to three successive editors-in-chief at Time Inc., died in July in Ardsley-on-Hudson where she had for many years lived with her husband that late Ed Magnuson, one of Time’s top writers.
When Jane left her home in New Jersey for New York she worked first at an ad agency, but soon moved to Time magazine to begin a long career at the company. She became administrative assistant to the managing editor, Henry Grunwald. When Henry moved up to the 34th floor as editor-in-chief of all the magazines, she accompanied him. When Jason McManus succeeded Henry she became his administrative assistant, and she continued in the same position when Norman Pearlstein followed Jason.
Katie McNevin, who worked next to Jane for many years, writes that she was “the best administrative assistant I ever came across in my 40 years with the company. “She was organized, had amazing skills, was unfailingly polite and perhaps most important was beyond discreet (sometimes maddeningly so).”
Another colleague, Sally Proudfit, said the two of them would have animated lunchtime conversations about politics and the theater. They both attended classes on global politics at the 92nd Street Y. They both followed New York theater closely and Sally writes that Jane was always able to get early tickets to Broadway shows worth seeing.
Jane and Ed, who at one time held the record for the most covers written for the magazine, married in the 1980s and moved from Manhattan to Ardsley-on-Hudson. They became avid dog lovers and trained a series of golden retrievers they took on long walks along the Hudson. Jane unfailingly attended the annual Westminster Dog Show in New York.
“How lucky we were to work with him”
• Richard B. Stolley, 92, the founding editor of the phenomenally successful People magazine and the enterprising reporter who secured the famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination for Life, died of a heart ailment on June 16 in Evanston, Illinois.
Dick had an exceptional combination of talents that enabled him to be both an extraordinary reporter and a competent and imaginative managing editor. His many admirers at People loved the sense of excitement that he created at the magazine. MC Marden, on learning of his death, emailed TLAS: “The day at People was never better then when you heard his office door open and Dick headed down the hall to start a new story. That rush of excitement was just great. As was Dick. How lucky we were to work with him.”
He was born in Peoria Illinois and always said that he knew at the age of 12 that he was going to be a journalist. At the age of 15 he became sports editor of the local daily newspaper. He later attended the school of journalism at Northwestern University, earning bachelor and Masters degrees.
As a young reporter for Life, Dick saw firsthand the struggle to integrate schools in the South. He said the magazine showed pictures of the face of hate and of the face of courage. As Life’s bureau chief in Los Angeles he mixed easily with Hollywood celebrities, but it was when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 that he achieved his finest moment. A freelance journalist in Dallas called to tell him that a man with a name that sounded like Zapruder had been on the scene with his home 8-mm movie camera and had a film of the assassination.
Dick rushed to the airport and got on the first Dallas-bound plane, which was crowded with journalists (some even traveling in the aisle). When he got to Dallas in the midst of the chaos he did something very simple. He looked in the phone book and under the “Zs” he found a name spelled exactly as it sounded, Abraham Zapruder. He called the number and found Zapruder receptive but too drained and upset to see Dick that evening. Instead of pushing, Dick made the crucial decision not to press too hard. Zapruder asked him to come by at nine the following morning.
Dick thought that by nine there might be a pack of journalists at the house so he showed up at eight. He found two Secret Service men there who wanted two of the three copies of the film which Zapruder had had it developed overnight. Dick negotiated a price of $50,000 for rights to use the third film and wrote out a contract while other journalists were pounding on the door desperate to talk to Zapruder. (Among them was Dan Rather who realized that CBS was not rich enough to outbid Life— hard to believe today.) Life later paid Zapruder more for additional rights and eventually he donated the film to the National Archives.
Later when Zapruder was asked to explain why he chose Life, he said that Dick acted like a gentleman and that he thought Life would treat the film with respect. His one requirement was that Life not print frame 313, which showed the moment when Oswald’s bullet exploded the president’s brain.
Dick went on to become an editor of Life and when Time Inc. decided to start a new magazine called People, he was asked to run it. From the first issue in 1974 it was a phenomenal success. At the time Dick explained it was not a celebrity magazine but a magazine that would “celebrate the lives of ordinary people doing extraordinary things and the lives of extraordinary people doing ordinary things.” As things turns out, there were a lot of celebrities. People ran 57 covers of Princess Diana, the most about anybody.
Dick’s sense of humor showed in his rough rules for what covers sold best. He laid these out tongue-in cheek:
• Pretty is better than ugly.
• Young is better than old.
• Movies are better than TV. [Today, TV would probably sell better than movies.]
• TV is better than sports.
• Anything is better than politics.
From People, Dick moved up the 34th floor in the Time & Life Building and became editorial director for all of the magazines. Later in retirement, he continued to advise the magazines. He was elected to the Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. He had many interests and activities including TLAS which he headed for a period, He moved to Santa Fe where he found an old friend Hal Wingo, who was also one of the founders of People.
When his health deteriorated he moved to Evanston near his daughter Melinda and entered a hospice. People was Time Inc.’s greatest magazine success—at a time when the other magazines started to decline.—Jeremy Main—posted 6/22/2021
A Personal Note: From my first day working with Dick in 1974 we clicked. I recall meeting him one time in the layout room to work on a story about the new Pope. The author had the picture people collect every picture available. When we got to the neatly piled stacks of hundreds of pictures, we looked at each other bewildered about where to begin. Without a word he began sorting the pictures at one end of the table, I began at the other end. When we met in the middle we had a reasonable selection. At that point he looked at me and said: “make it work.“ I did! It was not an unusual day in my eight years working with Dick at People —Bob Essman—posted 6/22/2021
Dick had an exceptional combination of talents that enabled him to be both an extraordinary reporter and a competent and imaginative managing editor. His many admirers at People loved the sense of excitement that he created at the magazine. MC Marden, on learning of his death, emailed TLAS: “The day at People was never better then when you heard his office door open and Dick headed down the hall to start a new story. That rush of excitement was just great. As was Dick. How lucky we were to work with him.”
He was born in Peoria Illinois and always said that he knew at the age of 12 that he was going to be a journalist. At the age of 15 he became sports editor of the local daily newspaper. He later attended the school of journalism at Northwestern University, earning bachelor and Masters degrees.
As a young reporter for Life, Dick saw firsthand the struggle to integrate schools in the South. He said the magazine showed pictures of the face of hate and of the face of courage. As Life’s bureau chief in Los Angeles he mixed easily with Hollywood celebrities, but it was when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 that he achieved his finest moment. A freelance journalist in Dallas called to tell him that a man with a name that sounded like Zapruder had been on the scene with his home 8-mm movie camera and had a film of the assassination.
Dick rushed to the airport and got on the first Dallas-bound plane, which was crowded with journalists (some even traveling in the aisle). When he got to Dallas in the midst of the chaos he did something very simple. He looked in the phone book and under the “Zs” he found a name spelled exactly as it sounded, Abraham Zapruder. He called the number and found Zapruder receptive but too drained and upset to see Dick that evening. Instead of pushing, Dick made the crucial decision not to press too hard. Zapruder asked him to come by at nine the following morning.
Dick thought that by nine there might be a pack of journalists at the house so he showed up at eight. He found two Secret Service men there who wanted two of the three copies of the film which Zapruder had had it developed overnight. Dick negotiated a price of $50,000 for rights to use the third film and wrote out a contract while other journalists were pounding on the door desperate to talk to Zapruder. (Among them was Dan Rather who realized that CBS was not rich enough to outbid Life— hard to believe today.) Life later paid Zapruder more for additional rights and eventually he donated the film to the National Archives.
Later when Zapruder was asked to explain why he chose Life, he said that Dick acted like a gentleman and that he thought Life would treat the film with respect. His one requirement was that Life not print frame 313, which showed the moment when Oswald’s bullet exploded the president’s brain.
Dick went on to become an editor of Life and when Time Inc. decided to start a new magazine called People, he was asked to run it. From the first issue in 1974 it was a phenomenal success. At the time Dick explained it was not a celebrity magazine but a magazine that would “celebrate the lives of ordinary people doing extraordinary things and the lives of extraordinary people doing ordinary things.” As things turns out, there were a lot of celebrities. People ran 57 covers of Princess Diana, the most about anybody.
Dick’s sense of humor showed in his rough rules for what covers sold best. He laid these out tongue-in cheek:
• Pretty is better than ugly.
• Young is better than old.
• Movies are better than TV. [Today, TV would probably sell better than movies.]
• TV is better than sports.
• Anything is better than politics.
From People, Dick moved up the 34th floor in the Time & Life Building and became editorial director for all of the magazines. Later in retirement, he continued to advise the magazines. He was elected to the Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. He had many interests and activities including TLAS which he headed for a period, He moved to Santa Fe where he found an old friend Hal Wingo, who was also one of the founders of People.
When his health deteriorated he moved to Evanston near his daughter Melinda and entered a hospice. People was Time Inc.’s greatest magazine success—at a time when the other magazines started to decline.—Jeremy Main—posted 6/22/2021
A Personal Note: From my first day working with Dick in 1974 we clicked. I recall meeting him one time in the layout room to work on a story about the new Pope. The author had the picture people collect every picture available. When we got to the neatly piled stacks of hundreds of pictures, we looked at each other bewildered about where to begin. Without a word he began sorting the pictures at one end of the table, I began at the other end. When we met in the middle we had a reasonable selection. At that point he looked at me and said: “make it work.“ I did! It was not an unusual day in my eight years working with Dick at People —Bob Essman—posted 6/22/2021
• • •
Belated Farewells 2 (in age order)
• Burjor Nargolwala, 99, Time magazine’s former layout chief, died at a retirement home in Florida some time ago. Joe, as he was called, was a quiet, modest man who came from India and was a Zoroastrian. During World War II he was living in America and he enlisted in the Army and became a US citizen. Joe was layout chief in the 1980s when the magazine began to experiment with computers instead of paste and scissors to create the magazine. We don’t know exactly when he died.
• F. Patrick Lintott, 90, a veteran Time Magazine executive in Canada and Asia, died in April in Toronto where he had lived for many years. Born in England, Patrick emigrated to Canada in 1948. He spent several years working for McLean Hunter, a major Canadian publishing and communication company, in Toronto. He joined Time Canada in 1966. He worked in Montréal, Toronto and Singapore before retiring. He was an enthusiastic skier, tennis player, hiker and traveler.
• Joan Dumper Mebane, 84, a researcher at Fortune and Time Life Books, died in 2015 in Short Hills, New Jersey, where she had lived all her life. She was a graduate of Vassar. She went from Time Inc. to work on corporate affairs at Philip Morris. She was a keen golfer and tennis player and served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.
• Richard T. Serafin, 79, former director of print operations at Time Inc. died in April at the Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a degree in economics, he served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1966.
• • •
Belated Farewells 2 (in age order)
• Burjor Nargolwala, 99, Time magazine’s former layout chief, died at a retirement home in Florida some time ago. Joe, as he was called, was a quiet, modest man who came from India and was a Zoroastrian. During World War II he was living in America and he enlisted in the Army and became a US citizen. Joe was layout chief in the 1980s when the magazine began to experiment with computers instead of paste and scissors to create the magazine. We don’t know exactly when he died.
• F. Patrick Lintott, 90, a veteran Time Magazine executive in Canada and Asia, died in April in Toronto where he had lived for many years. Born in England, Patrick emigrated to Canada in 1948. He spent several years working for McLean Hunter, a major Canadian publishing and communication company, in Toronto. He joined Time Canada in 1966. He worked in Montréal, Toronto and Singapore before retiring. He was an enthusiastic skier, tennis player, hiker and traveler.
• Joan Dumper Mebane, 84, a researcher at Fortune and Time Life Books, died in 2015 in Short Hills, New Jersey, where she had lived all her life. She was a graduate of Vassar. She went from Time Inc. to work on corporate affairs at Philip Morris. She was a keen golfer and tennis player and served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.
• Richard T. Serafin, 79, former director of print operations at Time Inc. died in April at the Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a degree in economics, he served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1966.
• • •
A True New Yorker
• Mary Elizabeth Morris, known to generations of Time Inc. editors as Betty, who lived for all of her 100 years in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, and who spent her entire 44-year career at Time Inc. magazines, died at home in Queens in April.
Betty graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in English in 1943 and went to work at Time Inc. in 1944 where she remained until her retirement in 1986. During those years she was a research assistant for several magazines and worked directly with top editors such as Daniel Seligman at Fortune and Philip K Jessup at Life. She enjoyed her front row seat on the world’s events during the best years of magazine publishing.
After retiring Betty volunteered for 20 years at New York Presbyterian Hospital, helping nurses, serving meals and comforting patients. At an award ceremony in 2014, the hospital recognized her services. Betty loved music, tennis and travel. She played tennis for more than 20 years at the Westside tennis club in Forest Hills. She sang for 40 years with St. George’s Choral Society and was proud to have sung once at Lincoln Center.
Her travels took her to many parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In New York she would set about briskly in her Ferragamo shoes to visit museums, shops and friends. She lived with her mother and cared for her until her death in 1986. A true New Yorker, Betty never had a driver’s license and for that matter never had a credit card.
Betty’s three siblings died before her, but she is survived by 12 nieces and nephews, and a large number of grandnieces and grandnephews. (Our thanks to George Smith and George Reilly for this information.) —posted 5/14/2021
A Good President
• Charles Rubens II, 90, known universally as the happy “Carky”, a self-proclaimed “Ad Man” of the great days of magazines and the cheery, painstaking president of our Time Life Alumni Society, died at home in Scarsdale in April.
Carky could find amusement in almost anything, even the time he was laid off by Life and consigned an “outbox” office until he could find his feet, but he was meticulous in his work. He would proofread our newsletter and find typos and mistakes that nobody else saw.
He would joyfully describe his days at Life and other and other magazines when he was selling liquor and tobacco ads bragging that he was paid to take weekend golfing trips with clients, by private plane if necessary, and no limit on spending for entertainment.
Carky grew up in Chicago and played football and swam at Highland Park high school. He kept up the sports at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. After graduating with a degree in philosophy in 1952 he joined the Army. His prowess as a swimmer got him assigned to be lifeguard to President Eisenhower’s grandchildren at Fort Sheridan. Colorado also introduced him to skiing which he kept at all his life. For nearly 50 years Carky would take his whole family for Christmas holiday skiing at Steamboat Springs or another Western resort. Who else nearing the age of 90 could spend nine straight days speeding down the slopes without serious damage. Carky also played golf, climbed mountains and finished in three New York marathons.
On leaving the Army, Carky signed up as a merchandiser for Life in Denver. From there he worked his way up the ladder in various jobs in Chicago and New York. In 1966 he became promotion director of Life and subsequently sales director. After the weekly Life folded in 1972, he took a detour and became advertising director for the Dreyfus Corporation. He led the first ad campaign for a mutual fund and created the tagline, “Is the investment world a jungle to you? To us it’s home.” He established an enduring connection with business as a member of the board of several Franklin Templeton investment funds.
When Life revived as a monthly in 1978, Carky returned as advertising sales director. He went on to hold several Time Inc. jobs at Sports Illustrated and Money, then as associate publisher for Sports Illustrated For Kids and finally as a corporate vice president of advertising for the liquor and tobacco categories. He was one of the first executives to hire Women and Blacks in these jobs.
Carky and his wife Mary, who graduated Colorado College just a year after Carky, endowed a scholarship at the college and Carky served as a college trustee. He also gave the college a page from one of the original Gutenberg Bibles. No, he did not cut it out from a museum copy. Somebody had already done that long ago and he inherited it. Carky and Mary were married 68 years, lived in Scarsdale most of those years and enjoyed the proximity to New York City. They were frequent theatergoers. They both loved golf and were 50-year members of the Lakeshore Country Club in Illinois and the Sunningdale Country Club in New York.
Carky joined the TLAS soon after retiring in 1992. In 2009 Carky was elected president, the ninth since the establishment of the TLAS but the first to come from the business side. It was not an easy time to be president because Time Inc. had started to run into trouble and was cutting costs. But Carky was well-connected throughout the company and knew how to make a sale so we kept our office and our subsidies after his successful meeting with CEO Joe Ripp. Carky ran our board meetings with cheerful competence. Requests from members always got his attention. He lined up good speakers and arranged a number of our successful trips overseas and to Washington. After he had been in office for five years we finally accepted his plea to be let go and we did. It was a good presidency. --Jeremy Main —posted 5/5/2021
—A REMEBRANCE OF CARKY: George Vollmuth dug out notes the other day for a speech had made to honor to Carky Rubens when he retired in 1991. He said that Carky who was then ad director for Money magazine was known for his frugality, much in contrast to his free-spending days when Carky was selling liquor ads for Life. Instead of taking his guests in the company jet for a weekend of golf Florida, he had them drive themselves to the Eagle Lodge in Pennsylvania in the dead of winter. The Eagle Lodge was not greatly in demand – it stood in the shadow of Three-Mile Island.
Carky drove there himself in his 10-year-old turquoise Datsun with about 400,000 miles on it. Instead of the expensive gifts Time Inc. used to give to its advertisers, at the Eagle Lodge Carky gave them long purple T-shirts, which hardly appealed to the men but surprisingly pleased their wives who use them as nightgowns. Emblazoned across the front of these T-shirts was the slogan "Carky Says Sunshine.”
Carky believed in group activities at these sessions, but with a sense of humor. At Eagle Lodge he produced a huge balloon -- an earth ball --for his guests to bounce around. At another winter gathering at Lake George, Carky had them playing indoor polo with broomsticks. Carky was a magician, or at least he delighted in pulling quarters on small children’s ears.
—posted 1/20/2022
A “Dream Employee” at SI
• Janet McDougall, 80, who spent her entire 43-year career working at Sports Illustrated and became the beloved go-to person at the magazine, died of leukemia early in April at home in Manhattan. Janet worked all those years in SI’s business office becoming staff operations manager, a job in which she was known for her meticulous attention to detail and for her cheerful helpfulness towards one and all.
After she retired in 2004, Janet volunteered to work at TLAS office and remained there while TLAS was being dissolved. Although she had been hospitalized twice recently, we were not aware of how ill she was. Janet was a private person and the only evidence she gave of the seriousness of her illness was an email she sent out in March saying she would no longer be able to handle emails.
TLAS board secretary Carolyn McCandless, who handled much of the work of closing down our society, writes: “Janet was my guide to the mechanics of how TLAS worked and kept track of its membership. She was invaluable in helping me sort through the proxies necessary for the TLAS meeting where the membership officially approved the dissolution. In the first couple of months of this year, we were working on the final directory and accuracy in this project made it a success. Realizing how ill she must have been, makes me doubly grateful for her efforts to help keep us connected.”
Janet and her twin Peter were born in Newark in 1940. She attended high schools in Kearny and Bernardsville and then earned a degree in political science from Hood College. Before starting her long career at Sports Illustrated she also studied at the Catherine Gibbs secretarial school.
Just as she had one employer in New York she had one address, on East 70th Street. At first she and three other young women rented a two-bedroom apartment. When the three roommates moved out Janet remained and eventually became owner of the apartment. That’s where she died.
Her brother Alan says that when their parents were in their 90s it was Janet who looked after them, as she did when her twin Peter was ailing.
She enjoyed an active cultural life in New York. She sang second alto with the Village Light Opera and later with the Canterbury Choral Society. She took several courses at universities in New York and according to her brother “never left a bookstore without several books in hand.”
We have received an unusual number of tributes to Janet. Here is a sample:
“I have never known a more dedicated employee. When something needed to be done, she could always be counted on to pitch in without complaint and pursue the task down to the smallest detail. She was a dream employee for any boss, a trusted confidant, and a very good friend.” --Vic Sauerhoff
“Janet was the nicest, most wonderful person one could ever hope to know. In my book, she was Miss Sports Illustrated. She kept the business office going.” --Bob McCoach
“Nicest person in the world indeed. Also easiest person to work with, most patient, most helpful, never without a welcoming smile, thoroughly knowledgeable.” --Jim Hayes.
(Thanks to her brother Alan McDougall for much help with this item, to her nephew John McDougall for the photo above and to
Ralph Spielman, who remains the one active member of the TLAS volunteer staff.)
A Real Ad Man
• Robert C. Foster III, 84; an ad salesman for Time Inc. magazines whose real life outdid whatever you may have seen on Ad Men but who also had a passion for the sea and sailing that never faded, died in December in Tucson, where he had lived in retirement.
Bob grew up in Newtonville, Massachusetts, but spent all his summers with his maternal grandparents, who were among the first to build a summer place in Ocean Point, Maine. There he came to love the sea. He enrolled in Bowdoin College in 1954. But was expelled and joined the Navy. He became a pilot and was assigned to Malta. His flying career came to an end when a plane he was riding as a passenger crashed and his injuries ended his career as a pilot. (He finally completed his studies at Bowdoin in 1984.)
He got to Madison Avenue in the 1960s when the big magazines were flush with ads and cash. Bob sold ads for Life, Time Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek. One of his jobs was to arrange celebrity events for advertisers and to produce somebody like Sammy Davis Jr. at exactly the right moment. The job was nerve-racking for he never knew if the celebrity would actually appear. After years at the magazines, Bob was hired by CBS, one of the networks that was taking ads away from the magazines .
In a self -published memoir, Ad Man, he did not spare himself in describing his excesses. The most extreme one he called “airport bingo.” At the end of the working week he would hoist a few drinks, take a cab to the airport and get on any plane with the destination that appealed. Often he would wake up the next day without any idea where he was. His only goal was to get back on Monday morning. Usually he made it, but once he woke up in Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia. He didn’t make it back in time. These weekends became even more fun when an attractive young French travel agent joined him. Bob was married twice, had four children but admitted to frequent infidelities. Eventually he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
During frequent gaps between gigs in the advertising business, Bob followed his passion for sailing. He spent years living in a wooden sailboat in the Caribbean. In 1996 he moved to live full-time in Maine and became marketing director for the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard. He brought to the shipyard several famous sailboats for restoration.
Eventually the nor’easters in Maine became too much for him, so he moved to Tucson where he died a landlubber, dry for 48 years.
Bevedit Veteran
• Daniel H Franks Jr., 90, who operated the telex machines in the Los Angela’s bureau for many years, died last June as we learned recently. Dan was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from high school there in 1947.
He enrolled in the Dana School of Music at Youngstown College (now Youngstown State University) in Ohio and studied the flute. While in college he became the first flutist in the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra. The Army drafted him in 1952 and sent him to Korea, where he served until 1955.
After returning from Korea he married and moved with his new wife to Los Angeles where he worked full-time for 33 years at Hughes Aircraft in its special communications department. For those same years he worked part-time for Time, operating the telex machine that transmitted copy and messages to New York.
Dan retired in 1989 and served the Presbyterian Church as a deacon, elder, Bible studies leader and choir member.
Breaking The Glass Ceiling
• Patricia Kyle, 89, an advertising executive at Time Inc. and other magazine companies during the heyday of the ad biz, died in December at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Greenport, Long Island, where she lived lately.
She was born in Summit, New Jersey, and went to school there but finished at the Chapin School in Manhattan. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she majored in early childhood education and psychology.
In 1958 Patricia began to appear in TV commercials and had some minor roles in TV dramas. But a friend persuaded her move to the magazine business where she became a promotion and merchandising executive at the Ladies Home Journal and Time Inc. She ended her career as director of advertising for a group of 14 magazines at Condé Nast. She served on the board of the Advertising Women of New York, among other trade groups.
Patricia spent summers at East Hampton and made the Long Island town her home for the rest of her life. Her father served as mayor East Hampton Village from 1967 to 1971. She played golf and tennis in the summer and paddle tennis in the winter at the Maidstone Club, where she became the first female member of the board. She put in many hours working for various charities. One of her particular pleasures was to take her children, five grandchildren and a niece a few days before Christmas to Manhattan for lunch and a matinee at the theatre.
A London Fixture
• Terry Smith, 75, a born Londoner who came to the Time Life bureau in London as a 15-year-old office boy and stayed on for the rest of his career becoming a skilled photographer and correspondent and eventually People’s deputy bureau chief, died in England last November.
One evening when the bureau was quiet, Terry and his buddy, Ken Goff, started looking through photos taken by staff photographers. They had the same thought. “I can do that.” And they did.
With much help and advice from visiting Life photographers, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt and Hank Walker, Terry became a skilled photographer. He was soon shooting for Time and People, as well as The New York Times and USA Today.
By the 1980s, Terry was shooting mainly for People. He was good at telling stories with his camera and he took pictures of many of the world’s most famous people. His favorite subject was Helen Mirren. After he had knocked on her door about 10 times at 11a.m. one day, she greeted him in her nightgown. With his skill at putting people at their ease, he soon had her perched on her unmade bed in her nightgown without any makeup on. She looked “absolutely gorgeous”, Terry said. His assignments took him to many places, including the Falkland Islands after the war there between Britain and Argentina in 1982.
In the 1980s, he was made a staff photographer and correspondent, as well as deputy bureau chief for People in London. He retired in 2000 and arranged exhibits of his work and pursued his interest in antiques. The National Portrait Gallery in London holds five of his photographs. (Thanks to M.C. Marden for this item.) —posted 3/18/2021
A Man With Many Friends
• David Sloan, 73, the genial and unflappable director of editorial operations at Fortune for many years, died in February at the Stony Brook Hospital on Long Island. The Fortune Facebook page filled up with affectionate messages from fellow workers.
David was born in Jackson Heights, New York, but spent the years from ages 5 to 15 high up in the Andes where his father managed a smelting plant in La Oroya, Peru (altitude 12,278 feet). He returned to the United States speaking fluent Spanish, but never having seen TV, and graduated from high school in Bedford, New York/
He studied political science at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania and began his long career in publishing at the Patent Trader in Mount Kisco, New York. David worked at Sports Illustrated, Time, Money, People, and Time-Life Books before settling into his job at Fortune. As director of editorial operations at Fortune he had to make sure that all elements of the magazine were ready to go to the printer. He was the buffer between sometimes difficult personalities, the guy who got the job done, the one who was never ruffled when deadlines were tight, and always had a joke to tell.
David had a condo in Puerto Vallarta, where he enjoyed using his Spanish, and a house on the North Fork of Long Island with ample views of the water. Friends and colleagues were welcome to use them, rent free. He was a keen golfer and bridge player. (Thanks to Edith Fried for this item). —Posted 2/28/21
“Life’s Paris Bureau Angel”
• Hélène Vèret, 88, for many years the bouncy, joyful photo editor for Life who could find a way to solve almost any of the extravagant requests that the weekly was prone to make, died in January 11, 2021 in Paris.
In an eloquent memorial to Hélène by Tala Skari and Cathy Nolan, published by The Eye of Photography, they described her as “one of the most beloved figures in the Paris journalism community.” Jordan Bonfante, former Time Paris bureau chief, recalls “I go way back to the old Life magazine where Hélène was already a belle of the ball…. our smart, lovable, live wire Hélène. How much friendship did she extend to us all? How many favors did she do for us, every one of us all over the place. How many laughs did we have over her every blasphemy,”
The authors of the memorial write: “She was irrepressible, vibrant, glamorous, a blond bombshell —a French femme fatale without the toxic ingredients, a natural-born free spirit feminist. She was a mesmerizing storyteller with an encyclopedic repertoire of show tunes and ribald songs.”
She had an adventurous spirit which took her to Pennsylvania to study at Bucknell and then on to San Francisco, where by day she tutored children in English and by night sang chansons in the Fallen Angel Café, alongside Johnny Mathis. On returning to France she hitchhiked across Europe and at the end of the 1950s returned to Paris. She hung out in the night clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
In 1960s. Hélène settled down. She went to work for Life and married. She had two daughters and remained married to the same man until his death in 2011. “She loved those days when Life was a weekly, when the parties were at the Tour d’Argent and the champagne flowed,” the authors write.
Hèlène became an expert in the care and feeding of photographers and was not intimidated by the inflated egos of some. She invented nicknames for them. Henri Cartier–Bresson, a good friend, she called a “hysterical monument” but got him to do what she wanted. Another photographer was “The Beast From The East.”
She also delivered commentary to the BBC, on everything from fashion to the death of President François Mitterand. The BBC loved what one BBC producer called ”the poshest French accent” of her delivery. —Posted 2/14/21
• Mary Elizabeth Morris, known to generations of Time Inc. editors as Betty, who lived for all of her 100 years in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, and who spent her entire 44-year career at Time Inc. magazines, died at home in Queens in April.
Betty graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in English in 1943 and went to work at Time Inc. in 1944 where she remained until her retirement in 1986. During those years she was a research assistant for several magazines and worked directly with top editors such as Daniel Seligman at Fortune and Philip K Jessup at Life. She enjoyed her front row seat on the world’s events during the best years of magazine publishing.
After retiring Betty volunteered for 20 years at New York Presbyterian Hospital, helping nurses, serving meals and comforting patients. At an award ceremony in 2014, the hospital recognized her services. Betty loved music, tennis and travel. She played tennis for more than 20 years at the Westside tennis club in Forest Hills. She sang for 40 years with St. George’s Choral Society and was proud to have sung once at Lincoln Center.
Her travels took her to many parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In New York she would set about briskly in her Ferragamo shoes to visit museums, shops and friends. She lived with her mother and cared for her until her death in 1986. A true New Yorker, Betty never had a driver’s license and for that matter never had a credit card.
Betty’s three siblings died before her, but she is survived by 12 nieces and nephews, and a large number of grandnieces and grandnephews. (Our thanks to George Smith and George Reilly for this information.) —posted 5/14/2021
A Good President
• Charles Rubens II, 90, known universally as the happy “Carky”, a self-proclaimed “Ad Man” of the great days of magazines and the cheery, painstaking president of our Time Life Alumni Society, died at home in Scarsdale in April.
Carky could find amusement in almost anything, even the time he was laid off by Life and consigned an “outbox” office until he could find his feet, but he was meticulous in his work. He would proofread our newsletter and find typos and mistakes that nobody else saw.
He would joyfully describe his days at Life and other and other magazines when he was selling liquor and tobacco ads bragging that he was paid to take weekend golfing trips with clients, by private plane if necessary, and no limit on spending for entertainment.
Carky grew up in Chicago and played football and swam at Highland Park high school. He kept up the sports at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. After graduating with a degree in philosophy in 1952 he joined the Army. His prowess as a swimmer got him assigned to be lifeguard to President Eisenhower’s grandchildren at Fort Sheridan. Colorado also introduced him to skiing which he kept at all his life. For nearly 50 years Carky would take his whole family for Christmas holiday skiing at Steamboat Springs or another Western resort. Who else nearing the age of 90 could spend nine straight days speeding down the slopes without serious damage. Carky also played golf, climbed mountains and finished in three New York marathons.
On leaving the Army, Carky signed up as a merchandiser for Life in Denver. From there he worked his way up the ladder in various jobs in Chicago and New York. In 1966 he became promotion director of Life and subsequently sales director. After the weekly Life folded in 1972, he took a detour and became advertising director for the Dreyfus Corporation. He led the first ad campaign for a mutual fund and created the tagline, “Is the investment world a jungle to you? To us it’s home.” He established an enduring connection with business as a member of the board of several Franklin Templeton investment funds.
When Life revived as a monthly in 1978, Carky returned as advertising sales director. He went on to hold several Time Inc. jobs at Sports Illustrated and Money, then as associate publisher for Sports Illustrated For Kids and finally as a corporate vice president of advertising for the liquor and tobacco categories. He was one of the first executives to hire Women and Blacks in these jobs.
Carky and his wife Mary, who graduated Colorado College just a year after Carky, endowed a scholarship at the college and Carky served as a college trustee. He also gave the college a page from one of the original Gutenberg Bibles. No, he did not cut it out from a museum copy. Somebody had already done that long ago and he inherited it. Carky and Mary were married 68 years, lived in Scarsdale most of those years and enjoyed the proximity to New York City. They were frequent theatergoers. They both loved golf and were 50-year members of the Lakeshore Country Club in Illinois and the Sunningdale Country Club in New York.
Carky joined the TLAS soon after retiring in 1992. In 2009 Carky was elected president, the ninth since the establishment of the TLAS but the first to come from the business side. It was not an easy time to be president because Time Inc. had started to run into trouble and was cutting costs. But Carky was well-connected throughout the company and knew how to make a sale so we kept our office and our subsidies after his successful meeting with CEO Joe Ripp. Carky ran our board meetings with cheerful competence. Requests from members always got his attention. He lined up good speakers and arranged a number of our successful trips overseas and to Washington. After he had been in office for five years we finally accepted his plea to be let go and we did. It was a good presidency. --Jeremy Main —posted 5/5/2021
—A REMEBRANCE OF CARKY: George Vollmuth dug out notes the other day for a speech had made to honor to Carky Rubens when he retired in 1991. He said that Carky who was then ad director for Money magazine was known for his frugality, much in contrast to his free-spending days when Carky was selling liquor ads for Life. Instead of taking his guests in the company jet for a weekend of golf Florida, he had them drive themselves to the Eagle Lodge in Pennsylvania in the dead of winter. The Eagle Lodge was not greatly in demand – it stood in the shadow of Three-Mile Island.
Carky drove there himself in his 10-year-old turquoise Datsun with about 400,000 miles on it. Instead of the expensive gifts Time Inc. used to give to its advertisers, at the Eagle Lodge Carky gave them long purple T-shirts, which hardly appealed to the men but surprisingly pleased their wives who use them as nightgowns. Emblazoned across the front of these T-shirts was the slogan "Carky Says Sunshine.”
Carky believed in group activities at these sessions, but with a sense of humor. At Eagle Lodge he produced a huge balloon -- an earth ball --for his guests to bounce around. At another winter gathering at Lake George, Carky had them playing indoor polo with broomsticks. Carky was a magician, or at least he delighted in pulling quarters on small children’s ears.
—posted 1/20/2022
A “Dream Employee” at SI
• Janet McDougall, 80, who spent her entire 43-year career working at Sports Illustrated and became the beloved go-to person at the magazine, died of leukemia early in April at home in Manhattan. Janet worked all those years in SI’s business office becoming staff operations manager, a job in which she was known for her meticulous attention to detail and for her cheerful helpfulness towards one and all.
After she retired in 2004, Janet volunteered to work at TLAS office and remained there while TLAS was being dissolved. Although she had been hospitalized twice recently, we were not aware of how ill she was. Janet was a private person and the only evidence she gave of the seriousness of her illness was an email she sent out in March saying she would no longer be able to handle emails.
TLAS board secretary Carolyn McCandless, who handled much of the work of closing down our society, writes: “Janet was my guide to the mechanics of how TLAS worked and kept track of its membership. She was invaluable in helping me sort through the proxies necessary for the TLAS meeting where the membership officially approved the dissolution. In the first couple of months of this year, we were working on the final directory and accuracy in this project made it a success. Realizing how ill she must have been, makes me doubly grateful for her efforts to help keep us connected.”
Janet and her twin Peter were born in Newark in 1940. She attended high schools in Kearny and Bernardsville and then earned a degree in political science from Hood College. Before starting her long career at Sports Illustrated she also studied at the Catherine Gibbs secretarial school.
Just as she had one employer in New York she had one address, on East 70th Street. At first she and three other young women rented a two-bedroom apartment. When the three roommates moved out Janet remained and eventually became owner of the apartment. That’s where she died.
Her brother Alan says that when their parents were in their 90s it was Janet who looked after them, as she did when her twin Peter was ailing.
She enjoyed an active cultural life in New York. She sang second alto with the Village Light Opera and later with the Canterbury Choral Society. She took several courses at universities in New York and according to her brother “never left a bookstore without several books in hand.”
We have received an unusual number of tributes to Janet. Here is a sample:
“I have never known a more dedicated employee. When something needed to be done, she could always be counted on to pitch in without complaint and pursue the task down to the smallest detail. She was a dream employee for any boss, a trusted confidant, and a very good friend.” --Vic Sauerhoff
“Janet was the nicest, most wonderful person one could ever hope to know. In my book, she was Miss Sports Illustrated. She kept the business office going.” --Bob McCoach
“Nicest person in the world indeed. Also easiest person to work with, most patient, most helpful, never without a welcoming smile, thoroughly knowledgeable.” --Jim Hayes.
(Thanks to her brother Alan McDougall for much help with this item, to her nephew John McDougall for the photo above and to
Ralph Spielman, who remains the one active member of the TLAS volunteer staff.)
A Real Ad Man
• Robert C. Foster III, 84; an ad salesman for Time Inc. magazines whose real life outdid whatever you may have seen on Ad Men but who also had a passion for the sea and sailing that never faded, died in December in Tucson, where he had lived in retirement.
Bob grew up in Newtonville, Massachusetts, but spent all his summers with his maternal grandparents, who were among the first to build a summer place in Ocean Point, Maine. There he came to love the sea. He enrolled in Bowdoin College in 1954. But was expelled and joined the Navy. He became a pilot and was assigned to Malta. His flying career came to an end when a plane he was riding as a passenger crashed and his injuries ended his career as a pilot. (He finally completed his studies at Bowdoin in 1984.)
He got to Madison Avenue in the 1960s when the big magazines were flush with ads and cash. Bob sold ads for Life, Time Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek. One of his jobs was to arrange celebrity events for advertisers and to produce somebody like Sammy Davis Jr. at exactly the right moment. The job was nerve-racking for he never knew if the celebrity would actually appear. After years at the magazines, Bob was hired by CBS, one of the networks that was taking ads away from the magazines .
In a self -published memoir, Ad Man, he did not spare himself in describing his excesses. The most extreme one he called “airport bingo.” At the end of the working week he would hoist a few drinks, take a cab to the airport and get on any plane with the destination that appealed. Often he would wake up the next day without any idea where he was. His only goal was to get back on Monday morning. Usually he made it, but once he woke up in Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia. He didn’t make it back in time. These weekends became even more fun when an attractive young French travel agent joined him. Bob was married twice, had four children but admitted to frequent infidelities. Eventually he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
During frequent gaps between gigs in the advertising business, Bob followed his passion for sailing. He spent years living in a wooden sailboat in the Caribbean. In 1996 he moved to live full-time in Maine and became marketing director for the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard. He brought to the shipyard several famous sailboats for restoration.
Eventually the nor’easters in Maine became too much for him, so he moved to Tucson where he died a landlubber, dry for 48 years.
Bevedit Veteran
• Daniel H Franks Jr., 90, who operated the telex machines in the Los Angela’s bureau for many years, died last June as we learned recently. Dan was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from high school there in 1947.
He enrolled in the Dana School of Music at Youngstown College (now Youngstown State University) in Ohio and studied the flute. While in college he became the first flutist in the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra. The Army drafted him in 1952 and sent him to Korea, where he served until 1955.
After returning from Korea he married and moved with his new wife to Los Angeles where he worked full-time for 33 years at Hughes Aircraft in its special communications department. For those same years he worked part-time for Time, operating the telex machine that transmitted copy and messages to New York.
Dan retired in 1989 and served the Presbyterian Church as a deacon, elder, Bible studies leader and choir member.
Breaking The Glass Ceiling
• Patricia Kyle, 89, an advertising executive at Time Inc. and other magazine companies during the heyday of the ad biz, died in December at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Greenport, Long Island, where she lived lately.
She was born in Summit, New Jersey, and went to school there but finished at the Chapin School in Manhattan. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she majored in early childhood education and psychology.
In 1958 Patricia began to appear in TV commercials and had some minor roles in TV dramas. But a friend persuaded her move to the magazine business where she became a promotion and merchandising executive at the Ladies Home Journal and Time Inc. She ended her career as director of advertising for a group of 14 magazines at Condé Nast. She served on the board of the Advertising Women of New York, among other trade groups.
Patricia spent summers at East Hampton and made the Long Island town her home for the rest of her life. Her father served as mayor East Hampton Village from 1967 to 1971. She played golf and tennis in the summer and paddle tennis in the winter at the Maidstone Club, where she became the first female member of the board. She put in many hours working for various charities. One of her particular pleasures was to take her children, five grandchildren and a niece a few days before Christmas to Manhattan for lunch and a matinee at the theatre.
A London Fixture
• Terry Smith, 75, a born Londoner who came to the Time Life bureau in London as a 15-year-old office boy and stayed on for the rest of his career becoming a skilled photographer and correspondent and eventually People’s deputy bureau chief, died in England last November.
One evening when the bureau was quiet, Terry and his buddy, Ken Goff, started looking through photos taken by staff photographers. They had the same thought. “I can do that.” And they did.
With much help and advice from visiting Life photographers, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt and Hank Walker, Terry became a skilled photographer. He was soon shooting for Time and People, as well as The New York Times and USA Today.
By the 1980s, Terry was shooting mainly for People. He was good at telling stories with his camera and he took pictures of many of the world’s most famous people. His favorite subject was Helen Mirren. After he had knocked on her door about 10 times at 11a.m. one day, she greeted him in her nightgown. With his skill at putting people at their ease, he soon had her perched on her unmade bed in her nightgown without any makeup on. She looked “absolutely gorgeous”, Terry said. His assignments took him to many places, including the Falkland Islands after the war there between Britain and Argentina in 1982.
In the 1980s, he was made a staff photographer and correspondent, as well as deputy bureau chief for People in London. He retired in 2000 and arranged exhibits of his work and pursued his interest in antiques. The National Portrait Gallery in London holds five of his photographs. (Thanks to M.C. Marden for this item.) —posted 3/18/2021
A Man With Many Friends
• David Sloan, 73, the genial and unflappable director of editorial operations at Fortune for many years, died in February at the Stony Brook Hospital on Long Island. The Fortune Facebook page filled up with affectionate messages from fellow workers.
David was born in Jackson Heights, New York, but spent the years from ages 5 to 15 high up in the Andes where his father managed a smelting plant in La Oroya, Peru (altitude 12,278 feet). He returned to the United States speaking fluent Spanish, but never having seen TV, and graduated from high school in Bedford, New York/
He studied political science at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania and began his long career in publishing at the Patent Trader in Mount Kisco, New York. David worked at Sports Illustrated, Time, Money, People, and Time-Life Books before settling into his job at Fortune. As director of editorial operations at Fortune he had to make sure that all elements of the magazine were ready to go to the printer. He was the buffer between sometimes difficult personalities, the guy who got the job done, the one who was never ruffled when deadlines were tight, and always had a joke to tell.
David had a condo in Puerto Vallarta, where he enjoyed using his Spanish, and a house on the North Fork of Long Island with ample views of the water. Friends and colleagues were welcome to use them, rent free. He was a keen golfer and bridge player. (Thanks to Edith Fried for this item). —Posted 2/28/21
“Life’s Paris Bureau Angel”
• Hélène Vèret, 88, for many years the bouncy, joyful photo editor for Life who could find a way to solve almost any of the extravagant requests that the weekly was prone to make, died in January 11, 2021 in Paris.
In an eloquent memorial to Hélène by Tala Skari and Cathy Nolan, published by The Eye of Photography, they described her as “one of the most beloved figures in the Paris journalism community.” Jordan Bonfante, former Time Paris bureau chief, recalls “I go way back to the old Life magazine where Hélène was already a belle of the ball…. our smart, lovable, live wire Hélène. How much friendship did she extend to us all? How many favors did she do for us, every one of us all over the place. How many laughs did we have over her every blasphemy,”
The authors of the memorial write: “She was irrepressible, vibrant, glamorous, a blond bombshell —a French femme fatale without the toxic ingredients, a natural-born free spirit feminist. She was a mesmerizing storyteller with an encyclopedic repertoire of show tunes and ribald songs.”
She had an adventurous spirit which took her to Pennsylvania to study at Bucknell and then on to San Francisco, where by day she tutored children in English and by night sang chansons in the Fallen Angel Café, alongside Johnny Mathis. On returning to France she hitchhiked across Europe and at the end of the 1950s returned to Paris. She hung out in the night clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
In 1960s. Hélène settled down. She went to work for Life and married. She had two daughters and remained married to the same man until his death in 2011. “She loved those days when Life was a weekly, when the parties were at the Tour d’Argent and the champagne flowed,” the authors write.
Hèlène became an expert in the care and feeding of photographers and was not intimidated by the inflated egos of some. She invented nicknames for them. Henri Cartier–Bresson, a good friend, she called a “hysterical monument” but got him to do what she wanted. Another photographer was “The Beast From The East.”
She also delivered commentary to the BBC, on everything from fashion to the death of President François Mitterand. The BBC loved what one BBC producer called ”the poshest French accent” of her delivery. —Posted 2/14/21
• • • Belated Farewells (in alphebetical order)
Before issuing the final edition of the TLAS Directory, we checked contact information for all fellow TLAS members. In that process we found that partly because we are all just getting old, we sadly note that some members had died without a TLAS goodbye. We apologize to the lives of our old colleagues if some have been given short shrift for lack of information. We'll add their pictures when one is provided to us. More standard obituaries follow below this group.
• Thomas Allison 67; was born in Columbus, Ohio and died in New York City on October 17th at the age of 67. A prodiction assistant and later a designer in the art department of People Magazine for many years, Tom was an artist, photographer, audiophile, Formula One enthusiast and avid reader of history. But his greatest talent was for happiness. Seven years ago he received a double lung transplant and his second life began. Whether he was snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, making Hungarian Goulash in the depths of winter, or doing the Times crossword at the local cafe, he relished every moment of the extra years he had been given. He will be missed terribly by all those whose lives he illuminated, especially his wife, Barbara, his sisters, Jane Halleck and Elizabeth Feinson and a multitude of friends. He was an irreplaceable colleague and friend.
• Harlan E. Anderson, 89; director of technology at Time Inc in the 1960s, died in New Canaan in 2019. He studied computers at the University of Illinois and after graduating in 1950 he and his new wife both joined MIT’s famed Lincoln Laboratory. Five years later, he became cofounder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, which introduced the first minicomputers and soon became the second largest computer company in the world. DEC’s enormous success didn’t last, and Harlan left to try to lead Time Inc.’s somewhat bemused management into the computer age. With the considerable wealth that came from DEC, he then became a venture capitalist and a benefactor of engineering schools, Connecticut institutions and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
• Evelyn M. Bennett, 99, (Pictured above) former supervisor of data processing at Time Inc., died in Ithaca in October. Her first job was at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York demonstrating IBM’s tabulating equipment. This led eventually to her position at Time Inc. After twice surviving breast cancer in the 1960s, she retired and became personal assistant to Charles Stillman, the retired executive VP and treasurer of Time Inc.
• John Charles Campbell, 82, whose career was spent as a tax accountant at Time Inc., died in 2017 in Greenville, South Carolina. A native of Brooklyn, he served in the U.S. Navy and was a graduate of St. John’s University in New York.
• Andrew Crichton, 94, one of the last surviving members of the original Sports Illustrated staff, died in 2018 in Vermont. He became a senior editor and Managing Editor Andrew Laguerre’s right-hand man. He commanded the platoons of SI staffers sent to cover Olympic Games in the 1950s and 1960s. But he thought story conferences were a waste of time and he spent them doing the Sunday crossword. A loyal Harvard man, he had a loud voice and strong opinions. He argued at length with Ted Williams that he (Williams) hadn’t the faintest idea how to hit a ball. When he decided his body needed trimming he walked the 26 miles from his home in Mamaroneck to the Rockefeller Center—and won a spot on What’s My Line. He took up running and competed in the Boston Marathon.
• Joan Cullen, 78, who worked in circulation and promotion at several of the magazines, died in 2009. She was born in Cedarhurst, N.Y., graduated from Lawrence High School and became a secretary at Time Inc. soon after. Over the years she worked at Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Time Canada. While still at the company in the early 1980s, she graduated summa cum laude from Fordham. After retiring in 1978, she worked for the development office at Columbia Law School. Her sister Anne worked for Life for a time in the 1950s. Thanks to Elisabeth Bland for this item.
• Alice Rose George, 76, a published poet and former photo editor of Fortune, died recently as a result of a fall at her home in Los Angeles. Alice was an assistant photo editor at Time in the 1970s and became Fortune’s photo editor in 1982. She was a former director of Magnum Photos, and served in many other capacities as a curator or consultant to intellectual publications and Duke University. Alice published a book of poetry, Ceiling of the World, in 1998. She was the editor or co-editor of four books of photography.
• Martha (Mart) Haymarket, 95, a Time picture researcher and reporter for 28 years, died last October in Los Angeles. Marty first worked for Time in New York but spent most of her career in Los Angeles. She secured many exclusive pictures for the magazine, including shots of the Manson family after the murder of Sharon Tate, the assassination attempt on President Ford, the first Santa Barbara oil spill and the wedding of Madonna and Sean Penn on bluff in Malibu taken by a paparazzi helicopter pilot. After retiring she became a freelance writer. (Thanks to Arnold Drapkin for this item.)
• Sue Hodgson, 78, died in 2018 after living with Parkinson’s Disease for 20 years. She graduated from Old Dominion College in Norfolk, Virginia, and worked for Time Inc. in the 1960s. She went on to hold management positions at Interactive Marketing Systems and later became a real estate broker with Baird & Warner. She donated her brain to Parkinson’s Disease Research at Rush University Medical Center in Illinois.
• Claudine Knight, 88, one of the stalwarts who meticulously put together the mass of information that went into Fortune’s annual 500 list, died in 2018. Claudine graduated from Barnard College and earned a master’s degree at Columbia University. She worked first in Time’s business section and then transferred to Fortune, where she worked on the monthly personal investing columns. In her work for the annual 500 list, she was especially skilled at the demanding, detailed work of calculating earnings per share.
• Mary Margaret Leverty, 91, who had a 60- year career in publishing in New York, mostly at Time Inc., died last year in Fairfield, Connecticut. A native of Bridgeport, she graduated from Manhattanville College. She started her career in publishing as a photo editor at American Heritage, but moved over to Time Inc., where she worked at first for the magazines and later for HBO. New York City life and its theater were her passions.
• Bernard Maltese, 90, a senior sales executive at both Time and Life, died in July. 2019, in Old Saybrook, where he had lived for many years. Ben began his ad career in the mail room at Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample and worked his way up to account executive handling major customers. He became a vice president at Gambier-North before moving to Time Inc. Ben had a successful career at both the weekly and monthly Life and ended up at Time, where he took early retirement. During the Korean War he served in the National Guard.
• Jane McClary, 70, a writer and noted figure in the horse country around Middleburg, Virginia, died in 1990, as we learn now. She worked for Fortune during World War II. A member of the Orange County Hunt, she wrote a novel about fox hunting in Virginia, among many other books and articles she produced.
• Mary Jane McGonegal, 89, former assistant to the head of Editorial Services, died in 2018 a few days short of her 90th birthday. A native New Yorker, she graduated from Misericordia College in Pennsylvania in 1950. She worked first on Madison Avenue but then spent the rest of her career at Time Inc. She started as secretary to Ed Thompson, the managing editor of Life. When the editorial services for all the magazines were moved into a single division, she became assistant to the chief and remained there until she retired in the 1990s. One of her chief responsibilities was managing photo rights and permissions. Colleagues remember her as being thoroughly competent and a lot of fun. (Thanks to Alex Stack for this information.)
• Sara Collins Medina, 77, a former Time researcher who specialized in Russian affairs, died in May at her home in Wakefield, Kansas. She grew up in Connecticut and graduated from Vassar with a degree in Russian studies. After writing for scholarly journals, she joined Time and became the authority on Russia. She married an architect, Ernesto Medina, and accompanied him when he sat up a practice in the Philippines. After his death in 1996, she returned to the U.S. and made the unusual choice of racing “muscle trucks” She loved to make them “fly”. She traveled all over the West and Midwest to compete, taking temporary jobs and living in temporary homes. She settled in Wakefield five years ago.
• Jeanne Marie North, 94, (Pictured above) former head of research for Time International, died in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in October. A native of Chicago, she graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947, and then earned a master’s degree in Spanish from UCLA. For a time she taught English as a second language in Colombia and then back in the U.S. she taught Spanish at George Williams College in Downers Grove, Illinois. Later when living with her Dutch husband in France she became a typist in the Paris bureau. Back in New York, she signed on as a reporter-researcher at Time International and became chief of research before retiring in 1991.
• John D Titman Jr., 93, who managed the real estate owned by Time Inc. and HBO for many years, died in Rye, New York, in January. John grew up in Binghamton and graduated from Princeton University in 1951. He began his long career at the Time Inc. in what was then “personnel employee services.” He soon moved to managing real estate and became director of facilities and operations at HBO. He supervised the renovation and construction of HBO offices around the world. John and his family lived for 70 years in Brooklyn Heights, where he was active in civic affairs. For 50 years he was an enthusiastic squash player every Thursday evening at the Heights Casino, which he served as president. An enthusiastic outdoorsman, John was and every year recruited campers for Camp Susquehannock in Pennsylvania, where he had enjoyed summers as a boy. He often took family and friends on hiking, camping and cross-country skiing expeditions in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. He loved the wilderness.
• Theresa Turley, 94, who worked for Time Inc. for nearly 30 years, died in January in Florida after a long illness. She was born in Shanghai and lived there in the foreign quarter until she was a teenager, when she moved to New York. She started work for Time part-time when she was in college and after graduating became a full-time employee. For many years she was secretary to Henry Luce III, then publisher of Time magazine. She served on the company team that planned and supervised the construction of the new Time & Life building, completed in 1960.
• Sidney Urquhart, 87, a Time researcher and editor for more than 20 years, died on January 3, one day after the death of her husband, Brian Urquhart, who won renown as a diplomat at the United Nations. A beautiful and sophisticated woman, Sidney moved easily in the diplomatic crowd but was down to earth and had warmth and sense of humor. Her first-hand knowledge of world politics made her especially valuable in the World section, but she also served as senior researcher in the Nation section and as an assistant editor she wrote “The Week,” a news summary section. --Betty Satterwhite
• Alice Patterson Wade, 92, former personal assistant to Henry Luce, died in 2017, as we just learned. Her father died in Belgium during World War II. After graduating from Endicott College in Massachusetts, she traveled around Europe on her own for ten months. Back in New York, she worked helping immigrants at the resettlement office at Ellis Island. She then worked at Young & Rubicam and moved on to Time Inc. as an assistant to Luce. She was an enthusiastic golfer and tennis player and, having learned from her grandmother to be an expert at needlepoint, she sold her popular needlepoint belts to a New York department store. She and her husband moved in 1970 to Atlanta where she became a real estate broker.
• Lucille Schulberg Warner, 97, a passionate New Yorker and a writer for Time-Life Books, died of COVID19 last year in a nursing home. Just after World War II, she dropped out of the drama program at Carnegie Tech to work for the Red Cross recreation program in France, Germany and Britain. When she returned to the U.S. she became a copywriter for Young & Rubicam and, following a literature and poetry fellowship in New Hampshire, she signed up with Time-Life Books to write Historic India in the Great Ages of Man series. While researching the book in India, she met her husband, Henry. In the 1970s and 1980s she wrote several young adult novels and finally finished college at the age of 70
• James Willwerth, 77, a versatile Time correspondent for 34 years, died in December in Visalia, California, where he lived with his wife Ulrike. Jim figured he had covered seven wars and skirmishes, including Vietnam and Cambodia. He joined the New York bureau in 1971 but soon went overseas. After working in southeast Asia he returned to New York to write about pop music and he interviewed Bruce Springsteen for a cover story. He served as Mexico City bureau chief in the 1980s, covering Central America and the Caribbean. Back in the U.S. for a long stint in the LA. bureau, Jim covering the riots in Los Angeles over the beating of Rodney King in 1992, Jim was punched in the head for his troubles. He attended every day of the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995 and was co-author of a book about it, American Tragedy, that became a best-seller.
• Shirley Barden Zimmerman, 95, longtime deputy copy chief at Time, died of Alzheimer’s in December in Bayside, New York. She was born in Los Angeles and graduated summa cum laude from USC, where she met her future husband on the college newspaper. They moved to New York and she earned a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. She worked part-time at Newsweek and Time as a researcher while they had four children in quick succession. Once the children were older she joined Time full-time and became deputy copy chief, a job she enjoyed until she retired in her 80s. During an active retirement, she played tennis, traveled, and read The New York Times cover to cover, pencil in hand to mark typos.
• • •
Before issuing the final edition of the TLAS Directory, we checked contact information for all fellow TLAS members. In that process we found that partly because we are all just getting old, we sadly note that some members had died without a TLAS goodbye. We apologize to the lives of our old colleagues if some have been given short shrift for lack of information. We'll add their pictures when one is provided to us. More standard obituaries follow below this group.
• Thomas Allison 67; was born in Columbus, Ohio and died in New York City on October 17th at the age of 67. A prodiction assistant and later a designer in the art department of People Magazine for many years, Tom was an artist, photographer, audiophile, Formula One enthusiast and avid reader of history. But his greatest talent was for happiness. Seven years ago he received a double lung transplant and his second life began. Whether he was snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, making Hungarian Goulash in the depths of winter, or doing the Times crossword at the local cafe, he relished every moment of the extra years he had been given. He will be missed terribly by all those whose lives he illuminated, especially his wife, Barbara, his sisters, Jane Halleck and Elizabeth Feinson and a multitude of friends. He was an irreplaceable colleague and friend.
• Harlan E. Anderson, 89; director of technology at Time Inc in the 1960s, died in New Canaan in 2019. He studied computers at the University of Illinois and after graduating in 1950 he and his new wife both joined MIT’s famed Lincoln Laboratory. Five years later, he became cofounder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, which introduced the first minicomputers and soon became the second largest computer company in the world. DEC’s enormous success didn’t last, and Harlan left to try to lead Time Inc.’s somewhat bemused management into the computer age. With the considerable wealth that came from DEC, he then became a venture capitalist and a benefactor of engineering schools, Connecticut institutions and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
• Evelyn M. Bennett, 99, (Pictured above) former supervisor of data processing at Time Inc., died in Ithaca in October. Her first job was at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York demonstrating IBM’s tabulating equipment. This led eventually to her position at Time Inc. After twice surviving breast cancer in the 1960s, she retired and became personal assistant to Charles Stillman, the retired executive VP and treasurer of Time Inc.
• John Charles Campbell, 82, whose career was spent as a tax accountant at Time Inc., died in 2017 in Greenville, South Carolina. A native of Brooklyn, he served in the U.S. Navy and was a graduate of St. John’s University in New York.
• Andrew Crichton, 94, one of the last surviving members of the original Sports Illustrated staff, died in 2018 in Vermont. He became a senior editor and Managing Editor Andrew Laguerre’s right-hand man. He commanded the platoons of SI staffers sent to cover Olympic Games in the 1950s and 1960s. But he thought story conferences were a waste of time and he spent them doing the Sunday crossword. A loyal Harvard man, he had a loud voice and strong opinions. He argued at length with Ted Williams that he (Williams) hadn’t the faintest idea how to hit a ball. When he decided his body needed trimming he walked the 26 miles from his home in Mamaroneck to the Rockefeller Center—and won a spot on What’s My Line. He took up running and competed in the Boston Marathon.
• Joan Cullen, 78, who worked in circulation and promotion at several of the magazines, died in 2009. She was born in Cedarhurst, N.Y., graduated from Lawrence High School and became a secretary at Time Inc. soon after. Over the years she worked at Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Time Canada. While still at the company in the early 1980s, she graduated summa cum laude from Fordham. After retiring in 1978, she worked for the development office at Columbia Law School. Her sister Anne worked for Life for a time in the 1950s. Thanks to Elisabeth Bland for this item.
• Alice Rose George, 76, a published poet and former photo editor of Fortune, died recently as a result of a fall at her home in Los Angeles. Alice was an assistant photo editor at Time in the 1970s and became Fortune’s photo editor in 1982. She was a former director of Magnum Photos, and served in many other capacities as a curator or consultant to intellectual publications and Duke University. Alice published a book of poetry, Ceiling of the World, in 1998. She was the editor or co-editor of four books of photography.
• Martha (Mart) Haymarket, 95, a Time picture researcher and reporter for 28 years, died last October in Los Angeles. Marty first worked for Time in New York but spent most of her career in Los Angeles. She secured many exclusive pictures for the magazine, including shots of the Manson family after the murder of Sharon Tate, the assassination attempt on President Ford, the first Santa Barbara oil spill and the wedding of Madonna and Sean Penn on bluff in Malibu taken by a paparazzi helicopter pilot. After retiring she became a freelance writer. (Thanks to Arnold Drapkin for this item.)
• Sue Hodgson, 78, died in 2018 after living with Parkinson’s Disease for 20 years. She graduated from Old Dominion College in Norfolk, Virginia, and worked for Time Inc. in the 1960s. She went on to hold management positions at Interactive Marketing Systems and later became a real estate broker with Baird & Warner. She donated her brain to Parkinson’s Disease Research at Rush University Medical Center in Illinois.
• Claudine Knight, 88, one of the stalwarts who meticulously put together the mass of information that went into Fortune’s annual 500 list, died in 2018. Claudine graduated from Barnard College and earned a master’s degree at Columbia University. She worked first in Time’s business section and then transferred to Fortune, where she worked on the monthly personal investing columns. In her work for the annual 500 list, she was especially skilled at the demanding, detailed work of calculating earnings per share.
• Mary Margaret Leverty, 91, who had a 60- year career in publishing in New York, mostly at Time Inc., died last year in Fairfield, Connecticut. A native of Bridgeport, she graduated from Manhattanville College. She started her career in publishing as a photo editor at American Heritage, but moved over to Time Inc., where she worked at first for the magazines and later for HBO. New York City life and its theater were her passions.
• Bernard Maltese, 90, a senior sales executive at both Time and Life, died in July. 2019, in Old Saybrook, where he had lived for many years. Ben began his ad career in the mail room at Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample and worked his way up to account executive handling major customers. He became a vice president at Gambier-North before moving to Time Inc. Ben had a successful career at both the weekly and monthly Life and ended up at Time, where he took early retirement. During the Korean War he served in the National Guard.
• Jane McClary, 70, a writer and noted figure in the horse country around Middleburg, Virginia, died in 1990, as we learn now. She worked for Fortune during World War II. A member of the Orange County Hunt, she wrote a novel about fox hunting in Virginia, among many other books and articles she produced.
• Mary Jane McGonegal, 89, former assistant to the head of Editorial Services, died in 2018 a few days short of her 90th birthday. A native New Yorker, she graduated from Misericordia College in Pennsylvania in 1950. She worked first on Madison Avenue but then spent the rest of her career at Time Inc. She started as secretary to Ed Thompson, the managing editor of Life. When the editorial services for all the magazines were moved into a single division, she became assistant to the chief and remained there until she retired in the 1990s. One of her chief responsibilities was managing photo rights and permissions. Colleagues remember her as being thoroughly competent and a lot of fun. (Thanks to Alex Stack for this information.)
• Sara Collins Medina, 77, a former Time researcher who specialized in Russian affairs, died in May at her home in Wakefield, Kansas. She grew up in Connecticut and graduated from Vassar with a degree in Russian studies. After writing for scholarly journals, she joined Time and became the authority on Russia. She married an architect, Ernesto Medina, and accompanied him when he sat up a practice in the Philippines. After his death in 1996, she returned to the U.S. and made the unusual choice of racing “muscle trucks” She loved to make them “fly”. She traveled all over the West and Midwest to compete, taking temporary jobs and living in temporary homes. She settled in Wakefield five years ago.
• Jeanne Marie North, 94, (Pictured above) former head of research for Time International, died in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in October. A native of Chicago, she graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947, and then earned a master’s degree in Spanish from UCLA. For a time she taught English as a second language in Colombia and then back in the U.S. she taught Spanish at George Williams College in Downers Grove, Illinois. Later when living with her Dutch husband in France she became a typist in the Paris bureau. Back in New York, she signed on as a reporter-researcher at Time International and became chief of research before retiring in 1991.
• John D Titman Jr., 93, who managed the real estate owned by Time Inc. and HBO for many years, died in Rye, New York, in January. John grew up in Binghamton and graduated from Princeton University in 1951. He began his long career at the Time Inc. in what was then “personnel employee services.” He soon moved to managing real estate and became director of facilities and operations at HBO. He supervised the renovation and construction of HBO offices around the world. John and his family lived for 70 years in Brooklyn Heights, where he was active in civic affairs. For 50 years he was an enthusiastic squash player every Thursday evening at the Heights Casino, which he served as president. An enthusiastic outdoorsman, John was and every year recruited campers for Camp Susquehannock in Pennsylvania, where he had enjoyed summers as a boy. He often took family and friends on hiking, camping and cross-country skiing expeditions in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. He loved the wilderness.
• Theresa Turley, 94, who worked for Time Inc. for nearly 30 years, died in January in Florida after a long illness. She was born in Shanghai and lived there in the foreign quarter until she was a teenager, when she moved to New York. She started work for Time part-time when she was in college and after graduating became a full-time employee. For many years she was secretary to Henry Luce III, then publisher of Time magazine. She served on the company team that planned and supervised the construction of the new Time & Life building, completed in 1960.
• Sidney Urquhart, 87, a Time researcher and editor for more than 20 years, died on January 3, one day after the death of her husband, Brian Urquhart, who won renown as a diplomat at the United Nations. A beautiful and sophisticated woman, Sidney moved easily in the diplomatic crowd but was down to earth and had warmth and sense of humor. Her first-hand knowledge of world politics made her especially valuable in the World section, but she also served as senior researcher in the Nation section and as an assistant editor she wrote “The Week,” a news summary section. --Betty Satterwhite
• Alice Patterson Wade, 92, former personal assistant to Henry Luce, died in 2017, as we just learned. Her father died in Belgium during World War II. After graduating from Endicott College in Massachusetts, she traveled around Europe on her own for ten months. Back in New York, she worked helping immigrants at the resettlement office at Ellis Island. She then worked at Young & Rubicam and moved on to Time Inc. as an assistant to Luce. She was an enthusiastic golfer and tennis player and, having learned from her grandmother to be an expert at needlepoint, she sold her popular needlepoint belts to a New York department store. She and her husband moved in 1970 to Atlanta where she became a real estate broker.
• Lucille Schulberg Warner, 97, a passionate New Yorker and a writer for Time-Life Books, died of COVID19 last year in a nursing home. Just after World War II, she dropped out of the drama program at Carnegie Tech to work for the Red Cross recreation program in France, Germany and Britain. When she returned to the U.S. she became a copywriter for Young & Rubicam and, following a literature and poetry fellowship in New Hampshire, she signed up with Time-Life Books to write Historic India in the Great Ages of Man series. While researching the book in India, she met her husband, Henry. In the 1970s and 1980s she wrote several young adult novels and finally finished college at the age of 70
• James Willwerth, 77, a versatile Time correspondent for 34 years, died in December in Visalia, California, where he lived with his wife Ulrike. Jim figured he had covered seven wars and skirmishes, including Vietnam and Cambodia. He joined the New York bureau in 1971 but soon went overseas. After working in southeast Asia he returned to New York to write about pop music and he interviewed Bruce Springsteen for a cover story. He served as Mexico City bureau chief in the 1980s, covering Central America and the Caribbean. Back in the U.S. for a long stint in the LA. bureau, Jim covering the riots in Los Angeles over the beating of Rodney King in 1992, Jim was punched in the head for his troubles. He attended every day of the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995 and was co-author of a book about it, American Tragedy, that became a best-seller.
• Shirley Barden Zimmerman, 95, longtime deputy copy chief at Time, died of Alzheimer’s in December in Bayside, New York. She was born in Los Angeles and graduated summa cum laude from USC, where she met her future husband on the college newspaper. They moved to New York and she earned a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. She worked part-time at Newsweek and Time as a researcher while they had four children in quick succession. Once the children were older she joined Time full-time and became deputy copy chief, a job she enjoyed until she retired in her 80s. During an active retirement, she played tennis, traveled, and read The New York Times cover to cover, pencil in hand to mark typos.
• • •
Making the Magazine
Tracy Windrum, 70, former head of production and distribution at Sports Illustrated, died in December at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, where he had lived for the past 42 years. Tracy once described his job at SI this way: “You have to deal with the demands of late-closing stories, the satellite transmission of these pages to eight regional printing plants and the production of several hundred versions of the magazine, all different in terms of advertising. Then you have to make sure the magazine reaches our readers on time.”
Tracy was born and raised in Brooklyn and attended Xaverian High School where, as 6’4” center on the basketball team he was the highest scorer in New York City in the 1967-68 seasons. At Wagner College on Staten Island he played basketball for three seasons and met his future wife, Catherine, the star of the women’s basketball team.
With many sports events taking place on weekends and the magazine closing on Mondays, the job was always stressful, but when SI produced a 540-page Olympic Preview the stress was doubled. For the Mike Tyson-Tony Tubbs fight in Tokyo in 1988, which took place late on a Sunday evening, there was not enough time to fly film to the U.S., so Tracy arranged to have a technician and some high-tech transmission equipment sent to Tokyo and the film was developed in Tokyo and the transparencies transmitted by phone to New York—a considerable feat until digital photography came along.
He helped break in Time Inc.’s Image Processing and Transmission Center, which enabled the magazines to send four-color pictures to the eight printing plants around the country. Tracy left SI to become vice president of manufacturing and purchasing at Grunner + Jahr USA Publishing and retired in 2005.
SI’s Typesetter & Rare Book Collector
• Bobby McFarland, 87, whose modest career as a typesetter at Time Inc. was almost overshadowed by his single-minded pursuit of first editions of a somewhat obscure and eccentric Victorian writer, died in New York in November.
Bobby (never Robert) was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and graduated from Vanderbilt University. He got a master’s degree from the University of Tennessee. He had a fine tenor voice and when he first came to New York he intended to be an opera singer. He studied under voice teachers and became secretary to the director of the New York City Opera. But he found that his body was too frail to meet the demands of operatic singing—he suffered severe back pains much of his life—so he abandoned that career.
Bobby signed up with Time’s letters department in 1969. He figured he had read a quarter of a million letters in the six years he spent there. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia was a regular correspondent.
He joined Sports Illustrated in 1975. For a while he was Writer Jerry Kirshenbaum’s secretary. Jerry writes that Bobby “like many underlings at Time Inc. was smarter than some of the overlings. He was a great character—avid rare book collector, former opera singer. . .most of his salary went to buy books of a writer of semi-renown in gay circles whose name I didn’t recognize. He kept the books in a bank vault near his apartment in Astoria. He acquired them at auctions in fierce bidding wars with a much wealthier fancier of the same author. Bobby called the other guy ‘my nemesis.’”
The author was Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo, who wrote novels at the beginning of the 20th Century. They were soon forgotten, but revived by a biography that appeared in the 1930s. Bobby picked up a used copy of the book, presumably at the Strand, which he frequented. He became a serious collector, eventually acquired copies of the first editions of all Rolfe’s books, as well as many other documents related to the author. On one occasion Bobby flew to London to bid at an auction.
For many years he headed the crew of typesetters that put every word of SI into its computers. He lived in New York for 60 years. He did have one ambition as a singer, according to a publisher’s letter in SI in 1982. He wanted to perform the national anthem in Yankee Stadium. He never did. (Thanks to Jerry Kirshenbaum for his help.)
“Creator of The Swimsuit Issue”
• Frederick Smith, 93, one of the original editors at Sports Illustrated and creator of the fabulously popular swimsuit issue, died at his home in Wainscott, Long Island, in December, 2018, as we have learned belatedly.
Fred joined the magazine in 1954 before the first issue came out and took over the job of writing about what he call “soft sports,” which included sports fashions. After two years, in 1956, he suggested that SI fill the sports void at the end of January (there was no Super Bowl then) with a feature on beautiful resorts populated with beautiful girls. He hired Jule Campbell to manage the issue, which she did successfully for 35 years. And so youngsters such as Chrissy Teigen and Christie Brinkley were launched on careers as supermodels.
Fred grew up on a farm near Tuscaloosa, Alabama and in 1943, at 18, he enlisted in the Army Air Force to train as a pilot. But before he could be sent overseas, the war ended and he enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he earned degrees in journalism and English.
He then headed for New York and got work reading manuscripts for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He had editing jobs at Charm (for women) and True (for men) before joining the SI startup. He covered “adventure” sports for the magazine, especially skiing in the West and the Alps.
Fred became an expert skier and took on the most challenging courses. He skied in powder snow off-piste and flew in turbo-props to glaciers. He became close to the famous skiers he profiled, such as Jean-Claude Killy.
He was most proud of a two-year project he undertook at SI to identify the sporting equipment that was as beautiful as it was practical. He thought that balls, no matter what the design, were always beautiful while fencing masks and baseball mitts, for instance, should also be a kind of art. After studying 10,000 items from around the world he presented 110 of them to the Museum of Modern Art for critics to judge. Six of the items were chosen for the museum’s permanent design collection.
He left SI in 1969 and took a series of top jobs in publishing, first as editor-in-chief of American Home, then at Time-Life Books and finally as president of East-West Networks, which
publishes in-flight magazines. When he retired in 1990, he returned to travel writing and took up water-color painting, which he continued into his 90s. Several of his still-lifes and landscapes have been exhibited in galleries on Long Island.
When Golf and Ad Sales Go Together
• Royal Peterson II, 96, one of Time’s ace ad salesmen in those Madmen Days of the 1950s and 1960s, died in California in May, 2019, as we have learned belatedly. He had an upbringing that fitted his first name. He grew up in Greenwich, attended the Greenwich Country Day School, the Hill School, Princeton and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Those were the kind of credentials that Time Inc. favored then.
He graduated from Princeton in 1944 and reported for duty as a Naval midshipman. He served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres and the end of the war found him, as a Lieutenant (j.g.) in command of a flotilla of landing craft in Subic Bay, in the Philippines, preparing for the invasion of Japan. He was thankful that the atomic bomb made the invasion unnecessary.
Royal earned his MBA from Columbia in 1948 and joined Time’s ad department, where he remained for 29 years. These were grand days for Time Inc. and Henry Luce and Roy Larsen were still active. At various times he managed the Chicago office and the Philadelphia office and in New York he managed ad sales for the Eastern half of the U.S. After leaving Time Inc in 1977, he became a consultant for various magazines, including Parade, The Atlantic, and McFadden Publications. In 1985 he retired to Montecito, California.
Like many a good ad salesman Royal was an avid golfer. He had started playing when he was five and became member of a number of the top golf clubs wherever he lived. In 1952 he set an amateur course record of 64 at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich. At the Valley Club in Montecito he shot two eagles in a row when he was 79. In addition to golf, Royal enjoyed surf casting on Nantucket and fly fishing in the West. Royal served on the board of the Montecito Music Academy, two of those years as chairman.
Royal met his future wife Dorothy floating on a raft at the Cliffside Beach Club in Nantucket in 1941. He had just finished his freshman year at Princeton and she was just 18 but they married the next year. They kept the marriage secret because Princeton undergraduates were not allowed to marry. They had a formal wedding at her parents’ house in 1944 and remained together for 67 years until her death in 2008. In her youth Dorothy was a skilled equestrian and after college she signed up with the Conover Modeling Agency, her pictures appearing in Life, Vogue and other magazines. The couple had bought their first standard poodle in 1950 and they bred and showed poodles for 50 years. Their Deryabar Kennel was known for the handsome and well-tempered black and white poodles they bred.
“The Ultimate Problem Solver”
• June Omura Goldberg, 85, the long-term chief of reporters at the monthly Life and the magazine’s anchor during the turmoil of frequent changes in managing editors, died of cancer in September in New York, where she had lived all her life. Her death brought out an unusual series of warm tributes from former Life staffers, such as this from Paula Glatzer: “June Goldberg was the glue that held us all together at the monthly Life through many managing editors. She knew everything and everyone, but in a calm and easy way.”
From a cluttered office that columnist Loudon Wainwright once described as “the most incredible den in history,” June supervised the work of 16 reporters, guiding, mentoring and befriending them. A former colleague and friend for 56 years, former assistant managing editor Mary Steinbauer wrote, “She’s the ultimate problem solver. . . June’s remarkable memory and resourcefulness left their mark on each issue.”
June was born in New York, attended Hunter College High School and Queens College. She grew up reading Life from cover to cover and at the age of 14 she applied for a summer job at Time. Personnel said she was a little young for the job, but got her some baby-sitting assignments for staffers. The next summer she did get a job in the mail room. After college, she moved up to research and reporting and by 1964 she had moved to Time-Life Books to head research projects..
When Time Inc. attempted to develop educational materials through Silver Burdett and General Learning Corporation she was enlisted in this ill-starred venture. But she was soon back at Books, leading the research for the Old West series and other projects.
The rebirth of Life as a monthly in 1978 opened up her final assignment, a 20-year reign as chief of reporters. A publisher’s note in Life said “June can procure the last manual typewriter in the building for a persnickety writer, call a biblical scholar in Alaska at two in the morning on deadline and provide the know-how to a reporter who is facing a tough assignment.” She remained there until l998, when Life had a massive staff cut.
In retirement June ardently pursued her love of New York’s life, going with old friends such as Mary Steinbauer to the theatre, concerts, art shows, ballet, and museums. She earned a master’s degree in costume preservation from the Fashion Institute of Technology and she regularly attended the Japanese American United Church on 7th Avenue.
Her Japanese-born father, Bunji Omura, had moved to the U.S. in his twenties, graduated from college in California and became a journalist in New York. During World War II he became an instructor in the Navy’s successful Japanese language school. —Posted October 1, 2020
A Partnership at Time – And Beyond
Erwin Edelman, 92, and Allis Ferguson Edelman, 93, who met and married when they both worked at Time and who later founded the Rainbow Press which for years printed the TLAS newsletter, both died recently— Allis died last December and Erwin in June.
Allis grew up at first in Longboat Key and later in Connecticut;. She attended Rosemary Hall and then Connecticut College. She first worked for photographer Edward Steichen, who was then director of photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art. She later joined Time as a picture researcher.
Erwin grew up in New York City and had a fine singing voice, but could not follow a career in music because he had a speech impediment. Instead he went to work for Time. As a member of the production staff one of his duties was to fly to Chicago every week to supervise the printing of the magazine.
They were married in 1966 and resigned from Time in 1969 when they bought an old colonial house in Cornwall, Connecticut much in need of restoration. The Appalachian Trail passed through their back yard.
They learned there was a need for a printer in nearby Torrington and they established Rainbow Press there in 1972. The business flourished and among other things printed our newsletter and our directory (at reasonable prices). They sold Rainbow Press to their employees in 1998 to retire to Plymouth Harbor in Sarasota.
The Edelmans made retirement exceptionally active. Allis discovered a Mayflower connection in her ancestry and joined the Mayflower Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society for many research trips in the U.S. and abroad. On one trip she flew home in the Concorde supersonic jet. Erwin followed his passion for fly fishing, which took them many times to Montana, Alaska, New Zealand, Scotland, and other places.
Life Begins at SI
• Walter Bingham 89, a star writer at Sports Illustrated during the golden years of sports and magazines, died in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in May a few months short of his 90th birthday. “Bing,” as he was known to family and friends, once said, “My life didn’t really begin until October 20, 1955, when I walked in the door at SI.”
Bing wrote eloquently and fluidly about baseball, tennis, running and golf, and was himself an accomplished runner. Stephanie Salter, a former colleague says there were so many things to like about Bing: “They range from his pristine memory to his ability to sing every song by Cole Porter to the sheer natural beauty of his running stride.” (Quoted by Steve Wulf in a tribute to Bing.)
People liked him and his articles commanded respect. His friends included Mickey Mantle, Chris Evert and Jack Nicklaus. He once accompanied Nicklaus on a practice round at Augusta. His friendship also encompassed young SI staffers. They gathered in his office to hear his stories and to watch sports on TV. Although he was mostly a writer, Bing served as an editor and as chief of reporters at the magazine. Wulf writes he “never knew an editor with the reliable gift he had of making your story better while making you feel better. He was never stressed or surly, and always friendly and smiling.”
Bing was born in Orange, New Jersey, and attended The Hill School in Pennsylvania. He was admitted to Yale but flunked out after one semester. He moved to Los Angeles to be with his mother, who had remarried the much-married and celebrated author and screenwriter, Robert Nathan.
With Nathan’s Hollywood connections, Bing became familiar with the society of celebrities. He lunched with Elizabeth Taylor, was treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock and played tennis with Kirk Douglas.
Bing took courses at UCLA, then during the Korean War enlisted as a medic in the Air Force, which stationed him at Geneva, New York. On his return to LA, he became a copy boy for the Los Angeles Examiner. He heard that SI was hiring and applied becaming a news clerk. He met Betty Bredin, a reporter for the magazine. Their first date was at a Red Sox-Yankees game on May 28, 1956 (she still has the scorecard). They married in 1957 and Bing became a staff writer that year.
He covered the Boston Marathon in 1963 and took to running. Along with SI buddies, Bing ran five Marathons in Boston and three in New York and countless 5K races. He also led the SI luncheon running group. He ran his last race when he was 83 in Truro, Cape Cod, where the couple lived for many years.
Bing retired from SI in 1988 but continued freelancing for the magazine until 2007, when the magazine ran his last byline—50 years after the first. In the meantime, the couple had moved from Manhasset, where they raised their family, to Truro. One day he picked up the phone to talk to the sports editor of The Cape Cod Times about an article he had read, and before they hung up he had accepted an invitation to write a weekly column for the Times. His last column appeared a few weeks before his death.
Here is a sample of Bing’s writing. He led off an article for SI in 1971 in this way: “When she came out from under the green enclosure beneath the royal box and strolled onto center court, she appeared to be smiling. Now you just don’t do that at Wimbledon especially for the finals. When you play a match on that hallowed lawn, the knees should turn to jelly and the elbow to stone; you are supposed to look humble and reverent and, above all, scared stiff. So where does this 19-year-old kid, this Evonne Goolagong, get off waltzing our there as if she were about to play a practice match.” (She won the Wimbledon crown that year and again in 1980 and won the Australian Open four years in a row, from 1974 to 1977.)
35 Years at Fortune
• E. William Kenyon, 93, who topped a 35-year career at Fortune as associate publisher, died in August in Vero Beach, Florida, where he and his wife had lived since in 1994.
Bill was born in Chicago and graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. He grew up in a family of entrepreneurs which owned Farm Maid Dairy, Detroit Coal & Ice and Consumer Services, among others businesses. After high school he joined the Army in World War II and was shipped to the Philippines, serving as a staff sergeant and chief electrician in 8th Army headquarters.
On his return to the U.S., Bill attended Assumption College in Ontario and then started his career at the Chrysler Corp. in Detroit. But New York beckoned to him and he found work at Time Inc., launching a 60-year career in media. He first worked for magazine distribution and circulation at Life then switched to Fortune where he remained for 35 years Early on he was ad director for the Midwest region. He traveled with Fortune writers and photographers and was deeply involved in the media world.
In 1984, when he was associate publisher for Fortune, rather than taking retirement he formed a joint venture with Time Inc. in a failing Time business, Targeted Media, which created a tighter focus on the advertising audience. He made a success of it, sold it, and started a new similar company, Publishers’ Alliance. Which is still privately held. Meredith Corporation now owns Targeted Media.
Once relocated in Vero Beach, Bill immersed himself in community affairs. He helped establish the John’s Island Foundation. As a resident of Indian River Shores, a community in Vero Beach, he served on the town council, then as vice mayor and finally, until 2011 as mayor. A former volunteer fireman himself, Bill made sure the fire and police departments were well funded.
“The Hottest Editor”
• Ray Cave, 91, former managing editor of Sports Illustrated and Time and finally editorial director for Time Inc., then number two editorial job in the company, died in August in Boothbay, Maine, where he had lived in retirement with his late wife, Pat Ryan, former managing editor of People.
An obituary in The New York Times said that during his eight years running Time he “oversaw a revamping of its stodgy look, introduced new sections, expanded its lifestyle coverage and promoted long-form single-subject issues.” Adweek named him “the hottest editor” in 1983 in its annual report on magazines.
Ray was born Ray Roberts in Tacoma in 1929. His father was killed in a car crash four years later and when his mother Agnes later married John Cave, a career officer who became a general, Ray took his stepfather’s name. He graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis in 1949 and became a reporter for the Southern Maryland Times. He then spent eight years as a reporter and editor at The Baltimore Sun with a break of two years to serve with Army counterintelligence in Japan and Korea.
Ray joined SI in 1959, first as a writer and then as an editor, where he supervised some of the most successful articles produced by the magazine. He was important in making SI one of the best-written magazines in the country. He became deputy to SI’s long-running managing editor, Andre Laguerre, but when Laguerre retired, Ray didn’t get the job.
Instead, he joined Time as one of two assistant managing editors, the other being the late Jason McManus. The two engaged in a long standing rivalry. Ray won the first round when he became managing editor. When he took over Time, as The Times wrote, “the magazine was still a swaggering journalistic force, unimpeded by competition from the internet. Time was the leading newsweekly when weekly magazines were still flourishing. Its pages were flush with ads.”
Nevertheless, Time needed some remaking. Ray hired Walter Bernard, as art editor to redesign the magazine. He used more color photos, hired writers to produce well-crafted articles and essays, created new sections, published special single-topic issues.
Jason, executive editor of Time under Ray, leapfrogged over Ray in 1984 to become corporate editor of Time Inc., and when Henry Grunwald retired Jason moved into the top job. Ray moved up too, becoming corporate editor under Jason in 1985. But he was miffed at not getting the top job and he and Jason could not work out a plan of responsibilities that suited him. In 1988 he retired and his wife, Pat Ryan, was fired soon after as managing editor of People.
For a deeper appreciation of Ray’s life, read the following tribute by Roger Rosenblatt
“The Sense and Stamina to Wait”
When Ray Cave called to ask if I’d come to Time to write for the Essay page, I was rusticating in Vermont, a requirement for all writers that usually proves fruitless. I drove down to New York, excited by the prospect of a real job, and of ending my year-long conversations with beavers, raccoons, and other woodland creatures. At the same time, I did not want to come off like a rube to Ray. I wanted to show him I was a sophisticated negotiator. So when I sat in his office discussing the assignment (fine), salary (fine—any salary would have been fine), I took a deep breath and said, “I’m used to four weeks vacation.”
This was both true and not true. At the Washington Post, where I’d worked before, I had three weeks vacation. But I also had taught in a university, where I got three months in the summers. I figured the whole thing averaged out. “I’m used to four weeks vacation”—louder this time, with more self-assurance.
I looked at Ray. Ray looked at me. I could tell he saw he was dealing with a sophisticated negotiator. Finally, after a long pause, he said quietly in his clear, profound voice, “All right, Roger. We ordinarily start with five weeks. But In your case we’ll make an exception.”
The key to Ray in this story was timing. He waited just the right beat before speaking, partly because he knew he was dealing with a fraud, and partly because silences were a hallmark of both his thinking processes and of his style of conversation. When you presented Ray with a problem, of any magnitude, he would wait before saying a word, often for as long as a couple of minutes. To complete the effect, it didn’t hurt that he was about six feet, wore a Brillow-like, gray-and-white beard and a stony demeanor. I used to call him Captain Ahab, without the sense of humor. But that wasn’t so. He could be funny as hell. The delivery was everything.
The delivery was everything. Yes. Among some of Time’s writers and sub-editors, Ray was thought cold and aloof. I once overheard a guy say stupidly that Ray wasn’t “a people person.” To me, that sounded like a compliment. But Ray was a people person when it counted.
A wonderful, old-school editor at the magazine had a drinking problem, which was poorly-timed to evidence itself most dramatically on the nights the magazine closed. After a while, the problem grew hazardous. So Ray went to this editor and told him privately and discreetly that Time would pay for whatever treatments it took for him dry out, and for however long the therapy required. For his health and that of the magazine, however, the man had to seek help. He did, and, after some months, returned as a non-drinker and as the brilliant editor he originally was. Ray would never speak of saving the man’s life, but the saved man did.
Ray knew the value of patience. As a boy, he stood with his grandfather, surveying a vast field of corn. “Grandpa,” he said. “How are you going to shuck all that corn?” His grandfather said, “One row at a time.” Similarly, Ray would wait for a cultural phenomenon like Michael Jackson to peak before putting it on Time’s cover. His theory—proved right by enormous newsstand sales—was to address public interest at the precise moment it was beginning to ebb, and then to pounce, as if to revive a cherished memory.
For anyone dealing with Ray, it was an advantage to know the antipodal influences on his youth. One was the Army. His stepfather was an Army general, and Ray grew up during the Depression (b. Tacoma, Washington in 1929), on various hard-scrabble military bases. The other Influence was the rarefied “Great Books” education afforded by St. John’s College, Annapolis. As a freshman, Ray was surprised that a lecture on Canon Law had nothing to do with artillery. As Time’s managing editor, he occasionally would play the Luddite from the sticks for a pseudo-intellectual dandy wanting to show off an elite education. The dandy would prattle on, then Ray would let St. John’s lower the boom. It tickled him to call me “college boy.”
There was not an ounce of fakery or unseemly ambition in him. His wants included a winning harness horse, and the avoidance of writing a book. The former derived from his beloved wife, Pat Ryan who died in 2013 (he only called her “Ryan’) who was Time Inc.’s first woman managing editor, of People, then of Life, whose father James was a famous trainer of racehorses; the wish not to write a book, from horse-sense modesty. Yet Ray was a rabid competitor. At weekly editorial meetings, he always voiced the deepest respect for Time’s chief competitor, Newsweek—just before finding a way to blow the competition out of the water.
He was a gift to writers such as Lance Morrow, Bob Hughes, Steve Kanfer, John Leo, Ron Shepard, and Richard Schickel. These were Time’s golden years, when writers were encouraged to write freely and imaginatively on everything., not necessarily about normal news events. One morning I told Ray that I wanted to take off from writing essays for a while, and travel around the world writing about the lives of children in war zones. Ray pondered for his usual minute or two, and said, “Go.” To be sure, that was a much different and richer era in journalism, but my proposed project seemed an expensive gamble even then.
On the way to the airport, I bumped into Henry Grunwald, Time Inc’s celebrated Editor-in-Chief, who asked what I was up to. When I told him, he said, “And this cockamamie scheme is OK with Ray? I’d never allow you to do that.” I said, maybe that’s why Ray didn’t tell you, Henry.
In my study is a photograph of Ray and me at some dinner in the 1980’s, me characteristically yammering, Ray characteristically listening. We both knew the wrong person was doing the wrong thing. His loving and attentive children, Catherine (CC),and Jon, born to Ray and his first wife Katherine, visited him often in the home in Maine that Ray and Pat shared in their retirement years. When he was still able to travel, Ray spent time fly fishing for salmon in Canada, Scotland and Norway—another activity that requires patience and the sense and stamina to wait. CC wrote me to say that on the night of August 17th, “Ray left us.” But we both knew that was impossible.
A Fascination with Railroads
Robert Hughes, 73, a Time Inc. printing and manufacturing executive and a much-traveled troubleshooter the company relied on to fix printing and distribution problems at its‘s far-flung sites around the world, died in July in Warren, Rhode Island, where he kept a condo and a boat.
Although Bob worked for Time Inc. from 1979 to 1995, he had an enduring interest in trains and railroads. When he was four, his grandfather would walk to a nearby bridge in New Rochelle to watch in fascination as the New Haven trains thundered by underneath. He became became a prolific train photographer. One of the great thrills of his life was when his father was transferred from New York to San Francisco and the family traveled on the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago and then continued on the California Zephyr to Oakland. Once in San Francisco of course he rode the cable cars to and from school.
Bob attended Colby College (where naturally he spent time at the nearby rail yards in Waterville). He graduated in 1968 and joined the Navy, serving as a photographer’s mate aboard the carrier Intrepid, which took him on a six-month NATO deployment. He worked as a tower operator for the New Haven railroad from 1968 to 1974 and then became a transportation analyst for the Long Island Railroad from 1974 to 1977, while at the same time earning an MBA from Fordham.
He switched to magazine printing and manufacturing in 1977, first at Newsweek where he was operations manager and then at Time, where he had several high level jobs at home and abroad. He was New York production director and later international production director in London, He traveled to fix problems around the world and was noted for getting Time printed on schedule even when late-breaking stories held up the closing.
The switch from railroads was not as puzzling as it might seem. Bob wrote in The Trackside Photographer: “The lessons learned on the railroad have stayed with me until this day/. Communications must be clear and understood.. Study the operation until you know it cold. Figure out where the vulnerable weak spots are, and talk with the crews to find out what could be improved to make their jobs easier.”
Bob and his wife Lynn had a big Victorian house on the water in New Rochelle and a had a boat there. On his retirement they bought a condo by the water in Warren and they a boat there, the 34-foot trawler, Costal Daylight. They cruised around the New England coastline in the summer and went south as far as New York City. For ten summers he was assistant harbor master for Barrington, Rhode Island.
He became a member of the Steamship Historical Society of America, which despite its name is also interested in railroads. He contributed articles and photos from a vast collection he had, joined the board in 2010 and became treasurer in 2012; He stepped down in 2019 after quadruple bypass surgery and his health declined.
(Thanks to Ralph Spielman for help with this item.)
Director of Photography
• Robert Grant Mason, 91, former director of photography at Time-Life Books, died on January 31 in Durham, North Carolina from complications following pneumonia.
Bob was born in 1929 in New Jersey. He graduated from Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1946. He graduated from Boston University in 1950 with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism degree. During the 1950s he worked for Life as a reporter, first in New York City specializing in stories about science and medicine and later becoming the bureau chief in Atlanta and then bureau chief in Boston.
Beginning in the 1960s, Bob shifted to the newly formed Time-Life Books division based in New York City, where he ultimately became the director of photography for Time-Life Books. When this division was transferred to Alexandria, Virginia, Bob moved there with his family. In the late 1980s he retired, initially staying in the Alexandria area and then moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2006.
Bob was kind, polite and always concerned for the welfare of others. He was extremely considerate and took real pleasure in brightening the day of his family and friends with calls, cards, flowers and other little surprises. More than anything in his life he enjoyed the company of his grandchildren, and was tirelessly interested in everything they did and filled with enthusiastic praise of each “remarkable” achievement.
A European Sophisticate
• Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo, 76, former head researcher and assistant editor in Time’s World and Nation sections, died of cancer on May 7, 2020, in Sarasota, Florida, where she had lived after retiring in 2000.
Orsi, as friends called her, was a countess descended from an aristocratic Hungarian family that dates back to the Middle Ages, but she never used the title. When she was a 12-year-old, her family fled with her from Hungary after Soviet troops crushed the 1956 revolution, crossing the border to freedom in Austria in the middle of the night.
She grew up in New York, graduated from Manhattanville College and became a clip girl at Time in 1965. An elegant and energetic presence, she always kept on top of news developments in Europe. Former colleague Tam Grey recalls, “I always felt that Ursula was a true European sophisticate: her slight accent, her clothes, her self-assuredness, she was a perfect choice as the World section head of reporters.”
Time’s Managing Editor Ratu Kamlani says, “I adored Ursula. I smoked with her (gulp!), and on closing nights, imbibed from the bottles on her round wooden table while watching sunsets. I remember when her office neighbor had a tantrum and hurled some object at the partition resulting in a hole in the wall, Ursula didn’t bat an eyelid except to exclaim in that husky voice, ‘What on earth was that?’ Such a class act.” --Betty Satterwhite.
Just Business
• Paul D. Williams, 82, a former senior executive at Time-Warner and an extraordinarily active volunteer in civic and church affairs, died in June. Paul was educated in New York City at Incarnation School and Fordham Preparatory School. He received a BA from Fordham University and an MBA from New York University.
In a business career spanning 50 years he worked for Johnson and Higgins (insurance brokers), The Equitable, General Foods, Philip Morris, Warner Brothers and finally Time Warner, where he was director of employee benefits, assistant secretary of the corporation and president of Time Warner Canada.
During his working years and after he was a dedicated volunteer. For more than 50 years he was an active member of St. Theresa’s Church in Briarcliff Manor, serving several terms as president of its parish council, and for more than 40 years he was a members of the Lions Club of Pleasantville, serving multiple terms as its president. He also sat on the board of trustees of Fordham Prep.
Paul and his wife lived in Briarcliff Manor for 53 years and they moved to Pleasantville in 2017. Paul loved travel and was an accomplished drummer.
A Foot Soldier in the Reagan Revolution
• Burton Yale Pines, 78, a former Time correspondent and editor and later a senior policy wonk at the conservative Heritage Foundation, died last summer, as we learned belatedly.
After graduating from high school in Chicago in 1957, Burt spent seven years at the University of Wisconsin, earning a BA, an MA and a doctorate and teaching modern European history as an instructor.
Time hired him in as a correspondent in the Chicago bureau in 1966 and later sent him on to Saigon to cover the war in Vietnam. He was not among the Time correspondents there who rebelled against what they called the distortion to their dispatches in the magazine. He moved on to Germany and then came back to New York as an editor. He stayed with the magazine for nearly 16 years.
Burt’s next step was to the Heritage Foundation, where he became a senior vice president and remained for 11 years. He was there during the Reagan years and in his on-line obituary he is quoted as having said that what made him proudest was “being a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution.”
He became president of Booknet, an on-line publishing company, in 1995 and moved to New York, where his wife, Helene, a psychologist, found a needy clientele. Burt enjoyed good food and wine, especially Pomerol, and was an interesting and well-informed conversationalist.
He published several books, notably America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One. His controversial argument was that Germany did not threaten America’s security and therefore we had no need to enter the war. At the time, the Allies and Germany had reached a stalemate and would have had to negotiate a compromise peace. But the arrival of two million doughboys made the allies dominant and they imposed a cruel treaty that impoverished Germany— which led to the rise of Hitler and eventually to World War II. The controversial book won several history awards and honorable mentions.
An Early Move to Time
Alexander Hood, 88, who started work in the mail room and rose to become head of the company’s real estate business in a 42-year career at Time Inc., died in March in Pelham, New York.
Alex was born in Toronto and as a boy showed a head for business. His mother managed a hotel on Toronto Island and he earned money with his bicycle and red wagon carting luggage between the passenger ferry and the hotel. While he was still a teenager, he decided he wanted to move to New York and work for Time Inc. He emigrated in 1949 and found work in the mail room—the starting point for many successful careers at Time Inc.
When the Korean War broke out in l950 Alex volunteered for the Army—though still a Canadian—and served at Fort Slocum, New York, teaching journalism to soldiers. Following his service, he earned both U.S. citizenship and a degree from Fordham University and returned to Time Inc.
He worked in a variety of Time Inc. divisions, including human relations and Fortune and got his introduction to the real estate business when he served with Hank Luce on the company’s building committee. That led eventually to running Time’s extensive real estate interests.
Although he and his family lived in Pelham Manor for 52 years, he loved the city. He read the entire NYTimes every day and was a long-term ticket holder for the Giants’ games.
Alex served on the Pelham Human Relations Committee in the 1960s and was a lector at his parish church. After retiring in the late 1980s, Alex joined the board and eventually became chairman of Aging in America, which runs a nursing home in Morningside Heights and provides services for the elderly. He had a second home in Silver Lake, Pennsylvania.
His family remembers him for being a gracious and witty host, master of ceremonies and a story-teller. They crowned him king of the pointless story.
A Master of the Picture Essay
John Loengard, 85, one of the weekly Life’s legendary photographers and later photo editor at the monthly Life, died in New York in May. His close friend and colleague, David Friend, described him as “a contemplative, brainy, self-possessed sort who liked to work alone in the field, often for months at a time.”
John was best known for masterful black-and-white picture essays – about Georgia O’Keefe, a Shaker community, his own family’s summer home in Maine and for his studies of Allen Ginsburg, Bill Cosby and the Beatles in a swimming pool in Miami. It was a chilly day in winter and the pool was unheated, but John persuaded them to plunge in an appear to be having grand time. He took a delightful photo of Henri Cartier-Bresson happily flying a kite in a field.
He was a long-time member of the TLAS board and faithfully attended our meetings, sitting quietly with a half-smile on his face listening to the others chattering away and then breaking in with a potent observation delivered in a barely audible voice.
John was born in New York and when he was 12 his father gave him a Kodak Brownie and photography captivated him for life. He was educated at Exeter and Harvard, where he was a photographer for the Crimson. He also freelanced and when Life asked him to take a picture of a tanker grounded off Cape Cod the editors took notice of his work, although they didn’t run the picture.
After he graduated in 1956 he continued to freelance and then in 1961 Life signed him up as staff photographer, which in those days was about the best job a photographer could get. He became one of the magazine’s best. When the
weekly Life folded in 1972, John joined Time Inc.’s magazine development group. People was one of his projects and when it started up he became picture editor. At the rebirth of Life as a monthly in 1978 he moved in as picture editor.
His friend David Friend, who was also director of photography at Life and is now editor of creative development at Vanity Fair, wrote an eloquent and perceptive portrait of John in 2011 in an introduction to Age of Silver, one of 12 books written by John. He was a fine writer too.
David wrote that after listening to the nightly cable news he might wander down to John’s “spacious, if disheveled, office.” John would “grunt” an acknowledgement and “continue sitting, contact sheet over his face, quickly moving his version of a loupe—actually a Leica lens he used as magnifying glass— down and up the sheet picture by picture. Occasionally he would take a grease pencil and mark off the particular frames that might be worth enlarging as work prints.”
“From a cranny of cast-off contact sheets or deep inside a stack of slides, he was forever finding the extraordinary moment that would become a photo essay’s cornerstone,” Friend wrote. He added John “valued a picture’s surprise and spontaneity over its elegance, its movement and content over artistry.” When he saw the picture he wanted there was no uncertainty about him and the magazine’s editors respected his judgement
David wrote that John was “known for his scowling oracular presence” and did not suffer fools. When a photographer returned from an assignment in Europe pleased with what he thought was a good job, John said, “if the film had been lost in transit, we would not have lost a thing.” But for the most John was kind and gentlemanly. He took trouble to encourage and help young photographers.
After the weekly Life folded John concentrated on his books, on teaching and he recorded a series of interviews with Life photographers. He was inducted into the International Hall of Fame of Photography in 2018 and many museums around the world exhibit his work. P.S. If you would like to own one of John photos Artnet sells them for $2,000 to $4,000 and other websites also sell them. —JM
A Connoisseur of Food and Fish
Arthur Loomis, 82, the convivial former circulation director of Sports Illustrated, died at his home in Chatham, Massachusetts, where he had lived full-time since retiring more than 20 years ago. Art worked with Andre Laguerre, SI’s managing editor, and survived Laguerre’s legendary liquid lunches at a Chinese restaurant next to the Time & Life Building. When Laguerre left SI in 1974 to found the short-lived Classic magazine about thoroughbreds, Art went with him as publisher.
Art held as many senior jobs in publishing as he had skills and interests in other fields. Born in New York, Art served in the Marine Corps, attended Villanova, graduated from Rutgers in 1962 and then earned an MBA from Harvard. In addition to his work at SI and Classic, he was a vice president of Times Mirror magazines, executive vice president of Lorimer-Telepictures, publisher of Saveur magazine and owner and publisher of Garden Design magazine.
He was also a connoisseur of food and fish, an expert fisherman, clam digger, squash player, crossword puzzle solver and a good story-teller. But he said his greatest accomplishment was the family he built with his wife Consuelo. They had four daughters.
While working in New York, Art commuted from New Canaan and had a house in Chatham on Cape Cod where the family spent every summer. More than 20 years ago the family moved full time to the Cape. Following his passion for food and fish, he founded Chatham Day Boat which supplied fresh fish to high-end New York restaurants. He also spent his time digging for quahogs, choosing the best produce at the farmers’ market, cooking and then enjoying the company of family and friends.
—Posted 5/1/2020
A Presidential Edit
• Michael Sovern, 88, a former law professor at Columbia University and then its president, died in February in New York. He never worked for Time Inc. and he was never a member of TLAS, but he is fondly remembered at Time edit. He was a long-time adviser to the Law section. Fred Golden, who wrote Law briefly, remembers that every closing night, Sovern would come down to the Time & Life Building to make sure the section was sound on the law. No matter how much stress there was at Columbia—and these were years of riots and financial crisis at the university—Sovern showed up and behaved with “charm, wit and humor.” Fred remembers that Sovern once said, “Fred, you’ve got the legal issues reasonably accurate but you really ought to lead the story with the third paragraph and chuck your opening paragraph.” Fred replied grumpily, “Mike, you’re not here to edit me—we’ve got plenty of editors.” Now, in retrospect, Fred thinks that Sovern had a pretty good eye for clear writing. (Thanks to Fred Golden for this item.)
“Photographer of Indelible Moments”
• Bill Ray, 83, described in The New York Times as a “photographer of indelible moments,” died at his home in Manhattan on January 9. One of those moments show Marilyn Monroe, viewed from above and behind in a shimmering, skin-right, flesh-colored dress singing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at the celebration of his 45th in Madison Square Garden. It was the Bill Ray picture most in demand over the years.
Bill was born in the small village of Shelby, Nebraska, where his father ran a lumber yard. His mother, a painter, wanted a different life for him and encouraged his interested in photography. By the time he was 11 he had a darkroom and professional cameras and during his senior year in high school he walked into the offices of The Lincoln Journal to declare his passion for photography. He was hired when he graduated.
He went on to work for the United Press in Chicago and then then The Minneapolis Star and Tribune. At a workshop in 1957 he impressed editors of the National Geographic with an essay he had photographed and they offered him a job. But when he got to Washington he decided he didn’t want to spend his life in rain forests, so he turned instead to Life.
He started as a freelancer with Life in 1957 and went on to become a staff photographer. The magazine sent him all over the world with an unlimited expense account to shoot memorable pictures. He was assigned to the Paris bureau for a spell. After Life folded in 1972, Bill freelanced for Newsweek and other magazines, including Fortune.
In addition to the Monroe picture (which Life did not publish at the time), Bill recorded other memorable moments. He was at the first Super Bowl, He was at the Brooklyn Army Terminal when Private Elvis Presley shipped out to Germany. He took pictures of the founder of Sony. He was at the wedding of Jackie Kenney and Aristotle Onassis on the island of Skorpios—it was raining heavily and Bill thought his strobe was going to electrocute him. He embedded himself with the Hell’s Angels. He slept on barroom floors and was accepted by the gang. (Life didn’t run that essay either because the managing editor found the gang disgusting).
Bill never lost his curiosity. “I think you’re always snooping,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with snooping, is there?” (Adapted from newspaper obituaries.)
• David Dolben, 85, former financial vice president of Time Inc. and later president of Temple-Eastex, the company’s lumber and paper subsidiary in Texas, died at home in Lufkin, Texas in January. The merger of a New York magazine company and a Texan paper company in 1976 created some testy relationships, but Dolben and the affable, wise Arthur Temple sealed a warm bond over many martinis, golf games and dinners.
Dolben grew up in Reading, Massachusetts and graduated from high school there. In a biographical memoir he recalled that from the 6th grade on he worked morning and evening paper routes and weekends until his graduation in 1952. During his junior year he bought a 1929 Model A Ford sedan for $50. Summers were spent on the property on Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, bought by his grandfather early in the century. He worked at the tiny general store in Newbury as soda-jerk, waiter, short-order cook and clean-up man.
At Dartmouth, like half the freshman class, he chose a pre-med program. But after his first intimidating encounter with chemistry, he retreated to economics. Dolben graduated with a BA in economics and went on to earn a master’s degree in accounting from Columbia. In 1958 he joined Price Waterhouse and earned his CPA certification there in 1962. The prestigious Rockefeller Brothers Corporation hired him and then Time Inc next door took him and put him on a fast track. He started as assistant treasurer and shortly after became comptroller in 1976.
When Time Inc. acquired Temple, the company sent him to Texas to become vice president of the new Temple-Eastex subsidiary. He and his family grew to love the small-town Texas life in Lufkin while Dolben cemented relations with the Temple people. But in 1979 Time Inc. dragged him back north to oversee the company’s world-wide subscription services in Chicago. His two daughters remained in Texas.
In the meantime, Arthur Temple moved to New York, where his affability and business skills so much impressed the locals that he became Vice Chairman of Time Inc.
Dolben got his wish to go back to Texas in 1988 for his final assignment as president of Temple-Eastex. He retired from that position in 2000 and spent his remaining 19 years at his home in Lufkin.
(Thanks to George Vollmuth for providing information for this obit.)
A Legend in the Caribbean
• Bernard Diederich, 93, a legendary reporter of revolutions and disasters in the Caribbean and
Central America and a former Time bureau chief in Mexico City, died in January in his adopted home in Haiti, according to an Associated Press report. He had covered Fidel Castro’s triumph in Cuba six decades ago.
Diederich was born in New Zealand and during World War II improbably set out for England as crew in a tall ship. After living in England a while, he bought a sailboat with friends intending to see the world. They stopped in Haiti to deliver some cargo and when he went ashore to try to retrieve a stolen camera he fell in love with the Island and decided to stay.
He became a stringer for Time and Life and founded an English-language newspaper, The Haitian Sun. Practicing journalism in the land ruled by “Papa Doc” Duvalier was a risky business. He was probably lucky when he fell afoul of Duvalier in 1963 and only got thrown out of the country. Ton Ton Macoute thugs put him and his family on a plane to the neighboring Dominican Republic. He had also covered the Dominican Republic and written a book about the assassination another ruthless dictator, Rafael Trujillo, in 1961.
Later Time sent Diederich to Mexico City with responsibility for covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. It was a time of violence and revolution. In 1983 when the U.S led an invasion of Grenada to restore an elected government, the Pentagon tried to keep reporters from seeing the action, but Diederich and a small group of reporters got to the island in a small boat. He helped the Marines find the body of a fallen comrade and he went to a political prison to inform the inmates that they were free.
He wrote 22 books, mostly about Haiti, which he had translated into Creole. He also wrote a book about his friendship with Graham Greene, who like many others was introduced to Haiti by Diederich. Greene wanted to write a mystery about Haiti and Diederich offered to help him get background. This was in 1965 when Diederich was in exile from Haiti. So he took Greene along the Haiti-Dominican border and made risky forays across the board to meet dissidents. The result was one of Greene’s best mysteries, The Comedians. Diederich in turn wrote Seeds of Fiction¸ an account of his experience with Greene which was also full of biographical details about Greene. According to the Associated Press, everyone who met Diederich came away with a fund a stories, most of them true.
• Harold Bonawitz Jr., 78, a genial and charming ad salesman for Time for 25 years, died in Virginia Beach in December, As the magazine’s mid-Atlantic divisional sales manager he specialized in liquor and tobacco ad sales but he also broke new ground by landing the Rover account and building auto accounts. Hal loved fast cars.
He was raised by a single mother in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and got his first job at the age of 12 setting up pins in a bowling alley. Other jobs that follow included a spell as a copy boy at The Pittsburgh Press. He served in the Navy as an aviation mechanic aboard the USS Yorktown and then put himself through California State University at Fullerton and earned an associate degree.
Hal worked first for The Los Angeles Times but in 1976, when he was working for the Chicago Times, Time recruited him and moved him to New York. Three years later Time moved him to Washington and he settled his family in Potomac, Maryland. He was a master toast maker, wore perfect suits and had a sense of style. He would urge people to quit smoking, as he did himself, but nevertheless died of lung cancer
Her retired eventually to a small ski resort called Wintergreen in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Amy Jamieson, the youngest of his four children, was a writer at People for 15 years. (Adapted from a family memoir in The Washington Post)
A Seasoned Traveler
• Patricia Hodges, 82, who worked for many years in Time Inc. corporate promotion and publicity, died in October in Stony Brook University Hospital after being struck by a car at a crossing in Greenport, Long Island, where she was one of six TLAS members living in a retirement community on the North Fork.
Her career notably included traveling on the staff of many of Time’s lavish “newstours” around Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. On these tours, remnants of the free-spending days at the company, two dozen or so top executives of major corporations (which were also advertisers) traveled across the world by chartered plane, met with world leaders, stayed in the best hotels and ate at the finest restaurants, all at Time Inc.’s expense. It fell to people like Pat, to make sure nothing went wrong.
Pat was born in 1937 in Huntsville, Alabama, the youngest of six siblings. After college she went to live in Miami and became a flight attendant for TWA—a good experience perhaps for the newstours far in the future. She moved to New York in 1979 and spent the rest of her career with Time Inc., in public affairs and promotion. At various stages she worked for Don Wilson, Flicky Ford and Bob Sweeny.
Pat helped produce a documentary, A Woman’s Place, based partly on a Life special report. The film, released in 1996, was a finalist in the New York Film Festival and the International Film Festival of the Americas. It was narrated by Julie Harris.
She and her late husband Paul enjoyed camping trips out West and in Alaska. In retirement in Southampton, she took up painting the countryside she loved. She entertained friends with her delicious lobster pot pie and pecan pie, finished off with Irish coffee. She liked to discuss politics, race relations and other serious topics and was a fan of The New York Times crossword puzzle.
HBO Star
• Frank Biondi, 74, who headed the HBO team that turned the company into an entertainment giant in the early 1980s, died in November at home in Los Angeles. After HBO he became CEO of two other major entertainment companies, Viacom and Universal Studios.
Biondi grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Princeton University, where he graduated with a degree in psychology and played center field on the baseball team. He went on to earn an MBA from Harvard. Early in his career he worked for several Wall Street brokerages and set up his own financial consulting firm. In 1973 he went to work for what became Sesame Workshop as assistant treasurer and from then on he worked in the entertainment industry, but more as a financial expert than as a creative director.
Time Inc hired him in 1978 as a programmer at HBO and he became president and CEO five years later. During his tenure HBO became a television powerhouse but by 1984 subscriber growth had slowed and Time Inc. replaced him with Michael Fuchs, a friend who had brought him to HBO. Their friendship cooled when Biondi overtook Fuchs to become CEO.
While Biondi was a quiet deal-maker who did not seek publicity, it was his fate to work for flashy entertainment moguls. Soon after his departure from HBO, he went to work for Sumner Redstone, the volatile head of Viacom. He was the CEO but with Redstone as chairman, “If you read the press, I don’t exist,” Biondi told The New Yorker. During his time at Viacom, the company grew with the acquisition of Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster but in 1987 Redstone abruptly fired him, reportedly over faltering box office sales at Paramount. Just five minutes after the news of his dismissal went out on the wires, Bondi received a call from Edgar Bronfman Jr., another billionaire business owner, who hired him to run Universal Studios.
Universal had financial problems and after two years, Bondi lost his job in a management reshuffle. Like Redstone, Bronfman wanted to be a more hands-on chairman.
In the 1990s, Bondi ran an investment fund which invested in new media, including the Tennis Channel, a reflection of his for love for playing tennis.
Sherry Lansing, former chairwoman of Paramount, said of Biondi: “Whether he said yes or no to you he did it with such balance and respect. He was calm in good times and in bad.”--Adapted from The New York Times.
——In a long obituary, The Wall Street Journal said Biondi learned that “entertainment moguls seeking supremacy in the creation and distribution of movies, TV programs and music” were “fickle masters.” The article described him as “Hollywood’s perpetual fall guy, the one to tell tycoons when their whims were unwise.” This didn’t stop the next tycoon from hiring him as soon as another fired him—or Biondi from taking the job. —Posted 12/2/19
A Champion of Modern Artists
• Dorothy Seiberling, 97, a former Life art editor who became an influential art critic and interpreter of the works of modern painters, died in November in Wilmington, Delaware, where she had moved to a senior residence only the month before from her longtime home in Shelter Island.
She grew up in a wealthy and successful family. He grandfather was a founder of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. He mother was a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Her brother was a congressman from Ohio who sat on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings. Her sister was a social activist. The family grew up on the grandfather’s 70-acre estate in Akron, Ohio.
After graduating from Vassar in 1943 with a degree in English, Seiberling was accepted in a training program for researchers at Life. In those days (and for many years after that), women seldom got far at Time Inc., but within 10 years she was editing and writing for the magazine.
He articles sought to explain the works of Abstract Expressionist such as Rothko and Rauschenberg. They helped to make their work understandable “to a somewhat perplexed public,” as The New York Times said in an obituary. She was a champion of Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock.
She married a prominent art historian, Leo Steinberg, in 1962 and together they amassed a collection of prints, some of which they gave to the University of Iowa art museum. They were divorced and in 1977 she married an old friend. Sidney Stirber, described as a director, producer and aviator.
Seiberling accumulated a collection of works by Picasso, Rauschenberg and others and gave dozens of them to the Vassar art museum. Her papers are at the Smithsonian in Washington. She became Life’s art editor in 1965. The weekly Life folded in 1972 and Clay Felker, who had left Life to start New York magazine, hired her to become deputy editor. She was also a deputy editor of the Sunday New York Times. A few years later she quit and moved with her second husband to Shelter Island. After he died in 2013, she sold her apartment on Central Park West for a reputed $3.5 million. For 22 years she was president of the Shelter Island Friends of Music. (Adapted from The New York Times) —Posted 12/2/19
• Rosalyn Taylor, 72, who worked for Time Inc. for 20 years and was a financial analyst at Sports Illustrated, died in Florida in January, 2018, as we learned recently. Rozzie, as she was known to her friends, was born in Brooklyn and educated in the New York public schools. She later attended Pace University and the New School in Greenwich Village. She and her husband relocated to Florida in 1998, where she worked for WABC in Fort Myers as a sales rep.
A devout Baptist all her life, Rosalyn received a degree in Theology from, Life Christian University in 2010. She always dressed immaculately and she was known for her devotion to her dogs.
A Spinner of Tales
• Gregory Douglas Jaynes, 68 (Time, Life edit), described in a death notice as a ”writer, nomad and spinner of tales”, died in New Orleans in March while the Mardi Gras parades passed below his window. Gregory was born in Florence, Alabama, but grew up in Memphis, where as a young reporter he covered the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. for the Commercial Appeal.
Ambitious and restless, Gregory moved from the Commercial Appeal to newspapers in Nashville, Atlanta, Miami and New York. At The New York Times he was a reporter, columnist and then for two years correspondent in Nairobi. He also had spells at Time, Life and the National Geographic .He covered the First Gulf War for Life.
He always traveled with an eclectic collection of books and he wrote some himself, including two memoirs. His second memoir, written in his 50s and titled Hell on High Water: A Really Sullen Memoir, recounted his misadventures aboard a Russian freighter. (Lifted from a paid death notice) Posted 11/8/2019
A Star Writer
• Ed Magnuson, 93, once one of Time’s star writers, died in October at his home in Ardsley-on-Hudson. When he retired in 1991 he had written a record 119 cover stories. His rival in the cover competition, George Church, delayed his retirement until he had beaten Mag’s record. Then along came Nancy Gibbs who out-wrote them both with 175 cover stories (and became Time’s managing editor.
Vanity Fair praised Mag as “go-to-guy” who could turn out a smooth, coherent story faster and better than anyone. He was a “storyteller” who “did not necessarily see it all but could weave a tale that did justice to both to the reporter and the reader.”
Mag was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and graduated from high school in 1944 in time to join the Navy before the end of World War II. Back in civilian life after a year in the Philippines, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he worked on the college newspaper and graduated magna cum laude in 1950. Then he spent ten years as a reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune.
He first wrote for the Education section at Time and within a year had written his first cover. In the late 1960e he joined the Nation section, where he made his name and spent the rest of his career. Mag was handed many of the tough last-minute cover stories such as the Challenger disaster, the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the Me Lai massacre.
Stefan Kanfer, another star Time writer, wrote in City Journal that Mag became “Time’s superstar during the Watergate period. A master of pellucid writing, he analyzed every bit of Nixon chicanery and set the entire scandal out week after week, quite often writing from one morning until the following sunrise.” He had closed one Nixon cover one evening when news came of the “Saturday night massacre”—the resignation of the top officials in the Justice Department after refusing the carry out Nixon’s orders. The old cover was scrapped and by Sunday morning Mag had turned out a new cover article, smooth and coherent.
He wrote more than a dozen Nixon cover stories. One of them happened to be his 50th cover overall and as a prize the magazine gave him the original art work for the cover, a portrait of Nixon. The Magnusons did not display it, but stored it under their bed, face down.
By the 1980s Time was changing. The managing editor, Henry Muller, decided to use more of the correspondents’ original writings rather than the work of editors in New York. According to Kanfer, Mag’s role was further diminished when he wrote a note to a Time correspondent in Washington praising him for his “fact-filled, unemotional reporting” in contrast to some of the magazine’s recent articles using “generalizations and hot rhetoric.” The letter leaked and Muller was not happy. Mag’s role diminished after that.
He left the company in 1991 and enjoyed nearly 30 years of retirement. He liked walking his Golden Retriever along the banks of the Hudson and continued his lifetime hobby as a ham radio operator, which he had taken up when he was 14. He erected a 50-foot-radio tower by the Magnuson’s country place in Copake Falls, in upstate New York, where the zoning laws were fairly relaxed.
Mag’s wife, Jane Nelson, also worked for Time Inc. for many years. She was Henry Grunwald’s assistant when he was managing editor of Time and moved upstairs with him when he became editor-in-chief. She continued in the same position for his successors, Jason McManus and Norman Pearlstine.
Eminent Editor
• Jason McManus, 85, former managing editor of Time and later editor-in-chief of all Time Inc.’s magazines, died in New York in September after undergoing surgery to repair damage to his spine suffered in a fall.
A quiet, courtly gentleman, Jason had a steely ambition from early on to rise to the top of Time Inc. It was his bad luck that he got there when the magazines were losing their luster and advertising and the corporate managers of the company were making poor decisions.
A farewell note in Time described Jason as an “eminent editor.” The note, written by a former assistant managing editor, Howard Chua-Eoan, said Jason’s reign “witnessed the onset of the titanic mergers and corporate ambitions—including the marriage of Warner and Timc Inc.—that would shrink the power of his office and remake the media forever.”
“Beset by immense forces,” Howard wrote, “Jason never ceased to be the master of the generous gesture.” He recalled that when he was a lowly fact checker, Jason read the introduction to the company softball team’s yearbook he had written and suggested that Howard might make a good writer. “One small kindness gesture helped make my career,” he wrote.
Jason was born in Kansas City but grew up in St. Louis because his father, a CPA, was transferred there. Jason became a lifelong Cardinals fan. He first wanted to become a Presbyterian minister and went to Davidson College, the premier Presbyterian university in the U.S. But after a while he decided that preaching was not for him and that journalism instead would provide him with “a bully pulpit.”
His degree in liberal arts from Davidson, he thought, was not enough to launch him in journalism so he presciently decided to study international economics and went to Princeton to earn a master’s degree. He polished up his considerable education with a Rhodes Scholarship and spent a year at Oxford.
Jason’s first experience at Time Inc. was as a summer intern at Sports Illustrated in 1957. Two years later he joined Time as a writer. His economics studies paid off when he was assigned to Paris to cover the Common Market (the predecessor of the European Union). He came to love France.
Time brought him back from Europe in 1963 and he soon proved himself an adept writer able to turn out a cover story swiftly and smoothly. He became the “world” editor and supervised the writing on the war in Vietnam and then as “national affairs” editor he oversaw what Time wrote about the Watergate scandal.
All along Jason had his sights set on becoming Time’s managing editor and when he was passed over for Ray Cave in 1977 he was tempted to resign. But he stayed on and the decision paid off in 1985 when he did become managing editor. Two years later he succeeded his mentor, Henry Grunwald, to become Time Inc.’s fourth editor-in-chief with responsibility for 24 magazines.
The promotion put him on top of Cave, with whom he had a well-publicized see-saw rivalry since the two had been assistant managing editors of Time. As Jason’s deputy, Cave sought more responsibility, but he was turned down and resigned. Subsequently Cave’s wife, the late Pat Ryan, who had started at Time Inc as a typist and rose to become the first female managing editor of a Time Inc., magazine--People—was fired without explanation.
Jason reached the top at a time when the troubles of the magazines became more serious. The weekly Life had already folded and some of the other magazines were seeing their relevance and advertising dwindle. The business managers at Time Inc. began to exert more control and demanded lay-offs and a less lavish lifestyle.. Jason lost his seat on the corporate board of directors. The merger with Warner Communications in 1989 reduced the influence of the editorial managers and cut the value of the options accumulated by these managers
Jason retired in 1994. He served on the Council on Foreign Relations and, together with his wife, Deborah, the Time researcher he married in 1973, ran the D.J.McManus Foundation, which gave away $640,000 “in one recent year,” according to Inside Philanthropy, a website.
As of this writing the only newspaper obituary about Jason appeared in the Highland Current in Garrison, New York, where the couple had a country house.
(For TLAS members who would like to know more about Jason, there is plenty of information if you Google “Jason McManus and Time Magazine”. One of the most interesting items is a long interview with him on C-span in 1988.) --JM
—Posted 9/29/2019
A Demanding Head Researcher
• Raissa Silverman, 94, died on July 23, in Westchester County. She was the scrupulous and demanding head researcher in Time’s Nation section supervising its research staff from 1972 until 1976 during the Watergate investigations. Jason McManus, then editor of the Nation section and subsequently the Editor-in Chief of Time Warner recalls, “The halcyon days were when I was the Nation editor and Raissa was the head researcher and we were pursuing Nixon. It was a very rewarding relationship, and not just because Raissa managed her end of our business so intelligently and well. We were equals with serious responsibilities in a serious and sometimes stressful time. It was gratifying to me to have someone to share delicate or just frustrating situations in perfect confidentiality. I think she felt the same way.”
Raissa was born in the Bronx and studied library science at the University of California at Berkeley. She came to Time Inc probably in the 1950s and by 1964 was well enough established in the Nation section to attend the raucous 1964 Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater. She was not a writer but presumably organized research for the writers.
Anne Hopkins, a senior reporter who was temporarily drafted from Back-of-the-Book to Nation remembers, “Those Watergate days were exciting and demanding, with cots in the corridor for overnights, but Raissa remained a firm and disciplined head researcher who as I recall on occasion came close to losing her cool, but never actually did.” Eileen Chiu Graham reflects that when she first arrived she was intimidated by Raissa, noting, “She was really strict about the fact checking, but there is no doubt that she was very loyal to Time and the people she worked with.”
Former Time Chief of Research Leah Gordon notes, “Whether it was a late closing or the 10:00 AM story conference, Raissa was always there, dependable, solid. And she was also thoroughly up to date on the material. She never let me down.”
Raissa’s perfectionism and devotion to accuracy were legendary, but while she could be intimidating, she was also great fun. On the night of the great blackout in New York, Raissa demonstrated her sangfroid and adaptability. She had invited four friends to dinner but when she realized there would be no elevator service to her tenth floor apartment, she cancelled those plans. Instead she asked her hallway neighbors to come and share a convivial candle-lit dinner. --Betty Satterwhite —Posted 9/10/2019
• Marcia Carnegie Gauger, 94, who had a long career at Time beginning at the newsdesk and went on to become a distinguished foreign correspondent, died in Boston on May 14, 2018, as we learned recently. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1944 she worked in the World War II Procurement Office in Washington before joining Goldman Sachs in New York City.
She soon moved to Time, starting at the news service desk, as a researcher, and then fulfilling her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. While on loan from Time to teach journalism in Cairo, she witnessed the riots over food prices that shook the Sadat government.
Marcia became the New Delhi bureau chief in 1979. Her beat included Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. She was in Kabul when Russia invaded Afghanistan and visiting the US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan when it was attacked and burned by an angry mob. With some 90 embassy staffers she took refuge in the embassy’s steel vault while the embassy burned around them. After suffering from heat and tear gas, they eventually made their way out of the vault. The mob had dissipated. She later disputed Carter administration claims that the Pakistani army had come to their rescue. Her fondest memories from that time were her relationship with Indira Gandhi and meeting Sir Edmund Hillary on a trek in Nepal. Her sister Jane Graham followed her in death two months later. Family and friends scattered Marcia's ashes in the ocean in a private ceremony.—Posted 9/10/2019
• Judith Devereux Fayard, 77, Life bureau chief in Paris during the 1980s, died of cancer in August in Paris, where she had lived for more than 40 years. Judy was born in New Orleans, attended high school in Mobile and went to the University of Colorado at Boulder on a National Merit Scholarship. She was president of her sorority and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
After college Judy worked for Life in Los Angeles and then in New York. When the magazine sent her to Paris she fell in love with the city and spent the rest of her life there. She was chief of the Paris bureau until Life closed it down in 1990. A charming, discerning woman, Judy wrote about art, museums, opera, architecture, travel, all things she loved and knew well. After Life she freelanced and edited several magazines in Europe. She was editor of France Today, a beautiful, glossy magazine, and contributed to others, including Women’s Wear Daily. She was a correspondent for the culture section of The Wall Street Journal. In 1972, Judy was a contestant in Hollywood in the Dating Game show on TV.
When she was diagnosed with lung cancer several years ago she agreed to take part in trials of immunotherapy treatments. They worked for a while but the cancer returned recently and she died at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Paris. —Posted 9/10/2019
• Dorothy Kirkham, 94, head nurse at Time Inc’s in-house medical clinic when that was one of the amenities offered to Time Incers, died in July in New Jersey. At Time Inc she fell in love with Ted Kirkham, the clinic doctor, and they were happily married for just five years until his death in 1981.
Debbie, as she was called, emigrated from Germany with her family just before World War II and settled in New York. She and her twin sister, Irene, attended the Northfield Academy in Northfield, Massachusetts. Debbie went on to nursing school and became an operating room nurse at New York Hospital. After many years there she joined the Time Inc clinic.
Debbie, an elegant and charming woman, loved New York and its arts. She volunteered as a docent at the New York Public Library until she was 90 and was an active member of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.
• John Shearer, 72, the second black staff photographer hired by Life, died in June. He had grown up in Westchester County as a neighbor of Life’s first black photographer, Gordon Parks, who encouraged John to take up the profession.
He showed his great promise when he was a teenager assigned to carry bags for Look’s director of photography at the Kennedy funeral in 1973. But he was given a camera and told to shoot pictures of mourners. He pushed his way into the stands and before being thrown out by the Secret Service he took the most famous of the pictures of little John Kennedy saluting his father.
The New York Times quotes James Spione, a professor of film at SUNY Purchase, who is making a documentary about John, as saying, “Most photographers went for the kid, but John composed his differently, as a moment in a tableau. It’s vertical instead of horizontal. He has always been a pictorialist taking a very painterly approach to composition and lighting and storytelling with the camera.” The shot was slightly overexposed showing Jackie Kennedy’s face clearly through her veil.
A staff job at Look soon followed and then the job at Life. Through the l960s and ‘70s he took many of the iconic pictures of the civil rights movement, including the Martin Luther King funeral. He worked in the Bronx and the Deep South. After the riots in Detroit and Harlem he walked the streets of the cities with his cameras. He took pictures of New York City gangs. When the prisoners at Attica in upstate New York rioted in 1971, he was the only photographer allowed into the prison by the rioters. John won 175 national photography awards and had his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums. As a young man he wore a striking Afro. (Adapted from Time and The New York Times) —Posted July 14, 2019
• Philip G. Howlett, 91, a modest and friendly former executive vice president of the Time Inc. magazine group, died in June in Pasadena, where he had lived since retiring in 1986.
Phil began a highly successful career at Time Inc when he joined Life at its prime in 1958 as a sales representative. After seven good years there he became business manager at Fortune. In 1970 Phil accepted one of the most challenging and enjoyable jobs Time Inc. had to offer, as publishing director of Time’s international editions based in London. With responsibility for the magazines’ business in Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa he had to find his way through the business practices and cultures of many countries.
After four happy years in London, the company hauled him back to New York to become associate publisher of Sports Illustrated. In 1974 he became ad director and in 1980 he was promoted to publisher of SI. In that position he took the important initiative of making SI a sponsor of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. That sponsorship proved for many years to be a big money maker for SI.
Time Inc. promoted Phil to executive vice president of the magazine group in 1986 under president Kelso Sutton. He supervised the monthly magazines while Kelso ran the weeklies. Phil took early retirement to move with his wife of 68 years, Ann, to Pasadena. She died of Alzheimer’s in 2018.
Phil was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Evanston, where he played varsity baseball. He won a scholarship to Northwestern in 1945 and spent a year there before he became old enough to be drafted by the Army. He passed two years with the occupation forces in Japan and returned home to finish at Northwestern, where he made the baseball team, married a fellow student, Ann Flowers, and earned a degree in political science in 1950.
Wilson Sporting Goods hired him in its public relations department and in 1954 made him head of its new advertising department. While there he ghost-wrote two books for prominent sports figures. In 1956 McCann Erikson hired him but after two years he decided he didn’t want to be in the advertising business and that’s when he started his distinguished career at Time Inc. by joining Life. (Adapted from The Greenwich Time.) —Posted 6/23/2019
• Linda Kitay Censor, 81 (TL Films, HBO), was an intrepid volunteer for TLAS for many years. A native of New York State and a graduate of Cornell University, she married Walter Censor, Associate Counsel of Time Inc.'s Magazine Group (now retired) and they enjoyed a life enlivened by friends, family, and the arts. “Linda was an extraordinary contributor to the Alumni Society and a mentor to many of us. She was a consummate professional and a standard bearer of all things good for our organization.” --Alan Wragg. We invite anyone who knew would like to add some notes about Linda to send them to us at tl.as@tlasconnect.com. —Posted 6/18/2019
Linda was in charge of the American distribution rights and residuals for Time Life Films' BBC television programs airing in the United States and John Cleese and his gang in the “Monty Python” films. She also handled the rights for David Susskind's TV production of "The Wall" staring Tom Conti, Eli Wallace, Rosanne Arquette and Dianne Wiest and the 1981 film "Fort Apache the Bronx" staring Paul Newman, Ed Asner and Danny Aiello.
When the Time Life Films operation was shutdown in the mid-1980s, Linda was their last employee as she still had her work cut out for her. She moved from the Time Life Building to HBO with all the hundreds of contracts in large vertical file cabinets that lined the halls outside her office in the HBO building. Once this challenging work was complete she retired.
--Marilyn McClenahan. —Posted 9/10/2019
• Le Anne Schreiber, 73, was the daughter of Newton Schreiber (LIFE photography division). She played basketball and baseball growing up; had a BA from Rice University in Houston and a Masters in English from Stanford. She began postgraduate work at Harvard when in 1974 wrote a letter to Henry Grunwald, then ME of Time, suggesting several articles she wanted to write. In a 1978 interview with the Philidelphia Inquirer she said “The ideas caught his eye and I was hired.” She originally covered international politics but persuaded HG to let her cover the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Shortly after Montreal, Tennis star and feminist Billie Jean King named her editor of her magazine, womenSports. Le Anne joined The New York Times’s sports section in early 1978 as an assistant editor. At 33, she was appointed editor, but with a caveat: she told the newspaper’s management that she would stay at the job for only two years. “If The Times was ready to appoint a female head of a hugely male department for the first time in its history, I had no right to refuse the position.” she wrote in a memoir, Midstream. She recalled feeling less than fully accepted both inside and outside the paper. At the time, The Times was in the midst of settling a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit filed by hundreds of its female employees. Gerald Eskenazi, a Times 44 year veteran sportswriter wrote “Ms. Schreiber was eager to learn what we covered and also what we might be doing differently.” And, he said, “With her Socratic method, she made you think about what you were doing.”
After leaving The Times in 1984, she wrote Midstream (1990), a dual account of her mother’s death and her life in rural upstate New York; freelance articles, including two for Glamour magazine about abortion winning a 1992 National magazine Award; and Light Years (1996), a collection of her essays about her parents and brother who had all died of cancer. In 2007, she joined ESBN as an ombudswoman for two years. “She enjoyed ESBN because by the time she had left The Times, she had become sports-phobic,” said Milena Herring, her former partner, “She didn’t want to watch the U.S. Open on TV or in person. But at ESPN, it wasn’t about sports at all, but about looking at the coverage of sports as a journalist with a critical eye.”
In recent times Ms. Schreiber taught English at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. (Thanks to Richard Sandomir and the NYTimes for this information) —Posted 6/16/2019
• Lillian A. Corsetti, 94 (Little Brown) We invite anyone who knew Lillian and would like to add some notes about her time at Little Brown to send them to us at tl.as@tlasconnect.com. —Posted 6/12/2019
• Robert C. Gardner, 88, a successful ad sales executive for Sports Illustrated in its early days, died at Vero Beach on May 12. Robert graduated from the University of Virginia in 1953 and then served in the Air Force as a 2nd lieutenant, before coming to Time Inc. He later became executive vice president of the Magazine Publishers Association. In 1980 he moved to take over the presidency of Decisions Publications, which publishes Media and Marketing Decisions, and two years later he and a partner bought the company. When they sold it to TV producer Norman Lear, Robert remained in the company as president. After retiring to Locust Valley, New York, he served as an industry consultant and sat on several boards and committees.
—Posted 6/1/2019
• Mary McDermott, 87, a former secretary at Life, died in Hilton Head in February. Polly, as she was known to all her many friends, was the widow of John (Jack) McDermott, former Life sports editor, who died in 1995.
Polly was the daughter of a documentary film maker and they moved around the country for his work. When the family settled in Princeton, she went to high school there. After graduating from Centenary Junior College in 1954, she went to work at Life. That same year, Jack graduated from Columbia and signed on at Life as a sports reporter. After their first date, at a Harlem Globetrotters game in 1955, they both knew they would marry and they became engaged three months later. They married in 1956.
Polly’s job at Life was an exciting one – dining with Albert Einstein and watching missiles take off from Cape Canaveral. Jack became sports editor at Life and then moved to a series of high profile jobs as president of Signature magazine, executive editor of Golf Digest. They traveled the world together, dining with sports stars and princes. Jack’s stint at Life included working in the Chicago bureau with Roy Rowan. The two of them formed a bureau syndicate to invest in a race horse that turned out to be more fun than a money-maker. —Posted 4/10/2019
• Michael Carpenter, 78 (Time, Life, People ad sales) Mike was an original member of the People staff, opening the only sales office outside New York—in LA. --Frank Roth (See picture in "It's About Time"—Posted 5/23/19
[We welcome any additional information about Mike’s career at Time Inc.—Ed]
• Marian Heiskell, Philanthropist
Marian Heiskell, 100, a member of the Sulzberger family that acquired The New York Times in 1896 and one of New York City’s most effective philanthropists, died in New York in March. Although she never worked for Time Inc., she became an honorary member of TLAS, because she was married to the late Andrew Heiskell, the company’s former CEO. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy our lunches, which she often attended.
Mrs. Heiskell was the granddaughter, daughter, wife, mother, aunt and great aunt of the six successive publishers of The Times since the Sulzberger family took over the paper. She was born in New York into the top-most level of New York society and influence. Her first husband, Orvil Dryfoos, third publisher of The Times, died in 1963 at the age of 50 after he had been running the newspaper for only two years. She married Heiskell in 1965, soon after his divorce from the actress Carole Lombard.
Mrs. Heiskell was a failure in several schools because of undiagnosed dyslexia but as a young woman she discovered—“much to my horror,” as she told The Times—that she was good at getting things done and fund-raising. So instead of a life of high society functions, she turned to notable efforts to improve New York’s urban environment.
Mayor John Lindsey and Mrs. Heiskell established in 1970 the Council on the Environment of New York City, which raised private funds to create small parks in abandoned lots in the city. She was a leader in the campaign to create the Gateway National Recreation Area, a park made up of scores of beaches and wildlife reserves around the entrance to the New York-New Jersey harbor area. At her death she was still chairwoman of the National Parks of the New York Harbor Conservancy.
The Times said her most “striking contribution” to the city was the renovation of the once grand West 42d Street theater district, which had become lined with a seedy collection of porn palaces. She raised millions of dollars of private money to renew some of those theaters and the whole street has taken on a new life. Photo: James Estrin/The New York Times
--Posted 3/18/2019
• W. Pendleton (Pen) Tudor, 89, a whizz Time-Life ad salesman and a cofounder of AdWeek, died in March in Montecito, California, where he had lived for many years. Such was the respect and warmth felt towards him that in spite of his imposing name he was universally known simply as “Pen.”
He joined Time Inc. in 1955 as a sales rep for Life in Los Angeles. He also worked in Chicago and New York but for most of his life he was based in his native California, where had earned an undergraduate degree and an MBA from the University of Southern California.
Pen spent 17 years in various line and sales management positions at Time Inc. and then two years as marketing director for a research project into paid TV satellite service.
In 1978, he and the late Jack Thomas, another Time Inc. sales executive, and a third partner joined forces to buy ASW, the publisher of three regional advertising magazines. They merged them into a single national magazine, AdWeek, and challenged the well-established Advertising Age. To make AdWeek more alluring they enlisted the help of Clay Felker, another Time Inc. veteran and founder of New York magazine, and two prominent designers, Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser.
When the partners acquired AdWeek it had 29 employees and revenues of $3 million. By the mid-1980s, AdWeek had overtaken Advertising Age in circulation and by other measures. When the partners sold AdWeek in 1990 it had more than 300 employees and revenue of more than $40 million from ten magazines and other activities.
Before and after retiring from AdWeek, Pen was active in many not-profits and served on the boards of several corporations. He was an associate director of the California Museum of Science and Technology and chairman of the Southern California U.S. Olympic Committee. He was married to the late Mary Alice Ghormley, whose father was president and vice chairman of the Carnation company—once a big advertiser in Life. Family provided the 2018 Photograph—Posted 3/26/2019
• The Best Sports Writer Ever
Dan Jenkins, 90, described “as the most influential sports writer ever,” by Sports Illustrated, where he wrote about golf and football for more than two decades, died on March 7 in Ft. Worth, his home town.
The Washington Post obituary said he was almost as famous as the players he wrote about, such as Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, who Jenkins had helped turn into stars. Golf Digest, which he joined in 1985, said Dan “stood at the center of magazine journalism in the golden age of magazine journalism.” He was funny, irascible, politically incorrect and the model for many sports writers who followed him.
Born in Ft. Worth, Dan was brought up by his grandparents after his father left home. His grandmother bought him typewriter and Dan put it on the kitchen table and copied out sports stories from the newspapers. After a while he decided “this guy is an idiot” and started improving on the stories. He never stopped writing
Dan captained the golf team at Texas Christian University and was hired to write sports for the Ft. Worth Press. Then, after a short stint at the Dallas Times Herald he was spotted by Andre Laguerre, the founding editor of SI who was a great talent scout. Laguerre hired Dan away to work in New York, where he was soon a familiar at Elaine’s and other watering holes for journalists. He was a raconteur who stayed til the end and always picked up the tab. His formula for writing—“Type fast, get it done and go to a bar”—reflected his effortless style but didn’t fool anyone who appreciated his deep knowledge of sports acquired in covering 200 golf “majors” and countless other events.
He turned to fiction in 1972 and published Semi-Tough a raunchy, raucous diary of a fictional Super Bowl running back. “It is outrageous,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times. “It mocks contemporary American mores; it mocks Madison Avenue; it mocks racial attitudes; it mocks writers like me; it even mocks sportswriters for Sports Illustrated like Dan Jenkins.” Semi-Tough became a best-seller and was turned into a movie starring Burt Reynolds in 1977. More books followed, establishing his reputation as novelist.
Dan left SI and returned to Dallas in 1985 and began writing for Golf and Playboy. Having revolutionized sports writing, Dan took to Twitter early on and built up a large following—with a little technological help plus some supervision to tone down his more outrageous, politically incorrect opinions. His daughter Sally is a well regarded sports-columnist for The Washington Post. --Photo: Martin Mills/Getty Images --Posted 3/17/2019
• Clementina Carmela Malvena DiGeronimo Allured, 94, known to generations of Time correspondents and writers simply as “Clem”, died in January. She worked for the magazine for 50 years (1942-1992) and was the cheerful assistant in the news bureau who was always ready to help Timeincers whether they were passing through New York or off in Katmandu. The daughter of Italian immigrants, Clem was a New Yorker, educated at Washington Irving High School and a long-time resident of East Harlem and Flushing.
• Paul Zimmerman, 86, well-known also as the “Dr Z” who skillfully explained the intricacies of football during his 30 years at Sports Illustrated, died at the beginning of November in Noblesville, Indiana. His career was cut short in 2008 by a series of strokes that left him unable to read or write and almost unable to speak.
Tributes from other sports figures made it clear that among the specialists in pro football, he was unequalled. Howie Long, a Hall of Fame defensive end featured in a memorable article by Zimmerman in 1985, wrote that “Dr. Z understood the sport of football in a way few if any members of the media before him did: Zimmerman would write not only about the running back who gained 100 yards, but about the offensive linemen who made it possible.”
Long also wrote, “Paul’s football knowledge was incredible. He had an appreciation particularly for line play and all of its nuance. He had a vision in his mind of how the game was supposed to be played, and anything short of that was unacceptable.”
Jimmy Traina, who was Dr.Z’s editor at CNN and SI, said “he LOVED football. He would literally cut out every single box score every single season and glue them into a notebook. He charted every single game using his own system where he graded every player. He had stories about anyone and everyone associated with the NFL, and he loved to share them.”
Paul was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Manhattan. His father was a union leader for the garment workers and co-chairman of the Socialist Party of America. Paul played football at the Horace Mann School, at Columbia and Stanford Universities, and later in the Army.
After earning a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism he first worked for the Sacramento Bee and then held a series of jobs with three New York afternoon newspapers and began his career as a sports writer. He also wrote a column about wine, another passion.
Paul made SI’s official preseason Super Bowl picks, made weekly game predictions and chose the all-pro teams at the end of the season. He appeared sometimes on TV but his cantankerous nature didn’t go down well with his colleagues. Jimmy Traina said that even in his 70s, Paul understood the internet better than his colleagues and it showed in the posts he wrote.
He produced several books, notably The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football.
(This was adapted from several printed obituaries.)
• Edward Thompson (Fortune edit), former worldwide editor of Reader’s Digest, died in February on his 90th birthday. He was the son of Life’s former managing editor, his namesake. When he was a boy the family moved from Milwaukee to New York. According to a family memoir: “Ed was enrolled at the Lawrenceville School. He credits Lawrenceville with teaching him how to think and, next, MIT with teaching him how to share a broken down car with five fraternity brothers.”
After a brief exposure to chemical engineering, he followed family instincts and became a journalist, first as a writer at McGraw Hill and then at Fortune. He joined the Reader’s Digest in 1960 and DeWitt Wallace chose him to run the magazine in 1976. He launched the magazine into investigative journalism, expanded its international editions, and commissioned more original articles.
Ed was a keen skier, a middling golfer and his favorite place was at the helm of his trawler, Sea Legs. According to the family, “He loved taking family and friends from Maine to Miami without always paying attention to the Coast Guard weather forecasts.” He played the guitar, cooked elaborate meals and enjoyed bridge. When macular degeneration dimmed his eyesight, he took up talking books and continued using his computer with the help of ZoomText, a screen magnifier.
(Adapted from a memorial in The New York Times.)
• Eric Pace, 82, a former Time correspondent in Bonn and Hong Kong (with side trips to Saigon during the war in Vietnam), died in New York in July.
Eric attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, graduated from Yale in 1957 and then earned a master’s degree from the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. After reporting for Time in the 1960s and 1970s, he switched to The New York Times and became its Tehran bureau chief. Returned to New York, he wrote for many years the well-researched and erudite obituaries for the Times. Eric also wrote three novels, Any War Will Do, Saberlegs and Nightingale.
• Leo Deuel, a double-Ph.D., a highly educated proofreader for Time, Sports Illustrated and the Books division for four decades, died about four years ago, as we learn very belatedly from Barbara Murray. He was in his 90s.
Leo was born in Switzerland and educated there and in Britain. He was an Egyptologist who also taught at the City College of New York. He wrote several books about archaeology, about the recovery of ancient documents and about the life of Heinrich Schliemann, the German who used the fortune he made as a businessman in the 1800s to search successfully for the site of Troy. He wrote another volume about the use of aerial photography in archaeological research. He spoke many languages, including Spanish and Ladino, a version of Spanish spoken by mestizos. Life en Espaňol used him as a consultant on these languages.
As Barbara Murray points out, Leo was one of a number of talented or prominent people, most of them with graduate degrees, who liked the flexibility of proof-reading to finance their principal interests. They included the daughter and niece of Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy’s husband, and the writer Luc Sante. (Thanks to Barbara Murray for telling us about Leo.)
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A note about obituaries: Since TLAS lost its office space in the Time-Life Building after the Meredith takeover, all our files have been stuck in a warehouse, which means we don’t have access to information about our members to help us put together these farewells. In any case memories are dimming. So we need help from anyone who can give us information about members who have died but whose obituaries we cannot piece together. They include Jayne-Janis Cortese, Edwin Casey, Valentin Chu, Frank Gander, William Ota, Dale Brown, James Cobbs, Vivien Duffy, Clement Figueroa, Patricia Roache, Eleanor Schaeffer, Roz Taylor, and Ros Taylor. Click here to contact us: tl.as@tlasconnect.com.
-------------------------------------------------------Posted September 27, 2018
• Stefan Kanfer, 85, for decades one of Time’s most talented writers and editors, died of a heart attack in June. Myron Magnet, a former Fortune writer and most recently editor of City Journal, had this to say about Steve: “He was the most vividly alive person I knew. . . He could, and did, do everything, from playing the musical saw in Greenwich Village nightclubs, writing plays, painting model birds, writing a shelf of novels (one published only last month) and bestselling biographies, narrating an Academy Award-nominated documentary and for 30 years being by a long measure the best book and movie critic that Time could boast, excepting only James Agee.” (Actually it was more like 25 years.)
Steve was born in Manhattan and educated at NYU. During the Korean War he served in Army intelligence. Before joining Time, he wrote for the theater and for TV. He was the senior editor for books at Time during its glory years. He also became one of the most endearing and colorful figures at the magazine.
Lance Morrow, who was himself one of Time’s best writers, recalls encountering Steve late one night in the Time & Life Building when he heard laughter down the hall and what sounded distinctly like the voices of Kirk Douglas, George Jessel and Gregory Peck. When he went to investigate he found it “was Steve, an eerily accurate mimic, in full shtick, with an audience of writers, researchers and copyboys.”
Lance, who like Myron and Steve, wrote for City Journal, had this to say about his old friend in the Journal: “He had a primitive integrity of character, at ease with his various roles: the moralist with a decisive, ruthless mind; the novelist with an amused discerning eye; the critic with a fund of considerable learning, and the deeply serious man who was also incredibly funny.”
Myron wrote this: “. . . vehement Steve was, in his loves – for America, for Israel, for virtue, for good culture (whether high or popular)—and his hates – for fraud, for political correctness, for anti-Semitism, for self-righteous Leftism, for the U.N., and for knee-jerk Trump-haters.”
When Myron asked Steve in 2016 to write a piece about Time, by then well into its decline, he pointed to the “latest ignorance in Time” – in a list of the most-read female writers in college classes, Number 97 was Evelyn Waugh. With a diminished staff Time had outsourced the research for the list and no one at the magazine caught the mistake. Steve said he and his colleagues at Time – and any well educated person -- would have been familiar with Waugh’s work and the fact that he was male.
After Time, Steve became a drama critic for the New Leader and wrote on a whole range of subjects as a contributor to the City Journal. He wrote 16 books, some of them best sellers, notably biographies of Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. A book about the gypsies in World War II led to his appointment to the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He received many awards and taught at several colleges.
For years he met old friends from Time, including Lance, Chris Porterfield, Roger Rosenblatt, B.J. Phillips and others for lunch regularly at Joe Allen’s on 46th Street. He died the day of his last lunch with them in June.
• John Austin, 78, a former Time correspondent and writer, died in June in San Rafael, California, where he had lived for the past 45 years. John grew up in Scarsdale, where he distinguished himself as an actor if not as an athlete, and went on to the University of Pennsylvania.
Instead of the theater, he chose journalism for his career and worked for Time from 1967 to 1979. As a Washington correspondent he covered Nixon’s 1968 campaign and tangled with Bob Kennedy on of the use of quotes. In a memoir John wrote how he would let a source see the quotes he was going to use, and amplify them if needed, but always refused the persistent demands of Kennedy’s press secretary and others to change the quotes.
He had a strong opinion on the use of unattributed quotes -- an issue in Trump’s Washington too. At that time, nearly 50 years ago, he thought “the use of unattributed quotes is too prevalent, especially in Washington journalism.” Their use “allows government manipulators, Henry Kissinger was one of the most adroit, to float a trial balloon on policy to see what the reaction to it is without risk of criticism.”
As a writer in New York, he recalled, he felt as much responsible for the accuracy of a piece as the “fact checker” – always a woman in those days – who had to put a colored dot over every word to indicate whether or not the fact was true. “As a nation writer,” he remembered, “I found myself on the phone at 3 a.m. to a Japanese golf course trying to explain that I needed to speak to Time’s Tokyo bureau chief to check the spelling of some obscure religious group of Okinawans.” Time’s readers got the right spelling.
John was also a correspondent in San Francisco, where he wrote about Patty Hearst, among others, and taught journalism for a year at Stanford. After he worked at Time, John’s interest in the holocaust led him to write a novel about the Jews in Vilnius, Poland, under the Nazi occupation. For the rest of his career he was a speech writer, first for Jimmy Carter’s treasury secretary and later for the presidents of Richmond Power & Light and then Pacific Gas & Electric. —(Thanks to Chris Cory and William Stott for this information.)
• Art Shay, 96, a photographer of the famous and of everyday life who had more than 1,500 assignments from Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Look, died in April at his home in Deerfield, Illinois.
Art took pictures of nine presidents, including Jack Kennedy, as well as other well-known people, including Mohammed Ali, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Hoffa and Senator Joseph McCarthy. He also chronicled the street life of his adopted hometown, Chicago.
In addition to his photography, Art was a prolific writer. He wrote 60 books, many of them for children, and two plays. In fact, Life first hired him as a writer. Beginning in 1947, he wrote more than 100 articles for Life but then in 1951 he went out on his own to a career as a successful freelance photographer.
Art was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. His father, a tailor, bought him a portable typewriter for $2 down and 25 cents a week. He wrote for his school paper and learned how to use a darkroom in the Boy Scouts. He enrolled in Brooklyn College but left to join the Army Air Force in 1943. As a lead navigator he flew more than 30 missions over Germany in a unit commanded by Jimmy Stewart. He survived a raid over Kassel in which dozens of American planes were shot down and more than 100 airmen killed. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Croix de Guerre.
Last year he won a lifetime achievement award from the Lucie Foundation in Los Angeles which recognizes great photography. He received the award in Carnegie Hall and after making a brief speech he brought out a harmonica to play a solo. He said any Jewish kid growing up in New York is expected to make it to Carnegie Hall.
(Condensed from The New York Times obituary.)
• Marguerite Michaels, 73, one of the first women reporters hired by Time in the early 1970s and the first to head the Nairobi bureau, died last year in a nursing home in Toledo.
Marguerite was born in New Jersey but went to high school in Toledo and then entered the order of the Sisters of Mercy in Cincinnati. She quit after two years, before taking her vows, to attend Southern Illinois University, where she earned a degree in English. She went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Time hired her straight out of Columbia as a reporter-researcher. She covered many major stories including a cover story on Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, and she covered an uprising in Liberia, where she was imprisoned for several days.
She left Time to write for Parade and produce a book, Showing the Flag, about life inside the American embassy in Bogota, published in 1982 by Simon & Schuster. By then she had returned to Time, which sent her off to the Nairobi bureau. She spent several years covering sub-Sahara Africa and returned to New York to write for Time. She also wrote pieces for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Marguerite was a serious collector of art. She came back from Nairobi with a number of African pieces. She also had an outstanding collection of Japanese prints and paintings, which she gave to the Art Institute of Chicago. When she retired to Toledo, where she had family, she supported the local art scene. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2007 and moved to an assisted living community in 2014.
• David Douglas Duncan, 102, war photographer, died in June in the south of France, where he had lived since 1962. An excellent obituary in The New York Times said, “He was among the most influential photographers of the 20th Century, a Life magazine peer of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Carl Mydans. In addition to his war work, Duncan spent years with Pablo Picasso, creating a pictorial history of the artist’s life.”
Duncan made his mark in the Korean War. The Times said of his Korea pictures for Life, “Dark and brooding, most black and white, they are the stills of a legendary combat photographer, and artist with camera, who brought home to America the poignant lives of infantrymen and fleeing civilians. . .”
He was born in Kansas City and studied archaeology at the University of Arizona, dropping out to join expeditions to Mexico and Central America. He then went on to the University of Michigan to study Spanish and zoology, graduating in 1938 with a determination to become a photographer. He roamed around Latin America taking underwater pictures of aquatic life and shots of wild life in the jungle. He sold them to the National Geographic and several newspapers.
When World War II broke out, Duncan joined the Marines, became an officer and photographer and covered the invasions of the Solomon Islands and Okinawa. He was aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the surrender.
Life hired him after the war and sent him to cover conflicts in the Middle East. When North Korea invaded the South he was in Tokyo and he was soon at the front. The Times described his work there this way: “Under the helmets, the faces are young and tormented, stubbled and dirty, taut with the strain of battle. They sob over dead friends. They stare exhausted into the fog and rain. They crouch in muddy foxholes.”
When the war in Vietnam broke out, he covered that too for Life and ABC and wrote a book denouncing it. Duncan covered other conflicts and was wounded three times. But he also took pictures of Richard Nixon, of the 1968 political conventions (in a sense a war zone), of Paris, and the Kremlin and ordinary people all over Asia.
Duncan showed up uninvited at Picasso’s house in 1956 and then became virtually the artist’s official photographer. They were close friends until Picasso’s death in 1973. His photos showed the artist’s daily life and his creativity. Duncan published eight books about Picasso and 17 other books.
The Whitney Museum of American Art staged an exhibit of his war work in 1972. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin has Duncan’s archives.
(This obituary was adapted entirely from The New York Times)
• Frank McCulloch, 98, a legend at California newspapers and at Time, died in Santa Rosa in May. The San Francisco Chronicle said Frank was “bald, blunt and beloved, ran newsrooms, challenged presidents, and got late night phone calls from Howard Hughes.”
Frank was largely responsible for saving Life from the embarrassment of publishing an extremely skillful fake autobiography of Hughes, a recluse billionaire aviator and film-maker. The author Clifford Irving had written a convincing autobiography, concocted largely from Frank’s own raw files of interviews with Hughes. Frank didn’t know Life had given Irving access to these file because the project was so secret that it was concealed even from the one person at Time Inc. who knew Hughes.
Frank found out about the project when Hughes phoned him and, amidst expletives, said he had never met or heard of Irving. Life and the co-publisher, McGraw-Hill, still believed in the book’s authenticity and went ahead with plans to announce the forthcoming book. While the presses in Chicago were actually running with the next issue of Life (carrying the announcement, not the biography), Frank cornered Irving and got him to confess at 1 a.m. the whole thing was a fake. On his own authority Frank stopped the presses, had the announcement replated, and saved Life from a lot of embarrassment. The scandal was made into a movie, The Hoax, starring Richard Gere.
The son of a northern Nevada cattle rancher, Frank attended high school in Reno and the University of Nevada in Reno. After graduating he got a job at the United Press in San Francisco at $15 a week. In 1942 he enlisted in the Marines. After the war, he covered crime for the Reno Evening News, earning threats from the shady applicants for gaming licenses whom he investigated.
Time hired Frank in 1951 and sent him traveling through the South to report a cover story on Thurgood Marshall. Somehow he established a rapport with Hughes and got used to midnight phone calls from the billionaire. Otis Chandler hired Frank in 1960 to be managing editor of The Los Angeles Times where he launched several important exposes. But in 1963 Frank returned to Time to cover the war in Vietnam. His files questioned the optimistic accounts issued by U.S. authorities.
Frank left Time in 1975 and became managing editor of The Sacramento Bee, eventually rising to executive editor of all three Bee newspapers. The investigative stories he launched got him named in seven libel suits, all unsuccessful. In his last act, when he was 65 in 1985, he became managing editor of the late San Francisco Examiner. William Randolph Hearst III said that getting Frank at that age “was a little like someone telling you Pelé is willing to play a little more soccer, and are you interested?” Hearst continued, “The younger people who worked for him were in awe of him. They adored him. He was a great mentor, always willing to share.”
• José M. Ferrer III, 78, a Time writer and editor for most of five decades, died in May in New York where he was born and lived his whole life.
Joe attended Canterbury School and went on to Princeton, where he majored in English and became chairman of the campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Time hired him when he graduated in 1961 and, like most new writers, he started by preparing short items for the Milestones section. He moved up to writing the slightly longer People items and went on up the ladder. He was an associate editor in 1976 when the Guild struck Time Inc. over a matter of pay scales. He served on the staff committee that negotiated with Henry Grunwald, Time’s managing editor. Time Inc.’s official history says this about him: “An affable, fair-minded Princetonian, Ferrer was trusted by both sides and found himself increasingly in the forefront, explaining the particular problems at Time.”
Joe became a senior editor but also took time to accept a fellowship at the law school at Stanford University and to lecture in journalism at Duke University. In l976 he left Time to help found and edit Nuestro, a bilingual general interest magazine and to edit the short-lived Politics Today. He returned to Time in 1980 to be managing editor of its international editions and then became part of corporate management.
When he retired in 2006, he wrote this to his colleague: “As a writer and editor at Time, I worked on my share of good stories, but what I remember more are the good arguments you could have about everything with everyone, those late-night usage debates, the tidy intelligence of researchers challenging sloppy facts, the to-and-fros with writers, art directors and correspondents, the jousting with editors as they tried to punch up, or sometimes punch down, a story.”
• George Bookman, at 103 likely our oldest alumnus, died recently in Seattle. Could anyone else you know say they had been a White House correspondent when FDR was the occupant? George could. George joined Time’s Washington bureau in 1948, became the magazine’s national economic correspondent, and then moved over to Fortune’s Board of Editors in 1959.
A native New Yorker, George graduated from Haverford in 1936 (with a junior year in Paris) and then in very quick succession worked for The Villager in New York, U.S.News & World Report in Washington and The Washington Post. Somehow in all this he managed a long reporting journey through the Middle East and Mediterranean. At the Post, after short spells on the desk and on the police beat, he became the Post’s White House reporter – the paper had a taut staff then.
In 1940 as the war approached, George joined what became the Office of War Information. Its chief, master-spy “Wild Bill” Donovan, who later became head of the OSS, assigned him to Brazzaville in the Congo, which was in the hands of the Free French. From there he made propaganda broadcasts in French. As the war progressed, the OWI took him to Cairo, then up the Italian peninsula into Austria, sometimes ahead of the troops. During a brief home leave he married Janet Madison, a UPI reporter in Washington.
After the war, George returned briefly to U.S.News & World Report and moved over to Time where he became the economics correspondent in Washington. Time later sent him to New York to be national economics reporter. He reported many cover stories and contributed an annual economics review, which the magazine reprinted as a booklet.
Fortune put him on the board of editors in 1959 but he didn’t stay long. The New York Stock Exchange made him director of public information in 1962. Living with Janet in the country in Millbrook, New York, George had taken enthusiastically to garden and yard work, so when the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx asked him in 1973 to become director of public relations, he readily accepted and soon became a vice president.
After that he returned to the Stock Market for a spell (ghost writing some columns for Sylvia Porter), became a consultant to Howard Stein at Dreyfus and advised the Budapest Stock Exchange on its public program. George was a member of the Overseas Press Club and served on its freedom of the press committee. (From George’s memoir)
• Nancy Pierce Williamson, 80, who came to work at Time Inc. right out of Northwestern University in 1959 and stayed for 39 years, died in Southampton in February. Nancy started as a researcher at Sports Illustrated and then became a writer-reporter for special projects. She covered the Winter Olympics in Austria, France and Japan. She was co-author of an award-winning cover story on women in sports and with William Johnson was co-author of Whatta Gal: The Babe Didrikson Story. After a two-year stint as a reporter-researcher at Time, she joined the start-up staff at People. Pat Ryan, the magazine’s managing editor, promoted her to chief of reporters. Colleagues said she had an uncanny knack for matching the right researcher with the story and had an ability to make crucial last-minute fixes on closing nights. She went to Sydney to help launch the Australian edition of People, WHO.
Jim Gaines, former managing editor of Time, People and Life, said “when I think of Nancy I think first of how wonderful it was just to be around her, and then of her great strength in support of high standards. She loved journalism and the people who helped her do it. The best possible colleague, she was also a delightful friend, during and after hours.”
She retired to her seaside home in Southampton in 1998 and enjoyed neighbors, golf, fishing, and long walks on the beach with her yellow lab “Rudder.” She also volunteered at the local hospital and library. (Thanks to Jerry Kirshenbaum and M.C.Marden for this item)
• Edward L. Jamieson, 88, a former executive editor of Time, died in Peabody, Massachusetts, in April. Ed graduated from Boston University in 1951 with a degree in English literature and spent four years as a reporter and feature writer at the Medford Daily Mercury. In 1955 he moved to New York to become a contributing editor at Time, where he met his wife Ann.
Ed wrote for all 25 sections of the magazine that existed at the time and then, as a senior editor, ran most of them as an assigned or sit-in editor. In 1969 at 39 he became assistant managing editor and deputy to managing editor Henry Grunwald. The company history, The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise, 1960-1980 by Curtis Prendergast, describes Ed’s role this way: “In addition to relying on him for many administrative chores, Grunwald considered Jamieson ‘crucial to the magazine.’ Something of a father-confessor to the staff, even at his young age, the Boston-born Jamieson had a keen if understated sense of humor but a stiffly formal manner. He was conspicuous around the Time offices for never removing his jacket.” He was named executive editor in 1976.
After Ed retired he served for several years as an editor and editorial adviser to America, a Jesuit weekly. For a quarter century Ed and Ann divided their time between East Orleans on Cape Cod but in 2013 they moved to a retirement community in Peabody.
Bill Nack, 77, one of the legendary, literary Sports Illustrated stars and the biographer of Secretariat, died in Washington in April. As a child in Skokie, Illinois, Bill cleaned stalls and in his teens he went to the racetracks around Chicago and worked as a groom. Even then he started to pick up horse stories which he loved to tell.
Bill attended the University of Illinois, where he was sports editor of the campus daily, and enlisted in Army in 1966. During a tour of duty in Vietnam he wrote speeches and press releases for General William Westmoreland. Back in the U.S., Long Island Newsday hired him to cover local politics and the environment. At an office party in 1971 he stood on a table and recited the names of all the Kentucky Derby winners beginning with Aristides in 1875. The paper’s editor, a horse racing fan, was so impressed that he made Bill the paper’s turf writer.
Bill met the two-year-old Secretariat in 1972 when an exercise rider introduced him with a prediction that Secretariat would make people forget last year’s Derby winner. In 1973 Bill spent 40 consecutive days with the horse, starting at 7 a.m., learning all about the horse and his team. Bill covered Secretariat’s wins in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. For the Belmont, Bill got to Secretariat’s stable at 3 a.m. and half a day later watched the horse win by 31 lengths in record time and become a Triple Crown Winner. Bill’s book, Secretariat, The Making of a Champion became the basis for a film in 2010.
Bill spent the next quarter century at SI, writing mostly about horses and jockeys, but also about boxers, football players and others. In a tribute to him, SI’s Tim Layden called him, “The greatest turf-writer in history.” He left SI in 2001 but contributed to GQ and ESPN and continued winning prizes until last year.
• Henry Groskinsky, 84, a Life staff photographer who started out working part-time in the magazine’s photo lab while he was still in high school, died last October. His best known picture was a shot of a total solar eclipse which ran on the cover of Life in 1979. He captured the perfect moment when a symmetrical corona surrounded a totally black moon.
In his book, Life photographers: What They Saw, John Loengard quotes Henry saying, “When I was 12, right after World War II, I got an old 8 x 10-inch camera from my uncle, who was an amateur photographer. It was a magical thing.” Henry went to the High School of Industrial Arts on 51st Street and worked nights at the Life lab. After he graduated in 1952 he started assisting Life photographers at the studio on 53d Street.
Bob Gomel, another staff photographer, recalls that Henry was an assistant to photographers when he came aboard in 1959. He writes, “After working with him on several jobs, his competence was so obvious that I felt comfortable in sending him across the country several days ahead of myself, to set up lighting in a gigantic arena and hand me a perfect polaroid when I arrived minutes before an event.”
It wasn’t until 1964 that Time Inc. offered him a job as a corporate photographer to take pictures of company events. He became a staff photographer a year later after his picture of Jackie Kennedy arriving at the U.N. ran for a full page in Life.
He was on assignment with reporter Mike Silva in Alabama in April, 1968, when they heard that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, 200 miles away. Without the magazine’s approval, they raced over and were astounded to find that they had free access to the motel where King was shot. King’s associates were sitting around solemnly and made no objection to any picture he wanted to take of them or the scene. Among other things, he shot a picture of King’s open briefcase, with a tube of shaving cream on top of his other belongings, and another of a hotel worker trying to clean up a huge pool of blood on the balcony. Life didn’t run any of his pictures; instead used an AP shot of King’s associates on the balcony pointing to the derelict building from where they thought the shot came from. Life did not use the pictures until 41 years later, in 2009, when it took them out of the archive and put them on its website.
In his book, John Loengard quotes Henry about his straightforward approach to photography: “I will often compose a picture so it is symmetrical. If you have a strange angle, it’s as if there’s not enough in the subject so the photographer has done something to jazz it up. I find that the more direct, pure approach is the best way to go. Here it is. This is what it looks like. This is the way I see it.”
• John Wesley Moffly IV, 91, an ace Life ad salesman, a seasoned ocean sailor and, with his wife Donna, the founder of a chain of luxury magazines based in Fairfield County, died in March in Greenwich.
Jack worked for House & Home and SAMI, but it was at Life that he made his mark. He was one of half a dozen salesmen assigned to Life’s crucial tobacco and alcohol group, which could have been a model for Mad Men. The group was located on a separate floor from the rest of the staff perhaps because their hours and level of entertaining might not have set a good example for the others. Carky Rubens, former president of TLAS, was head of the group but said Jack was by far the best salesman. “He sold more ads than I ever did,” said Carky and “he brought dignity to our group.” Jack was a little older and steadier than the others.
Jack was born in Philadelphia and schooled at Andover. He graduated early to join the Army Air Force in World War II. After his service, he attended Princeton, graduating in 1949. He then joined Time Inc., but after his star turn at Life he retired in 1986.
With his wife, he bought the Greenwich Review and combined it with the Nutmegger to make Greenwich, a monthly focused on the rich living in Greenwich. Moffly Media eventually expanded along Connecticut’s Gold Coast with magazines for Westport, Stamford, and New Canaan-Darien and other publications called Fairfield Living and athome. Moffly Media also sold services such as printing, photography, books, newsletters and advertising. The Mofflys retired in 2006 turning the business over to their son Jonathan, but Jack continued to write a column.
A serious yachtsman, Jack had sailed in six Bermuda races and four Marblehead-Halifax races, as well as events on Long Island Sound. Yachting has its hazards. Once crossing the North Atlantic he was washed overboard in a gale. Another time, sailing alone on the Sound, a freak accident left him in the water, being towed by a rope tangled around one foot while his boat, under power and on auto pilot with, headed for Oyster Bay. He was lucky to be rescued both times.
Jack loved duck hunting, skeet shooting, riding, tennis and golf. He was most social. He belonged to several clubs and luncheon groups. He served on the boards of such civic bodies as United Way and the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce.
• Lisa Maria Quiroz, 57, who launched two successful magazines for Time Inc., People en Espaňol and Time for Kids, died of pancreatic cancer in March in Denver, where her parents live. Her death occasioned unusually heartfelt messages about her work as an editor and publisher, as a public servant, as contributor to the arts in New York and especially as a supporter of the Latino community.
After her success with magazines, Lisa took on several major roles at Time Warner. She became the company’s chief diversity officer and took charge of the company’s philanthropic work as president of the Time Warner Foundation and senior vice president for cultural investment.
Time Warner’s CEO Jeff Bewkes wrote in a memo to his colleagues that Lisa was “an extraordinarily accomplished woman whose contributions throughout her life impacted many.” He pointed out that in addition to her work at Time Warner she was a “tireless public servant on the boards of the New York City’s Public Theater and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and a national leader appointed by President Obama to chair the board of the Corporation for National Community Service.”
Lisa was born on Staten Island and went to school there before attending Harvard. After graduating in 1983, she went to work for the Harvard admissions office, traveling around the country to recruit Latino students. She returned to the classroom to earn an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and Time Inc. had recruited her by the time she graduated.
Her sense of mission to serve the Latino community led her to become founding publisher of People en Espaňol and, after a visit to her grade school in Staten Island, her ability to see new opportunities inspired her to become the founding editor of Time for Kids in 1995. Both magazines were successful.
Lisa immersed herself in New York’s cultural life and served on the boards of the Public Theater and the Apollo Theater Foundation. She took time to mentor and support many people, among them Soledad O’Brien and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Right after her death, the Kennedy School established a fellowship in her honor for students committed to the Latino community. Time Warner funded the scholarship.
• Ann Morrell, 77, who had worked for Time, Life, People and corporate from 1973 until her retirement in 2001, died in New York in January. She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and had her first job with the Providence Journal before moving to New York and her career with Time Inc.
She worked for Jim Gaines for nine years, when he was managing editor of People and when he moved up to the 34th floor. She was hired as his executive assistant but as it turned out, he writes, she was his “editor, guardian, judge, jury and friend.” When he hired Ann he asked her if she had any special conditions and she replied, “Just treat me as a real person.” They shook hands on that.
Jim says “Ann’s discretion was impenetrable, which is part of what made her a great gate keeper, someone who could be trusted with secrets, and a stout companion in the internecine wars. When she spoke of her ex-husband. . . or of her many friends, it was always with great kindness and affection, literally never otherwise. . . . What I will always remember most was her irrepressible, infectious, slightly raucous laugh—often directed at me, sometimes at herself.”
• Mary Placko, 88, who helped keep the Time Life Alumni Society office going for 30 years as a volunteer, died in Lodi, New Jersey, in January. Mary and the late Loretta Geissler and Doris Laffan all retired from Time Inc. in 1988 when retirement packages became available for those who had worked for the company for 30 years and they signed up to volunteer for TLAS.
Mary worked at Printing Developments Inc., a subsidiary, and later helped Rose Epstein keep track of expense accounts, which were pretty inventive in those days. When she signed up with TLAS it had no real office—just a bunch of cartons behind a partition, she said. Later the company set aside a pair of offices in the Time & Life Building. The volunteers handled phone calls and the mail, helped to organize luncheons and trips, kept track of the 1,700 members of TLAS. It was a busy place.
Mary was a Eucharist minister and lector in the Rosary Society of St. Francis de Sales Church. She liked crossword puzzles, westerns and was a die-hard Yankees fan.
• Bobbi Baker Burrows, 73, den mother to many of Life’s famous photographers and guardian of Life’s incomparable picture collection, died in Martha’s Vineyard in January of a rare neurological disease, corticobasal degeneration. She joined Life in 1966 as a photographer’s assistant and became a go-fer for Alfred Eisenstaedt, one of many photographers who became lifelong friends.
She became a senior picture editor at Life when it was a weekly and at the monthly Life when it was resurrected in 1978. When the magazine folded in 2000 she remained as director of photography, helping to produce a series of special issues and books or “bookazines” of Life photos which were turned out at almost the same frantic pace as the magazine.
Barbara Jean Baker was born in Boston and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. She graduated from Colby Junior College (now Colby-Sawyer College) in New London, New Hampshire, in 1963. She set out for New York with the idea of becoming a dancer, but the need to earn a living turned her to Life, which was then at the peak of its popularity and influence.
As a senior picture editor she had much to do with assigning photographers and choosing which pictures to print from among the thousands that came in. Bobbi worked late and hard. She earned the love and respect of photographers for her devotion to finding the best pictures to illustrate a story and for taking a personal interest in them. Her close friends included many of the photographers who created the picture history of the 20th Century – David Douglas Duncan (who has just turned 102), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Martha Holmes, Lennart Nilsson and Bill Eppridge. She was with Carl Mydans when he died at 97 and visited Eisie in the hospital in his final days..
Life in those days was a family. Photographer Kenneth Jarecke recalls that he and Bobbi literally called each other “son” and “mom”. Jarecke covered the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989, but before the massacre he made the mistake of leaving for New York for an important date (with his future wife) without telling anyone. While others assumed he had covered the massacre and were livid when they found he hadn’t, Bobbi wasn’t. She was happy to see him safe in New York and they chatted about family matters.
She was as tough as she was charming. When Eppridge got a close-up picture of Robert Kennedy just after he had been shot in 1968, she held off two FBI agents demanding the negative with charming chit-chat while the film was processed. She figured her miniskirt might have helped distract them too.
Bobbi was married to Russell Burrows, the son of Life photographer Larry Burrows. Larry was killed along with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971. Their remains were recovered in the 1990s and buried at the Newseum in Washington. Her daughter Sarah is a picture editor at People.
• Marshall Loeb, 88, who brought new fame and profits first to Money in the 1980s and then to Fortune in the 1990s as managing editor of both magazines, died in December from the Parkinson’s disease that had afflicted him since 2006. The many tributes that came in included this one, re-quoted from The New York Times in 1994: He was “one of the most visible and influential editors in the magazine industry.”
In a life of prodigious output Marshall edited several sections of Time, produced 20 books, broadcast the daily “Your Dollars” and later “Your Money Minute” on CBS radio. He had several other radio and TV shows. He won two Gerald Loeb (no relation) Awards for financial journalism. After retiring from Time Inc., he became editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and continued to be in demand as a public speaker. He was amused that he could give the same talk with the same opening joke over and over again for $25,000 a pop. When he was serving a term as president of the Overseas Press Club a decade ago he discovered he had Parkinson’s. Later when he was bound to a wheel chair by the advance of the disease he continued to come to Time Life Alumni Society events, accompanied by an aide.
Marshall was born in Chicago and as a youngster so admired the Chicago journalists that he went to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri (Fortune’s Carol Loomis was a fellow student). After graduating he traveled to Germany because he was interested in finding out why Germany had become Nazi. Once there he landed a job with the United Press and met and married a red-headed German-French stewardess (today’s flight attendant) at Pan American Airways. Marshall and Peggy took a honeymoon trip around the world courtesy of Pan Am.
Back in the U.S. Marshall signed up as a city reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. But he had wider horizons and within a year, in 1956, Time hired him as a writer. There, the Jewish boy from a scruffy west side Chicago flourished among the Ivy Leaguers who then dominated the Time Inc. magazines. He edited several sections of the magazine, but found his real home running the business section. He was particularly successful with a column of interviews he did with CEOs and for gathering a board of distinguished economists who met periodically to share their views with Time’s readers.
When he was passed over for the managing editorship of Time, he moved in 1980 to Money, then a struggling monthly. The magazine’s profits went from zero to $35 million in the years he ran the magazine, said his son Michael, at a well-attended memorial at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. Circulation increased from 825,000 to 1.4 million. In 1986 he became managing editor of Fortune, with the same spectacular results. His daughter Margaret said that Fortune made more money in the eight years Marshall ran it than during all of its preceding years.
Marshall’s approach at both magazines was to make them more popular and widely read by expanding their scope. Instead of focusing on corporations and the economy, Fortune took on social issues and executive life, among other topics. The business side of the magazines loved him.
Tyler Mathisen, who worked with Marshall at Money and is now a well-known business commentator on CNBC, said Marshall was full of ideas and constantly busy. “Thank God we didn’t have cell phones then,” he said. Marshall was not the kind of editor who bellows at his staff. He was polite, witty and generous in sharing his sources with colleagues. Margaret described his kindness and patience. When photographer Neil Leifer told Marshall that his mother in Brooklyn was worried about what to do with her money, Marshall called her and gave her some advice. After that, when the market made a big move, she would call him and he would patiently answer her questions.
• Gilbert Rogin, 87, the irascible, talented managing editor of Sports Illustrated and author of highly praised fiction, died at his home in Westport, Connecticut, last November. He wrote two novels and many short stories for The New Yorker mostly about middle-aged Jewish Manhattanites who were eccentric magazine writers—in others words, like himself.
Gil, or “Rogie” as he was also called, grew up in Manhattan where his father practiced law and his mother had been an actress. He graduated from Columbia, worked briefly as an office boy at The New Yorker, and spent two years in the Army.
He joined the one-year-old Sports Illustrated in 1955 and was assigned to clipping articles to go into SI’s files, but he started writing articles almost immediately. He was recognized soon for the elegance of his writing and his acute observations. He could be mordantly funny. Of participating in a yacht race from California to Hawaii, he wrote, “It was a numbing, embittering and largely useless 12 days. There was no plot, no suspense. Our progress was as lacking in memorable incident as the passage of an hour hand over the face of a clock.”
He published his first short story in The New Yorker in 1963 and over the years the magazine published 33 of the 44 stories that he submitted, an enviable record. But in 1980 he encountered Roger Angell, the magazine’s fiction editor. who rejected his latest submission with the words, “You’re repeating yourself.” Gil was shattered and never wrote another word of fiction. He had already published two novels much praised by the likes of John Updike and John Cheever. They were republished in a single volume in 2010.
Gil was a man of fixed habits. Staffers at SI knew to be quiet between 2 and 3 p.m. because that’s when he took a nap. He had to swim a mile every day. When he traveled his secretary picked a hotel with a proper swimming pool, not a kidney-shaped one. One morning at a hotel in California he got up to find that the swimming pool was being emptied. He leapt in and completed his lengths as the water level sank.
Franz Lidz, a former SI staffer, recalls that he went to Gil to apply for a job, knowing nothing about the magazine or its managing editor. He found Gil struggling to open a bottle of orange juice. He handed it to Franz, saying, “Here, open this and you can have the job.” Franz opened it and started work the next week.
Some of his writers were offended by his style of editing, but one of them, Jerry Kirshenbaum, wrote “You didn’t feel like your fingers were being chopped off the way it was with some other editors. With Gil it was like having a manicure.”
Gil eventually moved reluctantly to take over Discover magazine in 1984 and then in 1987 he became corporate editor, the number three job on the editorial side. There he supervised the launch of Vibe magazine. Gil was married to Jacqueline Duvoisin, a former SI photographer. (Adapted from The New York Times and other sources.)
• Jim Richman, 78, who worked in Sports Illustrated’s promotion department in the 1970s and 1980s, was killed in an auto accident in Vermont in December. Jim had been especially helpful to TLAS in setting up video recordings of our luncheons.
In retirement, Jim divided his time between a co-op in Manhattan and a condo in Sugarbush, Vermont. He loved skiing and had skied with his brother and sister in Sugarbush the year before. He had a wry sense of humor and a sarcastic wit.
—Thanks to David Richman (see picture above ).
• Patricia Jane Vollmer Hotchkiss, 88, a former Life promotion writer died last October in New Mexico, where she had lived with her husband Gerald Hotchkiss, another Life promotion writer, since 1992. Patty was born in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated from Vassar College with the class of 1950. Gene Light writes “she was the very pretty, very smart extremely vivacious copy writer. Her laughter cheered up anyone who worked with her.”
She worked as a senior promotion writer at Life from 1952 to 1959 and then spent three years in the UK. Back in the US, she served on the town board of Bedford, N.Y. for 12 years and on the Westchester County legislature for four years. After she and Gerald moved to Tesuque, she helped develop a new master plan for Santa Fe County. Patty loved skiing the double black diamond trails in Taos and Mad River Glen, Vermont.
• Cristina Scalet, 53, an award-winning picture editor at Sports Illustrated and Time, died of cancer in New York in December. She joined Time Inc. in 1988 working briefly in the circulation promotion department and moving on to People the following year to be photo traffic coordinator.
Beginning in 1990, Cristina spent 16 years at Time as science picture editor, a job which involved everything from negotiating photo rates to conceptualizing art features. She was recognized three times by the National Press Photographers Association, with a first prize, a second prize and one honorable mention. In 2006 she became picture editor for SI books and Ebooks, which were heavily illustrated, and remained there until cancer cut her career short.
• Edwin W. Goodpaster, 91, a peripatetic journalist who, among many other things, served as news editor and deputy chief of Time’s Washington bureau from 1965 to 1972, died in January in Baltimore, where he was once national editor of The Baltimore Sun.
Before his death in 2005, Hugh Sidey, Time’s Washington bureau chief, told The Baltimore Sun, Ed “was the executive officer, deploying the troops of the 23-man bureau. He also played copy editor, assignment maker, staff psychiatrist and domestic affairs counselor.” He found gas masks and helmets for reporters covering the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination and Arctic underwear for reporters on their way to Greenland. But he seldom got the glamorous assignments.
The son of a janitor in Mount Pulaski, Illinois, Ed got a degree in journalism at the University of Miami, where he was a reporter for the campus newspaper. After Army service in the occupation of Japan, he became a reporter and then city editor at the Minneapolis Tribune before joining Time.
He finished his stint at the Washington bureau with a career turn-around. He bought the Whitehall (Wisconsin) Times, circ. 2,400, with the idea of bringing his ideal of journalism to a small town. A daughter wrote a school column, a son a sports column and another son took photos. His wife sold and laid out ads and the whole family joined in to distribute the paper.
After two years, Ed sold the paper back to its original owner and returned to Washington to serve as press secretary in the Department of Agriculture during the Carter administration. In 1981 he moved to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to run Grit, a national good-news weekly for rural Americans all over the country. Back in Washington in 1982, he became chief of the Washington bureau of the The Baltimore Sun and then moved to Baltimore to become the paper’s national editor. He retired in 1997. He took up guitar lessons at the age of 90. (Adapted from The Baltimore Sun)
• Helga Kohl, 89, who worked off and on, mostly on, for Time Inc. publications beginning in 1954 as she accompanied her diplomat husband around the world, died in Chevy Chase at the end of 2016.
She joined Time as a foreign news researcher in 1954 in New York and beginning in 1961 when her husband was assigned to Munich she contributed to Bayerischer Rundfunk writing scripts in her native German. When they moved to Athens in 1964 she became a stringer for the magazines and the Books division and learned conversational Greek.
Back in Washington in 1970 she was briefly a researcher for The National Geographic and then found herself back in Athens and other European cities stringing for the Time-Life News Service and for Books. She finished out the 1970s in Alexandria as a Books staffer, writing and editing.
For the final years of her career, ending in 1983, she was a stringer in Bonn. Over the years, Helga had traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, the Gulf states, Africa and Europe interviewing archaeologists, historians, museum directors and other experts to select art works and sites for illustrations for many of the books on ancient civilizations as well as a number of volumes on World War II.
• Jane Bachman Wulf, 62, known to everyone as “Bambi”, a cheery boss and mentor of reporters and writers at Sports Illustrated and Time, died of cancer last June at home in Larchmont, New York. She is survived by her husband, Steve Wulf, who wrote for SI before moving on to ESPN.
Bambi was born in Boston, grew up in Wellesley and graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1976 with a major in French. An undergraduate year in Paris enchanted her and left her with a love of travel. SI hired her as a copy clerk in the news bureau a year after graduation. She soon became a reporter and covered golf with Dan Jenkins. In addition to traveling to golf tournaments, she covered the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, the Olympics and the Super Bowl.
By the early 1980s she was chief of reporters and showed a talent for discovering and nurturing good writers and editors. She moved over to Time in 1999 as chief of correspondents and later assistant managing editor. She was responsible for a staff of 200 and deployed Time’s journalists to cover 9/11, the explosion of the shuttle Columbia and other major events..
She was known for her parties, for her copious production of cookies and cupcakes and for running her four children from event to event in spite of holding demanding jobs. SI said in a tribute to her “no person has done more to promote the careers of sportswriters in the U.S. over the last 40 years than she did.”
• Patricia Jane Vollmer Hotchkiss, 88, a former Life promotion writer died last October in New Mexico, where she had lived with her husband Gerald Hotchkiss, another Life promotion writer, since 1992. Patty was born in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated from Vassar College with the class of 1950. Gene Light writes “she was the very pretty, very smart extremely vivacious copy writer. Her laughter cheered up anyone who worked with her.”
She worked as a senior promotion writer at Life from 1952 to 1959 and then spent three years in the UK. Back in the US, she served on the town board of Bedford, N.Y. for 12 years and on the Westchester County legislature for four years. After she and Gerald moved to Tesuque she helped develop a new master plan for Santa Fe County. Patty loved skiing the double black diamond trails in Taos and Mad River Glen, Vermont.
• Edmund C. Burke, 90, who worked in the advertising departments at Life and Time for two decades, died in New Jersey last November. Edmund attended St. Benedict’s Prep and the College of William and Mary. During World War II he joined the merchant marine and during the Korean war he served in the U.S. Army.
In 1953, after the Korean war, he worked in Life’s market research department and moved on to sales development. He switched to Time ad sales in 1962 and remained there until l974. He concluded his career as executive vice president and group publisher for the family of financial service newspapers that included The American Banker and four other papers
• William Stewart, 80, a former Time correspondent and a columnist on world affairs for The New Mexican for the past 20 years, died in Santa Fe in February. He had a lifelong interest in world affairs and could fascinate his listeners with well-informed and amusing analyses of current and past events.
A native of Baltimore, Bill started out as a diplomat in the 1960s, serving as special assistant to the deputy director of intelligence and research in the State Department. He joined Time in 1971 and was bureau chief in Tokyo during the collapse of South Vietnam. He was among the correspondents who made a last-minute escape by helicopter. Then he served as Time’s Middle East correspondent and covered the Iran-Iraq war.
When he retired from Time in the mid-1990s, he moved to Santa Fe and became a columnist for The New Mexican. “He had the knowledge of a diplomat and the sensibility of common people,” said Rob Dean, the paper’s former managing editor, who hired him. “Bill had one goal above all else: helping readers understand the world.” He also loved to talk at length about world affairs.
When Dean considered dropping the column about 10 years ago, Dean said, he received “one of the loudest outpourings of protests I ever heard in my time as editor.” He kept the column. Bill collected antiques, loved dogs and cats and enjoyed cooking fancy dishes that he had encountered in his travels. He had no family. —Adapted from the Santa Fe New Mexican
• Mary Cronin, 88, (Time Edit) died September 3 in Charleston, South Carolina at the Bishop Gadsden retirement community there. Mary had moved from her longtime New York City home to Charleston in 2016.
Born July 27, 1929, in Orange, New Jersey, Mary attended Montclair High School and Bryn Mawr College before coming to work at Time. Starting as a researcher, she spent most of her career as a reporter, including a stint in the London Bureau where among other things she covered the Lady Di-Prince Charles wedding and aftermath. Upon returning to New York she reported on entertainment and lifestyle topics.
An avid gourmet, Mary loved to cook and her dinner parties, both in her New York apartment and her summer home in Southampton, were always lively and the food terrific. They were often enlivened by stories about the great and near-greats she had interviewed during her career. The British Royals were an especially rich lode for racy anecdotes. She was also an accomplished painter, especially of Long Island’s South Fork landscapes. Her many friends, inside Time Inc. and elsewhere, will long remember her wit, curiosity and intelligence. Mary is survived by her brothers Jerry, John and Bill Cronin. --John Schenck
• Hudson Stoddard, 94, former assistant to the publisher of Life and a pioneer in developing public TV, died in New Canaan, Connecticut, last October. Hud graduated from Princeton in 1944 and went to work as a courier for the State Department.
He joined Time Inc. in 1947 and eventually became assistant to the publisher of Life. His assignments included managing the publicity for the publication of Harry Truman’s memoirs in Life. He joined the public TV station, Channel 13, in 1965 as vice president for development. The dire need for funds for the three-year-old station persuaded him to go on the air to plead and to start the familiar pledge drives. He introduced the WNET tote bags and other premiums. Hud was also director of development for the drive that raised $150 million to build Lincoln Center.
Hud lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had been chairman of the school board and a member of the town council. He participated in the civil rights march on Washington in 1963. Adapted from The New York Times
• Rosemary Elson, 89, a copy editor at Time in the 1950s, died in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in March, 2017. At Time she met and married John Elson, who became one of the magazine’s senior editors. He died in 2009. She volunteered for more than 20 years at the Visiting Nurse Service in New York and also gave time to the New York Public Library.
• Barbara Ward¸ 75, a former reporter for People, died last October in New York. Born in Manhattan in 1933, she grew up in Rye, New York and was graduated from the University of Georgia. Robin, as she was called, went to work for Life as what was known then as a “mail girl” in the late 1950s. In a four-decade career at the company she became a reporter for People. In retirement she traveled, volunteered at the Lenox Hill Hospital and for animal and environmental causes.
Tracy Windrum, 70, former head of production and distribution at Sports Illustrated, died in December at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, where he had lived for the past 42 years. Tracy once described his job at SI this way: “You have to deal with the demands of late-closing stories, the satellite transmission of these pages to eight regional printing plants and the production of several hundred versions of the magazine, all different in terms of advertising. Then you have to make sure the magazine reaches our readers on time.”
Tracy was born and raised in Brooklyn and attended Xaverian High School where, as 6’4” center on the basketball team he was the highest scorer in New York City in the 1967-68 seasons. At Wagner College on Staten Island he played basketball for three seasons and met his future wife, Catherine, the star of the women’s basketball team.
With many sports events taking place on weekends and the magazine closing on Mondays, the job was always stressful, but when SI produced a 540-page Olympic Preview the stress was doubled. For the Mike Tyson-Tony Tubbs fight in Tokyo in 1988, which took place late on a Sunday evening, there was not enough time to fly film to the U.S., so Tracy arranged to have a technician and some high-tech transmission equipment sent to Tokyo and the film was developed in Tokyo and the transparencies transmitted by phone to New York—a considerable feat until digital photography came along.
He helped break in Time Inc.’s Image Processing and Transmission Center, which enabled the magazines to send four-color pictures to the eight printing plants around the country. Tracy left SI to become vice president of manufacturing and purchasing at Grunner + Jahr USA Publishing and retired in 2005.
SI’s Typesetter & Rare Book Collector
• Bobby McFarland, 87, whose modest career as a typesetter at Time Inc. was almost overshadowed by his single-minded pursuit of first editions of a somewhat obscure and eccentric Victorian writer, died in New York in November.
Bobby (never Robert) was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and graduated from Vanderbilt University. He got a master’s degree from the University of Tennessee. He had a fine tenor voice and when he first came to New York he intended to be an opera singer. He studied under voice teachers and became secretary to the director of the New York City Opera. But he found that his body was too frail to meet the demands of operatic singing—he suffered severe back pains much of his life—so he abandoned that career.
Bobby signed up with Time’s letters department in 1969. He figured he had read a quarter of a million letters in the six years he spent there. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia was a regular correspondent.
He joined Sports Illustrated in 1975. For a while he was Writer Jerry Kirshenbaum’s secretary. Jerry writes that Bobby “like many underlings at Time Inc. was smarter than some of the overlings. He was a great character—avid rare book collector, former opera singer. . .most of his salary went to buy books of a writer of semi-renown in gay circles whose name I didn’t recognize. He kept the books in a bank vault near his apartment in Astoria. He acquired them at auctions in fierce bidding wars with a much wealthier fancier of the same author. Bobby called the other guy ‘my nemesis.’”
The author was Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo, who wrote novels at the beginning of the 20th Century. They were soon forgotten, but revived by a biography that appeared in the 1930s. Bobby picked up a used copy of the book, presumably at the Strand, which he frequented. He became a serious collector, eventually acquired copies of the first editions of all Rolfe’s books, as well as many other documents related to the author. On one occasion Bobby flew to London to bid at an auction.
For many years he headed the crew of typesetters that put every word of SI into its computers. He lived in New York for 60 years. He did have one ambition as a singer, according to a publisher’s letter in SI in 1982. He wanted to perform the national anthem in Yankee Stadium. He never did. (Thanks to Jerry Kirshenbaum for his help.)
“Creator of The Swimsuit Issue”
• Frederick Smith, 93, one of the original editors at Sports Illustrated and creator of the fabulously popular swimsuit issue, died at his home in Wainscott, Long Island, in December, 2018, as we have learned belatedly.
Fred joined the magazine in 1954 before the first issue came out and took over the job of writing about what he call “soft sports,” which included sports fashions. After two years, in 1956, he suggested that SI fill the sports void at the end of January (there was no Super Bowl then) with a feature on beautiful resorts populated with beautiful girls. He hired Jule Campbell to manage the issue, which she did successfully for 35 years. And so youngsters such as Chrissy Teigen and Christie Brinkley were launched on careers as supermodels.
Fred grew up on a farm near Tuscaloosa, Alabama and in 1943, at 18, he enlisted in the Army Air Force to train as a pilot. But before he could be sent overseas, the war ended and he enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he earned degrees in journalism and English.
He then headed for New York and got work reading manuscripts for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He had editing jobs at Charm (for women) and True (for men) before joining the SI startup. He covered “adventure” sports for the magazine, especially skiing in the West and the Alps.
Fred became an expert skier and took on the most challenging courses. He skied in powder snow off-piste and flew in turbo-props to glaciers. He became close to the famous skiers he profiled, such as Jean-Claude Killy.
He was most proud of a two-year project he undertook at SI to identify the sporting equipment that was as beautiful as it was practical. He thought that balls, no matter what the design, were always beautiful while fencing masks and baseball mitts, for instance, should also be a kind of art. After studying 10,000 items from around the world he presented 110 of them to the Museum of Modern Art for critics to judge. Six of the items were chosen for the museum’s permanent design collection.
He left SI in 1969 and took a series of top jobs in publishing, first as editor-in-chief of American Home, then at Time-Life Books and finally as president of East-West Networks, which
publishes in-flight magazines. When he retired in 1990, he returned to travel writing and took up water-color painting, which he continued into his 90s. Several of his still-lifes and landscapes have been exhibited in galleries on Long Island.
When Golf and Ad Sales Go Together
• Royal Peterson II, 96, one of Time’s ace ad salesmen in those Madmen Days of the 1950s and 1960s, died in California in May, 2019, as we have learned belatedly. He had an upbringing that fitted his first name. He grew up in Greenwich, attended the Greenwich Country Day School, the Hill School, Princeton and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Those were the kind of credentials that Time Inc. favored then.
He graduated from Princeton in 1944 and reported for duty as a Naval midshipman. He served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres and the end of the war found him, as a Lieutenant (j.g.) in command of a flotilla of landing craft in Subic Bay, in the Philippines, preparing for the invasion of Japan. He was thankful that the atomic bomb made the invasion unnecessary.
Royal earned his MBA from Columbia in 1948 and joined Time’s ad department, where he remained for 29 years. These were grand days for Time Inc. and Henry Luce and Roy Larsen were still active. At various times he managed the Chicago office and the Philadelphia office and in New York he managed ad sales for the Eastern half of the U.S. After leaving Time Inc in 1977, he became a consultant for various magazines, including Parade, The Atlantic, and McFadden Publications. In 1985 he retired to Montecito, California.
Like many a good ad salesman Royal was an avid golfer. He had started playing when he was five and became member of a number of the top golf clubs wherever he lived. In 1952 he set an amateur course record of 64 at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich. At the Valley Club in Montecito he shot two eagles in a row when he was 79. In addition to golf, Royal enjoyed surf casting on Nantucket and fly fishing in the West. Royal served on the board of the Montecito Music Academy, two of those years as chairman.
Royal met his future wife Dorothy floating on a raft at the Cliffside Beach Club in Nantucket in 1941. He had just finished his freshman year at Princeton and she was just 18 but they married the next year. They kept the marriage secret because Princeton undergraduates were not allowed to marry. They had a formal wedding at her parents’ house in 1944 and remained together for 67 years until her death in 2008. In her youth Dorothy was a skilled equestrian and after college she signed up with the Conover Modeling Agency, her pictures appearing in Life, Vogue and other magazines. The couple had bought their first standard poodle in 1950 and they bred and showed poodles for 50 years. Their Deryabar Kennel was known for the handsome and well-tempered black and white poodles they bred.
“The Ultimate Problem Solver”
• June Omura Goldberg, 85, the long-term chief of reporters at the monthly Life and the magazine’s anchor during the turmoil of frequent changes in managing editors, died of cancer in September in New York, where she had lived all her life. Her death brought out an unusual series of warm tributes from former Life staffers, such as this from Paula Glatzer: “June Goldberg was the glue that held us all together at the monthly Life through many managing editors. She knew everything and everyone, but in a calm and easy way.”
From a cluttered office that columnist Loudon Wainwright once described as “the most incredible den in history,” June supervised the work of 16 reporters, guiding, mentoring and befriending them. A former colleague and friend for 56 years, former assistant managing editor Mary Steinbauer wrote, “She’s the ultimate problem solver. . . June’s remarkable memory and resourcefulness left their mark on each issue.”
June was born in New York, attended Hunter College High School and Queens College. She grew up reading Life from cover to cover and at the age of 14 she applied for a summer job at Time. Personnel said she was a little young for the job, but got her some baby-sitting assignments for staffers. The next summer she did get a job in the mail room. After college, she moved up to research and reporting and by 1964 she had moved to Time-Life Books to head research projects..
When Time Inc. attempted to develop educational materials through Silver Burdett and General Learning Corporation she was enlisted in this ill-starred venture. But she was soon back at Books, leading the research for the Old West series and other projects.
The rebirth of Life as a monthly in 1978 opened up her final assignment, a 20-year reign as chief of reporters. A publisher’s note in Life said “June can procure the last manual typewriter in the building for a persnickety writer, call a biblical scholar in Alaska at two in the morning on deadline and provide the know-how to a reporter who is facing a tough assignment.” She remained there until l998, when Life had a massive staff cut.
In retirement June ardently pursued her love of New York’s life, going with old friends such as Mary Steinbauer to the theatre, concerts, art shows, ballet, and museums. She earned a master’s degree in costume preservation from the Fashion Institute of Technology and she regularly attended the Japanese American United Church on 7th Avenue.
Her Japanese-born father, Bunji Omura, had moved to the U.S. in his twenties, graduated from college in California and became a journalist in New York. During World War II he became an instructor in the Navy’s successful Japanese language school. —Posted October 1, 2020
A Partnership at Time – And Beyond
Erwin Edelman, 92, and Allis Ferguson Edelman, 93, who met and married when they both worked at Time and who later founded the Rainbow Press which for years printed the TLAS newsletter, both died recently— Allis died last December and Erwin in June.
Allis grew up at first in Longboat Key and later in Connecticut;. She attended Rosemary Hall and then Connecticut College. She first worked for photographer Edward Steichen, who was then director of photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art. She later joined Time as a picture researcher.
Erwin grew up in New York City and had a fine singing voice, but could not follow a career in music because he had a speech impediment. Instead he went to work for Time. As a member of the production staff one of his duties was to fly to Chicago every week to supervise the printing of the magazine.
They were married in 1966 and resigned from Time in 1969 when they bought an old colonial house in Cornwall, Connecticut much in need of restoration. The Appalachian Trail passed through their back yard.
They learned there was a need for a printer in nearby Torrington and they established Rainbow Press there in 1972. The business flourished and among other things printed our newsletter and our directory (at reasonable prices). They sold Rainbow Press to their employees in 1998 to retire to Plymouth Harbor in Sarasota.
The Edelmans made retirement exceptionally active. Allis discovered a Mayflower connection in her ancestry and joined the Mayflower Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society for many research trips in the U.S. and abroad. On one trip she flew home in the Concorde supersonic jet. Erwin followed his passion for fly fishing, which took them many times to Montana, Alaska, New Zealand, Scotland, and other places.
Life Begins at SI
• Walter Bingham 89, a star writer at Sports Illustrated during the golden years of sports and magazines, died in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in May a few months short of his 90th birthday. “Bing,” as he was known to family and friends, once said, “My life didn’t really begin until October 20, 1955, when I walked in the door at SI.”
Bing wrote eloquently and fluidly about baseball, tennis, running and golf, and was himself an accomplished runner. Stephanie Salter, a former colleague says there were so many things to like about Bing: “They range from his pristine memory to his ability to sing every song by Cole Porter to the sheer natural beauty of his running stride.” (Quoted by Steve Wulf in a tribute to Bing.)
People liked him and his articles commanded respect. His friends included Mickey Mantle, Chris Evert and Jack Nicklaus. He once accompanied Nicklaus on a practice round at Augusta. His friendship also encompassed young SI staffers. They gathered in his office to hear his stories and to watch sports on TV. Although he was mostly a writer, Bing served as an editor and as chief of reporters at the magazine. Wulf writes he “never knew an editor with the reliable gift he had of making your story better while making you feel better. He was never stressed or surly, and always friendly and smiling.”
Bing was born in Orange, New Jersey, and attended The Hill School in Pennsylvania. He was admitted to Yale but flunked out after one semester. He moved to Los Angeles to be with his mother, who had remarried the much-married and celebrated author and screenwriter, Robert Nathan.
With Nathan’s Hollywood connections, Bing became familiar with the society of celebrities. He lunched with Elizabeth Taylor, was treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock and played tennis with Kirk Douglas.
Bing took courses at UCLA, then during the Korean War enlisted as a medic in the Air Force, which stationed him at Geneva, New York. On his return to LA, he became a copy boy for the Los Angeles Examiner. He heard that SI was hiring and applied becaming a news clerk. He met Betty Bredin, a reporter for the magazine. Their first date was at a Red Sox-Yankees game on May 28, 1956 (she still has the scorecard). They married in 1957 and Bing became a staff writer that year.
He covered the Boston Marathon in 1963 and took to running. Along with SI buddies, Bing ran five Marathons in Boston and three in New York and countless 5K races. He also led the SI luncheon running group. He ran his last race when he was 83 in Truro, Cape Cod, where the couple lived for many years.
Bing retired from SI in 1988 but continued freelancing for the magazine until 2007, when the magazine ran his last byline—50 years after the first. In the meantime, the couple had moved from Manhasset, where they raised their family, to Truro. One day he picked up the phone to talk to the sports editor of The Cape Cod Times about an article he had read, and before they hung up he had accepted an invitation to write a weekly column for the Times. His last column appeared a few weeks before his death.
Here is a sample of Bing’s writing. He led off an article for SI in 1971 in this way: “When she came out from under the green enclosure beneath the royal box and strolled onto center court, she appeared to be smiling. Now you just don’t do that at Wimbledon especially for the finals. When you play a match on that hallowed lawn, the knees should turn to jelly and the elbow to stone; you are supposed to look humble and reverent and, above all, scared stiff. So where does this 19-year-old kid, this Evonne Goolagong, get off waltzing our there as if she were about to play a practice match.” (She won the Wimbledon crown that year and again in 1980 and won the Australian Open four years in a row, from 1974 to 1977.)
35 Years at Fortune
• E. William Kenyon, 93, who topped a 35-year career at Fortune as associate publisher, died in August in Vero Beach, Florida, where he and his wife had lived since in 1994.
Bill was born in Chicago and graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. He grew up in a family of entrepreneurs which owned Farm Maid Dairy, Detroit Coal & Ice and Consumer Services, among others businesses. After high school he joined the Army in World War II and was shipped to the Philippines, serving as a staff sergeant and chief electrician in 8th Army headquarters.
On his return to the U.S., Bill attended Assumption College in Ontario and then started his career at the Chrysler Corp. in Detroit. But New York beckoned to him and he found work at Time Inc., launching a 60-year career in media. He first worked for magazine distribution and circulation at Life then switched to Fortune where he remained for 35 years Early on he was ad director for the Midwest region. He traveled with Fortune writers and photographers and was deeply involved in the media world.
In 1984, when he was associate publisher for Fortune, rather than taking retirement he formed a joint venture with Time Inc. in a failing Time business, Targeted Media, which created a tighter focus on the advertising audience. He made a success of it, sold it, and started a new similar company, Publishers’ Alliance. Which is still privately held. Meredith Corporation now owns Targeted Media.
Once relocated in Vero Beach, Bill immersed himself in community affairs. He helped establish the John’s Island Foundation. As a resident of Indian River Shores, a community in Vero Beach, he served on the town council, then as vice mayor and finally, until 2011 as mayor. A former volunteer fireman himself, Bill made sure the fire and police departments were well funded.
“The Hottest Editor”
• Ray Cave, 91, former managing editor of Sports Illustrated and Time and finally editorial director for Time Inc., then number two editorial job in the company, died in August in Boothbay, Maine, where he had lived in retirement with his late wife, Pat Ryan, former managing editor of People.
An obituary in The New York Times said that during his eight years running Time he “oversaw a revamping of its stodgy look, introduced new sections, expanded its lifestyle coverage and promoted long-form single-subject issues.” Adweek named him “the hottest editor” in 1983 in its annual report on magazines.
Ray was born Ray Roberts in Tacoma in 1929. His father was killed in a car crash four years later and when his mother Agnes later married John Cave, a career officer who became a general, Ray took his stepfather’s name. He graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis in 1949 and became a reporter for the Southern Maryland Times. He then spent eight years as a reporter and editor at The Baltimore Sun with a break of two years to serve with Army counterintelligence in Japan and Korea.
Ray joined SI in 1959, first as a writer and then as an editor, where he supervised some of the most successful articles produced by the magazine. He was important in making SI one of the best-written magazines in the country. He became deputy to SI’s long-running managing editor, Andre Laguerre, but when Laguerre retired, Ray didn’t get the job.
Instead, he joined Time as one of two assistant managing editors, the other being the late Jason McManus. The two engaged in a long standing rivalry. Ray won the first round when he became managing editor. When he took over Time, as The Times wrote, “the magazine was still a swaggering journalistic force, unimpeded by competition from the internet. Time was the leading newsweekly when weekly magazines were still flourishing. Its pages were flush with ads.”
Nevertheless, Time needed some remaking. Ray hired Walter Bernard, as art editor to redesign the magazine. He used more color photos, hired writers to produce well-crafted articles and essays, created new sections, published special single-topic issues.
Jason, executive editor of Time under Ray, leapfrogged over Ray in 1984 to become corporate editor of Time Inc., and when Henry Grunwald retired Jason moved into the top job. Ray moved up too, becoming corporate editor under Jason in 1985. But he was miffed at not getting the top job and he and Jason could not work out a plan of responsibilities that suited him. In 1988 he retired and his wife, Pat Ryan, was fired soon after as managing editor of People.
For a deeper appreciation of Ray’s life, read the following tribute by Roger Rosenblatt
“The Sense and Stamina to Wait”
When Ray Cave called to ask if I’d come to Time to write for the Essay page, I was rusticating in Vermont, a requirement for all writers that usually proves fruitless. I drove down to New York, excited by the prospect of a real job, and of ending my year-long conversations with beavers, raccoons, and other woodland creatures. At the same time, I did not want to come off like a rube to Ray. I wanted to show him I was a sophisticated negotiator. So when I sat in his office discussing the assignment (fine), salary (fine—any salary would have been fine), I took a deep breath and said, “I’m used to four weeks vacation.”
This was both true and not true. At the Washington Post, where I’d worked before, I had three weeks vacation. But I also had taught in a university, where I got three months in the summers. I figured the whole thing averaged out. “I’m used to four weeks vacation”—louder this time, with more self-assurance.
I looked at Ray. Ray looked at me. I could tell he saw he was dealing with a sophisticated negotiator. Finally, after a long pause, he said quietly in his clear, profound voice, “All right, Roger. We ordinarily start with five weeks. But In your case we’ll make an exception.”
The key to Ray in this story was timing. He waited just the right beat before speaking, partly because he knew he was dealing with a fraud, and partly because silences were a hallmark of both his thinking processes and of his style of conversation. When you presented Ray with a problem, of any magnitude, he would wait before saying a word, often for as long as a couple of minutes. To complete the effect, it didn’t hurt that he was about six feet, wore a Brillow-like, gray-and-white beard and a stony demeanor. I used to call him Captain Ahab, without the sense of humor. But that wasn’t so. He could be funny as hell. The delivery was everything.
The delivery was everything. Yes. Among some of Time’s writers and sub-editors, Ray was thought cold and aloof. I once overheard a guy say stupidly that Ray wasn’t “a people person.” To me, that sounded like a compliment. But Ray was a people person when it counted.
A wonderful, old-school editor at the magazine had a drinking problem, which was poorly-timed to evidence itself most dramatically on the nights the magazine closed. After a while, the problem grew hazardous. So Ray went to this editor and told him privately and discreetly that Time would pay for whatever treatments it took for him dry out, and for however long the therapy required. For his health and that of the magazine, however, the man had to seek help. He did, and, after some months, returned as a non-drinker and as the brilliant editor he originally was. Ray would never speak of saving the man’s life, but the saved man did.
Ray knew the value of patience. As a boy, he stood with his grandfather, surveying a vast field of corn. “Grandpa,” he said. “How are you going to shuck all that corn?” His grandfather said, “One row at a time.” Similarly, Ray would wait for a cultural phenomenon like Michael Jackson to peak before putting it on Time’s cover. His theory—proved right by enormous newsstand sales—was to address public interest at the precise moment it was beginning to ebb, and then to pounce, as if to revive a cherished memory.
For anyone dealing with Ray, it was an advantage to know the antipodal influences on his youth. One was the Army. His stepfather was an Army general, and Ray grew up during the Depression (b. Tacoma, Washington in 1929), on various hard-scrabble military bases. The other Influence was the rarefied “Great Books” education afforded by St. John’s College, Annapolis. As a freshman, Ray was surprised that a lecture on Canon Law had nothing to do with artillery. As Time’s managing editor, he occasionally would play the Luddite from the sticks for a pseudo-intellectual dandy wanting to show off an elite education. The dandy would prattle on, then Ray would let St. John’s lower the boom. It tickled him to call me “college boy.”
There was not an ounce of fakery or unseemly ambition in him. His wants included a winning harness horse, and the avoidance of writing a book. The former derived from his beloved wife, Pat Ryan who died in 2013 (he only called her “Ryan’) who was Time Inc.’s first woman managing editor, of People, then of Life, whose father James was a famous trainer of racehorses; the wish not to write a book, from horse-sense modesty. Yet Ray was a rabid competitor. At weekly editorial meetings, he always voiced the deepest respect for Time’s chief competitor, Newsweek—just before finding a way to blow the competition out of the water.
He was a gift to writers such as Lance Morrow, Bob Hughes, Steve Kanfer, John Leo, Ron Shepard, and Richard Schickel. These were Time’s golden years, when writers were encouraged to write freely and imaginatively on everything., not necessarily about normal news events. One morning I told Ray that I wanted to take off from writing essays for a while, and travel around the world writing about the lives of children in war zones. Ray pondered for his usual minute or two, and said, “Go.” To be sure, that was a much different and richer era in journalism, but my proposed project seemed an expensive gamble even then.
On the way to the airport, I bumped into Henry Grunwald, Time Inc’s celebrated Editor-in-Chief, who asked what I was up to. When I told him, he said, “And this cockamamie scheme is OK with Ray? I’d never allow you to do that.” I said, maybe that’s why Ray didn’t tell you, Henry.
In my study is a photograph of Ray and me at some dinner in the 1980’s, me characteristically yammering, Ray characteristically listening. We both knew the wrong person was doing the wrong thing. His loving and attentive children, Catherine (CC),and Jon, born to Ray and his first wife Katherine, visited him often in the home in Maine that Ray and Pat shared in their retirement years. When he was still able to travel, Ray spent time fly fishing for salmon in Canada, Scotland and Norway—another activity that requires patience and the sense and stamina to wait. CC wrote me to say that on the night of August 17th, “Ray left us.” But we both knew that was impossible.
A Fascination with Railroads
Robert Hughes, 73, a Time Inc. printing and manufacturing executive and a much-traveled troubleshooter the company relied on to fix printing and distribution problems at its‘s far-flung sites around the world, died in July in Warren, Rhode Island, where he kept a condo and a boat.
Although Bob worked for Time Inc. from 1979 to 1995, he had an enduring interest in trains and railroads. When he was four, his grandfather would walk to a nearby bridge in New Rochelle to watch in fascination as the New Haven trains thundered by underneath. He became became a prolific train photographer. One of the great thrills of his life was when his father was transferred from New York to San Francisco and the family traveled on the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago and then continued on the California Zephyr to Oakland. Once in San Francisco of course he rode the cable cars to and from school.
Bob attended Colby College (where naturally he spent time at the nearby rail yards in Waterville). He graduated in 1968 and joined the Navy, serving as a photographer’s mate aboard the carrier Intrepid, which took him on a six-month NATO deployment. He worked as a tower operator for the New Haven railroad from 1968 to 1974 and then became a transportation analyst for the Long Island Railroad from 1974 to 1977, while at the same time earning an MBA from Fordham.
He switched to magazine printing and manufacturing in 1977, first at Newsweek where he was operations manager and then at Time, where he had several high level jobs at home and abroad. He was New York production director and later international production director in London, He traveled to fix problems around the world and was noted for getting Time printed on schedule even when late-breaking stories held up the closing.
The switch from railroads was not as puzzling as it might seem. Bob wrote in The Trackside Photographer: “The lessons learned on the railroad have stayed with me until this day/. Communications must be clear and understood.. Study the operation until you know it cold. Figure out where the vulnerable weak spots are, and talk with the crews to find out what could be improved to make their jobs easier.”
Bob and his wife Lynn had a big Victorian house on the water in New Rochelle and a had a boat there. On his retirement they bought a condo by the water in Warren and they a boat there, the 34-foot trawler, Costal Daylight. They cruised around the New England coastline in the summer and went south as far as New York City. For ten summers he was assistant harbor master for Barrington, Rhode Island.
He became a member of the Steamship Historical Society of America, which despite its name is also interested in railroads. He contributed articles and photos from a vast collection he had, joined the board in 2010 and became treasurer in 2012; He stepped down in 2019 after quadruple bypass surgery and his health declined.
(Thanks to Ralph Spielman for help with this item.)
Director of Photography
• Robert Grant Mason, 91, former director of photography at Time-Life Books, died on January 31 in Durham, North Carolina from complications following pneumonia.
Bob was born in 1929 in New Jersey. He graduated from Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1946. He graduated from Boston University in 1950 with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism degree. During the 1950s he worked for Life as a reporter, first in New York City specializing in stories about science and medicine and later becoming the bureau chief in Atlanta and then bureau chief in Boston.
Beginning in the 1960s, Bob shifted to the newly formed Time-Life Books division based in New York City, where he ultimately became the director of photography for Time-Life Books. When this division was transferred to Alexandria, Virginia, Bob moved there with his family. In the late 1980s he retired, initially staying in the Alexandria area and then moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2006.
Bob was kind, polite and always concerned for the welfare of others. He was extremely considerate and took real pleasure in brightening the day of his family and friends with calls, cards, flowers and other little surprises. More than anything in his life he enjoyed the company of his grandchildren, and was tirelessly interested in everything they did and filled with enthusiastic praise of each “remarkable” achievement.
A European Sophisticate
• Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo, 76, former head researcher and assistant editor in Time’s World and Nation sections, died of cancer on May 7, 2020, in Sarasota, Florida, where she had lived after retiring in 2000.
Orsi, as friends called her, was a countess descended from an aristocratic Hungarian family that dates back to the Middle Ages, but she never used the title. When she was a 12-year-old, her family fled with her from Hungary after Soviet troops crushed the 1956 revolution, crossing the border to freedom in Austria in the middle of the night.
She grew up in New York, graduated from Manhattanville College and became a clip girl at Time in 1965. An elegant and energetic presence, she always kept on top of news developments in Europe. Former colleague Tam Grey recalls, “I always felt that Ursula was a true European sophisticate: her slight accent, her clothes, her self-assuredness, she was a perfect choice as the World section head of reporters.”
Time’s Managing Editor Ratu Kamlani says, “I adored Ursula. I smoked with her (gulp!), and on closing nights, imbibed from the bottles on her round wooden table while watching sunsets. I remember when her office neighbor had a tantrum and hurled some object at the partition resulting in a hole in the wall, Ursula didn’t bat an eyelid except to exclaim in that husky voice, ‘What on earth was that?’ Such a class act.” --Betty Satterwhite.
Just Business
• Paul D. Williams, 82, a former senior executive at Time-Warner and an extraordinarily active volunteer in civic and church affairs, died in June. Paul was educated in New York City at Incarnation School and Fordham Preparatory School. He received a BA from Fordham University and an MBA from New York University.
In a business career spanning 50 years he worked for Johnson and Higgins (insurance brokers), The Equitable, General Foods, Philip Morris, Warner Brothers and finally Time Warner, where he was director of employee benefits, assistant secretary of the corporation and president of Time Warner Canada.
During his working years and after he was a dedicated volunteer. For more than 50 years he was an active member of St. Theresa’s Church in Briarcliff Manor, serving several terms as president of its parish council, and for more than 40 years he was a members of the Lions Club of Pleasantville, serving multiple terms as its president. He also sat on the board of trustees of Fordham Prep.
Paul and his wife lived in Briarcliff Manor for 53 years and they moved to Pleasantville in 2017. Paul loved travel and was an accomplished drummer.
A Foot Soldier in the Reagan Revolution
• Burton Yale Pines, 78, a former Time correspondent and editor and later a senior policy wonk at the conservative Heritage Foundation, died last summer, as we learned belatedly.
After graduating from high school in Chicago in 1957, Burt spent seven years at the University of Wisconsin, earning a BA, an MA and a doctorate and teaching modern European history as an instructor.
Time hired him in as a correspondent in the Chicago bureau in 1966 and later sent him on to Saigon to cover the war in Vietnam. He was not among the Time correspondents there who rebelled against what they called the distortion to their dispatches in the magazine. He moved on to Germany and then came back to New York as an editor. He stayed with the magazine for nearly 16 years.
Burt’s next step was to the Heritage Foundation, where he became a senior vice president and remained for 11 years. He was there during the Reagan years and in his on-line obituary he is quoted as having said that what made him proudest was “being a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution.”
He became president of Booknet, an on-line publishing company, in 1995 and moved to New York, where his wife, Helene, a psychologist, found a needy clientele. Burt enjoyed good food and wine, especially Pomerol, and was an interesting and well-informed conversationalist.
He published several books, notably America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One. His controversial argument was that Germany did not threaten America’s security and therefore we had no need to enter the war. At the time, the Allies and Germany had reached a stalemate and would have had to negotiate a compromise peace. But the arrival of two million doughboys made the allies dominant and they imposed a cruel treaty that impoverished Germany— which led to the rise of Hitler and eventually to World War II. The controversial book won several history awards and honorable mentions.
An Early Move to Time
Alexander Hood, 88, who started work in the mail room and rose to become head of the company’s real estate business in a 42-year career at Time Inc., died in March in Pelham, New York.
Alex was born in Toronto and as a boy showed a head for business. His mother managed a hotel on Toronto Island and he earned money with his bicycle and red wagon carting luggage between the passenger ferry and the hotel. While he was still a teenager, he decided he wanted to move to New York and work for Time Inc. He emigrated in 1949 and found work in the mail room—the starting point for many successful careers at Time Inc.
When the Korean War broke out in l950 Alex volunteered for the Army—though still a Canadian—and served at Fort Slocum, New York, teaching journalism to soldiers. Following his service, he earned both U.S. citizenship and a degree from Fordham University and returned to Time Inc.
He worked in a variety of Time Inc. divisions, including human relations and Fortune and got his introduction to the real estate business when he served with Hank Luce on the company’s building committee. That led eventually to running Time’s extensive real estate interests.
Although he and his family lived in Pelham Manor for 52 years, he loved the city. He read the entire NYTimes every day and was a long-term ticket holder for the Giants’ games.
Alex served on the Pelham Human Relations Committee in the 1960s and was a lector at his parish church. After retiring in the late 1980s, Alex joined the board and eventually became chairman of Aging in America, which runs a nursing home in Morningside Heights and provides services for the elderly. He had a second home in Silver Lake, Pennsylvania.
His family remembers him for being a gracious and witty host, master of ceremonies and a story-teller. They crowned him king of the pointless story.
A Master of the Picture Essay
John Loengard, 85, one of the weekly Life’s legendary photographers and later photo editor at the monthly Life, died in New York in May. His close friend and colleague, David Friend, described him as “a contemplative, brainy, self-possessed sort who liked to work alone in the field, often for months at a time.”
John was best known for masterful black-and-white picture essays – about Georgia O’Keefe, a Shaker community, his own family’s summer home in Maine and for his studies of Allen Ginsburg, Bill Cosby and the Beatles in a swimming pool in Miami. It was a chilly day in winter and the pool was unheated, but John persuaded them to plunge in an appear to be having grand time. He took a delightful photo of Henri Cartier-Bresson happily flying a kite in a field.
He was a long-time member of the TLAS board and faithfully attended our meetings, sitting quietly with a half-smile on his face listening to the others chattering away and then breaking in with a potent observation delivered in a barely audible voice.
John was born in New York and when he was 12 his father gave him a Kodak Brownie and photography captivated him for life. He was educated at Exeter and Harvard, where he was a photographer for the Crimson. He also freelanced and when Life asked him to take a picture of a tanker grounded off Cape Cod the editors took notice of his work, although they didn’t run the picture.
After he graduated in 1956 he continued to freelance and then in 1961 Life signed him up as staff photographer, which in those days was about the best job a photographer could get. He became one of the magazine’s best. When the
weekly Life folded in 1972, John joined Time Inc.’s magazine development group. People was one of his projects and when it started up he became picture editor. At the rebirth of Life as a monthly in 1978 he moved in as picture editor.
His friend David Friend, who was also director of photography at Life and is now editor of creative development at Vanity Fair, wrote an eloquent and perceptive portrait of John in 2011 in an introduction to Age of Silver, one of 12 books written by John. He was a fine writer too.
David wrote that after listening to the nightly cable news he might wander down to John’s “spacious, if disheveled, office.” John would “grunt” an acknowledgement and “continue sitting, contact sheet over his face, quickly moving his version of a loupe—actually a Leica lens he used as magnifying glass— down and up the sheet picture by picture. Occasionally he would take a grease pencil and mark off the particular frames that might be worth enlarging as work prints.”
“From a cranny of cast-off contact sheets or deep inside a stack of slides, he was forever finding the extraordinary moment that would become a photo essay’s cornerstone,” Friend wrote. He added John “valued a picture’s surprise and spontaneity over its elegance, its movement and content over artistry.” When he saw the picture he wanted there was no uncertainty about him and the magazine’s editors respected his judgement
David wrote that John was “known for his scowling oracular presence” and did not suffer fools. When a photographer returned from an assignment in Europe pleased with what he thought was a good job, John said, “if the film had been lost in transit, we would not have lost a thing.” But for the most John was kind and gentlemanly. He took trouble to encourage and help young photographers.
After the weekly Life folded John concentrated on his books, on teaching and he recorded a series of interviews with Life photographers. He was inducted into the International Hall of Fame of Photography in 2018 and many museums around the world exhibit his work. P.S. If you would like to own one of John photos Artnet sells them for $2,000 to $4,000 and other websites also sell them. —JM
A Connoisseur of Food and Fish
Arthur Loomis, 82, the convivial former circulation director of Sports Illustrated, died at his home in Chatham, Massachusetts, where he had lived full-time since retiring more than 20 years ago. Art worked with Andre Laguerre, SI’s managing editor, and survived Laguerre’s legendary liquid lunches at a Chinese restaurant next to the Time & Life Building. When Laguerre left SI in 1974 to found the short-lived Classic magazine about thoroughbreds, Art went with him as publisher.
Art held as many senior jobs in publishing as he had skills and interests in other fields. Born in New York, Art served in the Marine Corps, attended Villanova, graduated from Rutgers in 1962 and then earned an MBA from Harvard. In addition to his work at SI and Classic, he was a vice president of Times Mirror magazines, executive vice president of Lorimer-Telepictures, publisher of Saveur magazine and owner and publisher of Garden Design magazine.
He was also a connoisseur of food and fish, an expert fisherman, clam digger, squash player, crossword puzzle solver and a good story-teller. But he said his greatest accomplishment was the family he built with his wife Consuelo. They had four daughters.
While working in New York, Art commuted from New Canaan and had a house in Chatham on Cape Cod where the family spent every summer. More than 20 years ago the family moved full time to the Cape. Following his passion for food and fish, he founded Chatham Day Boat which supplied fresh fish to high-end New York restaurants. He also spent his time digging for quahogs, choosing the best produce at the farmers’ market, cooking and then enjoying the company of family and friends.
—Posted 5/1/2020
A Presidential Edit
• Michael Sovern, 88, a former law professor at Columbia University and then its president, died in February in New York. He never worked for Time Inc. and he was never a member of TLAS, but he is fondly remembered at Time edit. He was a long-time adviser to the Law section. Fred Golden, who wrote Law briefly, remembers that every closing night, Sovern would come down to the Time & Life Building to make sure the section was sound on the law. No matter how much stress there was at Columbia—and these were years of riots and financial crisis at the university—Sovern showed up and behaved with “charm, wit and humor.” Fred remembers that Sovern once said, “Fred, you’ve got the legal issues reasonably accurate but you really ought to lead the story with the third paragraph and chuck your opening paragraph.” Fred replied grumpily, “Mike, you’re not here to edit me—we’ve got plenty of editors.” Now, in retrospect, Fred thinks that Sovern had a pretty good eye for clear writing. (Thanks to Fred Golden for this item.)
“Photographer of Indelible Moments”
• Bill Ray, 83, described in The New York Times as a “photographer of indelible moments,” died at his home in Manhattan on January 9. One of those moments show Marilyn Monroe, viewed from above and behind in a shimmering, skin-right, flesh-colored dress singing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at the celebration of his 45th in Madison Square Garden. It was the Bill Ray picture most in demand over the years.
Bill was born in the small village of Shelby, Nebraska, where his father ran a lumber yard. His mother, a painter, wanted a different life for him and encouraged his interested in photography. By the time he was 11 he had a darkroom and professional cameras and during his senior year in high school he walked into the offices of The Lincoln Journal to declare his passion for photography. He was hired when he graduated.
He went on to work for the United Press in Chicago and then then The Minneapolis Star and Tribune. At a workshop in 1957 he impressed editors of the National Geographic with an essay he had photographed and they offered him a job. But when he got to Washington he decided he didn’t want to spend his life in rain forests, so he turned instead to Life.
He started as a freelancer with Life in 1957 and went on to become a staff photographer. The magazine sent him all over the world with an unlimited expense account to shoot memorable pictures. He was assigned to the Paris bureau for a spell. After Life folded in 1972, Bill freelanced for Newsweek and other magazines, including Fortune.
In addition to the Monroe picture (which Life did not publish at the time), Bill recorded other memorable moments. He was at the first Super Bowl, He was at the Brooklyn Army Terminal when Private Elvis Presley shipped out to Germany. He took pictures of the founder of Sony. He was at the wedding of Jackie Kenney and Aristotle Onassis on the island of Skorpios—it was raining heavily and Bill thought his strobe was going to electrocute him. He embedded himself with the Hell’s Angels. He slept on barroom floors and was accepted by the gang. (Life didn’t run that essay either because the managing editor found the gang disgusting).
Bill never lost his curiosity. “I think you’re always snooping,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with snooping, is there?” (Adapted from newspaper obituaries.)
• David Dolben, 85, former financial vice president of Time Inc. and later president of Temple-Eastex, the company’s lumber and paper subsidiary in Texas, died at home in Lufkin, Texas in January. The merger of a New York magazine company and a Texan paper company in 1976 created some testy relationships, but Dolben and the affable, wise Arthur Temple sealed a warm bond over many martinis, golf games and dinners.
Dolben grew up in Reading, Massachusetts and graduated from high school there. In a biographical memoir he recalled that from the 6th grade on he worked morning and evening paper routes and weekends until his graduation in 1952. During his junior year he bought a 1929 Model A Ford sedan for $50. Summers were spent on the property on Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, bought by his grandfather early in the century. He worked at the tiny general store in Newbury as soda-jerk, waiter, short-order cook and clean-up man.
At Dartmouth, like half the freshman class, he chose a pre-med program. But after his first intimidating encounter with chemistry, he retreated to economics. Dolben graduated with a BA in economics and went on to earn a master’s degree in accounting from Columbia. In 1958 he joined Price Waterhouse and earned his CPA certification there in 1962. The prestigious Rockefeller Brothers Corporation hired him and then Time Inc next door took him and put him on a fast track. He started as assistant treasurer and shortly after became comptroller in 1976.
When Time Inc. acquired Temple, the company sent him to Texas to become vice president of the new Temple-Eastex subsidiary. He and his family grew to love the small-town Texas life in Lufkin while Dolben cemented relations with the Temple people. But in 1979 Time Inc. dragged him back north to oversee the company’s world-wide subscription services in Chicago. His two daughters remained in Texas.
In the meantime, Arthur Temple moved to New York, where his affability and business skills so much impressed the locals that he became Vice Chairman of Time Inc.
Dolben got his wish to go back to Texas in 1988 for his final assignment as president of Temple-Eastex. He retired from that position in 2000 and spent his remaining 19 years at his home in Lufkin.
(Thanks to George Vollmuth for providing information for this obit.)
A Legend in the Caribbean
• Bernard Diederich, 93, a legendary reporter of revolutions and disasters in the Caribbean and
Central America and a former Time bureau chief in Mexico City, died in January in his adopted home in Haiti, according to an Associated Press report. He had covered Fidel Castro’s triumph in Cuba six decades ago.
Diederich was born in New Zealand and during World War II improbably set out for England as crew in a tall ship. After living in England a while, he bought a sailboat with friends intending to see the world. They stopped in Haiti to deliver some cargo and when he went ashore to try to retrieve a stolen camera he fell in love with the Island and decided to stay.
He became a stringer for Time and Life and founded an English-language newspaper, The Haitian Sun. Practicing journalism in the land ruled by “Papa Doc” Duvalier was a risky business. He was probably lucky when he fell afoul of Duvalier in 1963 and only got thrown out of the country. Ton Ton Macoute thugs put him and his family on a plane to the neighboring Dominican Republic. He had also covered the Dominican Republic and written a book about the assassination another ruthless dictator, Rafael Trujillo, in 1961.
Later Time sent Diederich to Mexico City with responsibility for covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. It was a time of violence and revolution. In 1983 when the U.S led an invasion of Grenada to restore an elected government, the Pentagon tried to keep reporters from seeing the action, but Diederich and a small group of reporters got to the island in a small boat. He helped the Marines find the body of a fallen comrade and he went to a political prison to inform the inmates that they were free.
He wrote 22 books, mostly about Haiti, which he had translated into Creole. He also wrote a book about his friendship with Graham Greene, who like many others was introduced to Haiti by Diederich. Greene wanted to write a mystery about Haiti and Diederich offered to help him get background. This was in 1965 when Diederich was in exile from Haiti. So he took Greene along the Haiti-Dominican border and made risky forays across the board to meet dissidents. The result was one of Greene’s best mysteries, The Comedians. Diederich in turn wrote Seeds of Fiction¸ an account of his experience with Greene which was also full of biographical details about Greene. According to the Associated Press, everyone who met Diederich came away with a fund a stories, most of them true.
• Harold Bonawitz Jr., 78, a genial and charming ad salesman for Time for 25 years, died in Virginia Beach in December, As the magazine’s mid-Atlantic divisional sales manager he specialized in liquor and tobacco ad sales but he also broke new ground by landing the Rover account and building auto accounts. Hal loved fast cars.
He was raised by a single mother in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and got his first job at the age of 12 setting up pins in a bowling alley. Other jobs that follow included a spell as a copy boy at The Pittsburgh Press. He served in the Navy as an aviation mechanic aboard the USS Yorktown and then put himself through California State University at Fullerton and earned an associate degree.
Hal worked first for The Los Angeles Times but in 1976, when he was working for the Chicago Times, Time recruited him and moved him to New York. Three years later Time moved him to Washington and he settled his family in Potomac, Maryland. He was a master toast maker, wore perfect suits and had a sense of style. He would urge people to quit smoking, as he did himself, but nevertheless died of lung cancer
Her retired eventually to a small ski resort called Wintergreen in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Amy Jamieson, the youngest of his four children, was a writer at People for 15 years. (Adapted from a family memoir in The Washington Post)
A Seasoned Traveler
• Patricia Hodges, 82, who worked for many years in Time Inc. corporate promotion and publicity, died in October in Stony Brook University Hospital after being struck by a car at a crossing in Greenport, Long Island, where she was one of six TLAS members living in a retirement community on the North Fork.
Her career notably included traveling on the staff of many of Time’s lavish “newstours” around Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. On these tours, remnants of the free-spending days at the company, two dozen or so top executives of major corporations (which were also advertisers) traveled across the world by chartered plane, met with world leaders, stayed in the best hotels and ate at the finest restaurants, all at Time Inc.’s expense. It fell to people like Pat, to make sure nothing went wrong.
Pat was born in 1937 in Huntsville, Alabama, the youngest of six siblings. After college she went to live in Miami and became a flight attendant for TWA—a good experience perhaps for the newstours far in the future. She moved to New York in 1979 and spent the rest of her career with Time Inc., in public affairs and promotion. At various stages she worked for Don Wilson, Flicky Ford and Bob Sweeny.
Pat helped produce a documentary, A Woman’s Place, based partly on a Life special report. The film, released in 1996, was a finalist in the New York Film Festival and the International Film Festival of the Americas. It was narrated by Julie Harris.
She and her late husband Paul enjoyed camping trips out West and in Alaska. In retirement in Southampton, she took up painting the countryside she loved. She entertained friends with her delicious lobster pot pie and pecan pie, finished off with Irish coffee. She liked to discuss politics, race relations and other serious topics and was a fan of The New York Times crossword puzzle.
HBO Star
• Frank Biondi, 74, who headed the HBO team that turned the company into an entertainment giant in the early 1980s, died in November at home in Los Angeles. After HBO he became CEO of two other major entertainment companies, Viacom and Universal Studios.
Biondi grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Princeton University, where he graduated with a degree in psychology and played center field on the baseball team. He went on to earn an MBA from Harvard. Early in his career he worked for several Wall Street brokerages and set up his own financial consulting firm. In 1973 he went to work for what became Sesame Workshop as assistant treasurer and from then on he worked in the entertainment industry, but more as a financial expert than as a creative director.
Time Inc hired him in 1978 as a programmer at HBO and he became president and CEO five years later. During his tenure HBO became a television powerhouse but by 1984 subscriber growth had slowed and Time Inc. replaced him with Michael Fuchs, a friend who had brought him to HBO. Their friendship cooled when Biondi overtook Fuchs to become CEO.
While Biondi was a quiet deal-maker who did not seek publicity, it was his fate to work for flashy entertainment moguls. Soon after his departure from HBO, he went to work for Sumner Redstone, the volatile head of Viacom. He was the CEO but with Redstone as chairman, “If you read the press, I don’t exist,” Biondi told The New Yorker. During his time at Viacom, the company grew with the acquisition of Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster but in 1987 Redstone abruptly fired him, reportedly over faltering box office sales at Paramount. Just five minutes after the news of his dismissal went out on the wires, Bondi received a call from Edgar Bronfman Jr., another billionaire business owner, who hired him to run Universal Studios.
Universal had financial problems and after two years, Bondi lost his job in a management reshuffle. Like Redstone, Bronfman wanted to be a more hands-on chairman.
In the 1990s, Bondi ran an investment fund which invested in new media, including the Tennis Channel, a reflection of his for love for playing tennis.
Sherry Lansing, former chairwoman of Paramount, said of Biondi: “Whether he said yes or no to you he did it with such balance and respect. He was calm in good times and in bad.”--Adapted from The New York Times.
——In a long obituary, The Wall Street Journal said Biondi learned that “entertainment moguls seeking supremacy in the creation and distribution of movies, TV programs and music” were “fickle masters.” The article described him as “Hollywood’s perpetual fall guy, the one to tell tycoons when their whims were unwise.” This didn’t stop the next tycoon from hiring him as soon as another fired him—or Biondi from taking the job. —Posted 12/2/19
A Champion of Modern Artists
• Dorothy Seiberling, 97, a former Life art editor who became an influential art critic and interpreter of the works of modern painters, died in November in Wilmington, Delaware, where she had moved to a senior residence only the month before from her longtime home in Shelter Island.
She grew up in a wealthy and successful family. He grandfather was a founder of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. He mother was a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Her brother was a congressman from Ohio who sat on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings. Her sister was a social activist. The family grew up on the grandfather’s 70-acre estate in Akron, Ohio.
After graduating from Vassar in 1943 with a degree in English, Seiberling was accepted in a training program for researchers at Life. In those days (and for many years after that), women seldom got far at Time Inc., but within 10 years she was editing and writing for the magazine.
He articles sought to explain the works of Abstract Expressionist such as Rothko and Rauschenberg. They helped to make their work understandable “to a somewhat perplexed public,” as The New York Times said in an obituary. She was a champion of Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock.
She married a prominent art historian, Leo Steinberg, in 1962 and together they amassed a collection of prints, some of which they gave to the University of Iowa art museum. They were divorced and in 1977 she married an old friend. Sidney Stirber, described as a director, producer and aviator.
Seiberling accumulated a collection of works by Picasso, Rauschenberg and others and gave dozens of them to the Vassar art museum. Her papers are at the Smithsonian in Washington. She became Life’s art editor in 1965. The weekly Life folded in 1972 and Clay Felker, who had left Life to start New York magazine, hired her to become deputy editor. She was also a deputy editor of the Sunday New York Times. A few years later she quit and moved with her second husband to Shelter Island. After he died in 2013, she sold her apartment on Central Park West for a reputed $3.5 million. For 22 years she was president of the Shelter Island Friends of Music. (Adapted from The New York Times) —Posted 12/2/19
• Rosalyn Taylor, 72, who worked for Time Inc. for 20 years and was a financial analyst at Sports Illustrated, died in Florida in January, 2018, as we learned recently. Rozzie, as she was known to her friends, was born in Brooklyn and educated in the New York public schools. She later attended Pace University and the New School in Greenwich Village. She and her husband relocated to Florida in 1998, where she worked for WABC in Fort Myers as a sales rep.
A devout Baptist all her life, Rosalyn received a degree in Theology from, Life Christian University in 2010. She always dressed immaculately and she was known for her devotion to her dogs.
A Spinner of Tales
• Gregory Douglas Jaynes, 68 (Time, Life edit), described in a death notice as a ”writer, nomad and spinner of tales”, died in New Orleans in March while the Mardi Gras parades passed below his window. Gregory was born in Florence, Alabama, but grew up in Memphis, where as a young reporter he covered the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. for the Commercial Appeal.
Ambitious and restless, Gregory moved from the Commercial Appeal to newspapers in Nashville, Atlanta, Miami and New York. At The New York Times he was a reporter, columnist and then for two years correspondent in Nairobi. He also had spells at Time, Life and the National Geographic .He covered the First Gulf War for Life.
He always traveled with an eclectic collection of books and he wrote some himself, including two memoirs. His second memoir, written in his 50s and titled Hell on High Water: A Really Sullen Memoir, recounted his misadventures aboard a Russian freighter. (Lifted from a paid death notice) Posted 11/8/2019
A Star Writer
• Ed Magnuson, 93, once one of Time’s star writers, died in October at his home in Ardsley-on-Hudson. When he retired in 1991 he had written a record 119 cover stories. His rival in the cover competition, George Church, delayed his retirement until he had beaten Mag’s record. Then along came Nancy Gibbs who out-wrote them both with 175 cover stories (and became Time’s managing editor.
Vanity Fair praised Mag as “go-to-guy” who could turn out a smooth, coherent story faster and better than anyone. He was a “storyteller” who “did not necessarily see it all but could weave a tale that did justice to both to the reporter and the reader.”
Mag was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and graduated from high school in 1944 in time to join the Navy before the end of World War II. Back in civilian life after a year in the Philippines, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he worked on the college newspaper and graduated magna cum laude in 1950. Then he spent ten years as a reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune.
He first wrote for the Education section at Time and within a year had written his first cover. In the late 1960e he joined the Nation section, where he made his name and spent the rest of his career. Mag was handed many of the tough last-minute cover stories such as the Challenger disaster, the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the Me Lai massacre.
Stefan Kanfer, another star Time writer, wrote in City Journal that Mag became “Time’s superstar during the Watergate period. A master of pellucid writing, he analyzed every bit of Nixon chicanery and set the entire scandal out week after week, quite often writing from one morning until the following sunrise.” He had closed one Nixon cover one evening when news came of the “Saturday night massacre”—the resignation of the top officials in the Justice Department after refusing the carry out Nixon’s orders. The old cover was scrapped and by Sunday morning Mag had turned out a new cover article, smooth and coherent.
He wrote more than a dozen Nixon cover stories. One of them happened to be his 50th cover overall and as a prize the magazine gave him the original art work for the cover, a portrait of Nixon. The Magnusons did not display it, but stored it under their bed, face down.
By the 1980s Time was changing. The managing editor, Henry Muller, decided to use more of the correspondents’ original writings rather than the work of editors in New York. According to Kanfer, Mag’s role was further diminished when he wrote a note to a Time correspondent in Washington praising him for his “fact-filled, unemotional reporting” in contrast to some of the magazine’s recent articles using “generalizations and hot rhetoric.” The letter leaked and Muller was not happy. Mag’s role diminished after that.
He left the company in 1991 and enjoyed nearly 30 years of retirement. He liked walking his Golden Retriever along the banks of the Hudson and continued his lifetime hobby as a ham radio operator, which he had taken up when he was 14. He erected a 50-foot-radio tower by the Magnuson’s country place in Copake Falls, in upstate New York, where the zoning laws were fairly relaxed.
Mag’s wife, Jane Nelson, also worked for Time Inc. for many years. She was Henry Grunwald’s assistant when he was managing editor of Time and moved upstairs with him when he became editor-in-chief. She continued in the same position for his successors, Jason McManus and Norman Pearlstine.
Eminent Editor
• Jason McManus, 85, former managing editor of Time and later editor-in-chief of all Time Inc.’s magazines, died in New York in September after undergoing surgery to repair damage to his spine suffered in a fall.
A quiet, courtly gentleman, Jason had a steely ambition from early on to rise to the top of Time Inc. It was his bad luck that he got there when the magazines were losing their luster and advertising and the corporate managers of the company were making poor decisions.
A farewell note in Time described Jason as an “eminent editor.” The note, written by a former assistant managing editor, Howard Chua-Eoan, said Jason’s reign “witnessed the onset of the titanic mergers and corporate ambitions—including the marriage of Warner and Timc Inc.—that would shrink the power of his office and remake the media forever.”
“Beset by immense forces,” Howard wrote, “Jason never ceased to be the master of the generous gesture.” He recalled that when he was a lowly fact checker, Jason read the introduction to the company softball team’s yearbook he had written and suggested that Howard might make a good writer. “One small kindness gesture helped make my career,” he wrote.
Jason was born in Kansas City but grew up in St. Louis because his father, a CPA, was transferred there. Jason became a lifelong Cardinals fan. He first wanted to become a Presbyterian minister and went to Davidson College, the premier Presbyterian university in the U.S. But after a while he decided that preaching was not for him and that journalism instead would provide him with “a bully pulpit.”
His degree in liberal arts from Davidson, he thought, was not enough to launch him in journalism so he presciently decided to study international economics and went to Princeton to earn a master’s degree. He polished up his considerable education with a Rhodes Scholarship and spent a year at Oxford.
Jason’s first experience at Time Inc. was as a summer intern at Sports Illustrated in 1957. Two years later he joined Time as a writer. His economics studies paid off when he was assigned to Paris to cover the Common Market (the predecessor of the European Union). He came to love France.
Time brought him back from Europe in 1963 and he soon proved himself an adept writer able to turn out a cover story swiftly and smoothly. He became the “world” editor and supervised the writing on the war in Vietnam and then as “national affairs” editor he oversaw what Time wrote about the Watergate scandal.
All along Jason had his sights set on becoming Time’s managing editor and when he was passed over for Ray Cave in 1977 he was tempted to resign. But he stayed on and the decision paid off in 1985 when he did become managing editor. Two years later he succeeded his mentor, Henry Grunwald, to become Time Inc.’s fourth editor-in-chief with responsibility for 24 magazines.
The promotion put him on top of Cave, with whom he had a well-publicized see-saw rivalry since the two had been assistant managing editors of Time. As Jason’s deputy, Cave sought more responsibility, but he was turned down and resigned. Subsequently Cave’s wife, the late Pat Ryan, who had started at Time Inc as a typist and rose to become the first female managing editor of a Time Inc., magazine--People—was fired without explanation.
Jason reached the top at a time when the troubles of the magazines became more serious. The weekly Life had already folded and some of the other magazines were seeing their relevance and advertising dwindle. The business managers at Time Inc. began to exert more control and demanded lay-offs and a less lavish lifestyle.. Jason lost his seat on the corporate board of directors. The merger with Warner Communications in 1989 reduced the influence of the editorial managers and cut the value of the options accumulated by these managers
Jason retired in 1994. He served on the Council on Foreign Relations and, together with his wife, Deborah, the Time researcher he married in 1973, ran the D.J.McManus Foundation, which gave away $640,000 “in one recent year,” according to Inside Philanthropy, a website.
As of this writing the only newspaper obituary about Jason appeared in the Highland Current in Garrison, New York, where the couple had a country house.
(For TLAS members who would like to know more about Jason, there is plenty of information if you Google “Jason McManus and Time Magazine”. One of the most interesting items is a long interview with him on C-span in 1988.) --JM
—Posted 9/29/2019
A Demanding Head Researcher
• Raissa Silverman, 94, died on July 23, in Westchester County. She was the scrupulous and demanding head researcher in Time’s Nation section supervising its research staff from 1972 until 1976 during the Watergate investigations. Jason McManus, then editor of the Nation section and subsequently the Editor-in Chief of Time Warner recalls, “The halcyon days were when I was the Nation editor and Raissa was the head researcher and we were pursuing Nixon. It was a very rewarding relationship, and not just because Raissa managed her end of our business so intelligently and well. We were equals with serious responsibilities in a serious and sometimes stressful time. It was gratifying to me to have someone to share delicate or just frustrating situations in perfect confidentiality. I think she felt the same way.”
Raissa was born in the Bronx and studied library science at the University of California at Berkeley. She came to Time Inc probably in the 1950s and by 1964 was well enough established in the Nation section to attend the raucous 1964 Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater. She was not a writer but presumably organized research for the writers.
Anne Hopkins, a senior reporter who was temporarily drafted from Back-of-the-Book to Nation remembers, “Those Watergate days were exciting and demanding, with cots in the corridor for overnights, but Raissa remained a firm and disciplined head researcher who as I recall on occasion came close to losing her cool, but never actually did.” Eileen Chiu Graham reflects that when she first arrived she was intimidated by Raissa, noting, “She was really strict about the fact checking, but there is no doubt that she was very loyal to Time and the people she worked with.”
Former Time Chief of Research Leah Gordon notes, “Whether it was a late closing or the 10:00 AM story conference, Raissa was always there, dependable, solid. And she was also thoroughly up to date on the material. She never let me down.”
Raissa’s perfectionism and devotion to accuracy were legendary, but while she could be intimidating, she was also great fun. On the night of the great blackout in New York, Raissa demonstrated her sangfroid and adaptability. She had invited four friends to dinner but when she realized there would be no elevator service to her tenth floor apartment, she cancelled those plans. Instead she asked her hallway neighbors to come and share a convivial candle-lit dinner. --Betty Satterwhite —Posted 9/10/2019
• Marcia Carnegie Gauger, 94, who had a long career at Time beginning at the newsdesk and went on to become a distinguished foreign correspondent, died in Boston on May 14, 2018, as we learned recently. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1944 she worked in the World War II Procurement Office in Washington before joining Goldman Sachs in New York City.
She soon moved to Time, starting at the news service desk, as a researcher, and then fulfilling her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. While on loan from Time to teach journalism in Cairo, she witnessed the riots over food prices that shook the Sadat government.
Marcia became the New Delhi bureau chief in 1979. Her beat included Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. She was in Kabul when Russia invaded Afghanistan and visiting the US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan when it was attacked and burned by an angry mob. With some 90 embassy staffers she took refuge in the embassy’s steel vault while the embassy burned around them. After suffering from heat and tear gas, they eventually made their way out of the vault. The mob had dissipated. She later disputed Carter administration claims that the Pakistani army had come to their rescue. Her fondest memories from that time were her relationship with Indira Gandhi and meeting Sir Edmund Hillary on a trek in Nepal. Her sister Jane Graham followed her in death two months later. Family and friends scattered Marcia's ashes in the ocean in a private ceremony.—Posted 9/10/2019
• Judith Devereux Fayard, 77, Life bureau chief in Paris during the 1980s, died of cancer in August in Paris, where she had lived for more than 40 years. Judy was born in New Orleans, attended high school in Mobile and went to the University of Colorado at Boulder on a National Merit Scholarship. She was president of her sorority and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
After college Judy worked for Life in Los Angeles and then in New York. When the magazine sent her to Paris she fell in love with the city and spent the rest of her life there. She was chief of the Paris bureau until Life closed it down in 1990. A charming, discerning woman, Judy wrote about art, museums, opera, architecture, travel, all things she loved and knew well. After Life she freelanced and edited several magazines in Europe. She was editor of France Today, a beautiful, glossy magazine, and contributed to others, including Women’s Wear Daily. She was a correspondent for the culture section of The Wall Street Journal. In 1972, Judy was a contestant in Hollywood in the Dating Game show on TV.
When she was diagnosed with lung cancer several years ago she agreed to take part in trials of immunotherapy treatments. They worked for a while but the cancer returned recently and she died at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Paris. —Posted 9/10/2019
• Dorothy Kirkham, 94, head nurse at Time Inc’s in-house medical clinic when that was one of the amenities offered to Time Incers, died in July in New Jersey. At Time Inc she fell in love with Ted Kirkham, the clinic doctor, and they were happily married for just five years until his death in 1981.
Debbie, as she was called, emigrated from Germany with her family just before World War II and settled in New York. She and her twin sister, Irene, attended the Northfield Academy in Northfield, Massachusetts. Debbie went on to nursing school and became an operating room nurse at New York Hospital. After many years there she joined the Time Inc clinic.
Debbie, an elegant and charming woman, loved New York and its arts. She volunteered as a docent at the New York Public Library until she was 90 and was an active member of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.
• John Shearer, 72, the second black staff photographer hired by Life, died in June. He had grown up in Westchester County as a neighbor of Life’s first black photographer, Gordon Parks, who encouraged John to take up the profession.
He showed his great promise when he was a teenager assigned to carry bags for Look’s director of photography at the Kennedy funeral in 1973. But he was given a camera and told to shoot pictures of mourners. He pushed his way into the stands and before being thrown out by the Secret Service he took the most famous of the pictures of little John Kennedy saluting his father.
The New York Times quotes James Spione, a professor of film at SUNY Purchase, who is making a documentary about John, as saying, “Most photographers went for the kid, but John composed his differently, as a moment in a tableau. It’s vertical instead of horizontal. He has always been a pictorialist taking a very painterly approach to composition and lighting and storytelling with the camera.” The shot was slightly overexposed showing Jackie Kennedy’s face clearly through her veil.
A staff job at Look soon followed and then the job at Life. Through the l960s and ‘70s he took many of the iconic pictures of the civil rights movement, including the Martin Luther King funeral. He worked in the Bronx and the Deep South. After the riots in Detroit and Harlem he walked the streets of the cities with his cameras. He took pictures of New York City gangs. When the prisoners at Attica in upstate New York rioted in 1971, he was the only photographer allowed into the prison by the rioters. John won 175 national photography awards and had his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums. As a young man he wore a striking Afro. (Adapted from Time and The New York Times) —Posted July 14, 2019
• Philip G. Howlett, 91, a modest and friendly former executive vice president of the Time Inc. magazine group, died in June in Pasadena, where he had lived since retiring in 1986.
Phil began a highly successful career at Time Inc when he joined Life at its prime in 1958 as a sales representative. After seven good years there he became business manager at Fortune. In 1970 Phil accepted one of the most challenging and enjoyable jobs Time Inc. had to offer, as publishing director of Time’s international editions based in London. With responsibility for the magazines’ business in Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa he had to find his way through the business practices and cultures of many countries.
After four happy years in London, the company hauled him back to New York to become associate publisher of Sports Illustrated. In 1974 he became ad director and in 1980 he was promoted to publisher of SI. In that position he took the important initiative of making SI a sponsor of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. That sponsorship proved for many years to be a big money maker for SI.
Time Inc. promoted Phil to executive vice president of the magazine group in 1986 under president Kelso Sutton. He supervised the monthly magazines while Kelso ran the weeklies. Phil took early retirement to move with his wife of 68 years, Ann, to Pasadena. She died of Alzheimer’s in 2018.
Phil was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Evanston, where he played varsity baseball. He won a scholarship to Northwestern in 1945 and spent a year there before he became old enough to be drafted by the Army. He passed two years with the occupation forces in Japan and returned home to finish at Northwestern, where he made the baseball team, married a fellow student, Ann Flowers, and earned a degree in political science in 1950.
Wilson Sporting Goods hired him in its public relations department and in 1954 made him head of its new advertising department. While there he ghost-wrote two books for prominent sports figures. In 1956 McCann Erikson hired him but after two years he decided he didn’t want to be in the advertising business and that’s when he started his distinguished career at Time Inc. by joining Life. (Adapted from The Greenwich Time.) —Posted 6/23/2019
• Linda Kitay Censor, 81 (TL Films, HBO), was an intrepid volunteer for TLAS for many years. A native of New York State and a graduate of Cornell University, she married Walter Censor, Associate Counsel of Time Inc.'s Magazine Group (now retired) and they enjoyed a life enlivened by friends, family, and the arts. “Linda was an extraordinary contributor to the Alumni Society and a mentor to many of us. She was a consummate professional and a standard bearer of all things good for our organization.” --Alan Wragg. We invite anyone who knew would like to add some notes about Linda to send them to us at tl.as@tlasconnect.com. —Posted 6/18/2019
Linda was in charge of the American distribution rights and residuals for Time Life Films' BBC television programs airing in the United States and John Cleese and his gang in the “Monty Python” films. She also handled the rights for David Susskind's TV production of "The Wall" staring Tom Conti, Eli Wallace, Rosanne Arquette and Dianne Wiest and the 1981 film "Fort Apache the Bronx" staring Paul Newman, Ed Asner and Danny Aiello.
When the Time Life Films operation was shutdown in the mid-1980s, Linda was their last employee as she still had her work cut out for her. She moved from the Time Life Building to HBO with all the hundreds of contracts in large vertical file cabinets that lined the halls outside her office in the HBO building. Once this challenging work was complete she retired.
--Marilyn McClenahan. —Posted 9/10/2019
• Le Anne Schreiber, 73, was the daughter of Newton Schreiber (LIFE photography division). She played basketball and baseball growing up; had a BA from Rice University in Houston and a Masters in English from Stanford. She began postgraduate work at Harvard when in 1974 wrote a letter to Henry Grunwald, then ME of Time, suggesting several articles she wanted to write. In a 1978 interview with the Philidelphia Inquirer she said “The ideas caught his eye and I was hired.” She originally covered international politics but persuaded HG to let her cover the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Shortly after Montreal, Tennis star and feminist Billie Jean King named her editor of her magazine, womenSports. Le Anne joined The New York Times’s sports section in early 1978 as an assistant editor. At 33, she was appointed editor, but with a caveat: she told the newspaper’s management that she would stay at the job for only two years. “If The Times was ready to appoint a female head of a hugely male department for the first time in its history, I had no right to refuse the position.” she wrote in a memoir, Midstream. She recalled feeling less than fully accepted both inside and outside the paper. At the time, The Times was in the midst of settling a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit filed by hundreds of its female employees. Gerald Eskenazi, a Times 44 year veteran sportswriter wrote “Ms. Schreiber was eager to learn what we covered and also what we might be doing differently.” And, he said, “With her Socratic method, she made you think about what you were doing.”
After leaving The Times in 1984, she wrote Midstream (1990), a dual account of her mother’s death and her life in rural upstate New York; freelance articles, including two for Glamour magazine about abortion winning a 1992 National magazine Award; and Light Years (1996), a collection of her essays about her parents and brother who had all died of cancer. In 2007, she joined ESBN as an ombudswoman for two years. “She enjoyed ESBN because by the time she had left The Times, she had become sports-phobic,” said Milena Herring, her former partner, “She didn’t want to watch the U.S. Open on TV or in person. But at ESPN, it wasn’t about sports at all, but about looking at the coverage of sports as a journalist with a critical eye.”
In recent times Ms. Schreiber taught English at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. (Thanks to Richard Sandomir and the NYTimes for this information) —Posted 6/16/2019
• Lillian A. Corsetti, 94 (Little Brown) We invite anyone who knew Lillian and would like to add some notes about her time at Little Brown to send them to us at tl.as@tlasconnect.com. —Posted 6/12/2019
• Robert C. Gardner, 88, a successful ad sales executive for Sports Illustrated in its early days, died at Vero Beach on May 12. Robert graduated from the University of Virginia in 1953 and then served in the Air Force as a 2nd lieutenant, before coming to Time Inc. He later became executive vice president of the Magazine Publishers Association. In 1980 he moved to take over the presidency of Decisions Publications, which publishes Media and Marketing Decisions, and two years later he and a partner bought the company. When they sold it to TV producer Norman Lear, Robert remained in the company as president. After retiring to Locust Valley, New York, he served as an industry consultant and sat on several boards and committees.
—Posted 6/1/2019
• Mary McDermott, 87, a former secretary at Life, died in Hilton Head in February. Polly, as she was known to all her many friends, was the widow of John (Jack) McDermott, former Life sports editor, who died in 1995.
Polly was the daughter of a documentary film maker and they moved around the country for his work. When the family settled in Princeton, she went to high school there. After graduating from Centenary Junior College in 1954, she went to work at Life. That same year, Jack graduated from Columbia and signed on at Life as a sports reporter. After their first date, at a Harlem Globetrotters game in 1955, they both knew they would marry and they became engaged three months later. They married in 1956.
Polly’s job at Life was an exciting one – dining with Albert Einstein and watching missiles take off from Cape Canaveral. Jack became sports editor at Life and then moved to a series of high profile jobs as president of Signature magazine, executive editor of Golf Digest. They traveled the world together, dining with sports stars and princes. Jack’s stint at Life included working in the Chicago bureau with Roy Rowan. The two of them formed a bureau syndicate to invest in a race horse that turned out to be more fun than a money-maker. —Posted 4/10/2019
• Michael Carpenter, 78 (Time, Life, People ad sales) Mike was an original member of the People staff, opening the only sales office outside New York—in LA. --Frank Roth (See picture in "It's About Time"—Posted 5/23/19
[We welcome any additional information about Mike’s career at Time Inc.—Ed]
• Marian Heiskell, Philanthropist
Marian Heiskell, 100, a member of the Sulzberger family that acquired The New York Times in 1896 and one of New York City’s most effective philanthropists, died in New York in March. Although she never worked for Time Inc., she became an honorary member of TLAS, because she was married to the late Andrew Heiskell, the company’s former CEO. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy our lunches, which she often attended.
Mrs. Heiskell was the granddaughter, daughter, wife, mother, aunt and great aunt of the six successive publishers of The Times since the Sulzberger family took over the paper. She was born in New York into the top-most level of New York society and influence. Her first husband, Orvil Dryfoos, third publisher of The Times, died in 1963 at the age of 50 after he had been running the newspaper for only two years. She married Heiskell in 1965, soon after his divorce from the actress Carole Lombard.
Mrs. Heiskell was a failure in several schools because of undiagnosed dyslexia but as a young woman she discovered—“much to my horror,” as she told The Times—that she was good at getting things done and fund-raising. So instead of a life of high society functions, she turned to notable efforts to improve New York’s urban environment.
Mayor John Lindsey and Mrs. Heiskell established in 1970 the Council on the Environment of New York City, which raised private funds to create small parks in abandoned lots in the city. She was a leader in the campaign to create the Gateway National Recreation Area, a park made up of scores of beaches and wildlife reserves around the entrance to the New York-New Jersey harbor area. At her death she was still chairwoman of the National Parks of the New York Harbor Conservancy.
The Times said her most “striking contribution” to the city was the renovation of the once grand West 42d Street theater district, which had become lined with a seedy collection of porn palaces. She raised millions of dollars of private money to renew some of those theaters and the whole street has taken on a new life. Photo: James Estrin/The New York Times
--Posted 3/18/2019
• W. Pendleton (Pen) Tudor, 89, a whizz Time-Life ad salesman and a cofounder of AdWeek, died in March in Montecito, California, where he had lived for many years. Such was the respect and warmth felt towards him that in spite of his imposing name he was universally known simply as “Pen.”
He joined Time Inc. in 1955 as a sales rep for Life in Los Angeles. He also worked in Chicago and New York but for most of his life he was based in his native California, where had earned an undergraduate degree and an MBA from the University of Southern California.
Pen spent 17 years in various line and sales management positions at Time Inc. and then two years as marketing director for a research project into paid TV satellite service.
In 1978, he and the late Jack Thomas, another Time Inc. sales executive, and a third partner joined forces to buy ASW, the publisher of three regional advertising magazines. They merged them into a single national magazine, AdWeek, and challenged the well-established Advertising Age. To make AdWeek more alluring they enlisted the help of Clay Felker, another Time Inc. veteran and founder of New York magazine, and two prominent designers, Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser.
When the partners acquired AdWeek it had 29 employees and revenues of $3 million. By the mid-1980s, AdWeek had overtaken Advertising Age in circulation and by other measures. When the partners sold AdWeek in 1990 it had more than 300 employees and revenue of more than $40 million from ten magazines and other activities.
Before and after retiring from AdWeek, Pen was active in many not-profits and served on the boards of several corporations. He was an associate director of the California Museum of Science and Technology and chairman of the Southern California U.S. Olympic Committee. He was married to the late Mary Alice Ghormley, whose father was president and vice chairman of the Carnation company—once a big advertiser in Life. Family provided the 2018 Photograph—Posted 3/26/2019
• The Best Sports Writer Ever
Dan Jenkins, 90, described “as the most influential sports writer ever,” by Sports Illustrated, where he wrote about golf and football for more than two decades, died on March 7 in Ft. Worth, his home town.
The Washington Post obituary said he was almost as famous as the players he wrote about, such as Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, who Jenkins had helped turn into stars. Golf Digest, which he joined in 1985, said Dan “stood at the center of magazine journalism in the golden age of magazine journalism.” He was funny, irascible, politically incorrect and the model for many sports writers who followed him.
Born in Ft. Worth, Dan was brought up by his grandparents after his father left home. His grandmother bought him typewriter and Dan put it on the kitchen table and copied out sports stories from the newspapers. After a while he decided “this guy is an idiot” and started improving on the stories. He never stopped writing
Dan captained the golf team at Texas Christian University and was hired to write sports for the Ft. Worth Press. Then, after a short stint at the Dallas Times Herald he was spotted by Andre Laguerre, the founding editor of SI who was a great talent scout. Laguerre hired Dan away to work in New York, where he was soon a familiar at Elaine’s and other watering holes for journalists. He was a raconteur who stayed til the end and always picked up the tab. His formula for writing—“Type fast, get it done and go to a bar”—reflected his effortless style but didn’t fool anyone who appreciated his deep knowledge of sports acquired in covering 200 golf “majors” and countless other events.
He turned to fiction in 1972 and published Semi-Tough a raunchy, raucous diary of a fictional Super Bowl running back. “It is outrageous,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times. “It mocks contemporary American mores; it mocks Madison Avenue; it mocks racial attitudes; it mocks writers like me; it even mocks sportswriters for Sports Illustrated like Dan Jenkins.” Semi-Tough became a best-seller and was turned into a movie starring Burt Reynolds in 1977. More books followed, establishing his reputation as novelist.
Dan left SI and returned to Dallas in 1985 and began writing for Golf and Playboy. Having revolutionized sports writing, Dan took to Twitter early on and built up a large following—with a little technological help plus some supervision to tone down his more outrageous, politically incorrect opinions. His daughter Sally is a well regarded sports-columnist for The Washington Post. --Photo: Martin Mills/Getty Images --Posted 3/17/2019
• Clementina Carmela Malvena DiGeronimo Allured, 94, known to generations of Time correspondents and writers simply as “Clem”, died in January. She worked for the magazine for 50 years (1942-1992) and was the cheerful assistant in the news bureau who was always ready to help Timeincers whether they were passing through New York or off in Katmandu. The daughter of Italian immigrants, Clem was a New Yorker, educated at Washington Irving High School and a long-time resident of East Harlem and Flushing.
• Paul Zimmerman, 86, well-known also as the “Dr Z” who skillfully explained the intricacies of football during his 30 years at Sports Illustrated, died at the beginning of November in Noblesville, Indiana. His career was cut short in 2008 by a series of strokes that left him unable to read or write and almost unable to speak.
Tributes from other sports figures made it clear that among the specialists in pro football, he was unequalled. Howie Long, a Hall of Fame defensive end featured in a memorable article by Zimmerman in 1985, wrote that “Dr. Z understood the sport of football in a way few if any members of the media before him did: Zimmerman would write not only about the running back who gained 100 yards, but about the offensive linemen who made it possible.”
Long also wrote, “Paul’s football knowledge was incredible. He had an appreciation particularly for line play and all of its nuance. He had a vision in his mind of how the game was supposed to be played, and anything short of that was unacceptable.”
Jimmy Traina, who was Dr.Z’s editor at CNN and SI, said “he LOVED football. He would literally cut out every single box score every single season and glue them into a notebook. He charted every single game using his own system where he graded every player. He had stories about anyone and everyone associated with the NFL, and he loved to share them.”
Paul was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Manhattan. His father was a union leader for the garment workers and co-chairman of the Socialist Party of America. Paul played football at the Horace Mann School, at Columbia and Stanford Universities, and later in the Army.
After earning a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism he first worked for the Sacramento Bee and then held a series of jobs with three New York afternoon newspapers and began his career as a sports writer. He also wrote a column about wine, another passion.
Paul made SI’s official preseason Super Bowl picks, made weekly game predictions and chose the all-pro teams at the end of the season. He appeared sometimes on TV but his cantankerous nature didn’t go down well with his colleagues. Jimmy Traina said that even in his 70s, Paul understood the internet better than his colleagues and it showed in the posts he wrote.
He produced several books, notably The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football.
(This was adapted from several printed obituaries.)
• Edward Thompson (Fortune edit), former worldwide editor of Reader’s Digest, died in February on his 90th birthday. He was the son of Life’s former managing editor, his namesake. When he was a boy the family moved from Milwaukee to New York. According to a family memoir: “Ed was enrolled at the Lawrenceville School. He credits Lawrenceville with teaching him how to think and, next, MIT with teaching him how to share a broken down car with five fraternity brothers.”
After a brief exposure to chemical engineering, he followed family instincts and became a journalist, first as a writer at McGraw Hill and then at Fortune. He joined the Reader’s Digest in 1960 and DeWitt Wallace chose him to run the magazine in 1976. He launched the magazine into investigative journalism, expanded its international editions, and commissioned more original articles.
Ed was a keen skier, a middling golfer and his favorite place was at the helm of his trawler, Sea Legs. According to the family, “He loved taking family and friends from Maine to Miami without always paying attention to the Coast Guard weather forecasts.” He played the guitar, cooked elaborate meals and enjoyed bridge. When macular degeneration dimmed his eyesight, he took up talking books and continued using his computer with the help of ZoomText, a screen magnifier.
(Adapted from a memorial in The New York Times.)
• Eric Pace, 82, a former Time correspondent in Bonn and Hong Kong (with side trips to Saigon during the war in Vietnam), died in New York in July.
Eric attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, graduated from Yale in 1957 and then earned a master’s degree from the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. After reporting for Time in the 1960s and 1970s, he switched to The New York Times and became its Tehran bureau chief. Returned to New York, he wrote for many years the well-researched and erudite obituaries for the Times. Eric also wrote three novels, Any War Will Do, Saberlegs and Nightingale.
• Leo Deuel, a double-Ph.D., a highly educated proofreader for Time, Sports Illustrated and the Books division for four decades, died about four years ago, as we learn very belatedly from Barbara Murray. He was in his 90s.
Leo was born in Switzerland and educated there and in Britain. He was an Egyptologist who also taught at the City College of New York. He wrote several books about archaeology, about the recovery of ancient documents and about the life of Heinrich Schliemann, the German who used the fortune he made as a businessman in the 1800s to search successfully for the site of Troy. He wrote another volume about the use of aerial photography in archaeological research. He spoke many languages, including Spanish and Ladino, a version of Spanish spoken by mestizos. Life en Espaňol used him as a consultant on these languages.
As Barbara Murray points out, Leo was one of a number of talented or prominent people, most of them with graduate degrees, who liked the flexibility of proof-reading to finance their principal interests. They included the daughter and niece of Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy’s husband, and the writer Luc Sante. (Thanks to Barbara Murray for telling us about Leo.)
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A note about obituaries: Since TLAS lost its office space in the Time-Life Building after the Meredith takeover, all our files have been stuck in a warehouse, which means we don’t have access to information about our members to help us put together these farewells. In any case memories are dimming. So we need help from anyone who can give us information about members who have died but whose obituaries we cannot piece together. They include Jayne-Janis Cortese, Edwin Casey, Valentin Chu, Frank Gander, William Ota, Dale Brown, James Cobbs, Vivien Duffy, Clement Figueroa, Patricia Roache, Eleanor Schaeffer, Roz Taylor, and Ros Taylor. Click here to contact us: tl.as@tlasconnect.com.
-------------------------------------------------------Posted September 27, 2018
• Stefan Kanfer, 85, for decades one of Time’s most talented writers and editors, died of a heart attack in June. Myron Magnet, a former Fortune writer and most recently editor of City Journal, had this to say about Steve: “He was the most vividly alive person I knew. . . He could, and did, do everything, from playing the musical saw in Greenwich Village nightclubs, writing plays, painting model birds, writing a shelf of novels (one published only last month) and bestselling biographies, narrating an Academy Award-nominated documentary and for 30 years being by a long measure the best book and movie critic that Time could boast, excepting only James Agee.” (Actually it was more like 25 years.)
Steve was born in Manhattan and educated at NYU. During the Korean War he served in Army intelligence. Before joining Time, he wrote for the theater and for TV. He was the senior editor for books at Time during its glory years. He also became one of the most endearing and colorful figures at the magazine.
Lance Morrow, who was himself one of Time’s best writers, recalls encountering Steve late one night in the Time & Life Building when he heard laughter down the hall and what sounded distinctly like the voices of Kirk Douglas, George Jessel and Gregory Peck. When he went to investigate he found it “was Steve, an eerily accurate mimic, in full shtick, with an audience of writers, researchers and copyboys.”
Lance, who like Myron and Steve, wrote for City Journal, had this to say about his old friend in the Journal: “He had a primitive integrity of character, at ease with his various roles: the moralist with a decisive, ruthless mind; the novelist with an amused discerning eye; the critic with a fund of considerable learning, and the deeply serious man who was also incredibly funny.”
Myron wrote this: “. . . vehement Steve was, in his loves – for America, for Israel, for virtue, for good culture (whether high or popular)—and his hates – for fraud, for political correctness, for anti-Semitism, for self-righteous Leftism, for the U.N., and for knee-jerk Trump-haters.”
When Myron asked Steve in 2016 to write a piece about Time, by then well into its decline, he pointed to the “latest ignorance in Time” – in a list of the most-read female writers in college classes, Number 97 was Evelyn Waugh. With a diminished staff Time had outsourced the research for the list and no one at the magazine caught the mistake. Steve said he and his colleagues at Time – and any well educated person -- would have been familiar with Waugh’s work and the fact that he was male.
After Time, Steve became a drama critic for the New Leader and wrote on a whole range of subjects as a contributor to the City Journal. He wrote 16 books, some of them best sellers, notably biographies of Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. A book about the gypsies in World War II led to his appointment to the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He received many awards and taught at several colleges.
For years he met old friends from Time, including Lance, Chris Porterfield, Roger Rosenblatt, B.J. Phillips and others for lunch regularly at Joe Allen’s on 46th Street. He died the day of his last lunch with them in June.
• John Austin, 78, a former Time correspondent and writer, died in June in San Rafael, California, where he had lived for the past 45 years. John grew up in Scarsdale, where he distinguished himself as an actor if not as an athlete, and went on to the University of Pennsylvania.
Instead of the theater, he chose journalism for his career and worked for Time from 1967 to 1979. As a Washington correspondent he covered Nixon’s 1968 campaign and tangled with Bob Kennedy on of the use of quotes. In a memoir John wrote how he would let a source see the quotes he was going to use, and amplify them if needed, but always refused the persistent demands of Kennedy’s press secretary and others to change the quotes.
He had a strong opinion on the use of unattributed quotes -- an issue in Trump’s Washington too. At that time, nearly 50 years ago, he thought “the use of unattributed quotes is too prevalent, especially in Washington journalism.” Their use “allows government manipulators, Henry Kissinger was one of the most adroit, to float a trial balloon on policy to see what the reaction to it is without risk of criticism.”
As a writer in New York, he recalled, he felt as much responsible for the accuracy of a piece as the “fact checker” – always a woman in those days – who had to put a colored dot over every word to indicate whether or not the fact was true. “As a nation writer,” he remembered, “I found myself on the phone at 3 a.m. to a Japanese golf course trying to explain that I needed to speak to Time’s Tokyo bureau chief to check the spelling of some obscure religious group of Okinawans.” Time’s readers got the right spelling.
John was also a correspondent in San Francisco, where he wrote about Patty Hearst, among others, and taught journalism for a year at Stanford. After he worked at Time, John’s interest in the holocaust led him to write a novel about the Jews in Vilnius, Poland, under the Nazi occupation. For the rest of his career he was a speech writer, first for Jimmy Carter’s treasury secretary and later for the presidents of Richmond Power & Light and then Pacific Gas & Electric. —(Thanks to Chris Cory and William Stott for this information.)
• Art Shay, 96, a photographer of the famous and of everyday life who had more than 1,500 assignments from Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Look, died in April at his home in Deerfield, Illinois.
Art took pictures of nine presidents, including Jack Kennedy, as well as other well-known people, including Mohammed Ali, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Hoffa and Senator Joseph McCarthy. He also chronicled the street life of his adopted hometown, Chicago.
In addition to his photography, Art was a prolific writer. He wrote 60 books, many of them for children, and two plays. In fact, Life first hired him as a writer. Beginning in 1947, he wrote more than 100 articles for Life but then in 1951 he went out on his own to a career as a successful freelance photographer.
Art was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. His father, a tailor, bought him a portable typewriter for $2 down and 25 cents a week. He wrote for his school paper and learned how to use a darkroom in the Boy Scouts. He enrolled in Brooklyn College but left to join the Army Air Force in 1943. As a lead navigator he flew more than 30 missions over Germany in a unit commanded by Jimmy Stewart. He survived a raid over Kassel in which dozens of American planes were shot down and more than 100 airmen killed. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Croix de Guerre.
Last year he won a lifetime achievement award from the Lucie Foundation in Los Angeles which recognizes great photography. He received the award in Carnegie Hall and after making a brief speech he brought out a harmonica to play a solo. He said any Jewish kid growing up in New York is expected to make it to Carnegie Hall.
(Condensed from The New York Times obituary.)
• Marguerite Michaels, 73, one of the first women reporters hired by Time in the early 1970s and the first to head the Nairobi bureau, died last year in a nursing home in Toledo.
Marguerite was born in New Jersey but went to high school in Toledo and then entered the order of the Sisters of Mercy in Cincinnati. She quit after two years, before taking her vows, to attend Southern Illinois University, where she earned a degree in English. She went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Time hired her straight out of Columbia as a reporter-researcher. She covered many major stories including a cover story on Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, and she covered an uprising in Liberia, where she was imprisoned for several days.
She left Time to write for Parade and produce a book, Showing the Flag, about life inside the American embassy in Bogota, published in 1982 by Simon & Schuster. By then she had returned to Time, which sent her off to the Nairobi bureau. She spent several years covering sub-Sahara Africa and returned to New York to write for Time. She also wrote pieces for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Marguerite was a serious collector of art. She came back from Nairobi with a number of African pieces. She also had an outstanding collection of Japanese prints and paintings, which she gave to the Art Institute of Chicago. When she retired to Toledo, where she had family, she supported the local art scene. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2007 and moved to an assisted living community in 2014.
• David Douglas Duncan, 102, war photographer, died in June in the south of France, where he had lived since 1962. An excellent obituary in The New York Times said, “He was among the most influential photographers of the 20th Century, a Life magazine peer of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Carl Mydans. In addition to his war work, Duncan spent years with Pablo Picasso, creating a pictorial history of the artist’s life.”
Duncan made his mark in the Korean War. The Times said of his Korea pictures for Life, “Dark and brooding, most black and white, they are the stills of a legendary combat photographer, and artist with camera, who brought home to America the poignant lives of infantrymen and fleeing civilians. . .”
He was born in Kansas City and studied archaeology at the University of Arizona, dropping out to join expeditions to Mexico and Central America. He then went on to the University of Michigan to study Spanish and zoology, graduating in 1938 with a determination to become a photographer. He roamed around Latin America taking underwater pictures of aquatic life and shots of wild life in the jungle. He sold them to the National Geographic and several newspapers.
When World War II broke out, Duncan joined the Marines, became an officer and photographer and covered the invasions of the Solomon Islands and Okinawa. He was aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the surrender.
Life hired him after the war and sent him to cover conflicts in the Middle East. When North Korea invaded the South he was in Tokyo and he was soon at the front. The Times described his work there this way: “Under the helmets, the faces are young and tormented, stubbled and dirty, taut with the strain of battle. They sob over dead friends. They stare exhausted into the fog and rain. They crouch in muddy foxholes.”
When the war in Vietnam broke out, he covered that too for Life and ABC and wrote a book denouncing it. Duncan covered other conflicts and was wounded three times. But he also took pictures of Richard Nixon, of the 1968 political conventions (in a sense a war zone), of Paris, and the Kremlin and ordinary people all over Asia.
Duncan showed up uninvited at Picasso’s house in 1956 and then became virtually the artist’s official photographer. They were close friends until Picasso’s death in 1973. His photos showed the artist’s daily life and his creativity. Duncan published eight books about Picasso and 17 other books.
The Whitney Museum of American Art staged an exhibit of his war work in 1972. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin has Duncan’s archives.
(This obituary was adapted entirely from The New York Times)
• Frank McCulloch, 98, a legend at California newspapers and at Time, died in Santa Rosa in May. The San Francisco Chronicle said Frank was “bald, blunt and beloved, ran newsrooms, challenged presidents, and got late night phone calls from Howard Hughes.”
Frank was largely responsible for saving Life from the embarrassment of publishing an extremely skillful fake autobiography of Hughes, a recluse billionaire aviator and film-maker. The author Clifford Irving had written a convincing autobiography, concocted largely from Frank’s own raw files of interviews with Hughes. Frank didn’t know Life had given Irving access to these file because the project was so secret that it was concealed even from the one person at Time Inc. who knew Hughes.
Frank found out about the project when Hughes phoned him and, amidst expletives, said he had never met or heard of Irving. Life and the co-publisher, McGraw-Hill, still believed in the book’s authenticity and went ahead with plans to announce the forthcoming book. While the presses in Chicago were actually running with the next issue of Life (carrying the announcement, not the biography), Frank cornered Irving and got him to confess at 1 a.m. the whole thing was a fake. On his own authority Frank stopped the presses, had the announcement replated, and saved Life from a lot of embarrassment. The scandal was made into a movie, The Hoax, starring Richard Gere.
The son of a northern Nevada cattle rancher, Frank attended high school in Reno and the University of Nevada in Reno. After graduating he got a job at the United Press in San Francisco at $15 a week. In 1942 he enlisted in the Marines. After the war, he covered crime for the Reno Evening News, earning threats from the shady applicants for gaming licenses whom he investigated.
Time hired Frank in 1951 and sent him traveling through the South to report a cover story on Thurgood Marshall. Somehow he established a rapport with Hughes and got used to midnight phone calls from the billionaire. Otis Chandler hired Frank in 1960 to be managing editor of The Los Angeles Times where he launched several important exposes. But in 1963 Frank returned to Time to cover the war in Vietnam. His files questioned the optimistic accounts issued by U.S. authorities.
Frank left Time in 1975 and became managing editor of The Sacramento Bee, eventually rising to executive editor of all three Bee newspapers. The investigative stories he launched got him named in seven libel suits, all unsuccessful. In his last act, when he was 65 in 1985, he became managing editor of the late San Francisco Examiner. William Randolph Hearst III said that getting Frank at that age “was a little like someone telling you Pelé is willing to play a little more soccer, and are you interested?” Hearst continued, “The younger people who worked for him were in awe of him. They adored him. He was a great mentor, always willing to share.”
• José M. Ferrer III, 78, a Time writer and editor for most of five decades, died in May in New York where he was born and lived his whole life.
Joe attended Canterbury School and went on to Princeton, where he majored in English and became chairman of the campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Time hired him when he graduated in 1961 and, like most new writers, he started by preparing short items for the Milestones section. He moved up to writing the slightly longer People items and went on up the ladder. He was an associate editor in 1976 when the Guild struck Time Inc. over a matter of pay scales. He served on the staff committee that negotiated with Henry Grunwald, Time’s managing editor. Time Inc.’s official history says this about him: “An affable, fair-minded Princetonian, Ferrer was trusted by both sides and found himself increasingly in the forefront, explaining the particular problems at Time.”
Joe became a senior editor but also took time to accept a fellowship at the law school at Stanford University and to lecture in journalism at Duke University. In l976 he left Time to help found and edit Nuestro, a bilingual general interest magazine and to edit the short-lived Politics Today. He returned to Time in 1980 to be managing editor of its international editions and then became part of corporate management.
When he retired in 2006, he wrote this to his colleague: “As a writer and editor at Time, I worked on my share of good stories, but what I remember more are the good arguments you could have about everything with everyone, those late-night usage debates, the tidy intelligence of researchers challenging sloppy facts, the to-and-fros with writers, art directors and correspondents, the jousting with editors as they tried to punch up, or sometimes punch down, a story.”
• George Bookman, at 103 likely our oldest alumnus, died recently in Seattle. Could anyone else you know say they had been a White House correspondent when FDR was the occupant? George could. George joined Time’s Washington bureau in 1948, became the magazine’s national economic correspondent, and then moved over to Fortune’s Board of Editors in 1959.
A native New Yorker, George graduated from Haverford in 1936 (with a junior year in Paris) and then in very quick succession worked for The Villager in New York, U.S.News & World Report in Washington and The Washington Post. Somehow in all this he managed a long reporting journey through the Middle East and Mediterranean. At the Post, after short spells on the desk and on the police beat, he became the Post’s White House reporter – the paper had a taut staff then.
In 1940 as the war approached, George joined what became the Office of War Information. Its chief, master-spy “Wild Bill” Donovan, who later became head of the OSS, assigned him to Brazzaville in the Congo, which was in the hands of the Free French. From there he made propaganda broadcasts in French. As the war progressed, the OWI took him to Cairo, then up the Italian peninsula into Austria, sometimes ahead of the troops. During a brief home leave he married Janet Madison, a UPI reporter in Washington.
After the war, George returned briefly to U.S.News & World Report and moved over to Time where he became the economics correspondent in Washington. Time later sent him to New York to be national economics reporter. He reported many cover stories and contributed an annual economics review, which the magazine reprinted as a booklet.
Fortune put him on the board of editors in 1959 but he didn’t stay long. The New York Stock Exchange made him director of public information in 1962. Living with Janet in the country in Millbrook, New York, George had taken enthusiastically to garden and yard work, so when the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx asked him in 1973 to become director of public relations, he readily accepted and soon became a vice president.
After that he returned to the Stock Market for a spell (ghost writing some columns for Sylvia Porter), became a consultant to Howard Stein at Dreyfus and advised the Budapest Stock Exchange on its public program. George was a member of the Overseas Press Club and served on its freedom of the press committee. (From George’s memoir)
• Nancy Pierce Williamson, 80, who came to work at Time Inc. right out of Northwestern University in 1959 and stayed for 39 years, died in Southampton in February. Nancy started as a researcher at Sports Illustrated and then became a writer-reporter for special projects. She covered the Winter Olympics in Austria, France and Japan. She was co-author of an award-winning cover story on women in sports and with William Johnson was co-author of Whatta Gal: The Babe Didrikson Story. After a two-year stint as a reporter-researcher at Time, she joined the start-up staff at People. Pat Ryan, the magazine’s managing editor, promoted her to chief of reporters. Colleagues said she had an uncanny knack for matching the right researcher with the story and had an ability to make crucial last-minute fixes on closing nights. She went to Sydney to help launch the Australian edition of People, WHO.
Jim Gaines, former managing editor of Time, People and Life, said “when I think of Nancy I think first of how wonderful it was just to be around her, and then of her great strength in support of high standards. She loved journalism and the people who helped her do it. The best possible colleague, she was also a delightful friend, during and after hours.”
She retired to her seaside home in Southampton in 1998 and enjoyed neighbors, golf, fishing, and long walks on the beach with her yellow lab “Rudder.” She also volunteered at the local hospital and library. (Thanks to Jerry Kirshenbaum and M.C.Marden for this item)
• Edward L. Jamieson, 88, a former executive editor of Time, died in Peabody, Massachusetts, in April. Ed graduated from Boston University in 1951 with a degree in English literature and spent four years as a reporter and feature writer at the Medford Daily Mercury. In 1955 he moved to New York to become a contributing editor at Time, where he met his wife Ann.
Ed wrote for all 25 sections of the magazine that existed at the time and then, as a senior editor, ran most of them as an assigned or sit-in editor. In 1969 at 39 he became assistant managing editor and deputy to managing editor Henry Grunwald. The company history, The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise, 1960-1980 by Curtis Prendergast, describes Ed’s role this way: “In addition to relying on him for many administrative chores, Grunwald considered Jamieson ‘crucial to the magazine.’ Something of a father-confessor to the staff, even at his young age, the Boston-born Jamieson had a keen if understated sense of humor but a stiffly formal manner. He was conspicuous around the Time offices for never removing his jacket.” He was named executive editor in 1976.
After Ed retired he served for several years as an editor and editorial adviser to America, a Jesuit weekly. For a quarter century Ed and Ann divided their time between East Orleans on Cape Cod but in 2013 they moved to a retirement community in Peabody.
Bill Nack, 77, one of the legendary, literary Sports Illustrated stars and the biographer of Secretariat, died in Washington in April. As a child in Skokie, Illinois, Bill cleaned stalls and in his teens he went to the racetracks around Chicago and worked as a groom. Even then he started to pick up horse stories which he loved to tell.
Bill attended the University of Illinois, where he was sports editor of the campus daily, and enlisted in Army in 1966. During a tour of duty in Vietnam he wrote speeches and press releases for General William Westmoreland. Back in the U.S., Long Island Newsday hired him to cover local politics and the environment. At an office party in 1971 he stood on a table and recited the names of all the Kentucky Derby winners beginning with Aristides in 1875. The paper’s editor, a horse racing fan, was so impressed that he made Bill the paper’s turf writer.
Bill met the two-year-old Secretariat in 1972 when an exercise rider introduced him with a prediction that Secretariat would make people forget last year’s Derby winner. In 1973 Bill spent 40 consecutive days with the horse, starting at 7 a.m., learning all about the horse and his team. Bill covered Secretariat’s wins in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. For the Belmont, Bill got to Secretariat’s stable at 3 a.m. and half a day later watched the horse win by 31 lengths in record time and become a Triple Crown Winner. Bill’s book, Secretariat, The Making of a Champion became the basis for a film in 2010.
Bill spent the next quarter century at SI, writing mostly about horses and jockeys, but also about boxers, football players and others. In a tribute to him, SI’s Tim Layden called him, “The greatest turf-writer in history.” He left SI in 2001 but contributed to GQ and ESPN and continued winning prizes until last year.
• Henry Groskinsky, 84, a Life staff photographer who started out working part-time in the magazine’s photo lab while he was still in high school, died last October. His best known picture was a shot of a total solar eclipse which ran on the cover of Life in 1979. He captured the perfect moment when a symmetrical corona surrounded a totally black moon.
In his book, Life photographers: What They Saw, John Loengard quotes Henry saying, “When I was 12, right after World War II, I got an old 8 x 10-inch camera from my uncle, who was an amateur photographer. It was a magical thing.” Henry went to the High School of Industrial Arts on 51st Street and worked nights at the Life lab. After he graduated in 1952 he started assisting Life photographers at the studio on 53d Street.
Bob Gomel, another staff photographer, recalls that Henry was an assistant to photographers when he came aboard in 1959. He writes, “After working with him on several jobs, his competence was so obvious that I felt comfortable in sending him across the country several days ahead of myself, to set up lighting in a gigantic arena and hand me a perfect polaroid when I arrived minutes before an event.”
It wasn’t until 1964 that Time Inc. offered him a job as a corporate photographer to take pictures of company events. He became a staff photographer a year later after his picture of Jackie Kennedy arriving at the U.N. ran for a full page in Life.
He was on assignment with reporter Mike Silva in Alabama in April, 1968, when they heard that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, 200 miles away. Without the magazine’s approval, they raced over and were astounded to find that they had free access to the motel where King was shot. King’s associates were sitting around solemnly and made no objection to any picture he wanted to take of them or the scene. Among other things, he shot a picture of King’s open briefcase, with a tube of shaving cream on top of his other belongings, and another of a hotel worker trying to clean up a huge pool of blood on the balcony. Life didn’t run any of his pictures; instead used an AP shot of King’s associates on the balcony pointing to the derelict building from where they thought the shot came from. Life did not use the pictures until 41 years later, in 2009, when it took them out of the archive and put them on its website.
In his book, John Loengard quotes Henry about his straightforward approach to photography: “I will often compose a picture so it is symmetrical. If you have a strange angle, it’s as if there’s not enough in the subject so the photographer has done something to jazz it up. I find that the more direct, pure approach is the best way to go. Here it is. This is what it looks like. This is the way I see it.”
• John Wesley Moffly IV, 91, an ace Life ad salesman, a seasoned ocean sailor and, with his wife Donna, the founder of a chain of luxury magazines based in Fairfield County, died in March in Greenwich.
Jack worked for House & Home and SAMI, but it was at Life that he made his mark. He was one of half a dozen salesmen assigned to Life’s crucial tobacco and alcohol group, which could have been a model for Mad Men. The group was located on a separate floor from the rest of the staff perhaps because their hours and level of entertaining might not have set a good example for the others. Carky Rubens, former president of TLAS, was head of the group but said Jack was by far the best salesman. “He sold more ads than I ever did,” said Carky and “he brought dignity to our group.” Jack was a little older and steadier than the others.
Jack was born in Philadelphia and schooled at Andover. He graduated early to join the Army Air Force in World War II. After his service, he attended Princeton, graduating in 1949. He then joined Time Inc., but after his star turn at Life he retired in 1986.
With his wife, he bought the Greenwich Review and combined it with the Nutmegger to make Greenwich, a monthly focused on the rich living in Greenwich. Moffly Media eventually expanded along Connecticut’s Gold Coast with magazines for Westport, Stamford, and New Canaan-Darien and other publications called Fairfield Living and athome. Moffly Media also sold services such as printing, photography, books, newsletters and advertising. The Mofflys retired in 2006 turning the business over to their son Jonathan, but Jack continued to write a column.
A serious yachtsman, Jack had sailed in six Bermuda races and four Marblehead-Halifax races, as well as events on Long Island Sound. Yachting has its hazards. Once crossing the North Atlantic he was washed overboard in a gale. Another time, sailing alone on the Sound, a freak accident left him in the water, being towed by a rope tangled around one foot while his boat, under power and on auto pilot with, headed for Oyster Bay. He was lucky to be rescued both times.
Jack loved duck hunting, skeet shooting, riding, tennis and golf. He was most social. He belonged to several clubs and luncheon groups. He served on the boards of such civic bodies as United Way and the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce.
• Lisa Maria Quiroz, 57, who launched two successful magazines for Time Inc., People en Espaňol and Time for Kids, died of pancreatic cancer in March in Denver, where her parents live. Her death occasioned unusually heartfelt messages about her work as an editor and publisher, as a public servant, as contributor to the arts in New York and especially as a supporter of the Latino community.
After her success with magazines, Lisa took on several major roles at Time Warner. She became the company’s chief diversity officer and took charge of the company’s philanthropic work as president of the Time Warner Foundation and senior vice president for cultural investment.
Time Warner’s CEO Jeff Bewkes wrote in a memo to his colleagues that Lisa was “an extraordinarily accomplished woman whose contributions throughout her life impacted many.” He pointed out that in addition to her work at Time Warner she was a “tireless public servant on the boards of the New York City’s Public Theater and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and a national leader appointed by President Obama to chair the board of the Corporation for National Community Service.”
Lisa was born on Staten Island and went to school there before attending Harvard. After graduating in 1983, she went to work for the Harvard admissions office, traveling around the country to recruit Latino students. She returned to the classroom to earn an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and Time Inc. had recruited her by the time she graduated.
Her sense of mission to serve the Latino community led her to become founding publisher of People en Espaňol and, after a visit to her grade school in Staten Island, her ability to see new opportunities inspired her to become the founding editor of Time for Kids in 1995. Both magazines were successful.
Lisa immersed herself in New York’s cultural life and served on the boards of the Public Theater and the Apollo Theater Foundation. She took time to mentor and support many people, among them Soledad O’Brien and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Right after her death, the Kennedy School established a fellowship in her honor for students committed to the Latino community. Time Warner funded the scholarship.
• Ann Morrell, 77, who had worked for Time, Life, People and corporate from 1973 until her retirement in 2001, died in New York in January. She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and had her first job with the Providence Journal before moving to New York and her career with Time Inc.
She worked for Jim Gaines for nine years, when he was managing editor of People and when he moved up to the 34th floor. She was hired as his executive assistant but as it turned out, he writes, she was his “editor, guardian, judge, jury and friend.” When he hired Ann he asked her if she had any special conditions and she replied, “Just treat me as a real person.” They shook hands on that.
Jim says “Ann’s discretion was impenetrable, which is part of what made her a great gate keeper, someone who could be trusted with secrets, and a stout companion in the internecine wars. When she spoke of her ex-husband. . . or of her many friends, it was always with great kindness and affection, literally never otherwise. . . . What I will always remember most was her irrepressible, infectious, slightly raucous laugh—often directed at me, sometimes at herself.”
• Mary Placko, 88, who helped keep the Time Life Alumni Society office going for 30 years as a volunteer, died in Lodi, New Jersey, in January. Mary and the late Loretta Geissler and Doris Laffan all retired from Time Inc. in 1988 when retirement packages became available for those who had worked for the company for 30 years and they signed up to volunteer for TLAS.
Mary worked at Printing Developments Inc., a subsidiary, and later helped Rose Epstein keep track of expense accounts, which were pretty inventive in those days. When she signed up with TLAS it had no real office—just a bunch of cartons behind a partition, she said. Later the company set aside a pair of offices in the Time & Life Building. The volunteers handled phone calls and the mail, helped to organize luncheons and trips, kept track of the 1,700 members of TLAS. It was a busy place.
Mary was a Eucharist minister and lector in the Rosary Society of St. Francis de Sales Church. She liked crossword puzzles, westerns and was a die-hard Yankees fan.
• Bobbi Baker Burrows, 73, den mother to many of Life’s famous photographers and guardian of Life’s incomparable picture collection, died in Martha’s Vineyard in January of a rare neurological disease, corticobasal degeneration. She joined Life in 1966 as a photographer’s assistant and became a go-fer for Alfred Eisenstaedt, one of many photographers who became lifelong friends.
She became a senior picture editor at Life when it was a weekly and at the monthly Life when it was resurrected in 1978. When the magazine folded in 2000 she remained as director of photography, helping to produce a series of special issues and books or “bookazines” of Life photos which were turned out at almost the same frantic pace as the magazine.
Barbara Jean Baker was born in Boston and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. She graduated from Colby Junior College (now Colby-Sawyer College) in New London, New Hampshire, in 1963. She set out for New York with the idea of becoming a dancer, but the need to earn a living turned her to Life, which was then at the peak of its popularity and influence.
As a senior picture editor she had much to do with assigning photographers and choosing which pictures to print from among the thousands that came in. Bobbi worked late and hard. She earned the love and respect of photographers for her devotion to finding the best pictures to illustrate a story and for taking a personal interest in them. Her close friends included many of the photographers who created the picture history of the 20th Century – David Douglas Duncan (who has just turned 102), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Martha Holmes, Lennart Nilsson and Bill Eppridge. She was with Carl Mydans when he died at 97 and visited Eisie in the hospital in his final days..
Life in those days was a family. Photographer Kenneth Jarecke recalls that he and Bobbi literally called each other “son” and “mom”. Jarecke covered the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989, but before the massacre he made the mistake of leaving for New York for an important date (with his future wife) without telling anyone. While others assumed he had covered the massacre and were livid when they found he hadn’t, Bobbi wasn’t. She was happy to see him safe in New York and they chatted about family matters.
She was as tough as she was charming. When Eppridge got a close-up picture of Robert Kennedy just after he had been shot in 1968, she held off two FBI agents demanding the negative with charming chit-chat while the film was processed. She figured her miniskirt might have helped distract them too.
Bobbi was married to Russell Burrows, the son of Life photographer Larry Burrows. Larry was killed along with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971. Their remains were recovered in the 1990s and buried at the Newseum in Washington. Her daughter Sarah is a picture editor at People.
• Marshall Loeb, 88, who brought new fame and profits first to Money in the 1980s and then to Fortune in the 1990s as managing editor of both magazines, died in December from the Parkinson’s disease that had afflicted him since 2006. The many tributes that came in included this one, re-quoted from The New York Times in 1994: He was “one of the most visible and influential editors in the magazine industry.”
In a life of prodigious output Marshall edited several sections of Time, produced 20 books, broadcast the daily “Your Dollars” and later “Your Money Minute” on CBS radio. He had several other radio and TV shows. He won two Gerald Loeb (no relation) Awards for financial journalism. After retiring from Time Inc., he became editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and continued to be in demand as a public speaker. He was amused that he could give the same talk with the same opening joke over and over again for $25,000 a pop. When he was serving a term as president of the Overseas Press Club a decade ago he discovered he had Parkinson’s. Later when he was bound to a wheel chair by the advance of the disease he continued to come to Time Life Alumni Society events, accompanied by an aide.
Marshall was born in Chicago and as a youngster so admired the Chicago journalists that he went to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri (Fortune’s Carol Loomis was a fellow student). After graduating he traveled to Germany because he was interested in finding out why Germany had become Nazi. Once there he landed a job with the United Press and met and married a red-headed German-French stewardess (today’s flight attendant) at Pan American Airways. Marshall and Peggy took a honeymoon trip around the world courtesy of Pan Am.
Back in the U.S. Marshall signed up as a city reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. But he had wider horizons and within a year, in 1956, Time hired him as a writer. There, the Jewish boy from a scruffy west side Chicago flourished among the Ivy Leaguers who then dominated the Time Inc. magazines. He edited several sections of the magazine, but found his real home running the business section. He was particularly successful with a column of interviews he did with CEOs and for gathering a board of distinguished economists who met periodically to share their views with Time’s readers.
When he was passed over for the managing editorship of Time, he moved in 1980 to Money, then a struggling monthly. The magazine’s profits went from zero to $35 million in the years he ran the magazine, said his son Michael, at a well-attended memorial at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. Circulation increased from 825,000 to 1.4 million. In 1986 he became managing editor of Fortune, with the same spectacular results. His daughter Margaret said that Fortune made more money in the eight years Marshall ran it than during all of its preceding years.
Marshall’s approach at both magazines was to make them more popular and widely read by expanding their scope. Instead of focusing on corporations and the economy, Fortune took on social issues and executive life, among other topics. The business side of the magazines loved him.
Tyler Mathisen, who worked with Marshall at Money and is now a well-known business commentator on CNBC, said Marshall was full of ideas and constantly busy. “Thank God we didn’t have cell phones then,” he said. Marshall was not the kind of editor who bellows at his staff. He was polite, witty and generous in sharing his sources with colleagues. Margaret described his kindness and patience. When photographer Neil Leifer told Marshall that his mother in Brooklyn was worried about what to do with her money, Marshall called her and gave her some advice. After that, when the market made a big move, she would call him and he would patiently answer her questions.
• Gilbert Rogin, 87, the irascible, talented managing editor of Sports Illustrated and author of highly praised fiction, died at his home in Westport, Connecticut, last November. He wrote two novels and many short stories for The New Yorker mostly about middle-aged Jewish Manhattanites who were eccentric magazine writers—in others words, like himself.
Gil, or “Rogie” as he was also called, grew up in Manhattan where his father practiced law and his mother had been an actress. He graduated from Columbia, worked briefly as an office boy at The New Yorker, and spent two years in the Army.
He joined the one-year-old Sports Illustrated in 1955 and was assigned to clipping articles to go into SI’s files, but he started writing articles almost immediately. He was recognized soon for the elegance of his writing and his acute observations. He could be mordantly funny. Of participating in a yacht race from California to Hawaii, he wrote, “It was a numbing, embittering and largely useless 12 days. There was no plot, no suspense. Our progress was as lacking in memorable incident as the passage of an hour hand over the face of a clock.”
He published his first short story in The New Yorker in 1963 and over the years the magazine published 33 of the 44 stories that he submitted, an enviable record. But in 1980 he encountered Roger Angell, the magazine’s fiction editor. who rejected his latest submission with the words, “You’re repeating yourself.” Gil was shattered and never wrote another word of fiction. He had already published two novels much praised by the likes of John Updike and John Cheever. They were republished in a single volume in 2010.
Gil was a man of fixed habits. Staffers at SI knew to be quiet between 2 and 3 p.m. because that’s when he took a nap. He had to swim a mile every day. When he traveled his secretary picked a hotel with a proper swimming pool, not a kidney-shaped one. One morning at a hotel in California he got up to find that the swimming pool was being emptied. He leapt in and completed his lengths as the water level sank.
Franz Lidz, a former SI staffer, recalls that he went to Gil to apply for a job, knowing nothing about the magazine or its managing editor. He found Gil struggling to open a bottle of orange juice. He handed it to Franz, saying, “Here, open this and you can have the job.” Franz opened it and started work the next week.
Some of his writers were offended by his style of editing, but one of them, Jerry Kirshenbaum, wrote “You didn’t feel like your fingers were being chopped off the way it was with some other editors. With Gil it was like having a manicure.”
Gil eventually moved reluctantly to take over Discover magazine in 1984 and then in 1987 he became corporate editor, the number three job on the editorial side. There he supervised the launch of Vibe magazine. Gil was married to Jacqueline Duvoisin, a former SI photographer. (Adapted from The New York Times and other sources.)
• Jim Richman, 78, who worked in Sports Illustrated’s promotion department in the 1970s and 1980s, was killed in an auto accident in Vermont in December. Jim had been especially helpful to TLAS in setting up video recordings of our luncheons.
In retirement, Jim divided his time between a co-op in Manhattan and a condo in Sugarbush, Vermont. He loved skiing and had skied with his brother and sister in Sugarbush the year before. He had a wry sense of humor and a sarcastic wit.
—Thanks to David Richman (see picture above ).
• Patricia Jane Vollmer Hotchkiss, 88, a former Life promotion writer died last October in New Mexico, where she had lived with her husband Gerald Hotchkiss, another Life promotion writer, since 1992. Patty was born in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated from Vassar College with the class of 1950. Gene Light writes “she was the very pretty, very smart extremely vivacious copy writer. Her laughter cheered up anyone who worked with her.”
She worked as a senior promotion writer at Life from 1952 to 1959 and then spent three years in the UK. Back in the US, she served on the town board of Bedford, N.Y. for 12 years and on the Westchester County legislature for four years. After she and Gerald moved to Tesuque, she helped develop a new master plan for Santa Fe County. Patty loved skiing the double black diamond trails in Taos and Mad River Glen, Vermont.
• Cristina Scalet, 53, an award-winning picture editor at Sports Illustrated and Time, died of cancer in New York in December. She joined Time Inc. in 1988 working briefly in the circulation promotion department and moving on to People the following year to be photo traffic coordinator.
Beginning in 1990, Cristina spent 16 years at Time as science picture editor, a job which involved everything from negotiating photo rates to conceptualizing art features. She was recognized three times by the National Press Photographers Association, with a first prize, a second prize and one honorable mention. In 2006 she became picture editor for SI books and Ebooks, which were heavily illustrated, and remained there until cancer cut her career short.
• Edwin W. Goodpaster, 91, a peripatetic journalist who, among many other things, served as news editor and deputy chief of Time’s Washington bureau from 1965 to 1972, died in January in Baltimore, where he was once national editor of The Baltimore Sun.
Before his death in 2005, Hugh Sidey, Time’s Washington bureau chief, told The Baltimore Sun, Ed “was the executive officer, deploying the troops of the 23-man bureau. He also played copy editor, assignment maker, staff psychiatrist and domestic affairs counselor.” He found gas masks and helmets for reporters covering the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination and Arctic underwear for reporters on their way to Greenland. But he seldom got the glamorous assignments.
The son of a janitor in Mount Pulaski, Illinois, Ed got a degree in journalism at the University of Miami, where he was a reporter for the campus newspaper. After Army service in the occupation of Japan, he became a reporter and then city editor at the Minneapolis Tribune before joining Time.
He finished his stint at the Washington bureau with a career turn-around. He bought the Whitehall (Wisconsin) Times, circ. 2,400, with the idea of bringing his ideal of journalism to a small town. A daughter wrote a school column, a son a sports column and another son took photos. His wife sold and laid out ads and the whole family joined in to distribute the paper.
After two years, Ed sold the paper back to its original owner and returned to Washington to serve as press secretary in the Department of Agriculture during the Carter administration. In 1981 he moved to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to run Grit, a national good-news weekly for rural Americans all over the country. Back in Washington in 1982, he became chief of the Washington bureau of the The Baltimore Sun and then moved to Baltimore to become the paper’s national editor. He retired in 1997. He took up guitar lessons at the age of 90. (Adapted from The Baltimore Sun)
• Helga Kohl, 89, who worked off and on, mostly on, for Time Inc. publications beginning in 1954 as she accompanied her diplomat husband around the world, died in Chevy Chase at the end of 2016.
She joined Time as a foreign news researcher in 1954 in New York and beginning in 1961 when her husband was assigned to Munich she contributed to Bayerischer Rundfunk writing scripts in her native German. When they moved to Athens in 1964 she became a stringer for the magazines and the Books division and learned conversational Greek.
Back in Washington in 1970 she was briefly a researcher for The National Geographic and then found herself back in Athens and other European cities stringing for the Time-Life News Service and for Books. She finished out the 1970s in Alexandria as a Books staffer, writing and editing.
For the final years of her career, ending in 1983, she was a stringer in Bonn. Over the years, Helga had traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, the Gulf states, Africa and Europe interviewing archaeologists, historians, museum directors and other experts to select art works and sites for illustrations for many of the books on ancient civilizations as well as a number of volumes on World War II.
• Jane Bachman Wulf, 62, known to everyone as “Bambi”, a cheery boss and mentor of reporters and writers at Sports Illustrated and Time, died of cancer last June at home in Larchmont, New York. She is survived by her husband, Steve Wulf, who wrote for SI before moving on to ESPN.
Bambi was born in Boston, grew up in Wellesley and graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1976 with a major in French. An undergraduate year in Paris enchanted her and left her with a love of travel. SI hired her as a copy clerk in the news bureau a year after graduation. She soon became a reporter and covered golf with Dan Jenkins. In addition to traveling to golf tournaments, she covered the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, the Olympics and the Super Bowl.
By the early 1980s she was chief of reporters and showed a talent for discovering and nurturing good writers and editors. She moved over to Time in 1999 as chief of correspondents and later assistant managing editor. She was responsible for a staff of 200 and deployed Time’s journalists to cover 9/11, the explosion of the shuttle Columbia and other major events..
She was known for her parties, for her copious production of cookies and cupcakes and for running her four children from event to event in spite of holding demanding jobs. SI said in a tribute to her “no person has done more to promote the careers of sportswriters in the U.S. over the last 40 years than she did.”
• Patricia Jane Vollmer Hotchkiss, 88, a former Life promotion writer died last October in New Mexico, where she had lived with her husband Gerald Hotchkiss, another Life promotion writer, since 1992. Patty was born in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated from Vassar College with the class of 1950. Gene Light writes “she was the very pretty, very smart extremely vivacious copy writer. Her laughter cheered up anyone who worked with her.”
She worked as a senior promotion writer at Life from 1952 to 1959 and then spent three years in the UK. Back in the US, she served on the town board of Bedford, N.Y. for 12 years and on the Westchester County legislature for four years. After she and Gerald moved to Tesuque she helped develop a new master plan for Santa Fe County. Patty loved skiing the double black diamond trails in Taos and Mad River Glen, Vermont.
• Edmund C. Burke, 90, who worked in the advertising departments at Life and Time for two decades, died in New Jersey last November. Edmund attended St. Benedict’s Prep and the College of William and Mary. During World War II he joined the merchant marine and during the Korean war he served in the U.S. Army.
In 1953, after the Korean war, he worked in Life’s market research department and moved on to sales development. He switched to Time ad sales in 1962 and remained there until l974. He concluded his career as executive vice president and group publisher for the family of financial service newspapers that included The American Banker and four other papers
• William Stewart, 80, a former Time correspondent and a columnist on world affairs for The New Mexican for the past 20 years, died in Santa Fe in February. He had a lifelong interest in world affairs and could fascinate his listeners with well-informed and amusing analyses of current and past events.
A native of Baltimore, Bill started out as a diplomat in the 1960s, serving as special assistant to the deputy director of intelligence and research in the State Department. He joined Time in 1971 and was bureau chief in Tokyo during the collapse of South Vietnam. He was among the correspondents who made a last-minute escape by helicopter. Then he served as Time’s Middle East correspondent and covered the Iran-Iraq war.
When he retired from Time in the mid-1990s, he moved to Santa Fe and became a columnist for The New Mexican. “He had the knowledge of a diplomat and the sensibility of common people,” said Rob Dean, the paper’s former managing editor, who hired him. “Bill had one goal above all else: helping readers understand the world.” He also loved to talk at length about world affairs.
When Dean considered dropping the column about 10 years ago, Dean said, he received “one of the loudest outpourings of protests I ever heard in my time as editor.” He kept the column. Bill collected antiques, loved dogs and cats and enjoyed cooking fancy dishes that he had encountered in his travels. He had no family. —Adapted from the Santa Fe New Mexican
• Mary Cronin, 88, (Time Edit) died September 3 in Charleston, South Carolina at the Bishop Gadsden retirement community there. Mary had moved from her longtime New York City home to Charleston in 2016.
Born July 27, 1929, in Orange, New Jersey, Mary attended Montclair High School and Bryn Mawr College before coming to work at Time. Starting as a researcher, she spent most of her career as a reporter, including a stint in the London Bureau where among other things she covered the Lady Di-Prince Charles wedding and aftermath. Upon returning to New York she reported on entertainment and lifestyle topics.
An avid gourmet, Mary loved to cook and her dinner parties, both in her New York apartment and her summer home in Southampton, were always lively and the food terrific. They were often enlivened by stories about the great and near-greats she had interviewed during her career. The British Royals were an especially rich lode for racy anecdotes. She was also an accomplished painter, especially of Long Island’s South Fork landscapes. Her many friends, inside Time Inc. and elsewhere, will long remember her wit, curiosity and intelligence. Mary is survived by her brothers Jerry, John and Bill Cronin. --John Schenck
• Hudson Stoddard, 94, former assistant to the publisher of Life and a pioneer in developing public TV, died in New Canaan, Connecticut, last October. Hud graduated from Princeton in 1944 and went to work as a courier for the State Department.
He joined Time Inc. in 1947 and eventually became assistant to the publisher of Life. His assignments included managing the publicity for the publication of Harry Truman’s memoirs in Life. He joined the public TV station, Channel 13, in 1965 as vice president for development. The dire need for funds for the three-year-old station persuaded him to go on the air to plead and to start the familiar pledge drives. He introduced the WNET tote bags and other premiums. Hud was also director of development for the drive that raised $150 million to build Lincoln Center.
Hud lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had been chairman of the school board and a member of the town council. He participated in the civil rights march on Washington in 1963. Adapted from The New York Times
• Rosemary Elson, 89, a copy editor at Time in the 1950s, died in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in March, 2017. At Time she met and married John Elson, who became one of the magazine’s senior editors. He died in 2009. She volunteered for more than 20 years at the Visiting Nurse Service in New York and also gave time to the New York Public Library.
• Barbara Ward¸ 75, a former reporter for People, died last October in New York. Born in Manhattan in 1933, she grew up in Rye, New York and was graduated from the University of Georgia. Robin, as she was called, went to work for Life as what was known then as a “mail girl” in the late 1950s. In a four-decade career at the company she became a reporter for People. In retirement she traveled, volunteered at the Lenox Hill Hospital and for animal and environmental causes.