Family's obituary for Larry Williams

 

Excellent obituary (with a wife as a writer, no surprise) for Larry Williams, who drove the BJ to the Pulitzer for the Goldsmith/Goodyear calamity coverage.

Thank you to dear family, colleagues and friends for contributing.

 

Larry Williams, a newspaper editor who led journalists to three Pulitzer Prizes, died December 9 in Washington, D.C., following a brief Illness. He was 74.

Over a 42-year career that included stints at the Akron Beacon Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Knight Ridder Washington bureau and the Baltimore Sun, he energized reporters with a contagious appetite for good stories and an instinct for unearthing every reporting angle.

“Larry was one of the pivotal editors in fashioning a lackluster Inquirer into what became one of the nation’s top five newspapers. He turned what had been a small undistinguished business news department into one of the nation's best,” said Gene Roberts, former editor of the Inquirer.

“But his influence on the paper went far beyond business news into major investigative reporting and the design and layout of the paper. His talent and drive were exceptional."

Along with an ability to push and elevate reporters to excellence (his nickname in one newsroom was the Pit Bull), Williams also was known for his kindness and humor, his intellect and uproarious laugh.

Born January 9, 1945, in Carlisle, Pa., to Edwin Eugene and Irene Woerz Williams, he displayed an ability to compete and excel at an early age. At 16, he became one of the youngest Boy Scouts at the time to earn Eagle Scout honors, the organization’s highest rank.

After graduating from Carlisle High School, he won a full-scholarship to Drexel University, studying industrial engineering in a co-op program that split study with work.

While there, he began his first flirtation with journalism as editor of the college newspaper.

And during an engineering stint in Charleston, W. Va., near the end of his studies, he took a night job at the Charleston Gazette newspaper.

He discovered a passion for journalism and continued in newspaper jobs while finishing his studies at Drexel. As a cub reporter for the Gloucester (N.J.) County Times, he wrote a front-page Thanksgiving Day poem and, in the thrill of his then-young career, covered the 1967 summit between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, N.J.

 

Over the next few years, he abandoned his engineering plans and became a reporter and editor at the Camden (N.J.) Courier Post, winning state awards for exposing county government nepotism and coverage of a major race riot.

Williams joined the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1971, and over a 15-year tenure there wore many hats including labor writer, city editor and metro projects editor. But it was as the Inquirer’s business editor that he particularly excelled, helping direct coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear power disaster, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.

On the heels of that story, he led an investigation by reporter Arthur Howe into massive deficiencies in IRS operations that caused the agency to make major changes in procedures and issue a public apology to U.S. taxpayers. It won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

“He insisted that his staff work hard and smart, and he set the example every day,” said Gene Foreman, the Inquirer’s former managing editor. “While pursuing the news relentlessly, he always edited with a keen sense of fairness and compassion.”

In 1986, Williams accepted a job as managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal and within weeks, the paper was onto one of the biggest stories in its history: Sir James Goldsmith’s attempted corporate raid on the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

Williams enlisted more than 35 reporters, more than a dozen artists and photographers and countless editors to cover every angle -- from the offices on Wall Street to the sweeper at the Goodyear barbershop.

He dispatched the reporters beyond Akron to New York and Washington. In the end, after Goldsmith was sent packing, leaving behind substantial wreckage to Goodyear, Williams selected a small team to produce a 20,000-word narrative reconstruction of what had transpired and its impact. They wrote it in five days during Thanksgiving week.

In his unpublished memoir, the Beacon Journal’s late editor, Dale Allen, described the scene when he walked into the newsroom Thanksgiving morning to check on the story’s progress.

“The first person I saw was Larry Williams, his feet propped up on a desk in the middle of the newsroom, sound asleep, a file folder crammed with notes strewn across his lap. He had been at the paper throughout the previous night. For Larry, that was probably a very exciting way to spend Thanksgiving.”

The writers sent Williams their story at 4 a.m. the next day, thinking they were almost done. Not so.

“I’d never experienced the kind of deep dive into a story Larry Williams put us through for the next 20 hours,” recalls Stuart Warner, the lead writer on the project, who went on to become editor of Pulitzer-winning projects himself. “He questioned every assertion, wanted more information for everything … . It was a clinic in professional editing.

"I learned from Larry the difference between Knight Ridder and most other newspaper organizations: With most newspapers, good enough was good enough; with Knight Ridder, good enough was never good enough.”

Williams moved on to a position as news editor of the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, leading coverage of the nation’s capital for the newspaper chain’s more than 30 publications.

Rosemary Goudreau O’Hara, now editorial page editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, was an editor in the bureau, which included Knight Ridder stars as well as less experienced correspondents from around the country.

“He didn’t just pay attention to the veteran national reporters, covering the day’s big stories,” O’Hara said. “He sweated bullets with the young regional reporters who needed help finding the right words, the right sources and the right documents. He thought nothing of rolling up his crew-neck sweater sleeves and staying to turn out the lights.

“He could make me laugh, make me think and make me better than I thought I could be. So many of us who rotated through the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau found ourselves in this great man’s hearty embrace.”

Williams later served as Washington bureau chief for the Detroit News, and in 2002 moved to Baltimore, working at the Baltimore Sun in various capacities including business editor, Ideas editor, and serving on the paper’s editorial board.

A voracious reader, Williams amassed a library of 3,000 volumes, divvied up between an apartment in Washington and an 1865 farmhouse on Deer Isle, Maine, that he shared with his wife, Marcia Myers, a fellow journalist.

“He loved books and always had a tall stack of the latest titles,” said Angie Cannon, a former Knight Ridder White House correspondent and close friend for more than 25 years.

His book choices were as diverse as his many interests, which included photography, history, politics, gardening and racing sailboats. He was adept at origami and woodcut prints, and had an affection for building stone walls, including one for the garden club in his beloved Dickeyville neighborhood in Baltimore.

“He loved adventures – whether sailing in Maine, exploring quaint towns on Maryland’s Eastern Shore or hunting for morel mushrooms in a D.C. park,” said Cannon. “And he loved dogs.”

Jay Hancock, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who worked closely with Williams, described him as having “an engineer's brain and a poet's heart, which made him curious about everything. He was almost as interested in trying the dulcimer as he was in reading about urban planning or the newest business scam. He delighted -- and that is the right word -- in exposing crooks, incompetents and hypocrites.”

Williams retired from the Sun in 2009 and the next year followed his wife to London, where she’d taken a job. The city perfectly suited his love of history and culture, and he spent many days feeding his love of books at a desk he commandeered in a corner of the British Library.

 They returned to Washington in 2014.

In addition to his wife of 29 years, Williams is survived by daughters Christy Winslow (Bill), of Northampton, Mass., and Sarah Williams, of Boston; grandson Kai Winslow; sister Melinda Boomershine (David) of Glenwood, Md., and brother Stephen Williams of Hobe Sound, Fla.; sisters-in-law Anita Hickinbotham and Laurie Beech, along with 12 nieces and nephews and his beloved dog, Scout. He also is survived by Terrie Lilly, his first wife and the mother of his daughters.

Burial at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Boiling Springs, Pa., will be private. A celebration of Williams’ life is being planned in Washington for early next year. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in his name to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 330 7th Avenue, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10001. info@cpj.org