Peter A. Jay
Harford County farmer, publisher and columnist at the Baltimore Sun for more than 20 years was generous, loyal
Peter A. Jay, a Harford County farmer, writer and a longtime Baltimore Sun columnist who was active in environmental issues, died of heart failure Tuesday at the University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air. The Churchville resident was 83.
“Peter was a man for all seasons,” said John Woodard, whose friendship with Mr. Jay began when they were students at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, and later at Harvard College, where they were roommates.
“He was a skilled writer who loved politics at all levels and he had great insight into what drove politicians and Peter certainly had his opinions,” Mr. Woodard said. “When you consider his credentials, which were impressive, he was a very modest person which was most appealing. He was a very generous, loyal, and good friend for 70 years.”
Peter L.W. Osnos, who was a foreign correspondent and later an editor at The Washington Post, was a colleague when he and Mr. Jay were sent to cover the Vietnam War in 1970.
“When Ben Bradlee [then editor of The Washington Post] selected us to go to Vietnam he didn’t ask our political views or views on the war, he said ‘Just go and do the best job you can. Report what you see,'” Mr. Osnos said.
“We covered the men and women who were fighting the war and Peter was really good at it. He liked being outside of the scrum, and he did the same thing chronicling Maryland politics, he liked covering things on his own terms,” he said.
Tom Horton, The Sun’s former environmental reporter, was a friend and colleague.
“He was this liberal’s idea of what a conservative should be,” Mr. Horton said. “His politics and mine were different, but he was an eloquent creative writer, and what he did, he did so goddamn well.”
Peter Augustus Jay, son of Peter Jay, a farmer and horseman, and his wife, Gertrude McGinley “Trudy” Jay, a homemaker, was born in New York City.
Mr. Jay was a direct descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, president of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War and the second governor of New York.
“He looked like John Jay, quite patrician, and Peter felt that family history very deeply,” said Mr. Osnos, who retired from Random House where he was senior editor and vice president. “But Peter would never ask, ‘Do you know who I am?’ That wasn’t his style or approach to life.”
In 1946, Mr. Jay’s father moved the family to Windmill Hill Farm in Churchville, which is now owned and operated by a third generation of Jays.
Mr. Jay was a 1958 graduate of Milton Academy and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from Harvard where he began considering a career in news.
“He was a great fan of Art Buchwald, who was then editor of the Paris Herald Tribune, and he had a subscription to the paper. I think Buchwald’s writing style influenced Peter.”
After serving for two years in Peru with the Peace Corps, he returned to Harford County and began his newspaper career at The Aegis.
In 1965, Mr. Jay joined The Washington Post.
After covering Maryland politics and the Vietnam War, Mr. Jay was sent to Indochina as the paper’s bureau chief. After returning to Washington, he became deputy metropolitan editor, and then returned to Harvard after being named a Nieman Fellow in 1972.
In 1973, Mr. Jay married Irna Moore Stein, a fellow Post reporter, and the couple left the paper. They returned to Windmill Hill Farm.
That same year, they purchased The Susquehanna Publishing Co., publishers of The Record, a Havre de Grace newspaper, which they co-published until 1989, when they sold it to the Baltimore Sun Co.
While working at The Record, Mr. Jay’s long and storied career as a columnist began in 1974 and flourished for more than 20 years, until 1998 when he gave up the column.
His column, which ran as often as three times a week, was on topics as varied as the Maryland political culture to the joys of being a country farmer.
“His writing was just so civil. He made his points without being nasty,” Mr. Horton said. “His writing reminded me of the great CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid.”
In addition to journalism, of vital interest to Mr. Jay was land preservation, especially in Harford County, as farms and open ground gave way to tract housing.
In 1991, Mr. Jay and other concerned citizens founded the Harford Land Trust, of which he had been president. Last year, the trust gave him a lifetime award for his conservation efforts.
“He was very loyal, generous and supportive of the organization,” said H. Turney McKnight, a Land Trust colleague. “The trust was very dear to him,”
“Peter did what he could do to protect farmland. He wanted the county to be in a good place and not paved over,” Mr. Horton said.
In 2004, Mr. Jay with two other partners purchased Garrett Island, a rocky mound in the middle of the Susquehanna River, from a developer.
They donated the island to the National Wildlife Refuge System, which allowed it to become part of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, and enabled “Garrett Island to live on as a bird sanctuary where the Chesapeake Bay begins,” reported The Sun in 2004.
Mr. Jay had been a board member of the Chesapeake Bay foundation.
A mariner with a penchant for small boats, one of his proudest achievements, family members said, was earning a Coast Guard master’s license.
In addition to being a skilled sailor, he was an expert kayaker and canoeist, and owned and operated a charter business from Havre de Grace that used a converted bay workboat.
Mr. Jay wrote a history of Havre de Grace, and his second book, “Timepieces,” a collection of his Sun columns, was published last year.
“Peter was a person of unshakeable integrity who loved his family and farm,” his wife said.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. March 2 at Churchville Presbyterian Church at 2844 Churchville Road, with interment in the Jay Family Cemetery in Rye, New York, where his ancestor, John Jay, is buried.
In addition to his wife, who is a photographer, Mr. Jay is survived by a son, William Janney Jay, of Alexandria, Virginia; a daughter, Sara Jeanne Sisk, of Windmill Hill Farm; and three grandchildren.