Obituaries

Walter R. Mears,

who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87. “I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged – and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’S Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics.

who had a 30-year career with Mcclatchy, including many roles at the Modesto (California) Bee before joining The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina) and later the Sacramento Bee as senior vice president of advertising, died Feb. 25, just a few days before his 70th birthday.

Al Autry,

Longtime Denton (Texas) Recordchronicle Publisher Emeritus Fred

Patterson died Feb. 19. He was 92. He was remembered by friends and family as a man with two careers. He built a reputation in Denton as an advertising salesman and newspaper publisher. His legacy, though, will also be as a man whose support for the arts, history and economic growth helped plant the seeds that helped Denton bloom into a cosmopolitan county seat proud of its distinctions from Dallas and Fort Worth.

Richard Curtis,

founding managing editor for design at USA Today and a 1972 graduate of NC State’s College of Design, died Feb. 27 after a prolonged battle against cancer. He was 75.

Booker Izell,

82, died Feb. 16 after an extended illness. The retired head of diversity and inclusion changed the face of The Atlanta Journal-constitution and its parent company Cox Enterprises by championing diversity, attracting more employees of color and mentoring a generation of Black journalists.

Stan Champer,

who spent the majority of his 50-year newspaper career in supervisory roles at The Daily Independent in Ashland, Kentucky, has died. He was 79. He retired from the newspaper in 2009, spanning a career that started in 1959 when he worked in the circulation department at the Tribune in Ironton and a stop as a reporter at The Herald-dispatch in Huntington.

Michele Mcnally,

who elevated photojournalism at The New York Times as its director of photography and later as a top newsroom manager in a 14-year tenure that brought the paper six Pulitzer Prizes for news and feature photography, died Feb. 18 in a hospital in Yonkers, New York. She was 66.

Keith Jones,

72, who worked for daily newspapers for more than 40 years, died Dec. 3. He worked in various editorial positions, from evening news editor for the Orange County Register in the late 1960s to deputy regional editor for Medianews Group’s Bay Area newspapers in 2005.

Martin Tolchin,

a former reporter for The New York Times who covered Congress with a keen knowledge of its twisting ways and power plays and who was later the founding publisher and editor of The Hill, a successful newspaper devoted to events on Capitol Hill, died Feb. 17 at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 93.

Jon D. Smith Jr.,

a longtime finance executive for Hearst and the Hearst Foundations, died suddenly on Feb. 11 in Millbrook, New York. He was 77. Smith, who joined Hearst in 1986 and retired in 2011, most recently served as assistant treasurer and director of banking and corporate finance.

Jack Shea,

a freelance writer for The Martha’s Vineyard Times, died Feb. 13. He was a larger-than-life character who immediately put his friends at ease with his wry sense of humor.