Ex-editor of L.A. Times magazine

Michael Parrish, 67, who oversaw the reinvention of the Sunday magazine in the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1980s, died Feb. 8 of liver failure while under hospice care in the Los Angeles area, friends said.

When the newspaper replaced the Home magazine it had long published with the broader-interest Los Angeles Times magazine, Parrish served as its editor, from 1985 to 1989. During his tenure, the magazine’s reporting and writing was repeatedly recognized by the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. (The editorial department stopped publishing the magazine in 2008.)

After moving to the Business section to report on the environment, Parrish was in Alaska on an unrelated assignment when the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in 1989, according to his friend, Judy Irola.

He soon wrote the first of nearly 40 articles on the disaster, including a 1994 front-page story that concluded “virtually all the state’s residents” were suffering in its aftermath.

During widespread layoffs at The Times in 1995, Parrish lost his job. He discovered his fate when he took a source to lunch and tried to pay the bill with his credit card, only to learn the card had been canceled. Irola confirmed the account.

Parrish went on to freelance for a number of regional and national publications and since 2003 had taught magazine writing and editing at USC.

He was a “committed journalist,” former Times staff writer Elaine Dutka said in an email, who possessed a “crusty yet sensitive soul.”

Michael Udy Parrish was born Nov. 13, 1945, in Salt Lake City. He joined the Peace Corps in 1966 and lived in Niger for two years before earning a bachelor’s degree in 1970 from Reed College.

In the early 1970s, he worked on magazines in San Francisco and in 1976 became editor of the Los Angeles Free Press. He joined The Times in 1977 as an assistant editor on the editorial pages but left after two years to freelance and returned to the newspaper in 1985.

“For the People,” a history Parrish wrote about the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, was published in 2001.

Since 2006, he had put his research and reporting skills to another use, as a private investigator.