NEW YORK, Sept. 9 (UPI) — Former United Press International journalist and editor Frederick Moery Winship has died peacefully at his home in New York City, said his niece Anna Hudson. He would have been 91 on Sept. 24.
Winship began his 50-plus-year career with the venerable wire service in 1946.
Although he held many titles throughout his storied tenure, he was best known as Senior Editor for the Arts, a job he held from the 1970s through the 1990s, covering national and international theater, music, arts and archeological exhibitions, excavations and live performances. He later enjoyed a successful career as a freelance reporter and critic.
Born in Middletown, Ohio in 1924, he was a graduate of De Pauw University in Indiana and earned a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York.
A direct descendent of Edward Winship — who traveled to Boston from England on “The Defiance” in 1635 and settled in Cambridge Mass. — he was a member of The Society of the Cincinnati and The Dutch Treat Club, and is listed in The New York Social Register.
“Uncle Fred lived the life he chose and cherished and enjoyed every moment of it. And, I believe he had the kind of death he would have chosen: in his home, suddenly, and while he was still writing about and reviewing plays and the arts and enjoying the company of his family and friends,” Hudson said in a statement. “He was a true gentleman, a journalist of the Old School and one of the kindest, finest, most literate men I have ever known. … He will be greatly missed.”
“Fred was a real gentleman, inveterate world traveler and very nice guy,” his former UPI colleague, Xinhua News Agency Special Correspondent William M. Reilly, said of Winship.
Winship was predeceased by his parents Wilbur William Winship and Edna Moery Winship, as well as his wife, Joanne Tree Winship.
He is survived by his nieces Anna Hudson, Elizabeth Tannenbaum, Randi Jane Lambert and Marguerite Ulrich; his nephew William R. Knutson; and five great nieces and two nephews.
At his request, his body was cremated and will be interred at his family plot in Ohio, alongside his beloved Joanne.
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