LEARD, John E(arnshaw) 1916-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 15, 1916, in Boston, MA; died February 23, 2003, in Richmond, VA. Journalist, editor, and author. Leard was a former executive editor and vice president of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond News Leader. A graduate of Bates College, where he received an A.B. in 1938, he went on to earn a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1939. Leard had a love of journalism from the time he was seven years old, and his first job was with the Lewiston Sun-Journal in Maine. He moved to Virginia in 1939 to become an editorial assistant for the Richmond New Leader before taking a job as an assistant editor for the magazine Atlantic Monthly in Boston. He then returned to the Richmond New Leader as an assistant city editor until 1943, when he joined Army Intelligence and was assigned to a stateside post. Leaving the military in 1946 to work briefly for southern Connecticut's New Haven Register, Leard returned to Richmond to resume his assistant city editor work in 1947. Promoted to city editor in 1951, he left the paper for a time to become managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1963. Beginning in 1969 and until his retirement as vice president in 1982, he worked as executive editor for both the Times-Dispatch and the New Leader. As a editor, Leard was respected for his determination in making his newspapers responsive to the local community's news needs, and he was a mentor to hundreds of journalists over the course of his career. Always holding himself and his colleagues to high standards, he served as a Pulitzer Prize juror five times and received the George Mason Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1975. A former president of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association and the Associated Press Newspapers of Virginia, Leard was also the author of one book, The North Pole: An Historic Expedition in 1991 (1992).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), February 24, 2002, p. B1.

Washington Post, February 27, 2003, p. B6.