James Blackwell, 72, Newsweek editor, school board member
James M. Blackwell IV of Old South Salem Road, a former Newsweek editor who served on the Board of Education during some of its most tumultuous years, died Monday, May 12. He was 72 years old and the husband of Anne Stires Blackwell.
At Newsweek, Mr. Blackwell was involved in the coverage of some of the major stories of the 20th Century, including the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. As a school board member, he was involved in equally large stories on a local level, ranging from the famous “book burning” controversy that gained national attention to shutting down schools because of dwindling enrollments.
A native of New York City, James Madison Blackwell IV was born on Feb. 5, 1931, a son of the late James M. III and Betsy Talbot Blackwell. His father was a lawyer, but it was his mother, a former Ridgefielder, who inspired his career in magazines: She had been editor of Mademoiselle for 35 years.
Mr. Blackwell grew up in New York City, graduated from Hebron Academy in Maine, and from Harvard University in 1952.
The same year, during the Korean War, he entered the U.S. Army and wound up a drill sergeant in Mississippi. “He kept begging to be sent to Korea, but they wouldn’t send him because he was too good a drill sergeant,” Anne Blackwell said.
After the war, he went to work in the business department of Conde Nast, the magazine publishing company. Though his future wife worked for Vogue, a Conde Nast publication, the two met while working on a political campaign for a New York City councilman. They were married in 1963.
Mr. Blackwell joined Newsweek that year, starting in the production department and becoming a senior editor in 1971. When he retired in 1985, he was editorial operations director and senior editor.
For the next 10 years, he operated Blackwell Consulting, which specialized in publishing technology. He retired in 1995.
The Blackwells moved to Ridgefield in 1969, living at first on Silver Spring Lane and in 1973 acquiring their early 18th Century home on Old South Salem Road.
Mr. Blackwell once said that “in order to make a difference in anything, whether it be education, politics, the price of food or whatever, one must not only be willing to become involved, one must be involved.”
The former drill sergeant was outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam War, switching from being a Republican to a Democrat “when he found we were all being lied to about Vietnam,” his wife said. After attending an early 1970s lecture by Daniel Ellsberg, a classmate at Harvard who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” to The New York Times and others, he wound up being investigated by the FBI and Secret Service. “He considered it a great honor to be on Dick Nixon’s enemies list,” Anne Blackwell said.
In Ridgefield, Mr. Blackwell headed the Ninth Grade Placement Committee which in 1971 recommended moving the ninth grade from the junior high to the high school, a configuration still used today. Two years later, he ran successfully for the Board of Education, serving six years during one of the most contentious periods in the history of the schools. National attention was twice drawn to the town and efforts of parents and some board members to ban the use of several books, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, as supplemental reading in high school elective courses. They were efforts he vociferously opposed before and while he was on the board. It was also a period when the board had fierce annual budget battles and decided to close the nearly new Barlow Mountain School because enrollments had fallen so much.
He was also on the board that hired Dr. Elliott Landon, the 37-year-old school superintendent largely credited with vastly improving the education climate in the schools and in the town in the late 1970s and the1980s.
Nonetheless Mr. Blackwell found it ironic when, at his last meeting as a school board member in 1979, a parent stood up and began expressing his outrage at a book he found being used in the high school.
Mr. Blackwell asked what the book was.
“Catcher in the Rye,” the man said.
“Jesus Christ, here we go again!” Mr. Blackwell exclaimed.
Nothing became of the complaint.
For relaxation, Mr. Blackwell enjoyed tennis and travel. He had a summer and weekend home on Nantucket, and had for 50 years regularly visited Bermuda, where he was a member of the Coral Beach Club.
He belonged to the Silver Spring Country Club and the Harvard Club in New York City. In the early 1960s, he had been president of the Association of Publication Production Managers. In the 1990s, he became vice president of the board of directors of Nantucket Magazine.
Mr. Blackwell continued to follow world and local affairs closely. “He was a news nut up till the day he died,” Mrs. Blackwell said. In 1991, he wrote a letter about the Gulf War, observing that “journalists trying to learn and convey what is really happening are being condemned as being unsupportive of our troops and as helping the enemy and, therefore, disloyal.” But, he warned, a free and inquisitive press is vital, especially in times of war. “Military lying during the Vietnam War was so habitual that the White House routinely intercepted reports from Newsweek’s reporters in Vietnam and read them before we got them in New York, because our reports were far more accurate and timely than those they received from the military.”
Besides his wife, Mr. Blackwell is survived by three children, Stephen Hardwick Blackwell of Knoxville, Tenn., a professor of Russian and Russian literature, and his wife, Aleka; Hillary Van Cott Blackwell Abrams of Bethel, a nurse, and her husband Paul; and Carolyn Talbot Blackwell of Philadelphia, an urban planner; a grandson, Timothy George Blackwell of Knoxville; a sister, Barbara B. Hird of Warwick, R.I.; and several nieces and nephews.
Services will take place Friday, May 16, at 3 p.m. in the First Congregational Church.
A memorial celebration of his life will take place Friday at 4 p.m. at Silver Spring Country Club.
Contributions in his memory may be made to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital, 57 Prospect Street, Nantucket, MA 02554, or the Alzheimer’s Association, Southwestern Regional Office, 607 Main Avenue, Norwalk, CT 06851.
The Kane Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.