Tazewell County
Photo of the Month
Richard
B. Stolley |
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| Richard B. Stolley was born October 3, 1928 in
Peoria at Methodist Hospital. But he grew up in Pekin from a few days after his birth
until he joined the Navy at the age of 17. At about the age of 12 he decided that he wanted to be a journalist. In junior high he was editor of the junior high paper, and then editor of the high school paper when he was a sophomore In 1944, a neighbor was the sports editor of the Pekin Daily Times and was about to be drafted. And the publisher was looking around for a sports editor. So, although Stolley was only 15 years old at the time, he became sports editor of the Pekin Daily Times for two years. He graduated from Pekin High School in 1946. He served two years in the Navy, and then received both Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in journalism from Northwestern University. Stolley also wrote for a New York daily during summer vacations in college. After a brief stint at the Chicago Sun-Times, he began reporting for Life magazine in 1953. In his role as chief of bureaus in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Washington and Paris, he covered the school desegregation crisis, the dawning of the space age at Cape Canaveral, the White House during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the Paris student riots, combat along the Suez Canal and an expedition seeking the origins of man in Kenya. Probably his most memorable assignment was in Dallas in November 1963 when he found and obtained exclusively for Life the famous Zapruder home movie film of the Kennedy assassination. In 1973, Mr. Stolley became the founding editor of People Magazine, which has been described as the most successful magazine in publishing history. From 1982-85, he rejoined the monthly Life as its managing editor. He was appointed editorial director of all Time Inc. magazines in 1989. Since retiring from that spot in 1993, he has been senior editorial advisor. Mr. Stolley has written articles for People, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money, Esquire, Vanity Fair, New York and the New York Times. In 1994, he was the editor of a picture history of popular culture of the previous two decades, People Celebrates People: The Best of 20 Unforgettable Years, which was reissued in 1996. More recently, he reviewed over 50,000 pictures to select the 770 photographs published in LIFE: Our Century in Pictures which has been called the most fascinating pictorial history of the last 10 decades ever published. He is currently working on a new book, Life: Our Century of Change: America in Pictures 1900-2000. A former President of the American Society of Magazine Editors, Mr. Stolley is on the board of the Dirksen Congressional Leadership Research Center in Pekin. |
