Roy Rowan

Roy Rowan [1 February 1920-13 September 2016(2016-09-13) (aged 96)][1]) was an American foreign correspondent, editor, and author.

He reported on the 1949 revolution that led to the founding of the People's Republic of China, as well as the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Rowan worked for Time-Life for 23 years and from late 1952 to 1970 he was Life magazine's assistant managing editor in charge of news.

Early life and war service

Born in New York on 1 February 1920, Roy Rowan graduated in 1941 from Dartmouth College and a year later earned his MBA from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School. Drafted as a private into the U.S. Army in May 1942, Rowan served in Tunisia, New Guinea and the Philippines, winning a Bronze Star and finishing the war as a major[2].

China and South East Asia

In 1946 he took a job running a fleet of trucks in central China for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) . With the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists erupting around him, he delivered food, clothing, and farm equipment to villages recovering from the Japanese Occupation, and contributed freelance articles and photographs to U.S. publications.

Hired by Time-Life magazine in 1947 and paired with photographer Jack Birns, Rowan, already something of a China Hand[3], covered all the major battles of the Chinese Communist Revolution by hitching rides with General Claire Chennault’s former Flying Tigers, hired to airlift military supplies for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops. Rowan and Birns were the only foreign journalists in Manchuria when the Communists conquered the province in 1948.

Struck down by a bout of typhoid and jaundice, Rowan recovered to see Chairman Mao's troops enter Shanghai in May 1949 before being sent to cover the Malayan insurgency and the Korean War.

Europe and the United States

In 1951 Rowan began reporting on the Cold War in Europe. A story he tracked down in Yugoslavia about a mother’s fight to win back her son kidnapped as a baby by a German SS soldier during World War II was made into a movie called "Divided Heart” by the British film mogul, J. Arthur Rank.

In 1952, after proposing by trans-Atlantic telephone, Rowan married Helen Rounds, a Life picture researcher from Birmingham, Michigan. The couple went on to have four sons. As Life's Chicago bureau chief from 1955, Rowan covered the Little Rock school crisis and in 1957 he was the first writer to reach the "House of Horrors" in Plainfield, Wisconsin, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's movie, 'Psycho'[4][5].

In 1959, while still based in Chicago as Life's assistant managing editor in charge of news, Rowan spent a month with Jimmy Hoffa to profile the Teamster boss for Life and in 1963 he led the magazine's coverage of the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy.[6] Rowan's team managed to obtain the Zapruder film, which showed President Kennedy's death, and published frames from the film on Life's front page.[7]

Leaving Life in 1970 after 23 years working with the publication, Rowan founded his own publication, On the Sound, a magazine, covering the coast between New York City and Boston. The first in an intended series of regional waterfront publications, two years later it was followed by On the Shore, a magazine for the Chesapeake Bay area[8]. In 1972 Universal Publishing Corporation acquired the two magazines and Time rehired Rowan to return as Hong Kong bureau chief. In 1973 during the Vietnam War, Rowan was one of the few journalists the North Vietnamese government invited to inspect the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison that housed American Prisoners of War. On April 30, 1975 Rowan was one of the final foreign journalists evacuated from Saigon by helicopter.[9]

Rowan was friends with President Gerald Ford and in 1975 interviewed the then-sitting President for his book on the Mayaguez crisis. In 1977 Rowan returned to the U.S. to take a job as one of Fortune magazine's senior writers, penning some sixty five major articles, which included an exclusive 15-page exposé on the top fifty Mafia leaders in America, before resigning in 1980 to freelance write and author books. In 1990 he disguised himself as a homeless man and spent two weeks on the streets of New York for a ten-page article in People magazine.

In 1974, Rowan was diagnosed with a lethal form of melanoma, requiring radical surgery. Hospitalized for two weeks, he wrote a 6,000-word article about how he thought positive thinking could enhance his immune system. He later turned this into his book Never too late.

Rowan was a long-standing member of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (now located in Hong Kong) as well as president of the Time-Life Alumni Society, the Overseas Press Club of America, and the Dutch Treat Club.

Rowan died at a Greenwich, Connecticut hospital on 13 September 2016, at 96. No cause was given.

Awards

In 1995, Hartwick College awarded Rowan an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters.[10] In 2006 he received the Henry R. Luce Award for lifetime achievement in journalism. The Overseas Press Club Foundation's Roy Rowan Scholarship is named in his honour.

Publications and Books
gollark: Also, for neat decorative things, and the very useful stuff you can do with neural interfaces.
gollark: Unlike Terra I do actually like coming up with things, but mostly just use CC to shove into systems as a nice general-purpose tool.
gollark: Some people probably just don't want to meddle with trying to wrangle turtles into actually digging things properly.
gollark: They're very general-purpose, but bad at things.
gollark: I think it's more that CC turtles are just not good for many automation tasks.

References
  1. Rowan, Dana Rowan, Nicholas. "Roy Rowan, Foreign Correspondent, Editor and Author, Dies at 96". Time. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  2. "biography". www.royrowan.com. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  3. "[Roy Rowan] ✓ Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist's Firsthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution ↠ Read Online eBook or Kindle ePUB". storage.googleapis.com. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
  4. "The Serial Killer Who Inspired Three Classic Horror Movies". 2016-08-09. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  5. "Roy Rowan's Obituary on New York Times". New York Times. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  6. "Roy Rowan, 96". Block Island Times. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  7. "JFK Assassination: The Zapruder Film, Life Magazine And A Gentleman's Deal". tribunedigital-thecourant. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
  8. "Roy Rowan's Obituary on New York Times". New York Times. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  9. Rowan, Dana Rowan, Nicholas. "Roy Rowan, Foreign Correspondent, Editor and Author, Dies at 96". Time. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
  10. "OPC Roy Rowan, Doctor of Humane Letters Opening Convocation, Hartwick College, August 31, 1995". opcofamerica.org. Retrieved 2017-07-03.


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