Warner, William W. 1920–2008

(William Whitesides Warner)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 20, 1920, in New York, NY; died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, April 18, 2008, in Washington, DC. Public relations representative, foreign service officer, program director, consultant, and author. Warner admired nature, loved the water, enjoyed its bounty, and respected the watermen whose labor brought its culinary delicacies to American tables up and down the Atlantic coast. Warner's interest in nature was a hobby, as he described it himself. When he was a boy growing up in a wealthy but emotionally sterile household in New York City, he reportedly found solace along the Jersey Shore. As an adult in the 1950s Warner worked as a public relations officer at foreign service posts in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Chile, followed by an executive position with the fledgling U.S. Peace Corps. In the 1960s he settled in the Washington, DC, area, holding various positions with the Smithsonian Institution, where he was involved with the creation of the long-lived Smithsonian magazine and the first Folk Life Festival on the National Mall. When he traded active service in 1973 for a consultant position, Warner had the time to return to the shore—this time it was the coastline of the nearby Chesapeake Bay. Warner rediscovered the peace and beauty of the salt marshes with their abundance of wildlife, and he befriended the self-styled watermen, who eke out a precarious living fishing for blue crab. He watched them work, asked questions, took notes, and eventually wrote his first book. Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay (1976) earned Warner a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a Christopher Award, and it remained in print for decades. In 1978 he retired from his consultant position and devoted himself wholeheartedly to his next project. Warner ventured into the open ocean on several trips with British, German, Spanish, and Russian commercial trawlers whose fishing operations aboard massive vessels, equipped with full-service processing factories, fished the North Atlantic waters. In fact, they mined those waters almost to death before international regulatory agencies enacted quotas and other limits that protected the fish and ultimately doomed the industry. Warner's second book, Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (1983), was described as a tribute to the stamina and character of the international crews (with whom he could converse in their native languages), but it also represented a celebration of the success story that placed the value of the natural world and the importance of environmental conservation above the forces of commercialism and the quest for profit. Warner's love for the outdoors stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1999 he published Into the Porcupine and Other Odysseys: Adventures of an Occasional Naturalist. His other writings include a history of the Roman Catholic Church in Washington, DC.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Warner, William W., Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

Warner, William W., Into the Porcupine and Other Odysseys: Adventures of an Occasional Naturalist, National Geographic (Washington, DC), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2008, p. B5.

New York Times, April 30, 2008, p. C18.