Writers like to grouse about editors—those wretched creatures who convert our magnificent prose into dreck even mom can’t bear to read. But some editors are different. Bill Schulz, the longtime Reader’s Digest Washington bureau chief who died Monday at 80, nurtured young journalists, kept some older ones in deep clover and was an invaluable friend.
When we met in the early 1980s, I was working at a weekly newspaper of indeterminate circulation near the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. The biggest story I had covered was a Bigfoot sighting. Bill didn’t hold Bigfoot against me. Instead, he assigned me to write a story about Claire Sterling’s allegation of Soviet complicity in the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Seldom has a freelancing hack experienced such unearned confidence.
I was soon to discover the Dismal Swamp was no match for its Washington cousin, which boasted countless snakes on the make. But Bill knew his way around, offering guidance during lush, lengthy lunches at the Palm. These were Cold War days, and Bill helped keep the Digest vibrantly anti-Communist. Yet he would rather dive into an active volcano than publicly pontificate, preferring to pass out assignments quietly and distribute news clippings that provided factual foundation to shared beliefs.
