James Russell Wiggins

When James Russell Wiggins died early Sunday in his farm home in Brooklin, American journalism lost one of its greatest editors.

He was one of the last of the independent-minded editors whose strength of character and outspoken manner made their newspapers leaders in reporting the news and guiding public opinion. In his 20-year career at The Washington Post, Mr. Wiggins led in transforming a struggling local newspaper into an organ respected across the country. In his three decades as editor of the Ellsworth American, he wrote more than 100 editorials attacking gambling. When representatives of the Maine lottery urged him to publish news stories about the winners, he flummoxed them by asking for a list of the losers to publish.

But Mr. Wiggins confined his opinions to the editorial page, including his “Fenceviewer” column in the American. He insisted on keeping opinion out of news stories, going against a growing pattern of implying moral and political judgments through “interpretive” news stories. One of his favorite aphorisms was, “The reader deserves one clear shot at the truth.”

He was a prodigious reader and retainer of what he read. Leaning back in his leather chair in his office at the American, he would back up a point by recalling a page or so of Tacitus or data from the latest issue of Science magazine.

He had his puckish side, too. When he found mail deliveries too slow, he tested the system by sending a letter, first by ox cart and then by canoeist, from Ellsworth to Surry. The U.S. mail lost the race.

At an editors’ meeting right after a Post reporter had been found to have faked a story and had to give up her Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Wiggins walked up to publisher Katharine Graham and said, “I’ve never been prouder of our profession. I have just talked to 50 editors, and every one of them said, ‘It could never have happened in my shop.”‘

Mr. Wiggins had a lot of old-fashioned class. He always wore a jacket and tie to the office – and even when he was reading to himself at home in Brooklin.

Until a few days before his death, 16 days before his 97th birthday, he dressed the same and kept up his reading. The last books he read were one on the human genome and parts of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” He had read all three volumes at the age of 94.

He wrote the plans for his funeral arrangements. Instead of a big ceremony with time for friends and admirers from all over to get here, he specified a prompt, simple service (at 4 p.m. Wednesday at the Blue Hill Congregational Church, with private burial in Rural Cemetery, beside his wife, Mabel).