William G. Shepherd Jr. ’63

Bill died unexpectedly in his sleep Jan. 8, 2018, in Manhattan. He was a writer, editor, and investor.

Born in Jackson, Mich., and schooled at Wooster Academy in Danbury, Conn., at Princeton he majored in English and went to New York City after graduation “expecting to be a down-and-out writer.” But, he wrote in our 50th-reunion yearbook that he became “distracted” by journalism and gained “a ringside seat to most of the major events and notable people of the past half-century.”

At Business Week in the 1960s and 1970s he generated and edited financial and investigative stories. Later he was a freelancer for about 30 publications, particularly The New York Times. He focused on new technologies and international finance, and had yet another “ringside seat” to the “decline of literacy, cultural standards, and the print media.” Recently he was editing for Bloomberg Business Week, caring for his penthouse gardens, and laboring at last as a “down-and-out” writer on a novel set in the 13th century. In our 40th-reunion yearbook he reflected, “I certainly have lived 10 times more interesting a life than I ever expected.”

The class conveys its sympathies to his wife of more than 50 years, Dr. Ann Webster.