William Whitesides Warner ’43

Willy, 88, a retired Foreign Service officer whose book, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay, won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, died April 18, 2008, of Alzheimer’s disease at his home in Washington, D.C.

Born in New York, he prepped at St. Paul’s School and transferred from Cornell to Princeton in 1939. He was in the Madison Debating Society and Cottage Club, and graduated with honors in geology. During World War Il, Willy was a photography analyst on the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto in the Pacific. After the war he and his brother operated a ski resort in Stowe, Vt., while he taught English at a local high school.

Willy joined the United States Information Agency in 1953 and served nine years as a public affairs officer in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Chile. He next spent two years in the Peace Corps, and in 1964 joined the Smithsonian Institution, where he helped start Smithsonian magazine, Smithsonian Associates, and the Folk Life Festival. He retired in 1978 but wrote additional books including Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (1983), after working for weeks on foreign trawlers.

Willy’s survivors include his wife of 57 years, Kathleen McMahon Warner; two sons, four daughters; and nine grandchildren.