Ward Just, an acclaimed journalist and author with roots in Waukegan, died at 84 on Thursday.
He leaves behind a journalistic legacy that began in his early 20s when he was a reporter for his family’s newspaper, the Waukegan News-Sun, from 1957 to 1959.
Just was briefly a student at Lake Forest Academy before transferring to Cranbrook Boarding School in Michigan, according to the “International Who’s Who Authors and Writers” publication. He then went on to start his reporting career in Waukegan.
Just’s interest in writing didn’t only come from his father, Franklin Ward Just, and his grandfather, William L. Just, who owned the Waukegan News-Sun. In 2006, Just told the baiduhai that his mother, Elizabeth Swift Just, also helped him cultivate that love.
“One of my earliest memories was when I was 16 or 17, I think, she gave me a volume of the collected short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Just said. “She admired greatly his work. I was a little bit young for a volume like that, but I have to tell you I devoured it.”
In an obituary in the Washington Post, Just was quoted as saying he struggled to make friends as a boy and threw himself into books and,eventually, journalism.
According to the Washington Post, “An early stint at his family’s newspaper, the Waukegan News-Sun, ended when he was fired for wearing shorts in the office.”
Stories from friends told to the Vineyard Gazette, a newspaper on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where Just lived, recount how Just came up with stories for his fictional works, which came after he ended his journalism career.
According to the Vineyard Gazette, soon after Just and his wife moved to the Vineyard full-time, Tess Branhall became friends with the couple. “You never knew when his book ideas would come and neither did he,” Bramhall said. “They just emerged from his imagination and daily moments.”
In the Vineyard Gazette, Bramhall described a time when they were playing ice hockey on a pond and Bramhall tapped the ice with his hockey stick, which took Just back to his Chicago youth where his father had done the same thing. “That became a scene in ‘An Unfinished Season,’ Bramhall said.
In an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, Just said his novel “An Unfinished Season” was somewhat autobiographical. It tells the story of a young copy boy working for a tabloid newspaper in 1950s suburban Chicago.
Just’s wife, Sarah Catchpole, told The Associated Press that he died Thursday at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth, Mass. He had been suffering from Lewy body dementia.
A native of Michigan City, Ind., he had covered overseas conflicts for Newsweek before becoming one of the first hires by the Washington Post’s managing editor Ben Bradlee, who started his job in 1965.
Assigned to cover the Vietnam War, Just wrote hundreds of stories and survived wounds sustained from a grenade thrown during an attack by the North Vietnamese. He returned to the United States in 1967, and the following year covered the presidential election won by Richard Nixon and published a book that openly questioned the war, “To What End? Report from Vietnam.”
Bradlee had also worked with Just at Newsweek, and in his memoir “A Good Life” would remember him as “bright, full of ideas and energy, and a wonderful writer.” Bradlee had been looking for a “new Hemingway,” who could “write like an angel” but never lose sight of the facts. He believed Just was the right man.
“(He) found drama everywhere he looked — the drama that turned details into truth and isolated events into history,” Bradlee wrote. “Sometimes Just would get a single quote that would tell an entire story.”
Over the next 50 years, Just was a prolific author of politically and socially conscious fiction, his influences including Hemingway and Henry James. “Echo House” was a National Book Award finalist in 1997, and “An Unfinished Season” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005.
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His other novels included “The American Ambassador,” “A Dangerous Friend” and “Exiles in the Garden.”
Just was married three times, most recently to Catchpole. He had three children and six grandchildren.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.