Richard Atcheson, 71, of West Windsor died March 23 at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick. The cause was a heart attack and multiple system failures.##M:[more]##
Survivors include his wife of 44 years, Jean; three children, Katie and Nicholas, both of New York, and Dorothy of London, England; three foster children, Kate Skinner of San Francisco; Michael Skinner of New York, and Brian Skinner of Levittown, PA; a sister, Maryellen Vander Sluis of Napa, CA; and a brother, Robert of Vian, OK; and nephews, John Vander Sluis, of Burlington, VT, and Matthew Vander Sluis of Davis, CA.
He is best remembered for his work at AARP the Magazine, where he was executive editor until his retirement, and editor at large until recently, chronicling the epic journey through life with humor, doses of bewilderment, and always awe.
“I have been told that in 12 years the population of people over 85 will double,” he wrote in one piece. “The year will be 2013 and the streets will be jammed with rowdy 85-year-olds and their mothers on their way to fancy parties to which I will probably be too young to be invited.”
Atcheson was valedictorian of his class at Cascia Hall, an Augustinian preparatory school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He majored in English at Princeton University. Much of his free time at Princeton was spent singing; he was music director of the Tigertones and also sang tenor in a close harmony quartet called the Boomerangs, which performed annually during the summer opera festival in Central City, Colorado.
The Princeton Alumni Weekly gave him his first break in journalism, assigning him the “On the Campus” column his senior year. Following his graduation in 1956, Time Inc. hired him as an executive trainee. There he was charged with escorting the defecting Hungarian gymnastics and fencing teams, gold medal winners at the Melbourne Olympics who were being hosted by Sports Illustrated on a fund-raising tour of Hungarian communities in the U.S.
At the age of 22, he somehow contrived to keep the peace on the buses, design the events, deliver spontaneous audio commentaries, and carry the cash donations to Hungarian relief in his briefcase to deposit in the nearest bank of the next city on the tour.
Drafted soon after his return, he spent two years in the U.S. Army, where he trained as a postal clerk, shuttling mail between bases in Germany and seizing every opportunity to travel throughout Europe. He considered his military service as formative as his years at Princeton, but readily admitted that the Army, while outfitting him with a rifle to repel the Communist threat, felt it was not wise to also give him ammunition.
Eager as always for experience, he learned the newspaper business by moving to Chicago and reporting for the City News Bureau, which served all four daily papers. The legendary newspaper columnist Jack Mabley gave Atcheson his first job, hiring him to be his “legman” at the Chicago Daily News. His next break came after he had published a less than flattering review of Hugh Hefner’s new chain of Playboy Clubs. Hefner liked his style and offered him work on a new magazine he was starting called Show Business Illustrated.
Senior editor and feature writing positions at national magazines followed, including Show Magazine, Holiday Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, and Lear’s, founded by Frances Lear. There, among other accomplishments, he edited an ambitious and award-winning single-topic issue of the magazine. The subject was depression and mental illness, with which he was personally acquainted.
Throughout his adult life, Atcheson struggled with bipolar disorder. It first engulfed him in 1972, requiring hospitalization, and although medication and sobriety stabilized him, he suffered several episodes of severe distress until 1986, when he found a calmness that lasted until his final manic episode in October, 2005.
Perhaps as a result, he was always interested in the way people lived and the choices they made. In his first book, “What the Hell Are They Trying to Prove, Martha” (John Day Co., 1970), he put the counter-culture under a microscope. In “The Bearded Lady” (John Day Co., 1971), he joined it himself — visiting and writing about communes across America, examining their allure for middle-class youth. It wasn’t all pretty. “Communal life,” he wrote, “can be a very fine thing, but it takes hard work and dedication and gut-wrenching self-examination to do it right, and for many people is nothing less than a Last Judgment, an apocalyptic event after which no fire burns. Peace? Peace has nothing to do with it.”
Nonetheless, he remained attracted to the counter-culture, its proponents and institutions, and continued writing about subversive subjects even in the pages of AARP the Magazine (and its predecessor, Modern Maturity).
A story he loved telling involved a daylong party he and his wife threw in their Plainsboro home to celebrate a new post that would involve their moving to San Francisco. To complete the excesses of the day, he’d hired a live band at the recommendation of a friend. As the group climbed down from their van — a spectacle in long hair, tight pants, platform shoes, and makeup — his nine-year-old daughter tugged at his sleeve: “Daddy, why do they look like that? Are they trying to look like dolls?” Of course, they were the New York Dolls, the seminal punk group at the start of their career.
Atcheson met his wife in Chicago, where she was also an editor with Show Business Illustrated. They were married in 1961 and remained devotedly attached although they both declared that judicious separations were the heart of a successful marriage. For the last 10 years he had lived chiefly in Washington D.C., but returned regularly to the family home in Princeton Junction. For the last months, as he became increasingly ill, he lived there exclusively.
A memorial service was held at Trinity Church in Princeton on April 10 and another gathering will take place in conjunction with his 50th Princeton reunion in June, at which he had been hoping to sing once again with the Boomerangs. Alas, his quartet is now a trio.
