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"  Bob Sherrill passed away on July 6 in Durham, North Carolina. His career in journalism spanned six decades; one of them -- 1964 to 1974 -- he spent in New York as an editor at Esquire. Remembrances have thus far invariably mentioned an essay Bob wrote for us in 1992 called &amp;quot;The Truth About Growing Old.&amp;quot; True to himself, he was eloquent, angry, and wry. True to his newsman&amp;#039;s roots, he didn&amp;#039;t mince words:  Anyone who says old is gold is demented, a mindless optimist, under forty, or doing a study on it\u2014old age, I mean. I&amp;#039;m sixty-seven. Old. . . . I am not ready for the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first, should I be here. Who is? As it happened, Bob himself was: he continued to write well into this decade, most often for a scrappy Durham literary magazine called The Urban Hiker. Many of his stories are available through its Website; we&amp;#039;re pleased to reprint &amp;quot;The Truth About Growing Old&amp;quot; on ours. Bob&amp;#039;s contributions as an editor are harder to pin down, but that&amp;#039;s the nature of the job: Few who do it, even those who do it well, are recognized outside their profession.  One exception is Harold Hayes, architect of Esquire&amp;#039;s legendary Vietnam period. In 1964 he sent an angry memo to staff members, lamenting their lack of contributions -- all of theirs but one. &amp;quot;Sherrill,&amp;quot; he wrote, is &amp;quot;the only editor who consistently produces ideas without being asked.&amp;quot;  Considering what followed over the next ten years -- the string of genre-cracking reports that came to be known as New Journalism -- it&amp;#039;s more than just high praise. It&amp;#039;s an acknowledgement of Bob Sherrill&amp;#039;s impact on Esquire and, it follows, on American writing as a whole. We tip our hat. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3212/bobsherrill/>