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Illustration by V.C. Rogers
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Courtesy of Art Brewer
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Illustration by Gerry O'Neill
Bob Sherrill on the cover of the August 2002 issue of Urban Hiker
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Photo by Tom Walters
Though he flew on dozens of bombing missions over Germany with the Army Air Corps, Bob Sherrill always scoffed at the idea that he and his fellow World War II vets were heroes; his account of postwar demobilization in the September 2000 Urban Hiker was called "The Longest Party: Robert Sherrill salutes the Greatest Degeneration." Here, Sherrill (second from left) and friends goof around after the war.
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Illustration by V.C. Rogers
Caricature of Sherrill reveling astride the eagle on his discharge pin (aka the "ruptured duck")
You probably won't die alone, or at home. But if you do both, the police who answer the eventual 911 call will inspect the premises for signs of forced entry, missing valuables and other evidence of foul play.
"Tell me, Mr. Rogers," said an officer who had just performed that duty on Monday of last week. "The back room with all the papers in it, was it always in such a state of ..."he paused, searching for a word that would be both tactful and accurate"... disarray?"
"Oh, yes," I said. "If it wasn't, that would be a very suspicious circumstance."
The disarray, the room and house all belonged to Bob Sherrill, who died in bed two weeks ago at 82, sometime between the July Fourth fireworks (which he watched from his front porch, according to a neighbor) and Thursday's mail (which he never retrieved).
Bobhe signed his work "Robert Sherrill," but was Bob to everyone who knew himwas the kind of old-school newspaperman who hated to be called a "journalist," though he was one most of his life after the Army Air Corps plucked him out of Asheville to attend World War II. He also hated that Roman numeral "II," as opposed to "2," and every other word and phrase he found trendy ("dot-com"), euphemistic ("senior citizen"), redundant ("-based," as in "Durham-based business") or just plain godawful ("impact" as a verb). Talking with Bob could be like walking through a minefieldone careless cliché and boom!but those who did it regularly learned to write good English.
At Wake Forest College in the late 1940s, "back when it was where it's supposed to be" (i.e., the town of the same name), Bob worked on the undergraduate magazine with a fellow student named Harold Hayes. When Hayes became editor of Esquire a dozen years later, he hired his old buddy as associate editor, and Bob spent the '60s helping capture that freewheeling decade in print. Behind George Lois' unforgettable covers (Sonny Liston in a Santa hat! Andy Warhol drowning in soup!), Esquire featured John Sack in Vietnam, Gore Vidal on the underside of the Kennedy legacy, and Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe inventing what was not yet called the "New Journalism." (Wolfe's 1965 essay on stock-car racer Junior Johnson, "Great Balls of Fire," began as a long, rambling letter to Esquire describing the piece he planned to write; it was Bob who realized the letter was the essay.)
So great was the influence of Hayes' Esquire that last year Vanity Fair gathered the survivors in New York for a reunion photo. In the January 2007 issue, there was Bob, puckish in seersucker, surrounded by Talese, Wolfe, Peter Bogdanovich, Clay Felker, Nora Ephron and other heavy-hitters of that golden era (boom!).
