Bill Pride, who worked with words but never wasted his own, died unexpectedly while on a return trip from Santa Fe to Denver. He was 71.
Pride, a former executive news editor of The Denver Post, was praised by many former colleagues as a meticulous, serious editor but a man of few words.
Pride died while on a trip with his wife, Kay, and longtime friends Bill and Judy Shilstone of Palo Alto, Calif. They were returning from Santa Fe, where they had attended an opera, one of Pride’s favorite things to do.
The four were between Santa Fe and Raton, N.M., and Bill Pride was sleeping while his wife drove. They realized Pride had stopped breathing and called 911 after driving several miles to get into cellphone range. He had suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but the exact cause of death has not been determined.
A gathering for friends will take place next month, his wife said.
Pride, who had been at The Post 38 years when he retired in 2001, rose from copy editor to executive news editor.
Pride’s standards for stories were “demandingly high,” said Joan White, longtime friend and a former assistant managing editor at The Post.
“His judgment was excellent,” said Ray Dangel, who had worked for Pride as a copy editor when Pride was head of the copy desk. “I can’t remember whether I heard him actually speak 99 or 100 words in all the years I knew him.”
Pride knew the language well, “loved it and didn’t waste it,” Dangel said in an e-mail.
“Some people didn’t like him because he was so serious and he seemed colorless to them,” said Dick Kreck, an author and retired Post columnist. “But he was really an interesting character when you got to know him. He wasn’t a back-slapper and never aggressive about marketing himself.”
“He was unflappable” and had a “quick wit mixed with the proper amount of sarcasm,” said Whit Sibley, former Post reporter.
William Pride was born Feb. 17, 1939, in Monmouth, Ill. As a child, he moved with his family to Clovis, N.M., and then to Denver, where his father, Maurice, got a job as a Linotype operator at The Post.
Bill Pride graduated from Wheat Ridge High School. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at Northwestern University, where he met Kathryn (Kay) Piper. They married in December 1962; the next month, Pride got a job as copy editor at The Post.
He had worked previously at the Rock Springs Rocket-Miner in Wyoming and as a reporter for United Press International.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, William Dean Pride of Jerusalem and Stephen Maurice Pride Raffel of Berkeley, Calif.; and six grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
Other deaths
David Warren, 85, an Australian scientist who invented the “black box” flight data recorder, died Monday, defense officials said Wednesday.
He thought of the idea for a cockpit voice recorder after investigating the crash of the Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner, in 1953, the Department of Defence said.
He designed and constructed a prototype in 1956, but it took several years before officials understood just how valuable the device could be.
Warren was born in 1925 in a remote part of northeast Australia. In 1934, his father was killed in a plane crash.
In 2002, Warren was given the Order of Australia, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.
