Rudy Abramson, 70; former L.A. Times reporter
Rudy Abramson, a former longtime Washington reporter for The Times who wrote a highly praised biography of American statesman W. Averell Harriman, has died. He was 70.
Abramson sustained massive head injuries in a fall Tuesday at his home in Reston, Va. He died late Wednesday at a hospital in Fairfax, Va., according to a friend, John Bennett.
A staff writer in The Times' Washington bureau from 1966 to 1993, Abramson was hired to cover science and became one of the first national reporters assigned to the space program. He covered the development of the Apollo 11 mission and the historic moon landing in 1969.
He wrote two books, "Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986" (1992) and "Hallowed Ground: Preserving America's Heritage" (1996), about the Piedmont region of northern Virginia, where some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place. He also co-edited, with Jean Haskell, the "Encyclopedia of Appalachia" (2006), the first comprehensive reference work on the region that covers 13 states from Mississippi to New York.
While working on "Hallowed Ground," Abramson helped organize opposition to a plan by the Walt Disney Co. to build a history theme park near a key Civil War site, the Manassas Battlefield at the eastern end of the Piedmont. As executive director of the ad-hoc group Protect Historic America, he helped recruit prominent writers and historians, including William Styron, Shelby Foote and C. Vann Woodward, to defeat the proposal, which they believed would desecrate a region known for its natural beauty and historical importance. The effort made national headlines, and Disney withdrew the plan in 1994.
Abramson was a native Appalachian, born in Florence, Ala., on Aug. 31, 1937. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1958, he became a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean.
After several years as the Tennessean's Washington correspondent, he was hired by The Times, where he "had a part in just about every major story for 30 years," said longtime colleague Richard T. Cooper.
In addition to covering Vietnam War policy debates, the bombing of Cambodia and the Nixon impeachment hearings, Abramson showed a flair for feature writing, finding interesting tales in improbable places, such as his front-page profile of a 90-year-old pilot in Spearfish, S.D., who had been barnstorming for 60 years.
