Remembering Mr. William Rukeyser

“He was our cheerleader, our champion and our guiding moral light. It is no exaggeration to state that Press Club’s continued existence owes a strong debt to Bill Rukeyser’s work and love for the institution and all the people who keep it going.”

—Marc Fisher ’80, Senior Editor, The Washington Post

Bio

Mr. William Rukeyser joined the University Press Club in 1957, his freshman year. He wrote widely and often in his time in UPC, contributing to the Town Topics, The Newark Evening News, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. An English major, Mr. Rukeyser was as fluent in creative writing as in nonfiction reporting. By 1960, he was leading the Press Club as its president. After graduation from Princeton, Mr. Rukeyser went on to an illustrious and entrepreneurial career in journalism, including serving as founding managing editor of Money magazine and managing editor of Fortune magazine. He was a long-time board member on the Press Club’s advisory board, and gifted the club with the means to host the annual Rukeyser Lecture, which brings a distinguished journalist to Princeton’s campus to speak with current students. 

He was a dedicated and beloved mentor to generations of Press Club students, and helped many Press Club alumni to launch their own journalism careers. Mr. Rukeyser passed away in August of 2022. The University Press Club is honored to continue his legacy—and to celebrate his outstanding leadership and his passionate commitment to journalism. 

On this web page are tributes to Mr. Rukeyser, written by his friends, colleagues, and fellow Press Club alumni. If you would like to add your own remembrances of Mr. Rukeyser to this page, please visit this link: https://forms.gle/deV9NagNs1Zu6RXX6

Tributes

“Bill Rukeyser ’61 was one of those characters who make the Princeton experience something that lives with you forever. We knew each other through our combined efforts to create and chair an alumni board for the University Press Club, one of the treasures of campus journalism at Princeton. He was self-effacing, humble, humorous and always generous in sharing his advice and wisdom with members of the Press Club and other students as well. He had an uncanny ability to figure out college students and advise them about future careers and to sympathize with whatever struggles they faced. He had a remarkable career and was proud of his better-known brother, Louis ’54, also a Press Club member. He had much to be proud of, but I think his counsel and advice to dozens of Princeton students is something that gave him the greatest of pleasures. He will always be fondly remembered.”

—Mike McCurry ’76

“I joined Press Club as a sophomore (after my classmates wisely dumped me as class president), which turned out to be perfect timing to get paired with an alumni Press Club mentor, since Mike McCurry and others had recently created the new Alumni Board. I was lucky enough to draw Bill Rukeyser as my mentor. I’ll always remember meeting him for the first time when he took me out for a white tablecloth lunch in Manhattan (an unfamiliar scene for this kid from Ohio), during which he ordered a bottle of white wine and applied a lax Volunteer State sensibility to sharing the bottle with me despite my being a bit shy 21. Sitting in a snazzy New York City lunch spot with this august editor of iconic financial publications remains one of my vivid “Pinch me – I go to Princeton!” moments. In the years to follow, Bill was an excellent mentor, both in writing and in life – generous with advice and not shy in his opinions. I always thought that Bill’s conspicuously refined tone of voice let him get away with an extra measure of irreverence, which made him very fun company. I like to think that Bill is now sipping a glass of something nice at the Great Reunions in the sky.”

—P.G. Sittenfeld ’07

“In 1977, when I first began spending my afternoons in the old Press Club offices in the abandoned science labs on the top floor of Aaron Burr Hall, I loved paging through the decaying ledger books in which generations of UPC members had recorded their earnings from the likes of United Press, the Star-Ledger, the Newark Evening News, and so on, all listed according to that wonderfully obscure code we used to designate each loop (JQ was the Philadelphia Inquirer; MO was the New York Times; TT, more logically, the Trenton Times.) In those books were also the names of Press Club greats of the past, including those who had gone on what I thought of as journalism’s hall of fame. And that’s where I first came across Bill Rukeyser’s devotion to Press Club. I knew of William Rukeyser as the managing editor of Fortune and founder of Money magazine, and finding the evidence of his earliest reporting in those ledger books was a thrill surpassed only when I finally met him many years later, when we were forming Press Club’s first alumni board.

Bill was a stalwart member and in many ways the spiritual leader of our board. He was surpassingly devoted to the students, and he showed it with his generosity (he took students to the Overseas Press Club awards dinner every year, led the funding of key UPC initiatives, and quietly supported club members who could not afford to pay to attend some of our meetings), his creativity (he was the engine behind the annual speakers series on campus), and above all, his commitment to the idea that Press Club could and must survive the recurrent waves of change that threatened our business model, our journalism opportunities, and our viability as a student group.

It was always Bill who, at one or another of the all-too-many board meetings at which students wondered how and whether the club could go on, rallied the troops, reminding everyone of the powerful impact the club had made on generations of newspeople and the many other alumni who had learned in Press Club how to dig up and synthesize information, find granules of truth and blend it all together into compelling writing. Bill was determined not to let this thing die. He was our cheerleader, our champion and our guiding moral light. It is no exaggeration to state that Press Club’s continued existence owes a strong debt to Bill Rukeyser’s work and love for the institution and all the people who keep it going.”

—Marc Fisher ’80

“Bill was managing editor when my mother was a young writer at Fortune in the 1980s, and he was responsible for sending her to help open the magazine’s new bureau in DC — where she met my dad and eventually raised our family. She says he was the best kind of supervisor: decent, honest, and kind. It felt so fortuitous when I joined the Press Club a couple decades later and got to know Bill for myself! His warm manner, perceptive advice, and generosity with his time made the Club a better place for all of us.”

—Marina Isgro ’08

“Bill Rukeyser was one of my closest friends at Princeton. We stayed in touch all our lives, cordially but intermittently. His death has pierced my heart.

It has also made me see how deeply he influenced me. He was a year ahead, I followed him into the University Press Club and the English department; we took many of the same courses, read the same books outside of class, and we talked about novels, journalism, sentences. Especially sentences. Bill had a poet’s obsession with verbal precision and a journalist’s commitment to clarity and economy.

I’ve spent 60 years teaching writing in my classes in literature and media. Never needed or wanted formal instruction to teach writing. Bill was my teacher though neither of us knew it then. I yearn to know what he would say about the new AI writing machines!

Writing well was almost a moral obligation, Bill’s literary preferences and writing practice implicitly said. Bad writers misuse and damage the tools available to them. But for all his seriousness and rigor neither Bill nor his writing was solemn or grave. Wit and intellectual playfulness were notable elements of his personality and of everything he wrote, even memos and quick emails to old friends. A sentence or paragraph unsweetened by at least a trace of (verbally relevant) play wasn’t fully worthy. In a review of a Hollywood epic for a local Princeton paper, Bill observed that “the cast of thousands milled competently.” I remember his discomfort over a story about newly-hired meter maids that he’d been assigned by the same paper. A boring, tedious story, he complained. But a few minutes later he was humming and smiling at the typewriter. What happened? I found the lede, he said: ‘Princeton Borough is skirting the law.'”

—David Thorburn ’62

“Bill Rukeyser came to Princeton caring about writing and knowing in advance that he wanted to become a member of the Press Club. Bill’s father, Merryle S. Rukeyser, was an economic journalist who wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “Everybody’s Money.” And Bill’s older brother, Louis Rukeyser, Princeton ’54 and President of the Press Club, was also an economic journalist, writing for The Baltimore Sun before creating his popular television show “Wall Street Week” in 1970. Even as an undergraduate Bill was a superb writer. A few years ago I discovered in my own files an undergraduate paper that Bill had written, probably in sophomore year on G.B. Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” I read it with astonishment before returning it at lunch in New York: “Bill, I’ve been teaching English literature for 50 years. This is the best undergraduate paper I have ever read!”

Bill wrote beautifully. And he was a walking dictionary. We roomed together in freshman year and in a matter of weeks he transformed me from a terrible to an excellent speller: “Just LOOK at the words.” Bill also threatened to bring his jazz drum set down from New Rochelle – Bill was always a sophisticated appreciator of jazz – if I didn’t put away my banjo. “Mark,” he told this Jewish boy from New Jersey, “you will never be a West Virginia coal miner.” After freshman year Bill and I remained close, choosing the same courses, regularly breakfasting on sugar-frosted donuts at the Student Center, and having weekly Nassau Street meals at “The Balt,” a now defunct greasy spoon that specialized in “pizza-burgers.”

Being a member and eventually President of The Press Club was probably the most significant dimension of Bill’s undergraduate experience. The most important single influence on him was undoubtedly Kingsley Amis, the English novelist who taught at Princeton in Bill’s sophomore year. Amis provided a model for Bill of a charismatic and witty man, and for Bill, charismatic and witty himself, the friendship with Amis was inevitable. After graduation – and one year working for the Wall Street Journal – Bill followed Kingsley to Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where he became a close part of the Amis circle. And indeed it was through the Amis circle that he met and married his life-long spouse Elisabeth at a ceremony in which Amis participated as best man.

Bill’s career as an economic journalist and editor, first for the Wall Street Journal, then as founding editor of Money Magazine, and later as editor-in-chief of Fortune Magazine led him ultimately – and perhaps somewhat implausibly – to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he became editor-in-chief for Whittle Communications. And in Knoxville he became deeply involved in the community, serving as chair of the University of Tennessee Medical Center board of trustees and as a sponsor of the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. In his later years, still in Knoxville but maintaining an apartment in New York, Bill developed a new career for himself as a free-lance consultant, collaborator, and editor of books with an economic dimension. Through all of this, Bill remained connected to Princeton and the Press Club as a mentor and advisor. Rukeyser was always an elegant and witty writer and a genial man who made everything he touched a great deal better.”

—Mark Rose ’61