J. Douglas Perry

A Friend We'll Miss

J. Douglas Perry told tales. Between stories larded with whimsy and occasional melodrama, he worked to instill in his students a code of ethics that could meet the standards of his Quaker heritage.

"I've always felt the ethics of the journalist were quite as important as are ethics to a lawyer or ethics to a doctor," Doug Perry told Philadelphia Daily News feature writer and jazz critic Nels Nelson in an interview when he retired in 1968. "They can't be spelled out with perhaps the same exactness, but we should be working at it, and I've tried to put a lot of that into the courses which I have taught." Nelson was a student of Perry's in the late forties.

He was an unforgettable figure on campus. Perry was known for wearing plaid lumberjack shirts to class with ties that never matched, and for chewing on paperclips. Nelson wrote in the interview, describing him as a "stringbean Midwesterner with an oddly lurching gait, a rumpled suit, a sometimes preoccupied manner and a limitless supply of old- fashioned integrity."

He often taught by example, using a mythical newspaper, the Bootjack Bugle, and the adventures of its staff - Sophie Klutz, Edward K. Spivis, Susan Gilfish and Oscar McGoogleshire - to detail the principles and techniques of good reporting, writing and editing.

Doug and his two brothers, Claude and Donald, and two sisters, Mary and Edith, were born into a newspaper family. Mr. Perry joined the Temple teaching staff in 1936 after working as a journalist. He remained there for 32 years.

A graduate of Butler University in Indianapolis, Mr. Perry earned a master's degree in English at the University of Chicago and studied post-graduate sociology at the University of Pennsylvania before launching his journalism career. He received his master of arts degree from the University of Chicago. Perry headed the journalism department at Butler before moving to Philadelphia.

He worked as a reporter for the Kentucky News Bureau in Louisville; as a reporter, copy editor and feature writer for the Indianapolis Star; as a copy editor for the Indianapolis News, and as a rewrite man in the sports department of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. In 1952 he was a member of NBC's news staff covering the Democratic and Republican conventions, which were both held in Philadelphia.

He was recruited as an instructor by Henry E. Birdsong, who organized the first degree program in journalism at Temple in the late 1920s. Mr. Perry joined Birdsong in 1936 and then succeeded him as head of the program in 1949.

Mr. Perry became a full professor in 1951, when he was named head of Temple's communications department for 15 years before the establishment of the School of Communications and Theater in 1966. When SCAT was started, he was named its acting dean, a post he held until his retirement. When he retired in 1968, the University declared a "Doug Perry Day" (June 8, 1968) and some 500 former journalism and communications students and friends attended his testimonial dinner.

"Doug Perry is responsible for a large group of journalists, many of whom are now reaching the pinnacle of their careers," said Temple graduate John Dotson in 1986, when he was the administration and operations manager of the Daily News. "You always understood what he was trying to teach, and it was usually something you could put to good use for years to come. He was a man I respected, someone I'll always fondly remember."

Michael Sisak, an editor on the sports desk of the New York Times and a 1963 Temple graduate, said, "Doug Perry will always be in my thoughts. He was an inspiration to me."

Temple journalism professor Jacqueline Steck knew Perry since 1941, when she was a freshman in one of his journalism classes. "After Doug Perry retired, I happened to meet the hard-nosed city editor of one of the Philadelphia papers," said Steck. "He had studied with Professor Perry and he told me that he wished every city editor in the country could have had the opportunity to take Doug Perry's course. I asked him which course he meant, and he replied, 'Any course, because any contact with Doug Perry would have been uplifting to the profession.'"

"Doug Perry was a wonderful man," said Joseph C. Carter, professor emeritus of journalism at Temple and a longtime colleague. "He was a splendid administrator, a very fine teacher and a good scholar."

Mr. Perry was a 1961 recipient of a Lindback Foundation Award for distinguished teaching. After retiring, he taught part time at Rider College and was a co-author of The People's University: Temple's First Eighty Years.

A resident of Wynnewood before moving to South Carolina, Perry was married to the former Elizabeth Rodewald. They had two children, a son, J. Douglas Jr.; and a daughter, Judith McCaffrey.

J. Doug Perry died at the age of 85 on Monday, February 24, 1986 at his home Clemson, South Carolina. He will be missed by those of had the pleasure of observing his teaching abilities. However, he will missed more by generations to come who will never hear the stories of the Bootjack Bugle.

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