Remembering Larry DuPraz
December 26th, 2006
A friend sent me a long-expected obituary from The Daily Princetonian, where I was Chairman (what we called the editor-in-chief) 29 years ago: “Larry DuPraz, the beloved flat-topped, cigar-chomping curmudgeon whose critical eye refined six decades of journalism at The Daily Princetonian, died Christmas Eve morning in Massachusetts. He was 87 and suffered from heart disease.”
When I joined the Prince in 1974, Larry had already been on the paper for 28 years. He was incredibly irascible and he just about defined curmudgeon. But he, far more than any of the paper’s editors, was the guardian of standards for the Prince. If you worked on the nighttime production crew, which we all did on a regular rotation, you had to put up with Larry’s endless belittling of your talents. “You guys don’t know how to write a headline.” “Who taught you to do that?” “I don’t know why I keep working here with you guys.” “You’re the worst bunch ever.”
And there was a definite rite of passage with Larry. “When [fill in the blank] was Chairman, this was a good newspaper.” Sure enough, when I returned for my 25th reunion and went to the Prince barbeque, Larry regaled the 2003 editors with a familiar line: “When Knobel, Doyle, Klinger and Resnick were here, they knew what they were doing.”