News-Info-Alerts

Re: Laurence Jolidon Passes Suddenly

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: August 20, 2002

With profound sadness and respect we report the passing of a wonderful man.

"Journalist Laurence Jolidon Dies
Tue Aug 20, 8:38 PM ET

By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - Laurence Jolidon, a veteran war correspondent and author who covered the Persian Gulf War and U.S. forces in Somalia, died Tuesday in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he was serving as media spokesman for the NATO peacekeeping force. He was 64.


Jolidon suffered a heart attack after his morning jog, according to Don North, a journalist friend in Washington, D.C., and a sister, Mimi Schmergel, of Rochester, N.Y.

He had served as spokesman for the NATO Peace Stabilization Force, known as SFOR, for most of the past year.

A graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, Jolidon saw duty with the U.S. Army advisory group in Vietnam and later was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.

In a long journalism career, he worked for the Dallas Times-Herald, Texas Observer, Detroit Free Press, St. Petersburg Times and USA Today, where he was an editor and reporter from 1983 to 1993, covering the Gulf War and Somalia.

Colleagues knew Jolidon as a competitive reporter who was passionate about the news business and loved to argue about almost anything, especially military topics.

"He had remarkable energy, great reporting instincts, an innate sense of fairness and physical courage," said Michael Hedges, a Houston Chronicle reporter who worked with Jolidon in the Gulf War and Somalia.

Mike Tharp, a former reporter for U.S. News & World Report who also covered the Gulf War and Somalia, called Jolidon "a newsman's newsman" who "looked like a French leprechaun but could scoop anyone — and buy you a beer afterward."

When six soldiers in the battalion he was covering were killed in an explosion in Iraq, "he was torn up — but he filed first," Tharp said.

Jolidon served a year as press adviser to the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia-Herzegovnia in 1996. He also trained journalists in Indonesia, the Russian Federation and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

He founded his own publishing company, Ink Slinger Press, which produced his book, "Last Seen Alive," about Americans missing in the Korean War, and "Turn Back Before Baghdad," a compilation of journalists' dispatches from the Gulf War.

In the latter book, published in 2001, Jolidon told of finding an archive of 1,500 "media pool" reports by American and British reporters that been filed away in a U.S. military public affairs office at the Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, hotel that served as media headquarters during the war.

"Believing they had some historical value, I boxed them up and brought them back," he wrote, but could find no university or foundation that was interested. A decade later, he published 300 stories by 87 reporters in the book, "uncensored and raw as the day they came off a sand-choked typewriter."

Jolidon is survived by his sister.

Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press"

LAST SEEN ALIVE:
http://www.lastseenalive.com/