Frank Graham Jr., nature writer who updated ‘Silent Spring,' dies at 100

Boston Globe

9 hours ago

He added, 'I'd visit him in Maine, where he had a little island, and we'd be eating plants, and he'd also be picking spiders out of his kayak and identifying them.'
Advertisement
In addition to birds and insects, Mr. Graham wrote about threats to the environment. Ed Neal, the outdoors columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, described Mr. Graham's 1966 book, 'Disaster by Default: Politics and Water Pollution,' as 'a damning indictment of what industry and indifferent government have done to the nation's waterways.'
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
In 1967, after the book was reviewed in Audubon, the magazine asked him to write about the progress, if any, of pesticide legislation and regulation in the United States since the publication of 'Silent Spring,' a devastating examination of the ecological effects of insecticides and pesticides including DDT. A year later, Audubon named him its field editor, a job he held until 2013.
Advertisement
Mr. Graham's three-part series about pesticides for the magazine persuaded Paul Brooks, Carson's editor at Houghton Mifflin, to sign him to write an update of 'Silent Spring.'
The resulting Mr. Graham book, 'Since Silent Spring' (1970), described the years Carson spent researching and writing 'Silent Spring,' documented the attacks on her findings by agricultural and chemical companies and governmental interests, and chronicled the catastrophes caused by pesticides in the ensuing years. (Carson died in 1964.)
Mr. Graham's book came out several months after the federal government announced steps it was taking to ban DDT, vindicating Carson's message.
'One cannot read this book and escape the fundamental point that today's environmental advocates are attempting to make,' Francis W. Sargent, a conservationist and moderate Republican who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1970, wrote about 'Since Silent Spring' in The New York Times Book Review. 'Man's environment has become so complex and interrelated that any action that alters one aspect of the environment may have a potentially disastrous impact on man's health.'
Looking back in 2012 in an Audubon article, Mr. Graham wrote that his book was one Carson 'should have written to rebut the all-out attack on her work and person.' He attributed the modest success of 'Since Silent Spring' to readers who were 'reluctant to let Carson go' and who had 'remained eager to see how her work and reputation had survived the assaults of the exploiters.'
Frank Graham Jr. was born March 31, 1925, in Manhattan to Lillian (Whipp) Graham and Frank Sr., a prominent sports reporter and columnist for The New York Sun and The New York Journal-American. Frank Jr. grew up mostly in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., where his interest in nature was sparked.
Advertisement
During World War II, he served in the Navy aboard the escort aircraft carrier Marcus Island as a torpedoman's mate. He saw action throughout the Pacific, fighting in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945.
After being discharged, he studied English at Columbia University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1950; he had worked as a copy boy at The Sun during the summers.
With help from his father, Mr. Graham was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers and promoted in 1951 to publicity director. He left the job in 1955, after the Dodgers beat the Yankees for the first time in the World Series.
Mr. Graham went on to become an editor and writer at Sport magazine, where he stayed for three years, and then worked as a freelance writer for various publications, including The Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest.
He was also the author of 'Casey Stengel: His Half Century in Baseball' (1958), a biography of the Yankees' idiosyncratic and immensely successful manager; collaborated with Mel Allen, one of the Yankees' star broadcasters, on 'It Takes Heart' (1959), a book about heroic athletes; and wrote 'Margaret Chase Smith: Woman of Courage' (1964), about the trailblazing independent Republican US senator from Maine.
In 1981, Mr. Graham wrote 'A Farewell to Heroes,' which he called a 'dual autobiography' of his father and himself. The cover photograph shows Mr. Graham as a child at Yankee Stadium -- dressed in a jacket, tie, overcoat and Lou Gehrig's Yankees cap -- standing in a dugout beside Gehrig, the Yankees' slugging first baseman, who was a friend of Frank Sr.'s and a neighbor in New Rochelle.
Advertisement
Mr. Graham married Ada Cogan in 1953. An author herself under the name Ada Graham, she and her husband wrote several children's books together about the natural world. She is his only immediate survivor.
In 2013, Mr. Graham wrote in Audubon about the epiphany he once experienced in Central Park in New York when, using powerful new binoculars, he saw a black-and-white warbler.
It was a warbler 'as I had never seen one: resplendent in its fresh nuptial plumage, every detail clear and sharp,' he wrote. 'It was a revelation. The memory of that long-ago bird has never left me; it amplifies my pleasure every time I see one of its descendants.'
This article originally appeared in