CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter whose coverage of America’s first moon landing is legendary, passed away at his Charlottesville home on Monday. He was 92. According to The New York Times, his niece, Susan Tremblay, said the cause was prostate cancer.
“It was man’s first landing on another world,” he wrote in his New York Times’ report on the Apollo 11’s landing, “the realization of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination.”
The article was written in the Times’ largest font ever at the time, according to CBS Radio’s Peter King, the network’s chief NASA reporter who greatly admired Wilford and says he devoured Wilford’s stories during the Gemini and Apollo missions.
“They always say, ‘Don’t meet your heroes, because they’ll always disappoint you,'” King said. “Well, John Noble Wilford was absolutely one of my heroes and he couldn’t have been nicer and more gracious. John wrote several books. One of them I had him inscribe for me when I interviewed him back in 1996, and he wrote, ‘to a fellow space cadet’. It is one of my most treasured possessions.”
Wilford received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for National reporting for work on “scientific topics of national import.” In 1987, he contributed to the staff entry that received the 1987 National Reporting Pulitzer for coverage of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and its implications. He won several other awards over the course of his career, as well.
