Winthrop P. Carty, member 28 years, died Oct 10, 2014

Winthrop Peirce Carty died peacefully at home on October 10, 2014, surrounded by his family.

Born April 18, 1927, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Win never quite lost his Boston accent even though his family moved to Forest Hills, New York, when he was very young. His parents were both New Englanders: Mary Peirce, the daughter of H. Winthrop Peirce, a prominent artist, and John Russell Carty, a radiologist and the son of General John J. Carty, chief engineer of Bell Labs and an innovator in the early days of the telephone.

In 1953, Win married Lee Anderson. A year later, the couple moved from New York to Bogota, Colombia, where Win served as string correspondent for Time and Life magazines during a period of dictatorship, revolution and economic recovery. After seven years, they returned to the U.S., where Win joined Visión, a Spanish-language news magazine, in New York and then was Washington bureau chief. Later he became editor in chief of Americas, the monthly magazine of the Organization of American States (OAS). He then joined the Population Reference Bureau as in-house editor, where he organized and ran Global Edition, a worldwide coalition of journalists dedicated to reporting on environmental issues.

Journalism took him to many parts of the world, sometimes with uncanny timing. An assignment to Guyana in November, 1978, placed him among the first international journalists on the scene of the Jonestown massacre, and in 1980 he found himself a couple of blocks from the assassination of the exiled former Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in Asunción, Paraguay. His writing revealed a dry insightful wit and encyclopedic knowledge of world events. These and many more travels yielded a large collection of folk art from around the world.

In 1989, the Cartys moved from the Georgetown house, where they had lived since 1963, to 3900 Watson Place, where they merged two adjoining apartments to make a large and accessible home. Win is survived by his wife and their three children, Winthrop Davis Carty of Cambridge, Mass.; Jane Carty MacNealy, who lives nearby in Silver Spring; and Elizabeth Russell Galvan-Carty, of El Cerrito, California, who all came to Washington to be with him in his last week, and five grandchildren.