From the Managing Editor

By JAMES R. GAINES

RON KRISS, OUR EXECUTIVE EDITOR, was a charming, funny man -- self-effacing, passionate in his opinions, sometimes cranky. He was impatient, fair-minded and kind. He was surpassingly competent, and cool in the sort of crisis that a newsmagazine often has, with some major story tumbling in chaotically at the end of the week. Ron's professional reflexes were among the best in journalism. In both a military and an editorial sense, he was a superb officer of the line, and his death last week at the age of 58, after a long struggle with cancer, leaves us bereft. He was loved here.

Ron was a consummate professional, and his gifts as a writer and editor helped shape this magazine for 30 years. His greatest legacy to us is the high standard of inquiry and fairness, of skepticism and decency, that he imposed on himself and on the magazine; he always reminded us when the scoundrel had been acquitted. He was inner-directed and mistrusted trends. He never failed to check writers' inclination to excess. As a colleague says, "In a conflict between poetry and truth, Ron came down on the side of truth." He hated what was false and had X-ray vision for it.

Ron had been something of a child prodigy -- admitted to Harvard at age 16 -- and all his life he kept a quality of eager boyishness that made an odd, attractive contrast to his professional polish, somewhat in the way that, for years, his youthful face contradicted his prematurely gray hair. He was famous for his democratically inclusive range of friends, many of whom showed up at his poker games (all pigeons welcome, from copyboys to senior editors). Ron's love of gambling had a certain raffishness about it. Keep the casino open. Give everybody some chips.

Ron loved cats (he had four at the time of his death). He kept their photographs here and there around his office. He and his wife Suzanne Richie transported the cats each weekend to their home in the Catskill Mountains. There he turned them loose to explore the outdoors that he had loved as a boy, when his parents brought him up from Brooklyn on vacation, to stay in summer cottages.

A magazine is, or should be, an organic thing that takes its life from the passions and prejudices and gifts of the people who produce it. This one took a lot of its spirit from Ron. We are pained to have lost him, but we cherish the example -- and the memories -- he left us.