J.D. REED, 64, a gentle bear of a man and gifted writer, made PEOPLE's pages more fun to read and the office a better place to work. Talented? J.D. won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Expressways, a poetry collection; wrote the bestseller Free Fall (later made into the movie The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, starring Robert Duvall); and, for several years, ran the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts. Turning to journalism, he wrote for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and TIME before coming to PEOPLE in 1990. If you smiled at a lyrical line—particularly in one of our special issues about Princess Diana or John F. Kennedy Jr.—there's a good chance that you, like many a grateful PEOPLE editor, were hearing the voice of J.D.
HENRY FLESH, 57, a PEOPLE copy editor for seven years, died June 5. Active in New York's indie literary scene, he won a Lambda Award for his novel Massage in 1999 and movingly chronicled his 1 ½-year battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in the New York Press.
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