A Remembrance by Nancy Fitch Braucher
I grew up with Bruce Ingersoll. He went to Saint Paul Academy. I was at Summit School, also in St. Paul. Summit was an all-girls school. When there were dances we had to invite a BOY (ye gads)!
My junior year, I invited Bruce to a winter dance. It was a really big deal. My mother even gave a small dinner party before the dance. At the end of dinner (a very stilted affair) I was looking for Bruce. I found him upstairs in my grandmother Kitty’s room. She was 85 at the time. They were totally enjoying each other’s company. (I had been led to her room by the laughter). Maybe we would have had an especially wonderful evening if Kitty had been a chaperone at the dance!
Bruce will be remembered for his ability to find joy and interest in all sorts of people and events.
A Remembrance by John Cairns
Bruce played football as a halfback. He was tough and quick. He and I spent time together while he lived in Minneapolis. His grit and determination were evident in his reporting career, as evidenced by his being the first newspaper reporter into the 3 Mile Island disaster.
The following obituary is from the Chicago Tribune website, posted December 8, 2001:
Bruce Ingersoll, 60, an award-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Sun-Times who pursued politicians and bureaucrats and was an avid fisherman, died Saturday, Dec. 1, in Washington, D.C., from myelodisplastic syndrome.
Mr. Ingersoll began as a copy boy for City News Bureau in Chicago and spent 14 years at the Sun-Times, where he became the paper’s first full-time environmental reporter before joining the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau in 1984.
“He was a star at the Sun-Times during some of its best days,” said Harlan Draeger, a former environmental reporter for the Chicago Daily News who later joined the Sun-Times and worked with Mr. Ingersoll. “He used all the best techniques of investigative journalism to write about prosaic government agencies,” said Alan Murray, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, adding that Mr. Ingersoll’s stories had “an enormous impact on people’s lives.”
Mr. Ingersoll brought the same passion to fishing, whether in a boat on the Potomac River, drifting down the St. Croix River in Minnesota or wading Wedde Creek in Wisconsin. He was born in St. Paul. His father died when he was 11, and he grew up in the home of his uncle, the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch.
Mr. Ingersoll won numerous awards during his long career, most recently for coverage of allegations that led to the indictment of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.
Survivors include his wife, Carol Corbett Ingersoll; three daughters, Brenda, Gillian Carr and Mollie Carr; a son, Archie; and two sisters, Laura Ingersoll Johnson and Brenda. Services have been held.
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