Sheridan, Martin 1914-2003

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SHERIDAN, Martin 1914-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born August 1, 1914, in Providence, RI; died of kidney failure, December 31, 2003, in New London, CT. Journalist, businessman, and author. Sheridan is most often remembered for his work as a field correspondent during World War II. After attending the College of William and Mary and Rhode Island State College in the early 1930s, he set out on his own as a freelance writer and photographer. As a journalist, Sheridan managed to rub elbows with such well-known figures as George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was while working on a story about famous movie cowboy Buck Jones that Sheridan first came face to face with mortal danger. Joining Jones at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston in 1942, Sheridan almost lost his life when a fire raged through the club, killing 492 people, including Jones and Sheridan's wife. Sheridan, though badly burned, survived. After recuperating, he was too injured to serve in the military, so he joined the Boston Globe as a war correspondent. As a reporter, Sheridan was one of the first journalists to work alongside soldiers, thus becoming the first "embedded reporter" long before the term was invented. Working in the Pacific theater, he witnessed firsthand the famous battles at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, was the first reporter to work on a U.S. submarine, and was on board one of the B-29s that bombed Tokyo in 1945. After the war, Sheridan left the newspaper to work in public relations. He joined Carl Byoir and Associates in New York City in 1946, and from 1951 to 1971 was vice president of public relations at Admiral Corp. in Chicago; he also worked for the New England Council. Sheridan returned to freelance writing in 1971 before retiring in 1986. In addition to his newspaper writing, he was the author of Comics and Their Creators: Life Stories of American Cartoonists (1942) and Overdue and Presumed Lost: The Story of the U.S.S. "Bullhead" (1947; reprinted, 2004).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Boston Globe, January 9, 2004, p. B7.

Boston Herald, January 6, 2004, p. 38.

Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2004, p. B11.

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Sheridan, Martin 1914-2003

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