Word: torgerson
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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...hour drive southeast of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, is that the border with Nicaragua is as little as 20 or 30 yards away. There is a sporadic, undeclared war between the two countries; the proximity can mean "action"-gunfire. Last week that promise of a story drew Reporter Dial Torgerson, 55, of the Los Angeles Times, and Freelance Photographer Richard Cross, 33, on assignment for U.S. News & World Report, to their deaths...
Fifty foreign correspondents in Mexico City held a vigil of commemoration and rather wistfully urged greater safety for reporters. But journalists conceded that in battle, caution may matter less than fate. The war-hardened correspondents' judgment on their slain peers: Torgerson and Cross had run out of luck. (Indeed, only chance limited the deaths to two: Stringers Susan Morgan of London's Economist and Marcia Johnson of ABC and the Los Angeles Times, dropped out of the trip...
...deaths hit fellow reporters hard. Cross was young and earnest, and Torgerson was a popular veteran, married to another member of the Central America press corps, Lynda Schuster of the Wall Street Journal. Torgerson, a North Carolina native, had been a newsman since his teens; his foreign assignments included Nairobi and Jerusalem. Renowned for quick wit and warmth, he was unflappable; when a plane he was aboard had a harrowing landing last year, Torgerson buried any fears he may have had in a hearty laugh. Cross, a Kansan who worked in Central America for years under the pseudonym R. Cruz...
There was no evidence that Cross and Torgerson were killed specifically because they were newsmen. The grim news certainly did not long deflect reporters whose luck was still holding. The day after Cross and Torgerson were killed, a Honduran official pleaded with some journalists to stay out of the area. But Juan Tamayo of the Herald and Photographer Sill talked their way past military checkpoints and ignored bursts of nearby gunfire. They turned back only when they saw that the road ahead had been newly mined...
...nature of this relationship was illustrated in the deaths last week of two American journalists, Dial Torgerson and Richard Cross, who were killed when their white, rented Toyota was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade on a road in Honduras near the Nicaraguan border (see PRESS). Nicaraguan soldiers apparently added machine-gun fire to the damage of the grenade. This kind of story always startles people, though it is hard...