Harley R. Bierce, 58, who shared in a Pulitzer Prize won by The Indianapolis Star for exposing police corruption, died Aug. 3 while on a mountain-climbing trip in Colorado. A school teacher before becoming a reporter at the Star, Bierce in later years wor

By: Jamie Santos

Bierce, a founding member of the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization, together with reporter Richard Cady formed an investigative reporting team that in 1973 produced a series exposing corruption in the Indianapolis Police Department. Their work, along with that of reporter Bill Anderson, helped the Star earn a Pulitzer Prize for special local reporting in 1975.
In 1978, Bierce left newspapers to become vice president and director of market research and planning for Meridian Insurance in Indianapolis. He later moved to Chicago, where he was the principal in a firm specializing in insurance consulting.

Doris Hedges, 89, publisher of the Indian Journal in Eufaula, Okla., for more than two decades, died Aug. 7. Mrs. Hedges and her late husband, Homer Hedges, established the Lawton (Okla.) Morning Press in 1932 and published the daily newspaper until 1944. In 1945, they moved to Eufaula where they purchased the Indian Journal, a weekly that is Oklahoma's oldest newspaper. They sold the newspaper in 1970.
The couple also merged two Tahlequah newspapers to create the Tahlequah Star-Citizen, which Doris Hedges served as managing editor. She was a member of the Oklahoma Press Association and was honored for her regular columns.

Paul W. Pinckney, 86, a former sports editor for the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, died Aug. 8 after a long illness. Pinckney edited the Democrat and Chronicle sports pages from the 1950s to the 1970s. He joined the paper's sports staff in June 1937 after covering sports for the Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald-American and editing the sports pages of The Citizen in Auburn, N.Y. Pinckney was promoted to sports editor in 1952, a job he held until the early 1970s when he resumed writing. He retired in 1978.

Lynette Ricketson, 56, newspaper publisher, died July 31 after a long battle with cancer. Ricketson didn't miss an edition as publisher, even when a fire destroyed the century-old offices of the Suwannee Democrat. Ricketson was president of Lake City, Fla.-based Ricketson Newspapers Inc., which includes the Suwannee Democrat, the Branford News, the Jasper News, and the Mayo Free Press.

Frederick C. Whitney, 79, journalism professor, died Aug. 3 of complications from surgery on a carotid artery. Whitney joined the faculty of San Diego State University in 1970, after having worked for various papers, including the Los Angeles Evening Herald, the El Cajon Valley News (later The Daily Californian), and two English-language news publications in Cuba: the Havana Post and Havana PM. In 1975, Whitney wrote the college textbook, ""Mass Media and Communications in Society.""
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