Frank Graham Jr., who "wrote eloquently about the natural world and conservation for Audubon magazine for nearly 50 years and published a book that updated Rachel Carson's groundbreaking 1962 exposé, Silent Spring, which had warned about the dangers of pesticides," died May 25, the New York Times reported. He was 100.
David Seideman, a former editor-in-chief of Audubon, said the subjects of Graham's writing "ran the gamut from the tiniest creatures, like spiders--about which he was a self-taught expert--to giant sandhill cranes on Nebraska's Platte River. There wasn't a creature that didn't interest him.... I'd visit him in Maine, where he had a little island, and we'd be eating plants, and he'd also be picking spiders out of his kayak and identifying them."
Graham also wrote about environmental threats. Ed Neal, the outdoors columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, called his 1996 book, Disaster by Default: Politics and Water Pollution, "a damning indictment of what industry and indifferent government have done to the nation's waterways."
In 1967, Audubon asked Graham to write about the progress, if any, of pesticide legislation and regulation in the U.S. since the publication of Silent Spring. A year later, Audubon named him its field editor, a job he held until 2013.
Graham's three-part series about pesticides for the magazine convinced Paul Brooks, Carson's editor at Houghton Mifflin, to sign him to write an update of her classic work. Since Silent Spring (1970) described the years Carson spent researching and writing her book, "documented the attacks on her findings by agricultural and chemical companies and governmental interests, and chronicled the catastrophes caused by pesticides in the ensuing years," the Times wrote. Carson died in 1964.
In a 2012 Audubon article, Graham wrote that his book was one that Carson "should have written to rebut the all-out attack on her work and person." He attributed the modest success of Since Silent Spring to readers who were "reluctant to let Carson go" and who had "remained eager to see how her work and reputation had survived the assaults of the exploiters."
Graham served in the Navy during World War II, seeing action in the South Pacific. After he was discharged, he earned a BA in English at Columbia University, and worked as a copy boy at the New York Sun during the summers. He was later hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers and promoted in 1951 to publicity director, but left the job in 1955. He became an editor and writer at Sport magazine, where he stayed for three years, and then worked as a freelance writer for various publications.
Graham's other books include Casey Stengel: His Half Century in Baseball (1958), It Takes Heart (1959, with Yankees broadcaster Mel Allen), and Margaret Chase Smith: Woman of Courage (1964). He also wrote A Farewell to Heroes (1981), which he called a "dual autobiography" of himself and his father, Frank Graham Sr., a sports reporter and columnist for the New York Sun and the New York Journal-American.
Graham married Ada Cogan in 1953, and under the pseudonym Ada Graham, the couple wrote several children's books together about the natural world. The Times noted that Graham once wrote in Audubon about the epiphany he experienced in New York's Central Park when, using powerful new binoculars, he saw a black-and-white warbler for the first time.
It was a warbler "as I had never seen one: resplendent in its fresh nuptial plumage, every detail clear and sharp," he recalled. "It was a revelation. The memory of that long-ago bird has never left me; it amplifies my pleasure every time I see one of its descendants."