Vinson Hall Retirement Community
Mr. William Edwin Howard, 89 years old, grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. A son of the editor for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Mr. Howard started playing on his father’s typewriter at the age of five.
After high school, Mr. Howard postponed college to avoid being drafted for war in the middle of the semester. Instead, he began his first job as a copy boy for the Memphis Press-Scimitar. He was about to be promoted to a journalist when he was called to report to duty. He attended basic infantry training at Camp Croft, South Carolina. While in service he was assigned to be a combat correspondent to write about the soldiers in his regiment. In addition, his Commanding General wanted a weekly paper for the 1st Armored Division. Mr. Howard then co-founded and was the editor for The Warrior.
In 1945 Mr. Howard returned to the Memphis Press-Scimitar but took a job with the Associated Press one week later. Six months later, he returned to the Memphis Press-Scimitar as the entertainment and book editor and simultaneously entered Southwestern College, now Rhodes College.
Mr. Howard was a veteran newspaperman, film columnist, and TV lively arts critic and writer. As early as 1951, he traveled the world from his home base in Memphis (one of his claims-to-fame is that he was the first person ever interview to Elvis Presley!) to meet and write about the “greats” of the day including: Clark Gable, Patricia Neal, Sophia Loren and Paul Newman, to name just a few. In addition to his long tenure as arts and entertainment editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, he was founding editor and columnist of the Memphis Business Journal’s Life at the Top Section. Long before there was an Entertainment Tonight, he was providing nightly celebrity news in his newspaper column, The Front Row.
Mr. Howard also wrote for big movie companies like MGM, Paramount and Universal for several decades, again meeting and writing about the entertainment greats of the day. His awards and honors include the 1964 Boyd Martin Award for the “Most Outstanding Motion Picture Pages in the U.S.”, (100,000-250,000 circulation), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the first annual Tennessee Williams Theater Festival Award.
Mr. Howard is a veteran of the Italian campaign in World War II. He moved to Washington D.C. with his wife in 1992 and continued to write about the arts and travel. He wrote five books including “Seeing Stars, Memoirs of a Professional Celebrity Seeker” under the name Edwin Howard.
Mr. William Edwin Howard is a resident of Vinson Hall Retirement Community in McLean where he has resided since October 2012.