James Osmyn BERRY

BERRY, James Osmyn
James Osmyn Berry, beloved husband for 59 years of the late Heather D. Berry (1934-2014), passed away in Boynton Beach, FL in the early hours of March 20, 2015. He was 83. He is survived by sons J. Duncan Berry of Yarmouth Port, MA, Alexander O. Berry and daughter in-law Kristine B. Berry of Boynton Beach, FL; and grandchildren Charlotte, Hannah, Kendall, and James A. Berry. Berry, was born in Oak Park, IL to the late James and Dorothy Berry in the final year of the Hoover Administration. His father was an executive in General Motors. The family moved several times in the Midwest before settling in Lakewood, OH by the end of World War 2. Berry attended Dartmouth College and met his future wife at Ohio Wesleyan University; they were wed in 1955. Following a brief stint in the U. S. Navy aboard a destroyer where he dabbled with a cartoon strip for the ship's newsletter, Berry leveraged his degree in business administration in several ventures, including work as a management consultant in Manhattan. However, in mid-1961, with one young child and a second on the way, Berry made a radical and risky career break by accepting a position as a staff illustrator on the Cleveland Plain Dealer. His talent and industry was recognized almost immediately. He created an editorial feature called "Berry's World" in mid-1963 and achieved national syndication within months. By the age of 33, Berry was a bona fide media celebrity with a daily reach of over 400 papers nation-wide, invitations to the White House, and had either received or was nominated for the highest awards that were bestowed by his peers in the industry. A move to Washington, D. C. in the early 1970s enabled him to observe his quarry at close range. In the mid-1970s, he launched a second, short-lived, feature called "Benjy" about an amiable hobo. In the early1980s, now settled in South Florida and equipped with a personal computer and a scanner, Berry was able to have a late-breaking material appear throughout the country in the very next print edition; this certainly qualifies him as being among the earliest creative telecommuters. Throughout his career, Berry was dispatched internationally for new material. One such trip to the former Soviet Union yielded a contract with the satirical journal "Krokodil" that temporarily gave him more daily readers in Russia than in the United States. By the 1990s, "Berry's World" appeared daily in approximately 1,000 newspapers. After over forty years, and nearly 15,000 unique published works to his name, Berry retired in 2003 without having missed a single deadline. He was regarded by colleagues as one of the most astute, insightful chroniclers of his generation. A five-time winner of National Cartoonist Society awards, winner of the National Headliners Club award, and past president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists were among his professional distinctions. A constant source of nourishment throughout his life was time spent at the old family homestead on Cape Cod. The grandson and great grandson of sea captains, Berry was an avid and lifelong sailor. A tough competitor in tennis and golf, a gifted painter and photographer, and an adventurous world traveller, he led a life of incomparable freedom yet was yoked with non-stop daily deadlines for half his life. Berry's entire published oeuvre, as well as four decades of extensive correspondence, has been bequeathed to the archives of Ohio Wesleyan University, where students of his profession and of that era will be able to research the daily, incremental transformations of our culture from the perspective of a gifted individual with a distinctive point of view. A memorial service will be held at the Boynton Memorial Chapel, 800 Boynton Beach Blvd., Boynton Beach, FL on Friday, March 27th at 1:00pm. A graveside service at Pine Grove Cemetery, West Harwich, MA will be announced at a later date.
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