The Bowdoin Orient

EDITOR’S NOTE: Longtime Orient adviser Sandy Polster died yesterday at his New York home after battling cancer for more than two years. Bill Wheatley, a close friend of Sandy’s and former executive vice president of NBC News, notified friends of Sandy’s death in an email yesterday evening to which the following obituary was attached. “As you know, Sandy loved to write. Accordingly, he composed his own obituary, which he asked be sent to you,” Wheatley wrote.  Sandy advised The Orient for 12 years, presiding over a marked increase in the professionalism of the paper. Which is not to say that he was satisfied: “One hundred percent of The Orient is 40 percent overwritten,” he once said. To a student body with a four-year memory, his perspective was invaluable. He is missed, but his guidance steers us still.

WRITER’S NOTE: Greetings from the beyond, wherever it is. While death is life’s only certainty, most don’t know the when and how. I did, and I decided it would be fun if my final writing assignment were my own obituary. —s.

Sandor M. Polster, who worked closely with Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw as writer and news editor in the 1970s and 1980s, died on March 21 at his apartment in New York. He was 71. The cause was complications from gastric cancer, which he had battled for more than two years.