William Decker, novelist, instructor and editor, dies at 73

ASHLAND, Ore. - William Butterfield Decker, a novelist and former New York editor who claimed he once sent Jackie Onassis out for coffee, died from complications following a Jan. 1 stroke. He was 73.

Mr. Decker died Thursday at a care center.

Mr. Decker also was a Southern Oregon University writing instructor in the late 1980s.

He was born in 1926 in Richmond, Va., and graduated in 1950 from Stanford University, where he studied writing.

Before college, he worked as a cowboy on an Arizona ranch owned by the family of Bruce Babbitt, U.S. secretary of the interior.

Mr. Decker trained to be a fighter pilot for the Army Air Corps in 1944-45, but the war ended before his training was complete. He ended up buying a ranch in Klamath Falls and began work there as city editor for the Klamath Falls Herald and News in the late 1950s.

In 1959, he moved to New York to work in the publishing industry, where he first found work with McGraw-Hill, and then The Dial Press.

He later became an executive editor at Viking Press, where he worked at the same time that Jackie Onassis was an editor there.

"He told a story that he once sent Jackie out for coffee," said Russell Sadler, who teaches journalism and environmental studies at Southern Oregon University.

Mr. Decker edited such authors as Earnest Gaines ("The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman"), Larry McMurtry ("The Last Picture Show"), and Pulitzer prize-winner Wallace Stegner.

He married his wife, Anne, in New York in 1964.

After Mr. Decker retired from publishing, the couple moved to Ashland in 1986.

He wrote two novels, "To Be A Man" in 1967, which The New York Times named one of the 10 best novels of the year, and "Holdout" in 1979, which won the Western Writers Association's Golden Spur award for best Western novel.