Bruce Christopher Carr

Bruce Christopher Carr, 66, of Stratford, Conn., died peacefully on April 14, 2019, at Bridgeport Hospital, with his beloved husband, Harold Watson, at his side. He had fought a valiant brave struggle against cancer. Bruce Carr was an extremely socially responsible activist, working on gay, women’s, and human rights all his life. He was a pioneer in the fight against the AIDS epidemic. He was active in the Democratic Party, and a member of the Stratford Democratic Town Committee. Bruce was born on August 6, 1952, in Cambridge, Mass. He spent most of his youth in Massachusetts, and received his B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. After college, Bruce moved to Manhattan, and became a sought-after copy editor. He served as the copy chief of Scientific American magazine from 1977 to 1982, creating its style book and copy flow, then moved to Time Inc. in 1983, where much of his career took place. In 1983 he worked on the ill-fated venture TV-Cable Week, the first digitally edited and produced magazine, and after its demise, on Time magazine, where he was a highly respected copy editor and later copy coordinator for three decades. At Time, in addition to his work as a copy editor, Bruce supervised the copy desk, updated the Time style book, and fact-checked stories, as well as producing and correcting pages, and beta-testing new software for the magazine. With Kelly Knauer, he produced a series of books under Time’s brand, on dozens of issues, which were widely popular. In the late 1980s through the 1990s, Bruce copy-edited books for Alfred A. Knopf, among them Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer’s The Aspirin Wars, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch (1995 Pulitzer Prize), and Meryle Secrest’s Frank Lloyd Wright, A Biography. Bruce met his lifelong love, Harold Doane Watson, in 1981. In 1992 they became registered domestic partners in New York City, and they exchanged marriage vows in Connecticut on December 5, 2018. Together they lived a happy and incredibly fortunate life in Manhattan and in Orient Point, N.Y. After Bruce retired from Time, and Harold from his second career, as an English and theater teacher in the New York Public Schools of the South Bronx, they moved to Stratford, Conn. To his friends worldwide, who are legion, Bruce was a prince and a gentleman. He was a brilliant and unfailingly kind man, generous with his time and effort, honest, straightforward, funny, devoted, graceful. He was a supporter of the arts, particularly photography, and assisted many young, particularly female, in their careers; some of his collection has been donated to the Yale University Art Gallery. He was beautiful inside and out. As a friend wrote, “We shall not see his like again.” He is survived by his husband, Harold Watson; his mother-in-law, Betty Lou Crossland; his brothers, John and Charles Carr; and by sisters and brothers from Harold’s family, as well as many beloved nieces and nephews on both sides of the family. Bruce was predeceased by his parents, Charles and Virginia Powers Carr, and by his father-in-law, James A. (“Pop”) Clawson. A Memorial service for Bruce Christopher Carr will be held at Galello-Luchansky Funeral Home, 2220 Main Street, Stratford, on Wednesday, April 24, 2019 from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, followed by refreshments nearby from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM at the Olde Dog Tavern, 2505 Main Street.  At a later date, Bruce’s ashes will be scattered privately at Race Point on Cape Cod. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation online to the Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center Closer to Free Fund, in Bruce’s name, at closertofree.com/give.aspx. 

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