Jack Limpert, who died this morning at age 90, was the face, heart, and soul of Washingtonian magazine for four decades. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1934, Jack never laid eyes on Washington until he was in his early thirties, and he rarely left thereafter. An internship with then Vice President Hubert Humphrey got him to the nation’s capital, but in 1969 Jack parlayed his previous experience as a UPI editor into a chance to edit a fledgling Washingtonian, and he never looked back. Laughlin Phillips, son of the founder of the Phillips Collection, had launched the magazine a few years earlier in the spirit of the New Yorker—cartoons and poetry ran irregularly early on, along with a horseracing column—but Phillips was mostly an absentee publisher. He gave Jack a free hand to shape the magazine as he saw fit, and Jack did—through his inextinguishable curiosity about the city and his firm belief that the world was quantifiable and in sore need of ranking. Top Doctors, 100 Very Best Restaurants, Cheap Eats, Weekend Getaways, Great Neighborhoods, and the like became cornerstones of Washingtonian and of the entire genre known as “city and regionals” that Jack, Clay Felker at New York magazine, and a few other editors created from scratch. On that solid foundation of service pieces and with the backing of his second publisher, Philip Merrill, who bought the magazine in 1979, Jack allowed first-rate, in-depth journalism to flourish. He had a nose for a good story—Jack was among the first to figure out, in 1974, that Deep Throat was FBI associate director Mark Felt—and when he hooked onto one, he gave it the magazine’s all. The five National Magazine Awards bestowed on Washingtonian during Jack’s tenure were all well earned. “Jack Limpert not only made Washingtonian a great success but helped shape the entire landscape of city and regional magazines,” says Washingtonian president and CEO Catherine Merrill. “His vision and integrity remain in everything we do. His famous blue pencil—because a red pen is too harsh—will be missed but his legacy will continue to inspire us.” Jack gave more than a few writers their start, often based on a hunch rather than solid evidence. Laura Elliott was only 26 years old, with a slim record as a feature reporter, when Jack assigned her to write about Charlotte Fedders, who had been fearfully abused by her ex-husband, once the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “It took Jack a while to trust a writer,” Elliott recalls, “but once he did, his trust was steadfast and so elevating. I, for one, had more confidence in my own abilities to tackle tough stories because he believed in me.  And I so wanted to live up to his faith.”  Ornamentation was Jack’s mortal enemy. He lived unpretentiously in Bethesda and drove sturdy American sedans. While the magazine’s restaurant critics scoured the metropolitan area for must-have nouvelle cuisine, his idea of a gourmet experience was closer to the old Duke Zeibert’s, without the signature pickles. Jack’s snack of choice was raw carrots. He rarely showed up at work without a Ziploc bag of them.  There probably wasn’t a single piece of clothing in Jack’s closet that a journalistic fashion plate like Ben Bradlee would have worn in public. Save for towering stacks of magazines and manuscripts and the old Royal typewriter on which Jack banged out Post-it-size notes to staff, his office had the feel of a monk’s cell. Ornamental prose, though, deserved a special place in Jack’s hell. Literary flourishes, soaring metaphors, even humble adjectives and adverbs—none was safe when Jack went into edit mode. (This paragraph would have been whittled down to half its length.) What was almost certainly Jack’s darkest day as editor came early in his career at the magazine. By the mid-1970s, the District’s majority African American population was slowly taking the reins of power. Marion Barry was mayor; Black pride was flourishing. The magazine sought to capture all of this in a cover story titled “Chocolate City,” illustrated by an ice-cream cone with four chocolate scoops teetering over a single vanilla one. That image and the very fact that a “white” magazine like Washingtonian would even attempt such a feature article provoked longtime Washington Post columnist William Raspberry to accuse the magazine of racism, sending Jack into a weeks-long, soul-searching seclusion from which he emerged a wiser and perhaps more cautious editor. Jack with one of his beloved golden retrievers, Danny. Cancer treatment in his thirties had left Jack with prematurely white hair. A temperament shaped by his upper-Midwest childhood and Scandinavian heritage did not incline him to garrulous moments or whooping laughter. He was a quiet man, slow to anger (but capable of it), with a sly humor. Dick Victory, who spent an interrupted 25 years with the magazine as a top editor, recalls an incident that revealed both qualities: “Jack was uncharacteristically raising his voice in an argument with a longtime contributor: ‘The trouble with you is that you’re in love with your own brain!’ he shouted. Later, a couple of us needled him about it. ‘Hey, Jack—we’re all in love with our own brains!’ He nodded and grinned. His wit was as dry as his eye for excess.” For a seemingly taciturn man, Jack was also prone to surprising revelations and a deep empathy rooted in the early death of his father. “Years ago, I was in my office, wrapping up some work before heading off to vacation on a tropical beach,” current Washingtonian editor Sherri Dalphonse remembers. “Jack came in and told me how he liked to keep small seashells in his pocket. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out this very flat, smooth piece of shell. He said he found rubbing on a smooth shell to be soothing. Then he asked me a favor: If I saw any like the one he was holding, could I bring them back for him? And I did—not only on that trip but on many others. From that day on, if I saw Jack reach into his pocket during a meeting, I’d smile.” Former longtime senior editor Ken DeCell recalls another telling moment: “When my young children begged me to quit smoking after my father died of lung cancer at age 63, Jack offered to split the cost of a smoke-ending week for me at Canyon Ranch in Arizona. When I returned smoke-free, he said if I stayed that way for the next six months, he’d reimburse me for the half that I had paid. I did, and he did.” Maybe because he had held the same job for so many years and almost never allowed himself anything like a real vacation, Jack was also very welcoming to staffers who wandered off to other publications and pursuits only to find that they missed the camaraderie on the second floor of 1828 L Street, where the magazine was based for almost half a century. At Washingtonian, you could go home again. More than a few editors and writers proved it over Jack’s 40 years at the helm. Jack retired as top editor in 2009, but he never really left Washingtonian. Until 2012, he still did a line edit on every story in every issue. From there, he moved on to a blog, About Editing and Writing, that frequently revisited the challenges of his tenure as editor.  After Jack had a pacemaker installed early in 2020, he sent out an email about his experience at Sibley Hospital: the care, the changing role of nurses, their rainbow of nationalities, on and on. Reading it, a veteran of the Limpert years couldn’t help but think that if Jack were still running the show, he already would have assigned a 10,000-word piece on “How Hospital Care Is Changing,” perhaps with sidebars on “10 Best ERs” and “Private-Care Suites of the Stars.” In addition to his wife, Jean, and daughters Ann, a Washingtonian editor, and Jeannie, a physician, Jack leaves behind three grandchildren and a magazine that will continue to bear his imprimatur for years to come. ______ Howard Means is a former senior writer and senior editor at Washingtonian. His first article for the magazine appeared in 1976.The post Jack Limpert, Longtime Editor of Washingtonian, Dies at Age 90 first appeared on Washingtonian.