Biography/Personal Life

Wilfred Charles Heinz was born on January 11, 1915 in Mount Vernon, New York, the only child of Elizabeth (Thielke) Heinz and Frederick Louis Sylvester Heinz. His name was a combination of his maternal grandfather's name, Wilhelm, and his father's, Frederick. It was a German speaking household, but young Wilfred learned early on that German, when spoken on the street, would bring a beating from the neighborhood boys in the post World War I era. Although athletic, he was slight of build, and in his high school years Heinz ran track and played for the Mount Vernon High School hockey team. He was an avid reader and looked forward to reading the sports pages of the daily newspaper his father brought home every day. His father had been a typewriter repairman before becoming a salesman and in 1932 presented his son with a Remington portable typewriter that became the vehicle for essays, college papers, dispatches from World War II, newspaper columns, magazine articles, and books for a span of over 50 years.

In the fall of 1933 Heinz enrolled as a freshman at Middlebury College in Vermont. It was a college that his parents, with a loan from friends, could afford. While attending a planning meeting for the 1934 Middlebury College Winter Carnival, he set eyes on the co-chair, Elizabeth Bartlett Bailey ("Betty"), a junior and native Vermonter, who was addressing the gathering. Immediately attracted to the petite blue-eyed brunette, he turned to his roommate and said, "I'm going to marry that girl." They dated from the following spring throughout their remaining college days and post graduation until returning to the Middlebury campus to marry in the college chapel on January 18, 1941.

Heinz was already working for the New York Sun and his wife had earned her M.A. degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1939. They resided in a small apartment on East 53rd Street. Betty worked as a vocational guidance counselor to young women at the YWCA while Bill pounded the pavement for stories for the paper's city desk. Two and a half years after marrying, Heinz shipped off to cover the war. Upon his return in 1945 the two bought a small house on the shore of Long Island Sound in Old Greenwich, CT. Here they started their family with the birth of Barbara Bailey Heinz in July of 1947 and then Gayl Bailey Heinz in February of 1951. In between Bill was writing sports for the paper until it closed its doors in 1950. He continued his writing with longer pieces as a freelance writer for national magazines.

After the hurricanes of the early 1950's deposited the salty Long Island waters in their home causing evacuations by boat, the Heinz family moved inland to Stamford, Ct in 1955. Here Bill continued selling stories to magazines until earning enough to concentrate on writing his first novel, The Professional (1958), followed by more articles and two more books, The Surgeon (1963) and Run to Daylight! (1963). While Bill attended the Sonny Liston-Cassius Clay Heavyweight Championship fight in Miami in February of 1964, his 16 year old daughter, Barbara, became ill. Following the fight, Bill flew to New York to write the script for the newsreels that would appear in the movies. Betty summoned him to Stamford where Barbara was hospitalized, her organs starting to shut down. Bill made it there in time to see her before she passed away from an undiagnosed infection on February 27. That spring the family took her ashes to Dorset, Vermont to scatter them where she had spent the happiest time of her life at a camp the previous summer. A year later Betty and Gayl moved to the village of Dorset, and Bill joined them in 1966 when they bought a house on the mountainside on the edges of town. Here Betty and Bill remained for thirty-six years during which time Bill produced his remaining books (MASH, Emergency, Once They Heard the Cheers, American Mirror, What a Time It Was, When We Were One: Stories Of World War II), co-edited The Book of Boxing, and continued to write for various magazines.

Betty passed away on February 16, 2002, after years of home care for Alzheimer's Disease. Bill, unable to stay in the house, moved to an assisted living facility in nearby Bennington, VT where, weakend by old age and minor strokes, he passed away at 2:27 a.m. on February 27, 2008 (the 44th anniversary of Barbara's death) at the age of 93. His and Betty's ashes were scattered on the mountainside behind their Dorset home that they loved so dearly.