Roy Welts Nickerson ’51 died on March 24, 2006, in San Diego, California.

Born in Presque Isle, Maine, on May 6, 1927, he prepared for college at Presque Isle High School and Caribou High School. Five days after his graduation from high school he was inducted into the U.S. Army, serving a year in Italy in from 1945 to 1946. Following his discharge from the Army he worked at the Presque Isle Herald Star until the fall of 1947, when he entered the University of Maine. He transferred to Bowdoin as a sophomore and graduated cum laude as a member of the Class of 1951. Following his graduation, he returned to service in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Europe. He wrote a series of articles for Maine newspapers on his travels in Europe and Central America. He taught in the English department at the University of Arizona and in the Bucksport (Maine) public school system. In 1960 he worked for British Overseas Airways Corp. in New York and then in Beverly Hills, California, as a public relations director. He wrote for the Arizona Daily Star for a year, the Monterey (Calif.) Herald from 1963 to 1972, for the Maui News in Hawaii, where he was the Lahaina bureau chief, and as a copy editor for the Monterey Herald from 1981 to 1991. He was a writer and historian at the Lahaina Restoration Foundation in Hawaii from 1991 to 1993, and a freelance writer in Key West, Florida, from 1993 to 1994. He retired in 1994. He was the author of numerous books, including Brother Whale, Robert Louis Stevenson in California, Sea Otters: A Natural History, and Lahaina, Royal Capital of Hawaii. He is survived by a nephew, Christopher Charles Barnes, of El Paso, Texas.