RALEIGH (ABP) — Career journalist and champion for a free Baptist press R.G. “Gene” Puckett died May 12, months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Puckett, 80, worked as a Baptist journalist longer than any person in the 20th century. He was a founding director of Associated Baptist Press and chairman of the board.
A native of Kentucky, Puckett was a graduate of Western Kentucky University and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
R.G. Puckett displays an engraved clock presented to him as award for lifetime achievement in 2011. (ABPnews photo)
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After pastorates in Kentucky and in Ohio, at age 25 he became editor of the Ohio Baptist Messenger and director of Baptist student work for Southern Baptists in Ohio in 1958. He left in 1961 to become pastor of First Baptist Church in Dunedin, Fla.
In 1963, Puckett began work with the Western Recorder, first as assistant editor and later promoted to associate editor. In 1966, he was named editor of the Maryland Baptist, which also published the New England Baptist and the Penn-Jersey Baptist.
Between 1979 and 1982, he was executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit group founded in 1947 to defend, protect and preserve religious liberty and its corollary, the separation of church and state.
Puckett returned to journalism in 1982, serving as editor of North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder. In 1990, he joined the editors of the Religious Herald and other Baptist state papers to form Associated Baptist Press as a free and unfettered news service hours after the firing of the two top editors of Baptist Press by the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. Puckett called that date, July 17, “a day to live in Baptist infamy” and editorialized about it each year on its anniversary until his retirement in 1998.
ABP recognized Puckett in 2011 with the Greg Warner Lifetime Achievement Award in Religious Journalism. Puckett credited his mentor C.R. Daley, who hired him at the Western Recorder, and contemporaries of Daley’s like Texas Baptist Standard Editor E.S. James; John Jeter Hurt, who edited both the Baptist Standard and Georgia’s Christian Index; and Reuben Alley of the Religious Herald with teaching him about the integrity it took to be a Baptist editor.
“The effectiveness of any democracy depends on an informed constituency, and if Baptists don’t know, they can’t do,” Puckett said.
An endowment fund established in 2006 with a $125,000 lead gift from Puckett's long-time friend and fellow church member, the late Ed Vick of Raleigh’s First Baptist Church, bears Puckett's name. Earnings from the fund support the ABPnews student internship program.
“Gene Puckett stood tall as a biblical and theological scholar; devoted churchman; exemplary husband, father and grandfather; and a professional journalist of the highest caliber,” said David Wilkinson, ABP executive director.
“Gene gave his best to his calling and to his craft,” Wilkinson said. “His hundreds of editorials across the decades stand as a tribute to the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his convictions as a Baptist Christian. His prophetic voice rang clearly, courageously and honestly, sometimes painfully so.”
Survivors include Puckett’s wife of 58 years, the former Robbie Lake of Mackville, Ky., two daughters and grandchildren.
Bob Allen ([email protected]) is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.