News reached the Gazette recently of the death last July of Peter D. Bunzel in Los Angeles. He was 88 and had been a Gazette reporter in the 1940s and 1950s.

Later he was a writer for The New Yorker, entertainment editor of Life magazine, co-founder, editor and publisher of Seattle Magazine, editor of West Magazine and the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and TV critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. His journalistic skills in his youthful years at the Gazette impressed Henry Beetle Hough and Elizabeth Bowie Hough, editors and publishers of the paper. Reportedly they asked him to succeed them. The lure of big city journalism and the West Coast sent him elsewhere, but he always retained a deep affection for the Vineyard and the Gazette.

He was born in New York city in 1927, a son of Dr. E. Everett Bunzel and Harriet (Harvey) Bunzel, longtime seasonal residents in Edgartown. He was a graduate of the Kent School in Kent, Conn., and of Princeton University, class of 1949. At Princeton, he was editor and chairman of the university’s newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. He spent 16 months in the U.S. Army in World War II

He is survived by his wife, Suzanne Belcher Platt of Los Angeles; a brother, John H. Bunzel of Belmont, Calif.; and three sons by his first wife, the late Jane Cole: Robert H. Bunzel of Oakland, Calif., Jeffrey H. Bunzel of New York city, and John D. Bunzel of Los Angeles, Calif.; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by a fourth son, Cole.