Arthur G. Turner Jr., a former newspaper reporter and life insurance salesman, died Feb. 11 at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville. He was 86.
His son, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles A.P. Turner, said his father's health had been weakened by a stroke a few years ago. A recent bout of influenza, he said, proved fatal.
Mr. Turner was born in Baltimore, the son of Arthur Gordon Turner Sr. and Florence Brainerd Turner. He graduated from West Nottingham Academy in Colora in 1938 and attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia before joining the Army Air Corps in the early 1940s. He served as a communications officer in the 409th Bombardment Group, which conducted missions in Europe during World War II. He received an honorable discharge with the rank of captain.
He then wrote for The New York Herald Tribune from its Washington bureau. While at the newspaper, he met Katherine Clemson, a nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and they married in 1948 in Westminster. Mr. Turner then became an agent for the Fred Smith Real Estate Co. in Bethesda, where the couple lived at the time.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Turner was hired by Flynn & Emrich, an iron-casting company in South Baltimore, as a salesman. Two decades later, he began selling policies for the George Boynton Agency of the Mass Mutual Life Insurance Co. He retired from the agency in 1987 but continued to assist some of his clients with their insurance needs for another decade.
Mr. Turner retained a decades-long connection to his days as a communications officer, mostly by operating a ham radio from his home of 43 years in Towson's Southland Hills neighborhood. For the past 11 years, Mr. Turner lived at Broadmead.
Services were Saturday.
Survivors include his wife, of Lexington Park; their son, based in Sasebo, Japan; two daughters, Margo Turner of Greenbelt and Katie Turner of Columbia; a brother, Philip H. Turner of Sykesville; and two grandchildren.