John Virtue's Obituary
John Virtue, foreign correspondent and educator, dead at 81
VIRTUE, John who was a foreign correspondent for UPI, spent the better part of three decades chasing the news around Latin America while history and revolutions shaped and changed his life and career, died Saturday morning at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. He was 81
Virtue retired in July of last year from his post as director of the International Media Center at the School of Journalism, Florida International University. He had been there for 25 years, crowning a long career in journalism by educating more than 8,000 mid-career journalists in Latin American and the Caribbean.
Before that, Virtue had spent most of his professional life as a correspondent for United Press International (UPI) most of it in Latin America, where he managed at various times the Mexico City, Caracas and Sao Paulo bureaus, reporting on events through the region during the heady decades of the ‘50s to the ‘80s.
In addition to his years at UPI and Florida International University, he worked in newspapers such as El Mundo, in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Miami News, in Miami, Florida.
He also pursued his other interests authoring books on topics as diverse as entrepreneurship and racial integration in Mexican baseball, the history of four U.S. Army regiments of black soldiers who built the Alaska Highway during World War II, and biographies of expatriate artists in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
John Francis Virtue was born in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada and graduated in journalism from Carleton University at the time Carleton College, in Ottawa.
He is survived by his wife Anna, his sister Dawn, his daughter-in-law Laura and by two granddaughters, Madeline Gene and Samantha Rose. He was predeceased by his only child, his son Mark David, who passed away at the end of last year.
Arrangements by Blasberg-Rubin-Zilbert Memorial Chapel (305) 538-6371
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