NEW YORK - Brewster Yale Beach, an Episcopal priest and renowned psychotherapist who traced his ancestry to the publisher of the original New York Sun newspaper and founder of the Associated Press, has died at the age of 83.
Mr. Beach died in his sleep Tuesday [June 17, 2008] in a nursing home in Staatsburg, in upstate New York, according to his wife Sandra.
Mr. Beach had been in failing health for three years, and his wife said doctors attributed his death to long-term effects of a head injury suffered in a fall outside a Connecticut restaurant in 2005.
Mr. Beach's name reflected a family legacy dating from early colonial days. He was descended from William Brewster, a Pilgrim elder who arrived in America on the Mayflower, and Elihu Yale, the first benefactor of what would become Yale University.
His great-great-grandfather, Moses Yale Beach, was the second owner-publisher of the New York Sun, whose innovative idea for an alliance of newspapers sharing Mexican War dispatches in 1846 led to the creation of the Associated Press as a news cooperative.
In 2005, Mr. Beach presented the AP with family papers detailing his ancestor's role in that history. They showed that the news agency was founded two years prior to 1848, the year the AP had always cited as its own birthdate.
At the time, Mr. Beach said he had long known the contents of the documents but "never really got serious" about them until he learned that the AP was interested in acquiring them for its corporate archives. "I'm most happy that the telling letter of Moses Yale didn't get lost in the shuffle down the decades," he said.
The key document was an 1872 memorandum by Moses Sperry Beach, describing how the Sun publisher in 1846 had found a speedier method for receiving war news - a day ahead of the regular mail - and then offered to share it with other New York papers, four of which accepted.
The memo also made clear that a claim by Beach's principal rival, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, to having invented the AP was exaggerated.
Brewster Yale Beach was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 10, 1925 to Brewster Sperry and Orlena Weed Beach. Educated at Yale and the Virginia Theological Seminary, he became an Episcopal priest and psychotherapist embracing the ideas of psychology pioneer Carl Jung.
In 1943, during his time at Yale, Mr. Beach was drafted into the Army, but due to a rare and undiagnosed back ailment suffered a collapsed spine during infantry training.
"The Army doctors put him under deep anesthesia, piled sandbags on him to straighten him out and put him in a full body cast for most of a year," Sandra Beach said. "He ended up delivering pies to the Army base in Trenton."
Mr. Beach studied at New York's C.G. Jung Institute while simultaneously earning a master's degree in psychology from Drew University in Madison, N.J.
He later founded the Center for Jungian Studies in Rye, N.Y., taught in seminars, lectured widely and was a practicing psychotherapist in Manhattan for 25 years. He also was for many years the vicar of St. Peter's Episcopal church in Millbrook.