Obituaries

Garven F. HudginsJournalist, Executive

Garven F. Hudgins, 84, a former Associated Press journalist who later became an executive for an education association, died June 23 at Manor Care nursing home in Potomac. He had dementia.

Mr. Hudgins, who worked briefly as a police reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin, joined AP Newsfeatures in New York in 1951. Six years later, he joined the AP foreign staff and worked in Paris and London until 1960, when he was assigned to Istanbul as bureau chief. His arrival coincided with a military coup d'état. His bureau oversaw news from Cyprus and Israel, so Mr. Hudgins covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

He rejoined the AP Newsfeatures staff in New York in 1962, went back to Paris in 1964 and became Cairo bureau chief in 1965. Mr. Hudgins covered the 1967 Arab-Israeli war from Cairo until he was incarcerated in a hotel and expelled from Egypt by ship with most of the rest of the Western press corps.

Mr. Hudgins returned to the United States and was assigned to Washington as AP's education writer, a job he held until he retired from the news agency in 1971.

His second career was as director of the office of institutional research for the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. By the time he retired from that organization in 1989, he was special assistant to the president for university relations.

Mr. Hudgins was born in Portsmouth, Va., and served in the Army Air Forces as an air crew radio operator during World War II in the Pacific. He graduated from Yale University after the war.

He was a member of the Popham Seminar, a gathering of journalists who covered the civil rights movement. His interests included Civil War history and classical music. He was a resident of Potomac for 40 years.

His wife of 57 years, Jane Moore Hudgins, died in 2005.

Survivors include two sons, Garven Hudgins of Potomac and Robert Hudgins of Centreville, Md.; three grandchildren; and twin great-granddaughters.

-- Patricia Sullivan