Otto Fuerbringer; Time Editor in 1960s Helped Start Money, People Magazines

Mr. Fuerbringer's son said his father always regretted the decision.

"He was very open to the cultural trends of the time and making sure Time magazine wrote about them," Jonathan Fuerbringer, a retired New York Times reporter, said by telephone.

Nonetheless, Mr. Fuerbringer found a successful formula during his eight years at the helm, as the magazine's circulation rose from 3 million to 5 million.

"Otto was Time magazine sprung to life," Halberstam wrote, "a living extension of the very magazine he edited."

Otto Fuerbringer was born into a family of Lutheran ministers and theologians in St. Louis on Sept. 10, 1910. He graduated from Harvard College, where he edited the Harvard Crimson, and worked for his hometown St. Louis Post-Dispatch before joining Time in 1942. As a national affairs writer, he penned Time's 1945 cover story about the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II.

He was Time's second-highest ranking editor for nine years before assuming the top job, against the wishes of many of the magazine's reporters, in 1960.

Later, as chief of Time Inc.'s magazine-development group, Mr. Fuerbringer secured a lasting legacy by overseeing the development of Money magazine in 1972 and People magazine in 1974.

According to a 1991 article in Greenwich magazine, another executive casually suggested, "Why don't we start a magazine called People?" Mr. Fuerbringer then wrote the prospectus for a magazine that "believes that most people are interested in what other people do," which led to one of the most successful magazine launches in publishing history.

Mr. Fuerbringer moved to California from Connecticut in 1999 and wrote a memoir, "On Time," last year.

In addition to his son, of Civitella in Val di Chiana, Italy, survivors include his wife of 68 years, Winona Gunn Fuerbringer of Fullerton; three other children, Peter Fuerbringer of Costa Mesa, Calif., Alexis Selwood of Los Angeles and Juliana Fuerbringer of Burlingame, Calif.; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.