About the author
A journalist and consultant, Rush Loving, Jr. began his career as a photo-journalist selling news pictures to local newspapers while an undergraduate at the University of Richmond. He sold his first magazine story on the Confederate ranger John S. Mosby while a college freshman. Upon graduation he joined the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a photo-journalist, and after a two-year leave to serve as an Army lieutenant with the National Security Agency Mr. Loving rejoined the paper, training in various newsroom positions before becoming a reporter. In 1962 he took the job of police reporter at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot where he stayed for a year before taking a post at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In 1965 Mr. Loving became business editor of the Times-Dispatch, where, charged with increasing readership of the business pages, he used human-interest stories to double readership in only two years.After four years he was named an associate editor of FORTUNE magazine. His stories at Fortune included an exposé of Penn Central’s bookkeeping scandal and bankruptcy, the French Rothschilds’ takeover of Copperweld Corp., an exposé of Amtrak’s mismanagement, a first-hand story on a boardroom coup at United Airlines, an article that made the case for the creation of Conrail, and such human interest subjects as a profile of a Mississippi towboat captain, a rare inside view of Howard Hughes’s empire and John DeLorean’s controversial exit from General Motors. Mr. Loving also was a leader in the move to make FORTUNE more readable and more in tune with the demands of modern readers, and in 1977 he was a key member of the task force that redesigned the magazine into a biweekly publication, a change that increased readership dramatically and multiplied earnings substantially.
In 1979 Mr. Loving left FORTUNE to serve for a year at the White House as Assistant Director of the Office of Management and Budget, where he headed all public affairs and media relations. On his departure from OMB he continued writing on occasion but concentrated most of his time on consulting, specializing in transportation economics, issues before Congress and corporate communications problems. Many of his clients were transportation companies.
Now in semi-retirement, Mr. Loving is an adjunct member of the faculty of the Intermodal Transportation Institute, which is part of the University of Denver, and continues to write, most recently producing articles for Trains magazine and op ed pieces for the Providence Journal and working on a new book.