GREENVILLE - Renowned Delta travel journalist Leo Bernard Bern Keating, who wrote more than two dozen books, has died at 88.
Keating, who had lived in Greenville since 1946, died Monday at Delta Regional Medical Center.
He and his wife, photographer Franke Keating, frequently visited friends in Greenwood.
The couple contributed to one collection of illustrations that won a special Pulitzer Prize. Bern Keating also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
Bern Keating's work also included more than 800 magazine articles, with his wife handling the bulk of the photography.
He was born in Canada and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arkansas in 1938 with a bachelor of arts degree. After a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he and his wife moved to Greenville.
He first opened a photography studio, but turned to travel photography after a chance assignment for Collier's magazine.
He turned in his camera for a keyboard after his wife began traveling with him as the photographer half of the photojournalism team.
Keating wrote prolifically on travel and history.
He penned articles for periodicals such as Smithsonian, Travel and Leisure, Town and Country, Look, Life, Holiday, National Geographic, Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest and The New Yorker.
The Pulitzer Prize was for a volume of photographs of Civil War battlefields published by the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.
In a Commonwealth article published in 2003, Keating said he was lucky to see so much of the world. With the help of magazine expense accounts, he was able to live in fine hotels and travel first-class when he could barely pay his gas bill.
He circled the globe five times. Four of those journeys lasted four to five months each, and the other was a 20-day whirlwind in 1975, sponsored by the State Department. In that trip, he traveled to 19 national capitals to invite journalists to visit the United States for the Bicentennial.
The couple sometimes would be on the road for several months - for example, maybe six months in Alaska or four months in Pakistan.
Keating remembered the filth of Baghdad, where he recalled seeing a street "paved from gutter to gutter with human excrement" with children playing next to it. "I have not been there since Saddam, but there's nothing he could do to make Baghdad worse than it was," he said.
Some trips were perilous.
"I've been picked up by police as a spy just because I had a camera," Keating said. "I was picked up by a policeman in Syria for asking the way to the airport."
Keating said his favorite place to see was Paris. The couple's travels took them to some of the world's most spectacular sites, such as the Taj Mahal. Keating remembered the way the spectators all gasped when they saw that landmark.
"The first time you really see it, it staggers you off your feet," he said. "And it does it to everybody."
The couple was married 64 years.
"There has never been a couple more considerably in love, ever in history," Bern Keating said. "I am mad about that woman, and apparently she must be about me, to put up with what she does."
Survivors also include a son, Dr. John Geoffrey Keating of Atlanta, Ga.
Funeral services will be 2 p.m. Wednesday at Boone-Wells Funeral Home.
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