Dear Jo,
   Thank you very much.  Treat as a state secret: he was 82.  Or 81---we don't
know; birther laws would have derailed his bid to succeed Kennedy in '68.
Here is some other info---OK I've written it flip-ly, but the nuggets are
there, and you can add things I've missed:

Bob Regan's career began with teaching airplane identification at Floyd Bennett Field as a 15-year-old during WW II. Realizing he might miss the war while learning to fly, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the Army in 1945. He would have been in the Japan invasion force if not for the atom bomb, but he went there for the occupation, and then did CB-type work in the Pacific. Thus he had a taste of three services, and Harry Truman took care of finishing his education. Friends in the British Royal Navy arranged for a London deed shop to create him the First Earl of Nussex, thus completing the compass rose of Sussex, Essex, Wessex, and Middlesex.

He met Mary in 1949 while both were doing college at night, and after about 15,000 rubbers of bridge, the English and history majors married in 1957. Bob got his first reporting job on the Journal of Commerce, and moved to UPI and Paramus, New Jersey, with three boys in tow by Oct. 1963. Then shots rang out and changed his life. Driving to church on Sun. Nov. 24, his son Kenneth's first memory is Bob's prediction that Oswald would not live out the day. That was the first of many prognostications that would eventually win Bob two glass-owl prizes from Chilton Corp. for economic forecasting. While Mary taught the kids to pretend that nobody existed as part of her protocol on the Fair Housing Council, Bob delved into mysteries of trajectories and forensics as a data-sifter for Harold Weisberg's Whitewash series among others. Two more assassinations and their fourth child followed in 1968-69. All four kids were middle-named for British generals, the girl for Sir Frederick Stanley Maude.

Shortly afterward Bob ascended to be Non-Ferrous Editor of Iron Age magazine, which at first sounds like charge of lollipops at Willie Wonka's, but it was the dawning of the Age of Aluminum. He hailed the lightening of cars after the 1974 Energy Crisis, railed their Reagan-era re-bulking as "Family Trucks", and skewered Lee Iacocca as standing for "I Am Crazy Over Computer-Controlled Automobiles." Iron Age and AMM were his focus up until September 2001, when Reed Elsevier's pulling of Chilton was arguably as traumatic as the impact on the North Tower which he felt while bussing his tray in a ground-floor eatery. Leaving his assassinations-research briefcase behind, he lit out northeast against the crowd, was blocks away when the second plane hit, and found an Arab-owned hangout to escape the crowds and finally call home. He continued with [AMM and] Purchasing Magazine and the Magnesium Monthly Review right up until the MMR Mar. 30 issue, in which he invoked Nicolai Kondratieff with wit as sharp as always, and noted the disaster in Japan. His harnessing of words and eye for the rub in figures will be missed by [everyone, even we who were cubs when he was grizzled.]

Sincerely, hard to be completely sorrowful after writing that
(and my Mom approves),   ---Ken Regan