Peter A. Jay, a former Washington Post correspondent in Saigon who reported on the Vietnam War before decamping to his family farm in rural Maryland, where he raised horses, published a weekly newspaper and chronicled the state in a wide-ranging column for the Baltimore Sun, died Jan. 23 at a hospital in Bel Air, Md. He was 83.
The cause was complications from a lung infection, said his wife, Irna Jay.
Mr. Jay, who began his column in 1974 and continued it off and on for 24 years, was an elegant and perceptive observer of Maryland and its people, as fascinated by Chesapeake Bay watermen as he was by the senators, governors, moguls and tycoons who made headlines each day. He wrote about presidential campaigns and statehouse controversies, often through a conservative lens, but he also filed lyrical dispatches about the changing of the seasons, the woes of the Baltimore Orioles, the return of rhymed poetry, and the quirks of his horses and cattle at Windmill Hill Farm, where he lived near Havre de Grace, at the head of the bay.
Publishing as often as three times a week, he reflected on the careers of Maryland politicians such as Paul Sarbanes, the long-serving Democratic senator who had “an odd lack of sparkle for one so brilliant,” as Mr. Jay put it in a 1985 piece, “The Puzzle of Paul.” The column, which was often quoted in profiles of the senator, went on to liken Sarbanes to Puritan clergyman “Increase Mather — a man of sobriety and rectitude, quick to spot the shortcomings of others, but without much humor or imagination.”
Mr. Jay later wrote about making a 100-mile voyage across the Chesapeake Bay in his old wooden boat, the Sea Horse. (Spending the night on board with a friend, “a propane lantern gave us light and warmth. A little bourbon did the same.”) He wrote end-of-year columns in verse, staking his claim as Maryland’s Ian Frazier or Roger Angell: “Sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ for William Jews, and sing again for Harry Hughes.” (The line referred to one of the state’s health-care executives and one of its ex-governors.) And he wrote about the difficulties of running what is now a 500-acre farm, even as he was quick to point out the beauty of the land.
“On the oaks, the white oaks especially, the leaves of last summer are still clinging to the branches,” he wrote one January. “The tenacity of the dead oak leaves is celebrated; when the wind blows they rustle and rattle, shiver and shake, but they don’t let go.”
Whatever the subject, his column concluded with a brief but elegant biographical note: “Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.” It was the sign-off of a man who came from a prominent family but wore his privilege lightly, and who seemed at home whether he was fox-hunting, shoveling manure, reporting from the battlefield or competing for steeplechase trophies.
“He was patrician. He was elegant and reserved in his own way. But he liked cleaning out barns, and he liked hanging out with G.I.s,” said former Post journalist Peter L.W. Osnos, his reporting partner in Saigon.
A direct descendant of John Jay, the New York jurist who served as president of the Continental Congress, U.S. secretary of foreign affairs and the first chief justice of the United States, Peter Augustus Jay was born in Manhattan on Nov. 27, 1940.
His father, a farmer and horsebreeder, served in an Army artillery unit in Italy and the Pacific during World War II. After he was discharged, he bought Windmill Hill Farm and moved the family to Maryland, where he had gone fox-hunting before the war. Mr. Jay’s mother became a conservationist and garden-club leader and ran unsuccessfully for the Maryland House of Delegates when Mr. Jay was a teen.
After graduating from Milton Academy prep school in Massachusetts, Mr. Jay studied English at Harvard College, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1962. He joined the Peace Corps shortly after its founding, serving for two years in Peru, and fell into journalism after he returned home to Maryland, discovering through a friend that there was a job opening at the Aegis, a weekly paper in Bel Air.
Mr. Jay wrote features, news articles and editorials before joining The Post in 1965. He covered Prince George’s County and the Maryland State House in Annapolis, and in 1970 he was sent to Saigon, where he completed an 18-month tour as Indochina bureau chief at a time when American troops were pulling out of the country and military morale was low.
For a Vietnam series called “Army in Anguish,” Mr. Jay partnered with Osnos to interview enlisted men as well as high-ranking U.S. officials, including an Army general who was granted anonymity to speak frankly “about the plague of drugs, about the growing rift between draftees and career men, about the difficulty of maintaining order and motivation among bored garrison troops far from home with nothing to do,” as the two reporters put it.
“Duty, honor, country,” they wrote. “Where are the old values — the things old soldiers counted on, the traditions that held the Army together? Not here.”
Mr. Jay returned to Washington in 1972, working as The Post’s deputy metro editor, and later that year he was awarded a Nieman journalism fellowship to study at Harvard. But with his mother’s health failing, he was eager to return to the family farm. He moved to Windmill Hill in 1973, around the same time he married one of his Post colleagues, local reporter Irna Moore, and wrangled a columnist job at the Sun.
With his wife, he also bought the Record, a weekly newspaper in Havre de Grace. They ran it for more than 15 years, working with young reporters who were often sent their way by a friend at The Post, managing editor Howard Simons, before selling the publication in 1989 to the Times Mirror Co., which owned the Sun.
Through it all, Mr. Jay continued to write his column — he published a selection of his commentary, “Timepieces,” in 2022 — in addition to running charter tours out of Havre de Grace using a repurposed Chesapeake Bay workboat. He also worked on conservation efforts, serving as a board member of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and co-founding the Harford Land Trust, which has helped protect more than 12,000 acres of Harford County parks, forest and farmland, according to the group’s website.
His first marriage, to Stephanie Gerard, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, of Havre de Grace, survivors include two children from his second marriage, William Jay of Alexandria, Va., and Sarah Jay, who now runs the family farm; and three grandchildren.
Reflecting on the job of a columnist in one of his last pieces for the Sun, Mr. Jay noted that he had received hundreds of letters over the years, including the occasional piece of hate mail.
“Taken as a whole, reader response is the main reason why column writers — or this column writer, anyway — find the activity worthwhile,” he wrote. “Without response, it’s a Sisyphean task. The writer pushes his 800 words up the hill every few days; then they vanish like smoke on the wind, and he has to start again. But as long as someone notices, whether to applaud or throw fruit, the effort doesn’t seem wasted.”
