The ACES Board of Directors awarded its 2024 Glamann Award posthumously to former ACES Education Fund president and longtime beloved mentor Henry Fuhrmann.
The Glamann Award, named for ACES co-founder Hank Glamann, was created in 2007 to recognize people and organizations that have significantly contributed to ACES and the craft of editing. The Board of Directors selects the recipient each year.
The award was accepted by Fuhrmann’s daughter Angela Fuhrmann at ACES' 28th annual conference, ACES 2024 San Diego: Unleashing Creativity.
“This organization and the people in it meant so much to my dad and I know he would feel so honored to be recognized in this way,” she told the audience in San Diego upon accepting the award. “If he were up here right now to accept an award from ACES about his contributions, I could imagine him redirecting all of his ‘thank yous’ and ‘congratulations’ back to you all. He would probably say that it was the people within the organization that kept him going.”
Fuhrmann, who died in 2022, was considered a mentor to so many editors over his long career at the Los Angeles Times and then, after his retirement in 2016, as an adjunct instructor at the University of Southern California — not to mention as a trainer for countless sessions at ACES conferences and workshops, and as a leader in the Asian American Journalists Association.
ACES Education Fund
Fuhrmann was a longtime ACES member when he joined the Board of Directors of the ACES Education Fund, and he became that Board’s president in 2016. He was devoted to fostering editing among students, continuing the Education Fund’s mission of providing at least five scholarships per year.
Soon he expanded that mission. He was instrumental in the creation of the Bill Walsh Scholarship, working with the family of the beloved editor and author to provide an annual award to a student of editing in news. The Walsh Scholarship program began in 2017.
Fuhrmann subsequently led an effort, working with the Dow Jones News Fund, to both honor another long-heralded editor and champion of diversity in editing, and fulfill a longtime ACES Education Fund goal of funding continuing education for mid-career editors from a variety of backgrounds: the Richard S. Holden Diversity Fellowship. Three sets of Holden Fellows were selected under Fuhrmann’s tutelage.
Striking the hyphens
Fuhrmann also was a founding member of ACES’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Committee, acting as a guiding hand to influence programming at ACES’ national conferences, and other efforts.
He had gained national acclaim for persuading the Associated Press Stylebook, and later other style leaders like those at The New York Times, to strike the hyphens in references to a person’s dual heritage, such as “Asian American” and “African American.”
He wrote for the Conscious Style Guide in 2018, “Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American.”
He was in the room at the 2019 ACES conference when the AP made the announcement and the packed audience rose as one to give him a standing ovation.
Math lover
Fuhrmann also loved math. He studied engineering at Caltech and UCLA, and he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For an ACES web article, he was asked to choose his favorite ACES memory, and he cited having the chance to invite one of his heroes, mathematician and author John Allen Paulos, to co-present with him at an ACES conference.
A newspaper clip from Fuhrmann’s high school days shows that he placed first in spelling in a Future Business Leaders of America competition — the article misspelled his name, among other typos — and that he tied for first place in a Math Association of America competition.
ACES is committed to honoring Fuhrmann by continuing his work advocating for editors as well as diversity and inclusion, and ACES has partnered with AAJA’s Los Angeles chapter to provide an annual mentorship award in Fuhrmann’s name.
Neil Holdway recently completed his term as the president of the ACES Board of Directors.
