A graduate of Upsala College, Mr. Stinson wrote his first article in 1959 for Surburban Life magazine and served as a reporter for daily newspapers in Connecticut and New Jersey before joining the New York bureau of the Associated Press, where he was a general assignment reporter till 1970. He was a media consultant for the Chet Burger PR agency in Manhattan and a public speaking adviser for the Wasserman Institute (Mountainside, NJ). Stinson is noted for his three decades at AT&T, where he was a corporate spokesman before retiring in 2001 after 3,000 interviews with national and international media, handling a variety of issues, ranging from 100,000 job cuts and cell-phone introductions to abortion protests, gay rights and nationwide network failures. (In 1996, the Jack O'Dwyer Newsletter nicknamed him "Bad News" Burke.). Stinson was a guest speaker/chairman at various PR society conferences throughout the 1990s, an editorial board member and columnist for Ragan Communications and a contributor to a number of publications, including "The Harvard Business Review" and "The Public Relations Strategist." He also has been quoted in a half-dozen books about the corporate scene. Stinson sponsored writing scholarships at Upsala and taught English as a Second Language for New York's Chinatown Planning Council, the YWCA in Summit, N.J. and the Banff Centre for Learning in Canada. In recent years, Stinson has been a guest lecturer at MIT, Dusquesne, Farleigh Dickinson, Seton Hall, Baruch College and the state universities of New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. His first lecture at Rutgers was in 1999. In 2001, he was chosen by the university to lecture in Bosnia -- as part of a Fullbright Scholarship program -- where he spoke to students and faculty at three institutions, including the University of Sarajevo, in concert with the US State Department. He also heads the Eagle Pass Fund, an effort that has sent children to summer camps in Texas, Pennsylvania and Alberta, Canada, and has provided grants to university students in Hungary, Canada and the US. The fund also supports an arts program for seriously ill or abandoned children at a public hospital in Moscow and an intern program at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. In 2006 - 2007, the fund backed educational programs to help disadvantaged school children in Southwest Philadelphia and began an intern program at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, a music award at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and a joint effort with the Banff Centre in Canada to bring Russian classical musicians to North America. In 2008, the fund established a monthly cash award for nurse-of-the-month winners at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an annual award for most-improved students at ECS, a charitable organization in Philadelphia that runs education programs for the disadvantaged.