Lee Woodruff Of U-M TV Dies

Lee Woodruff Of U-M TV Dies

Lee M. (Mack) Woodruff Jr., 51, of 1505 Shadford Rd., prize-winning senior producer of the University of Michigan Television Center, died suddenly Wednesday at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital of cancer.

Winner of numerous national awards for excellence in writing and TV program producing, Mr. Woodruff in 1964 led a television crew to Antarctica under National Science Foundation and U.S. Navy sponsorship to film a documentary on the South Polar Continent.

The 10-show series resulting from the 59-day expedition, like many of his other productions, was shown on television stations coast-to-coast.

MR. WOODRUFF, a yachtsman by avocation who took part in a number of Chicago-Mackinaw and Port Huron-Mackinaw sailboat races, was a son of the late editor of the Grand Rapids Press. Lee M. Woodruff Sr., and was employed by The Ann Arbor News prior to joining the U-M staff 20 years ago.

He was a past president of the Ann Arbor Town Club and a past president of the Ann Arbor Ecology Center board of directors.

Holder of bachelor and master’s degrees from the U-M, Mr. Woodruff twice won Hopwood Awards in creative writing in the fiction division while a student.

He also won an American Psychological Foundation’s Science Writer’s Award, an American Bar Association Award, a National Institute for Education and Television Award, and others for his writing and television productions.

Mr. Woodruff was a Golden Gloves boxing champion in his youth. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II.

Memorial services will be held at 4 p.m. Friday at the First Unitarian Church here, with the Rev. Erwin A. Gaede officiating. Memorial contributions may be made in his name to the Ann Arbor Ecology Center, 417 Detroit St . Cremation has been made under arrangement by the Muehlig Funeral Chapel.