Robert Clarke “Bob” Blair, a former Salt Lake Tribune reporter and opinion writer whose steady nerves on deadline helped the newspaper win its first Pulitzer Prize in 1957, died Monday at a Sandy nursing home.
He was 102.
Blair’s fourth daughter, Betsy, one of his 13 children, said the Virginia native, who spent most his life in Utah, died peacefully of natural causes.
Retired since 1985, Blair was among a team of Tribune reporters, photographers and editors awarded U.S. journalism’s highest prize for breaking coverage of a 1956 midair collision of two passenger planes over the Grand Canyon that killed 128 people.
The July 2, 1956, front page of The Salt Lake Tribune, with its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of a commercial air disaster near the Grand Canyon.
Sometimes called “the Colonel,” he worked for 40 years at The Tribune, with stints as general assignment reporter, rewrite man on the news desk and editor of the paper’s society and women’s sections. He also served for 10 years as its editorial page editor.
“He was one of the great characters of The Tribune,” said Terry Orme, former Tribune editor who started as a copy boy at newspaper in 1977. Opinion writers in those days, Orme said, were regarded with awe — and considered unapproachable — but Blair “was a very friendly guy. And he was funny.”
“The image of Bob Blair I have is: office attire, shirt and tie, maybe a sweater or a suit jacket, but a little disheveled,” said Orme, who left the newspaper in 2016. “He’d be walking around with his glasses low on his nose and carrying a stack of page proofs that were heavily marked up.”
Another former colleague recalled his calm and determination under pressure.
“One of the things that happens when you have 13 children is, you’re completely unflappable. That he was,” remembered Tim Fitzpatrick, a 40-year reporter, writer and editor at The Tribune who retired last year. “There was nothing that surprised him.”
After graduating in 1946 with a journalism degree from the University of Montana, according to his family’s obituary, Blair worked a reporter at the Billings Gazette for a year before moving to Salt Lake City with his college sweetheart and wife of what would be 73 years, Alice Drum. He took a job as a Tribune reporter shortly thereafter.
Sharp and well-spoken almost until the end, Blair enjoyed a gin and tonic and a fine cigar nightly, his daughter said, in a ritual he kept up until days before his death.
Fateful day
(The Blair family) Robert Clarke "Bob" Blair, a former Salt Lake Tribune reporter who helped the newspaper win its first Pulitzer Prize, died Jan. 20, 2025, at age 102.
The Tribune’s smoky newsroom, then at 143 S. Main in Salt Lake City, remained calm that otherwise quiet Saturday afternoon of June 30, 1956, when the first inklings came in via teletype of a midair collision of a United Airlines DC-7 and TWA Super Constellation over the Grand Canyon.
The crash would emerge as the world’s worst commercial aviation disaster up until then, killing all aboard and leaving wreckage and human remains strewn over miles of the desert.
“No one was running around hollering and screaming,” Mike Korologos, a retired advertising executive who was then a Tribune sports writer, recalled in 2017.
“A lot of the guys in the newsroom were veterans of World War II and the Korean War,” Korologos said. “They were tough old codgers and they were good under pressure.”
Then-Managing Editor Jim England sent a young and hard-charging reporter, Robert Alkire, and Jack White, a photographer, off in a chartered plane for Cedar City in hopes of reaching the crash scene.
Blair, then a reporter, joined others in the newsroom working dozens of sources by phone, gathering facts and ascertaining details on the flight paths of the fated planes, which had taken off from Los Angeles three minutes apart.
Later that night, England made Blair rewrite man for The Tribune’s first story, assigning him to pull together reportage from its reporters and wire services.
That Sunday morning coverage included detailed information from the two airlines, with photographs of the pilots and flight attendants, as well as crash-site graphics by Tribune artists.
In their Pulitzer citation in 1957, judges praised the paper’s “prompt and efficient coverage of the crash ... This was a team job that surmounted great difficulties in distance, time and terrain ... made possible because of the complete coordination of editors, rewrite men, laboratory photographers and technicians.”
The Tribune won a second Pulitzer in 2017 for its investigation of sexual assaults at Utah colleges.
Loved hiking
Interviewed when he was 95, Blair said England deserved the most credit for “us winning the prize. He realized right away what we needed to do. He was a wild man. He did things without advising [top editor] Art Deck, which he probably shouldn’t have done.”
Daughter Betsy said that while “a great conversationalist” and well-read storyteller with an impish sense of humor, her father never mentioned to her his part in winning the Pulitzer.
Celebration of life planned
Bob Blair’s family is planning a celebration of his life on Jan. 31 at Starks Funeral Parlor, 3651 S. 900 East, in Millcreek.
Blair eventually moved to St. George with his wife after he retired, taking a job as a janitor at what was then the city’s only bar, the Blarney Stone, to help fund hiking trips across southern Utah and destinations such as Nepal, Morocco, Peru and New Zealand.
His world adventures at age 76 were chronicled in a 1998 Tribune story.
“Twelve years, twice a week,’’ Blair said at the time of his regional hiking schedule. “Have to fit it around my work schedule that pays for the whole damned thing.”
