Pulitzer Winner Walter Mears Dies, AP’s ‘Boy On The Bus’

WASHINGTON — 

Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87.

“I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics.

Mears died Thursday at his apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight days after being diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer, said his daughters Susan Mears of Boulder, Colorado, and Stephanie Mears of Austin, Texas, who were with him.

They said he was visited on his last night by a minister, with whom he discussed Alf Landon, the losing Republican presidential candidate in 1936, a year after his birth.

Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became legend among peers. In 1972, Timothy Crouse featured Mears in The Boys on the Bus, a book chronicling the efforts and antics of reporters covering that year’s presidential campaign.

Crouse recounted how, immediately after a political debate, a reporter from The Boston Globe called out to the man from AP: “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?” The question became a catchphrase among political reporters to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,” Mears cracked in 2005.

FILE – In this 1976 file photo, Associated Press Special Correspondent Walter R. Mears, right, talks with presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in Concord, N.H., before the New Hampshire Primary.

It was a natural question. Mears had to bang out stories about campaign debates while they were still underway. Newspaper editors would see his lead on the wire before their own reporters filed their stories. So it was defensive for others on the press bus to wonder what Mears was leading with, and to ask him.

Early in his Washington career, he was assigned to write updates on the 1962 congressional elections. His bureau chief asked a senior colleague to size up how Mears worked under pressure and report back. “Mears writes faster than most people think,” the evaluator wrote, then, tongue in cheek, “and sometimes faster than he thinks.”

“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,” said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”

Kathleen Carroll, a former AP executive editor, said he taught generations of journalists “how to watch and listen and ask and explain.”

“Walter was also a wonderful human being,” she said. “He loved his family — being a grandfather was one of the great joys of his life. He loved golf and the Red Sox, in that order. He loved politics and he loved the AP.”

Mears didn’t seem to mind being known as a pacesetter. “I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career,” he recalled in his 2003 memoir, Deadlines Past. Over four decades, Mears covered 11 presidential campaigns, from Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 to Bush-Gore in 2000, as well as the political conventions, the campaigns, debates, the elections and, finally, the pomp and promise of the inaugurations.

In tribute, Jules Witcover, who covered politics for The Sun in Baltimore, said Mears combined speed and accuracy with an eye for the telling detail.

“His uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any story and relate it in spare, lively prose showed the way for a generation of wire service disciples, and he did so with a zest for the nomad’s life on the campaign trail,” Witcover said.

FILE – President Bill Clinton is interviewed by Associated Press reporters, White House correspondent Terry Hunt, second from right and AP special correspondent Walter Mears, aboard Air Force One en route to Brunei, on Nov. 14, 2000.

At other times in his career, Mears served AP as Washington bureau chief and as the wire service’s primary news executive, the executive editor in the New York headquarters. But he missed writing and went back to it.

He left once, to be Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News, but returned to AP nine months later. “I couldn’t take the pace,” he said. “It was too slow.”

In 1977 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the election in which Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated a sitting president, Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited his office through the resignation in disgrace of Richard M. Nixon.

It was the Pulitzer, not the Crouse catchphrase, for which Mears thought he would be remembered. Asked to address a later crop of Pulitzer winners, he told them they would never have to wonder what would be the first words of their obituaries: They would be, he said, “Pulitzer Prize-winning.”

Winning his Pulitzer, Mears said, was “the sweetest moment in a career that is like no other line of work.”

In his lead paragraphs, Mears captured the essence of events, not just the words but the music.

• When the 1968 Democrats, in a convention held in the midst of antiwar rioting on the streets of Chicago, finally chose their nominee, he wrote: “Hubert H. Humphrey, apostle of the politics of joy, won the Democratic presidential nomination tonight under armed guard.”
• When, earlier that year, a gunman killed John Kennedy’s brother: “Robert F. Kennedy died of gunshot wounds early today, prey like his president brother to the savagery of an assassin.”
• And, in 1976, when former peanut farmer Carter took the presidency from its accidental occupant: “In the end, the improbable Democrat beat the unelected Republican.”

Said Terry Hunt, former AP White House correspondent and deputy bureau chief in Washington: “You can’t talk about Walter without using the word legendary. He was a brilliant writer, astonishingly fast, colorful and compelling.”

David Espo, former special correspondent and assistant Washington bureau chief agreed. “No one ever wrote faster or with more clarity, nor worked harder and made it look easier than Walter did,” he said. “He took care to mentor those less talented than he, in other words, all of us.”

Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in Lexington, the son of an executive of a chemical company. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1956 and within a week joined the AP in Boston.

In those days, news was written on typewriters and transmitted on teletypes. “They were slow and they clattered,” Mears once wrote, “but the din was music to me.”

His first assignment was far from the din. He single-handedly covered the Vermont Legislature. “It was fun covering a citizen legislature with a representative from every hamlet in the state” — 276 of them, he recalled years later, including one elected by his townspeople to keep the fellow from being eligible for welfare.

Mears covered John F. Kennedy in 1960 whenever Kennedy campaigned in New England and covered Barry Goldwater’s hapless race against Lyndon Johnson four years later. He was back at it every presidential year, even after he retired in 2001.

On election night, 2008, he wrote an analysis of Barack Obama’s victory, and the challenge before him.

“Obama is the future,” he wrote, “and it begins now, in troubled times, for a president-elect with a costly agenda of promises that would be difficult to deliver in far better economic circumstances.”

No cheerleading from Mears there. He didn’t believe in reporters expressing political opinions and he kept his own to himself. Although he got to know the candidates he covered, sometimes shared after-hour drinks and played golf with them, he always addressed them by their titles.

He considered a distance between newsperson and newsmaker to be appropriate. He once explained: “I can’t really say I ever felt close to any of them, maybe because I always felt that there’s a line there, there’s sort of a reserve that I think needs to be maintained because you’re not covering a friend. You’re covering somebody who’s trying to convince the American people to give him the most important job they’ve got at their command.”

After retiring, Mears taught journalism for a time at the University of North Carolina and made his home there, in Chapel Hill.

His wife, Frances, died in January 2019. His first wife and their two children were killed in a house fire in 1962. Mears directed that a portion of his ashes be distributed with Frances’ remains and the rest in Massachusetts with those of his first wife and two children lost in the fire.

'Candy Bomber' Who Dropped Sweets During Berlin Airlift Dies

Denver — 

U.S. military pilot Gail S. Halvorsen — known as the “Candy Bomber” for his candy airdrops during the Berlin airlift after World War II ended — has died at age 101.

Halvorsen died Wednesday following a brief illness in his home state of Utah, surrounded by most of his children, James Stewart, the director of the Gail S. Halvorsen Aviation Education Foundation, said Thursday.

Halvorsen was beloved and venerated in Berlin, which he last visited in 2019 when the city celebrated the 70th anniversary of the day the Soviets lifted their post-War World II blockade cutting off supplies to West Berlin with a big party at the former Tempelhof airport in the German capital.

“Halvorsen’s deeply human act has never been forgotten,” Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey said in a statement.

Retired Col. Gail Halvorsen, center, poses with boys and girls as he attends a ceremony to dedicate the baseball and softball field of the Berlin Braves baseball team in ‘Gail Halvorsen Park’ in Berlin , May 11, 2019.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox also praised Halvorsen, who was born in Salt Lake City but grew up on farms before getting his pilot’s license.

“I know he’s up there, handing out candy behind the pearly gates somewhere,” he said.

After the United States entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Halvorsen trained as a fighter pilot and served as a transport pilot in the south Atlantic during World War II before flying food and other supplies to West Berlin as part of the airlift.

According to his account on the foundation’s website, Halvorsen had mixed feelings about the mission to help the United States’ former enemy after losing friends during the war.

But his attitude changed, and his new mission was launched, after meeting a group of children behind a fence at Templehof airport.

He offered them the two pieces of gum that he had, broken in half, and was touched to see those who got the gum sharing pieces of the wrapper with the other children, who smelled the paper. He promised to drop enough for all of them the following day as he flew, wiggling the wings of his plane as he flew over the airport, Halvorsen recalled.

He started doing so regularly, using his own candy ration, with handkerchiefs as parachutes to carry them to the ground. Soon other pilots and crews joined in what would be dubbed “Operation Little Vittles.”

After an Associated Press story appeared under the headline “Lollipop Bomber Flies Over Berlin,” a wave of candy and handkerchief donations, followed.

The airlift began on June 26, 1948, in an ambitious plan to feed and supply West Berlin after the Soviets — one of the four occupying powers of a divided Berlin after World War II — blockaded the city in an attempt to squeeze the U.S., Britain and France out of the enclave within Soviet-occupied eastern Germany.

Allied pilots flew 278,000 flights to Berlin, carrying about 2.3 million tons of food, coal, medicine and other supplies.

Finally, on May 12, 1949, the Soviets realized the blockade was futile and lifted their barricades. The airlift continued for several more months, however, as a precaution in case the Soviets changed their minds.

Memories in Germany of American soldiers handing out candy, chewing gum or fresh oranges are still omnipresent — especially for the older generation born during or right after the war.

Many fondly remember eating their first candy and fresh fruit during an era when people in bombed-out cities were starving or selling their family heirlooms on the black market for small amounts of flour, butter or oil just so they could get by.

Halvorsen’s efforts to reach out to the people of Berlin helped send a message that they were not forgotten and would not be abandoned, Stewart said.

Despite his initial ambivalence about the airlift, Halvorsen, who grew up poor during the Great Depression, recognized a bit of himself in the children behind the fence and made a connection with them, he said.

“A simple person to person act of kindness can really change the world,” Stewart said.

Cali: Brother of athlete killed in robbery on hill dies in accident - Cali - Colombia

In a car accidentwhich would be due to a gap in the road from Cali to JamundíJulián Andrés Tobón Sánchez died on the spot when he was on his way to do some work.

In April of last year, he suffered from grief at the murder of Jorge Felipe Tobon Sanchez, player of the Colombian National Hockey Team. in a robbery on a hill in the capital of Valle del Cauca.

On the morning of Monday, February 14, Julian Andres Tobon Sanchez He left his home in Cali aboard a motorcycle.

His intention was to reach Puerto Tejada, in the north of Cauca, limits with Valle del Cauca. As a technologist in electromedicine, he had to attend to the maintenance of equipment in an institution in the area.

His father, Jorge Mario Tobon A retired Army sergeant, who is grieving over the death of two children, says that Julián Andrés never refused to provide a service because he said that the equipment had to be fully operational for diagnosis or instrument sterilization.

(Read in context: Family of an athlete murdered on a hill in Cali went into exile

He decided that he would travel by motorcycle because if he used a car he would have inconveniences due to the high congestion in the road to Jamundi.

The professional lost control of the motorcycle and crashed into a pole. His death was on the spot.

His father assures that in his death there is negligence and corruption in a road that was built years ago and has been left halfway.

(Read may be of interest: Cold wave and excess rain in the dry months of the year in the Valley)

How many times did you run late at night to repair the biomedical equipment, because it failed and its normal operation was required to save a life that required it?

Jorge Felipe Tobón, murdered in a robbery on the hill of Cali

“Our son, who in life, leaves us a beautiful grandson, nephew of just four years and an adorable companion, was not only a son, brother, friend, an exemplary professional, but also, he always committed himself to being a great citizen and a great person…”, says a message from the family.

He notes that Julián Andrés “managed to stand out in all areas of life, as a worthy representative of health, as a technologist in electromedicine. A professional devoted to saving lives… how many times did he run, late at night, to repair biomedical equipment, because they failed and their normal functioning was required to save a life that required it. Their actions and acts in the field of health are infinite”.

On April 18, 2021, the tragic death of Jorge Felipe Tobón, hockey player and coachwho went out early with his girlfriend to training for the closed close to your home in north of Cali.

A few minutes later, when they were just beginning the ascent through the back of Chipichape, they were met by some young men with sharp weapons.

They intimidated the couple who had no other belongings and told Tobón’s girlfriend to go downstairs to look for money. This would prevent sexual abuse, according to the complaints.

The athlete was subdued and tied up. In these circumstances he lost most of his clothing and suffered injuries that caused his death, when his girlfriend returned accompanied by other people to help him.

Four people have been arrested for the crime. Last July, the father announced that he had gone into exile.

“Today I ask, beg, exclaim and demand as a citizen within the legal parameters, the State at the national, departmental and local levels. That their actions of negligence do not continue to claim more lives and in this case due to the abandonment and corruption on the roads of our country, do not take more lives,” he wrote on social media Monday.

Read more news from Colombia

In Buenaventura they cry out for money to put out fires

Ivan Reitman, Producer, ‘Ghostbusters’ Director, Dies at 75

Ivan Reitman, the influential filmmaker and producer behind many of the most beloved comedies of the late 20th century, from “Animal House” to “Ghostbusters,” has died. He was 75.

Reitman died peacefully in his sleep Saturday night at his home in Montecito, Calif., his family told The Associated Press.

“Our family is grieving the unexpected loss of a husband, father, and grandfather who taught us to always seek the magic in life,” children Jason Reitman, Catherine Reitman and Caroline Reitman said in a joint statement. “We take comfort that his work as a filmmaker brought laughter and happiness to countless others around the world. While we mourn privately, we hope those who knew him through his films will remember him always.”

Known for bawdy comedies that caught the spirit of their time, Reitman’s big break came with the raucous, college fraternity sendup “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” which he produced. He directed Bill Murray in his first starring role in the summer camp flick “Meatballs,” and then again in 1981′s “Stripes,” but his most significant success came with 1984’s “Ghostbusters.”

Not only did the irreverent supernatural comedy starring Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis gross nearly $300 million worldwide, it earned two Oscar nominations, spawned a veritable franchise, including spinoffs, television shows and a new movie, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” that opened this last year. His son, filmmaker Jason Reitman directed.

Paul Feig, who directed the 2016 reboot of “Ghostbusters” tweeted that he was in shock.

“I had the honor of working so closely with Ivan and it was always such a learning experience,” Feig wrote. “He directed some of my favorite comedies of all time. All of us in comedy owe him so very much.”

“A legend,” comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani said on Twitter. “The number of great movies he made is absurd.”

Among other notable films he directed are “Twins,” “Kindergarten Cop,” “Dave,” “Junior” and 1998′s “Six Days, Seven Nights.” He also produced “Beethoven,” “Old School” and “EuroTrip,” and many others, including his son’s Oscar-nominated film “Up in the Air.”

He was born in Komárno, Czechoslovakia, in 1946 where his father owned the country’s biggest vinegar factory. His mother had survived Auschwitz and his father was in the resistance. When the communists began imprisoning capitalists after the war, the Reitmans decided to escape, when Ivan Reitman was only 4. They traveled in the nailed-down hold of a barge headed for Vienna.

“I remember flashes of scenes,” Reitman told the AP in 1979. “Later they told me about how they gave me a couple of sleeping pills so I wouldn’t make any noise. I was so knocked out that I slept with my eyes open. My parents were afraid I was dead.”

The Reitmans joined a relative in Toronto, where Ivan displayed his show biz inclinations: starting a puppet theater, entertaining at summer camps, playing coffee houses with a folk music group. He studied music and drama at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and began making movie shorts.

Reitman accepting an award at CinemaCon in 2014. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

With friends and $12,000, Reitman made a nine-day movie, “Cannibal Girls,” which American International agreed to release. He produced on a $500 budget a weekly TV revue, “Greed,” with Dan Aykroyd, and became associated with the Lampoon group in its off-Broadway revue that featured John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Murray. That soon led to “Animal House.”

Reitman seized the moment after “Animal House’s” massive success and raised money to direct “Meatballs,” which would be tamer than the hard-R “Animal House.”

He hand picked Murray to star, which would prove to be a significant break for the comedian, but Ramis later said that Reitman didn’t know if Murray would actually show up until the first day of the shoot. But it was the beginning of a fruitful and longrunning partnership that would produce the war comedy “Stripes,” which Reitman said he thought up on the way to the “Meatballs” premiere, and “Ghostbusters.”

Reitman also put Schwarzenegger in his first major comedy, opposite Danny DeVito in “Twins.” There was such uncertainty around the project that all forfeited their fees for a share of the profits, which would prove to be a lucrative deal when the film earned $216 million against an $18 million production budget. In Sept. 2021, it was announced that a sequel, “Triplets” was in the works with Reitman directing his original cast, plus Tracy Morgan as their long lost brother.

By the time 1990′s “Kindergarten Cop” came around, Reitman had established himself as the most successful comedy director in history. Though not even being the father of three children could have prepared him for the arduous task of directing 30 children between the ages of 4 and 7 in the Schwarzenegger comedy.

The political comedy “Dave,” starring Kevin Kline as an ordinary man who has to double for the US President, provided a bit of a departure for Reitman. Roger Ebert wrote at the time that “The movie is more proof that it isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it: Ivan Reitman’s direction and Gary Ross’ screenplay use intelligence and warmhearted sentiment to make Dave into wonderful lighthearted entertainment.”

Reitman slowed down as a director after “Six Days, Seven Nights,” the 1998 adventure comedy with Harrison Ford and Anne Heche — only four films would follow “Evolution,” “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” “No Strings Attached” and “Draft Day,” from 2014.

But he continued producing. His company, the Montecito Picture Co., produced Todd Phillips’ first movie, “Road Trip.” And with “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” even found himself on the press circuit with his son, providing emotional moments for both with the passing of the baton. Jason Reitman, who was only 7 when the original came out, included some nods to his father’s films like “Beethoven” and “Cannibal Girls” in “Afterlife.”

“Directing ‘Ghostbusters Afterlife’ was completely intimidating,” Jason Reitman said last year. “I was lucky enough to do it sitting next to my dad.”

When asked why the 1984 film continued to fascinate, Reitman told the AP that it was hard to define.

“I always had a sort of sincere approach to the comedy,” he said. “I took it seriously even though, it was a horror movie and a comedy, I felt you had to sort of deal with it in a kind of realistic and honest way.”

He always took comedy and the power of laughter seriously.

“The great cliche is about how damn tough comedy is. But of course, nobody really gives that any respect,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “It’s such a visceral thing, laughing. So, getting to the point where you can get an audience of 600 people laughing is really precise and intricate work. … My sense is we’re laughing at the same things we’ve always laughed at, but the language of the filmmaker and the performer shifts.”

World's oldest male gorilla dies at 61 | Main | Spanish edition

The world’s oldest male gorilla has died at the age of 61, Zoo Atlanta announced on Tuesday.

The gorilla was found dead by his care team, and the cause is not yet known, the zoo said in a statement, adding that staff were “heartbroken.”

Ozzie began to show signs of lack of appetite last Thursday and this week experienced swelling in the face, weakness and inability to eat or drink. A necropsy will be carried out.

“This is a devastating loss for Zoo Atlanta. While we knew this time would come someday, that inevitability does nothing to stem the deep sadness we feel at losing a legend,” said president and CEO Raymond King.

Ozzie was the third oldest gorilla in the world after two females: Fatou, 64, who lives at Berlin Zoo, and Helen, 64, of Louisville Zoo in Kentucky.

(…)

Student dies after falling from third floor in Popular University in Colombia

Valledupar – A student in the last semester of Engineering at the Universidad del Areandina, Valledupar campus, lost her life this Wednesday, while supervised a work in the capital of Cesar. Is about Blanca Cecilia Sanchez Villazon, 23 years old, a close relative of the deceased vallenato music singer, Rafael Orozco.

Sanchez had finished his academic process, was doing professional internships at the aforementioned institution and was preparing to graduate this year.

The preliminary report indicates that the young woman fell into the void, after trying to lean against a wall, where an elevator appears to be built in the People’s University of Cesar (UPC), savannah headquarters of this locality.

The student suffered severe head trauma and fractures in different parts of the body, for which she was referred to the Laura Daniela Clinic in Valledupar, where she died.

The death of the young woman shook her fellow students and the Areandina educational community, who expressed their solidarity with the Sánchez Villazón family.