James G. Bellows '47

James G. Bellows '47 died on March 6, 2009, at an assisted-living facility in Santa Monica, California, of Alzheimer's disease. He was eighty-six.

In a journalism career spanning more than three decades, Jim delighted in playing the scrappy underdog as he ran major metropolitan daily newspapers that operated in the shadow of larger competitors. He did it as editor of the New York Herald Tribune and antagonized the New York Times. He did it at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and badgered the Los Angeles Times. And he did it at the Washington Star and competed with the Washington Post.

At the Herald Tribune in the 1960s, Jim encouraged writers like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin to create what came to be called "New Journalism." It was colorful, novelistic, and highly personalized. It also shocked the purists, which never bothered Jim.

"A newspaper ought to be like an old bathrobe or a friend," he said in a 1980 interview. "It ought to have some anger and some sadness, so it isn't just an inanimate object that appears on the front porch. It is a part of your household and your family," he said. "It's got to be irreverent, rash, feisty, and really care about the city and the people."

Jim not only helped change the look and style of journalism, he also helped transform the newsroom by fostering the careers of women, including current New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She once called him "a newspaperman with verve and bravery in equal measure, who always backed up his reporters, and who loved nothing better than to do a joyous rain dance in a hail of criticism."

Jim went on to do other things besides run newspapers. He worked in television, did some media consulting, and served as the West Coast bureau chief for TV Guide. He also became a trustee at Kenyon. But he was fundamentally a newspaper man, and his passion and devotion to the business is detailed in his 2002 autobiography, The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency.

"It is one of those seasoned-old-newsman memoirs about the old days and the good times when reporters treated celebrities and politicians with the contempt they deserved and sometimes did brave things," Russell Baker wrote in the New York Review of Books. "It is light as a June cloud and just as pleasant."

There was little indication that the larger-than-life journalism career that unfolds in the book was a possibility when Jim enrolled at Kenyon in 1940. He began by studying economics, but college was interrupted by World War II. The small and wiry man gorged on bananas for weeks to make the 130-pound weight requirement for the Naval Air Corps. It worked. But much to his disappointment, Jim spent the remainder of the war in flight school. At one point, he and a buddy tried to transfer to the Army so they could see a little combat. His request was denied.

"It was an early lesson for me in top management's ability to ignore passion in the ranks," he writes in The Last Editor.

But the experience of flying-the "umbrella of sky" and the "limitless ocean"-did have a lasting impact. "Being a Navy carrier pilot got me wondering what I really wanted to do in life," he said.

He became a philosophy major when he returned to Kenyon and dabbled in journalism at the Collegian. As graduation approached, he went to his mentor, Philip Blair Rice, professor of philosophy, to discuss his future. Rice admitted that he had once tried unsuccessfully to be a journalist but suggested the field might be right for Jim.

"Now, after a lifetime of work in newsrooms across the country, from New York to Washington to Los Angeles, from Miami to Detroit to Atlanta, I look back on his suggestion with gratitude," Jim wrote in The Last Editor. "I often ask myself: What if Professor Philip Blair Rice had been a failed veterinarian?"