The Kansas City journalism scene lost another great one this week — former city editor and weekend editor Bob Lynn.
Lynn, renowned and most admired, perhaps, for his refusal to bow and scrape to upper management, died of a massive heart attack Tuesday outside the Lowe’s store in Roeland Park.
Karen Dillon, a good friend of Bob’s, wrote on the Kansas City Star Bylines Facebook page: “A registered nurse happened to be in the parking lot and rushed over to him and began giving him CPR but he had no pulse.”
Lynn, 71, is the fourth titan from The Star’s heyday to die in the last 15 months. First it was reporter Rick Alm in February 2017. Then it was Laura Hockaday, former society editor, last October, and finally it was Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Mike McGraw just four months ago.
Because he spent his career as an editor, Bob was not as well known to the public as Alm, Hockaday and McGraw.
He was every bit as legendary in The Star’s newsroom, though.
Bob, with mother Betty (2003)
Reporters loved working with him because of his easygoing disposition, lack of ego and the fact that he treated everyone equally, disbursing advice clearly and concisely. Upper managers respected him because they knew he was extremely competent and pulled not punches.
The highest position he attained was city editor of The Kansas City Times, the morning Kansas City Star, until it merged with The Star in 1990. He then worked as an editor on the State Desk and later became the weekend editor.
It was as weekend editor that many reporters got extensive exposure to him and learned to appreciate his skill and lack of ego. All reporters had to work occasional weekend shifts, and it was to Bob they’d report for Saturday or Sunday duty. On the KC Star Bylines page, reporter after reporter wrote Thursday about memories of weekend duty with Bob.
Here’s a sample:
Julius Karash, retired, former business reporter: He was an inspiration! We used to bitch about weekend metro duty, but working Saturday or Sunday with Bob was fun: Journalism, sedition, story-telling and barbecue. I don’t think I realized at the time that those weekend metro duty shifts would turn into great memories some day.
Dawn Bormann Novascone, former reporter: Bob was such a good man and a great editor. I learned so much from working with him on the weekend. I’m sure I owe him $100 or more from all the times he spotted me money for Rosedale (Barbecue) when I could barely make rent.
Ed Eveld, former reporter: Great boss. Great editor. Coolest dude.
Bob was also incredibly insightful and had an excellent feel for the state of the newspaper — that is, if things were going well or slipping. Karash recalls, for example, that after McClatchy Co. purchased The Star and the other KnightRidder papers in 2006, Bob was one of the first to sense that layoffs were on the horizon.
One day, Karash said, he and Bob were reading a note on the bulletin board about a longtime, high-ranking newsroom editor who, to the surprise of many, was moving to the Human Resources division — an exceedingly strange move for a newsroom denizen.
Karash said Bob turned to him and said, “He’s going to be the hatchet man.”
Sure enough, in 2008, when The Star announced the first round of layoffs under McClatchy ownership, the former editor was intimately involved in the layoffs and sat in on every meeting where staff members were given notice.
Bob had such great foresight that he recognized at the time of the first wave of layoffs that The Star was no longer a reliable employer. Karash recalls, again, that with the announcement of the 2008 layoffs and buyouts, Bob went to management and offered to take early retirement, saying he would be willing to go if it meant someone else could keep his or her job.
And that was that. He walked out and called it a career. He later worked as a librarian at the Mid-Continent Library in Riverside.
A minimalist to the end, Bob was cremated, and there will be no funeral service.
…So long, buddy. You were a hell of a newsman.
With his 1964 (and a half) Mustang (Photos courtesy of Karen Dillon)
Bob and I worked nights together in the Independence bureau in our early days at the paper. In addition to watching Chris Chambliss’ walk-off HR against the Royals together in 1976 (I’ll never forget the look on Bob’s face; he probably never forgot mine), I learned from Bob that it is possible to defy an editor and get away with it. Remember when an editor would call at, oh, 10 p.m. with a crazy request such as calling a source at home about something minor? Bob told me you just say “OK” to the editor and then don’t do it. I was like, “We can do that?” After slamming down the phone on the editor, Bob often would pretend to make the call, dialing the number, “talking” to the source and hanging up. In the event the editor would check back, which was rare, Bob would just say he couldn’t get a hold of the source. Which was true, because he never made the call. We had great fun working together and I learned a lot from Bob.
Great story, Steve…He always took the most practical route to the goal.
That’s a wonderful tribute, Fitz. And your assessment of Bob is spot on. Like so many of my former colleagues, I came to know Bob after the Star-Times merger when he was the weekend editor. He made working weekends fun, no matter how dull the weekend assignment was.
On the KC Star Bylines page, I described Bob as a “newsroom hero.” He was a true journalist who every reporter gravitated to for advice, guidance and laughter.
I don’t think he saw himself as a comedian but his stories had many of us in stitches. The funniest was one about legendary publisher Jim Hale calling the newsroom one night about a photo he wanted to have taken at the American Royal. “Who’s this!?” Hale shouted to Bob whose Texas drawl mimic of Hale had me rolling on the floor.
I also remember Bob sharing with me how he broke one of the wildest local stories of the late 1970s – Independence Mayor Dick King had stolen a bunch of coats from a restaurant during a drunken episode and Bob, who covered the city of Independence at the time, found out about it. After a council meeting, a few weeks after the incident, Bob approached King on a different matter and King told him “You got a lot of balls to be trying to talk to me.” By the time I covered Independence in the 1990s, King was clean and sober and had resurrected his career as a development attorney. I never brought up Bob’s name whenever I interviewed King but I bet he would have credited him with indirectly saving his life.
Between Bob, McGraw and Alm, I have lost three mentors in the last 15 months. I’ve shed a lot of tears but am a stronger, wiser and happier person for having known them. RIP Bob. You were the best!
Thanks, Mike…As I told Mark Morris earlier this morning, I had planned to base this remembrance on two or three personal experiences with Bob, but as I started writing — as is often the case — the story took its own direction.
…But here’s one of my experiences with him, and it says a lot about how he operated…
I was covering City Hall at the time, probably in the late ’80s, and the Convention and Visitors Bureau was part of my beat. The bureau, which was not used to having reporters covering their business, didn’t want to share any information with us, even though the bureau was mostly city funded and thus covered by the Sunshine Law. I had been trying to learn the salary of the c.e.o., Patrick Tierney, but neither he nor the bureau’s volunteer chairman, a civic leader named Gil Bourk, would tell me. I heard the board had given Tierney a big raise and asked Bourk if that was the case. “No,” he told me, flat out.
Then, I went to Mayor Dick Berkley, who was on the board, and told him I wanted to see the salary figures under the Sunshine Law. He told the board to hand over the information. Turned out, Tierney had been given a big raise.
I was furious about being lied to and began writing a story, intending to give Bourk the going over he deserved. Somehow, though, the editor of the paper, Mike Waller, got involved (he frequently looked over reporters shoulders, which we all loved because it was flattering to have the top editor take an active interest in our stories), but in this case he went timid and urged me to present it like Bourk had made a mistake, instead of having lied.
I didn’t like that but…well, Waller was the editor and I did what he said. When I turned the story in, I told Bob why I had handled the story like I did.
“This is bullshit,” Bob said, immediately getting to his feet. “Let’s go talk to Waller.”
We marched over to Waller’s big, corner office — Bob leading the way — and went in. It was short and sweet. Bob said Bourk had clearly lied — there was no mistake — and that we needed to write the story that way. “OK,” Waller said, without a hint of protest.
So, I went back and rewrote the story, saying something like, “The Convention and Visitors board of directors recently gave c.e.o. Patrick Tierney a large salary increase, even though bureau chairman Gil Bourk had earlier denied giving Tierney a raise.”
Gotcha! Shortly after that, Tierney — realizing that from then on the bureau would be under the newspaper’s glare — resigned.
He might not have resigned, and Bourk would have gotten away without being exposed as a liar, had it not been for Bob Lynn standing up to the editor and telling him exactly what our responsibility was to the public.
Fine tribute yourself, there, mikerice64. My sympathy to you, and all who knew Mr. Lynn.
And Jim, your remembrance is a perfect example of what Peggy Stevinson Bair was talking about a couple of days ago.
Thanks, Gayle….I don’t know how that situation would play out in today’s newsroom. First of all, they wouldn’t be covering the Convention and Visitors Bureau, though!
I love Bob Lynn.
He had the greatest laugh ever!
One night we all went down to The New/Old Stanley.
There was four or five of us.
I bought a round of beets.
Steve Shirk surprised us.
Steve felt I should disrespect our friends there, The Pub and other bars at nineteen.
As I paid for the round.
Bob grabbed my beer and laughed and laughed . Steve wasn’t sure why not noticing me pay.
Bob looked and said “you shouldn’t bought THAT round!”
He dared me to take the cruiser (a brand new Chrysler K car) to Westport after work one summer.
We were smashed about 5am and he was already in his Cutless Supreme.
I was parked on a curb with the driver’s side exposed.
Bob started slamming the new cruiser with his Oldsmobile seven or eight times. Severe damage to both…I took it back to The Star.
The next night we looked at the cruiser and got i his car laughing so hard!
Nothing was said to me.
The cruiser was not repaired and Bob didn’t fix His Olds.
He loved TABB, Merits and a college basketball team in Lawrence.
He covered my ass daily. With Shirk and Marietta Dunn.
I can hear his m now laughing and saying “Shirk is going to kill you!”
And I will never forget his Navy Pea Coat!!
I can’t tell all of the stories…now lol.
I’ll miss Bob and I Pray I see him again.
My fondest memory of Bob goes back about 25 years. It was sometime around 12:30 a.m., and I was the late slot editor. The night janitors and a couple of other folks were still around. Bob walked into the newsroom, didn’t say much, and then helped himself to a janitor’s bucket and mop. As the bewildered cleanup crew watched, he quietly did a really good job using the mop to soap up the outside of the windows to the managing editor’s office. Satisfied that the windows were properly lathered, he put the mop back in the bucket and quietly left. No rinse, no repeat.
Oh, my God…
I’m up in the world,
But I’d give the world to be where I used to be,
A heavenly nest,
Where I rest the best,
Means more than the world to me.
It’s only a shanty
In old Shanty Town
The roof is so slanty it touches the ground.
But my tumbled down shack by an old railroad track,
Like a millionaire’s mansion is calling me back.
I’d give up a palace if I were a king.
It’s more than a palace, it’s my everything.
There’s a queen waiting there with a silvery crown
In a shanty in old Shanty Town.