In 1951, Bob Landauer, all of 14, took the wheel of a Willys jeep before school each morning and delivered scores of newspapers – the Herald Tribune, the New York Times and Daily News, the Bridgeport Herald among them – in the vales of rural Connecticut.
Composer Richard Rodgers was on the 30-mile route. So was Helen Keller, near the old mill at Aspetuck Corners. Henry Luce, the head of Time, Inc., paid a dollar extra each month for Landauer to walk his papers up the long driveway to Luce’s breakfast patio.
This lonely spring, Landauer, now 83 and living at Terwilliger Plaza, is back at it. Because the retirement community, on guard against COVID-19, stops outsiders and newspapers at the front door, Landauer is up at dawn, to greet and deliver them.
He is 14 years retired from The Oregonian. What still propels him on his rounds?
Well, he’s up anyway, anxious to take that cigar out for its daily walk. But there’s also this:
“I fundamentally believe our system relies on informed consent,” Landauer says. “Without vibrant journalism, informed consent is impossible. You have intuition and gut feelings replacing intensive, community-minded thought. That’s a formula for chaos, predatory behavior and injustice of the first order.”
To encourage informed consent, you do what’s necessary. You bring a Harvard degree in international relations, and your experience stringing for Time magazine in Taiwan, to a newsroom in Oregon. You spend 16 years at the helm of the editorial page.
You bring a second tote bag down to the Terwilliger Plaza lobby for the hefty Sunday editions.
Landauer and I spent 26 years together at 1320 SW Broadway. He had editorial control of my column for less than 12 months, in its clumsy transition from sports to politics in the late ‘80s, but forever changed the discipline I brought to it.
He moved my deadline to 8 a.m. for several months because I didn’t call former state Treasurer Jim Hill and allow him the opportunity to respond to my critique of him. “I found that offensive,” Landauer said then, and now. “If you’re going to take a shot at someone, you call that person and give him or her the absolute right of rebuttal.”
He was equally annoyed when I made a glib crack about Harry Glickman, the general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers. He was no longer reading my column on the proofs, but he tracked me down in the newsroom the next day and said, “You sideswiped the guy. When you write about people, confront them head-on, or not at all.”
“He had exacting standards,” says Jack Ohman, who worked for The Oregonian/OregonLive for 29 years and won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning at the Sacramento Bee in 2016. “Whatever he said was insightful, but it could be brutal. You’d bring him an idea and he’d look at you and say, ‘That’s name-calling, not commentary.’ And he was right.”
One morning early in his career, Ohman didn’t have an idea. A half hour before his deadline, he walked into Landauer’s office and confessed as much. “He looked at me, those piercing blue eyes like lasers, and said, ‘You have to have an idea. That’s what we pay you for.’”
Ohman returned 25 minutes later, Ronald Reagan cartoon in hand.
When we spoke this week, Landauer said he always meant to be a writer, not a manager: “My goal in life was not to be on the masthead of The Oregonian.” But where he was most needed, publisher Fred Stickel soon realized, was at the helm of the editorial board.
The paper’s voice was never stronger than in the series of editorials Landauer wrote in 1992 against Measure 9, the Oregon Citizens Alliance initiative that castigated gays, lesbians and bisexuals. The son of German immigrants, Landauer was “vastly offended by the raid on civil rights,” and believed the editorial board needed to make amends for not speaking out forcefully against the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.
A Portland police car was often stationed outside Landauer’s home that summer. Measure 9 was defeated, and Landauer’s series was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.
In that Northwest Portland home, all the while, Landauer and his wife, attorney Sally Landauer, raised their children, foster kids and adopted children. They rescued a 9-year-old girl from a dysfunctional family in the neighborhood. They made college tuition payments for friends who could not afford them. They erred on the side of daunting kindness.
“When my mother was dying, he assigned me to go back to New York for a week to write some things about the United Nations,” recalls David Sarasohn, a long-time associate editor and columnist. “That wasn’t exactly vital to the coverage of The Oregonian, but it was enormously important to me.”
Landauer was attentive to so many of us. “He cares about humanity,” Ohman says. “He cares about his family. He cares about justice. He cares about his craft. That is a rare combination of values in anybody.”
It’s only rarer than it used to be in American journalism because so many fewer newspapers reach the breakfast patios of those wrestling with the responsibilities of citizenship. Bob Landauer still rises every morning to confront that dilemma, one paper at a time.
-- Steve Duin
stephen.b.duin@gmail.com
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