Bill Blair died of cancer Nov. 19, 2012, in New York City, where he lived all his adult life except for New York Times stints in foreign capitals.
Bill was born in Chicago and prepped at Kent School. Admitted to Princeton with our class, but spending three years in the Pacific with the Marines, he did not matriculate until 1946. He graduated in 1950 as an English major with a love of writing and a desire to be in the newspaper business.
Bill’s next two years were with the Kansas City Star, where he met and married his first wife, Sue. He was on the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1952 flooding of the Kansas and Missouri rivers. In 1953 he joined The New York Times, and since there was already a Bill Blair on the staff, he wrote as Granger Blair.
In 1956, Bill transferred to Europe and reported from France, North Africa, the Middle East, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. He was bureau chief in Israel from 1962 until 1965. Returning to New York in 1967, he became a manager of employee communications for the Times and then its director of public relations. In 1973 he became the first reporter to create two nightly news shows for WQXR-FM. He retired from the Times in 1991.
Bill’s second wife, Ellen, predeceased him by one month. He is survived by his children, Robert and Laura, to whom the class sends this proud memory.