BOB GILES TRAVERSES TO LITERARY AWARD

 

Former BJ executive editor Bob Giles, at Ol’ Blue Walls from 1958-1975, received the Traverse City (Michigan) National Writers Series’ Literary Service Award for “When Truth Mattered,” his book on how the BJ handled the 1970 Kent State shootings by the Ohio National Guard that killed 4 and wounded 9 and brought the first of four Pulitzers to the BJ. Owner John S. Knight also got a Pulitzer for his editorial columns.

 

He can use the Traverse City award as an impressive trifecta to the 1971 Pulitzer and the 1978 Scripps-Howard Foundation's Distinguished Journalism Citation for "outstanding public service in the cause of the First Amendment" for columns that advocated more press coverage of courtroom proceedings.

 

After leaving 44 E. Exchange Street Bob was executive editor then editor of the Rochester (New York) Democrat & Chronicle and Times-Union. Later, Bob was editor/publisher of the Detroit News for 11 years. The  News received a 1994 Pulitzer for disclosing a Michigan House Fiscal Agency scandal. After a year with Freedom Forum, Bob became curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard for a decade till his 2011 retirement and permanent move to Traverse City, where he joined the Bob editorial board of the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

 

Traverse City is the place to go for tart cherries. It’s the largest producer of that delicacy in America. The Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi  tribes called it Kitchiwikwedongsing (“at the head of the bay,” as in Grand Traverse Bay). European settlers pushed the tribes out, of course. Traverse is on the northwest edge of the lower of two chunks of Michigan land that is separated by Lake Michigan.  

 

Bob’s wife, Nancy Giles, is a psychologist. She would have had a field day at the BJ during my 1969-96 days there.

 

Bob was a 1955 DePauw University graduate who got his master’s in 1956 from Columbia University.