BOB GILES' WIFE, NANCY, PASSES AWAY

 

Bob was the managing editor at the BJ during his 1958-75 tenure who assigned the late Pat Englehart the task of handling the BJ’s coverage of the 1970 slaughter of 4 Kent State students and the wounding of 9 others by the Ohio National Guard, send there by Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes who was on the verge of an unsuccessful run for the Senate.

I was in Bob’s office with Al Fitzpatrick and co-assistant State Desk editor with me Harry Liggett when they announced that Pat Englehart, also sitting there, would be in charge of the BJ’s coverage of the Kent State shootings that killed 4 and wounded 9.

They couldn’t have made a better choice. Pat was a Tasmanian devil and whirling dervish combined when it came to grabbing a project by the throat. Pat filled a BJ storage room to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of photos and notes related to the Kent State shooting and the aftermath.

Bob wrote a book about the BJ handling of thed situation, “When Truth Mattered.”

Bob was curator for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard after he left the BJ. And editor of the Rochester
Democrat & Chronicle, publisher of the Detroit News.

He lives in Cambridge and later Travers City, Michigan with his wife, Nancy, a psychologist. Travers City is among my many stops in Michigan. Delightful view of Grand Traverse Bay, too.

Bob and Nancy, lived, appropriately since she was a psychologist, in a former mental hospital that was restructed into a condo building.

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

Nancy was honored by Ohio Wesleyan, where she was a student, with a 2010 Alumni Award for service to the college. At Wesleyan she was on the Student Council, the YMCA, The Transcript and Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.

After Wesleyan, Nancy got her master’s from the University of Akron in school psychology and child psychology followed by an Ed.D. in psychology from the University of Rochester.

She was licensed to practice in five states. She served on Wesleyan’s Board of Directors for 12 years, including as president in 2004-2006.