Pulitzer winner Walter Mears dies, AP’s ‘Boy on the Bus’

By MIKE FEINSILBER and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A longtime and many say legendary Associated Press writer has died. Walter R. Mears died Thursday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at 87. For 45 years Mears fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns and elections for the AP and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president. But he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics, before his retirement in 2001, and sometimes after. In 1972, Timothy Crouse featured Mears in “The Boys on the Bus,” a book chronicling the efforts and antics of reporters covering the 1972 campaign.