Dorr honored

By Scott Franz

Bob Dorr

Bob Dorr (’58) always wanted to be a newspaper reporter. On a cold Omaha December night in 1959, just before his 24th birthday, he said he remembers the wire service machines clattering and the clicking of Royal and Underwood typewriters. For the first time, he walked through the huge room that went on forever.

“Smoke hung in the air from about eye level on up,” Dorr said. “The Omaha World-Herald had a bad air-handling system back then, but it was exactly how a newsroom should be.” He said he was one of the few who didn’t smoke.

On April 24, Dorr received an award from the Omaha Press Club Foundation honoring his extensive career in journalism at the Omaha World-Herald. The award goes to a journalist in print or electronic media who has spent a substantive part of his or her career in Omaha.

“I wasn’t in competition with Tom Brokaw, who started his career in Omaha and moved on to greater things elsewhere,” he said. “The journalism community has found other ways to honor him.”

An annual award at the World-Herald is named after Dorr. The editorial staff gives the Bob Dorr Award to a journalist at the paper who is deemed to have made the greatest contribution to the newspaper during the past year. He said he hopes it has improved the performance of the newsroom.

“It means a lot to me,” Dorr said.

Dorr said he began his 42-year reporting career at CU, where he worked for the Colorado Daily newspaper as a freshman and sophomore. He said he found the job “exhilarating” and learned the trade from his father, who owned the Brighton Blade.

“I was fascinated by my dad’s newspaper office, and I listened to him give his take on stories to The Denver Post reporters who stopped by,” Dorr said.

“I remember when the hand-fed press would get stuck, Dad would crawl underneath the press and get ink on his white shirt to get the press running again.”

After graduation, Dorr said he was able to obtain a job on the recommendation of the head of CU’s journalism department. He said that he has never had a job interview in his life.

“When Gayle Waldrop was journalism dean, he had a close relationship with a lot of publishers and editors and did a lot to get graduates jobs,” Dorr said.

“One of them was with Fred Ware, the executive editor of the World-Herald. There was a flow of students at CU who came over, and I was one. The two had absolute trust with each other.”

Dorr spent much of his journalism career at the World-Herald, covering what he called “giant calamities.” They included the collapse of a major savings company in Lincoln and the Midwestern farm depression of the 1980s, he said.

He credited his initial success in the newsroom to a profile piece he did on Warren Buffett before he became an icon.