Walter R. Mears, 87

Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87.

“I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. 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.

Mears died Thursday at his apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight days after being diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer, said his daughters Susan Mears of Boulder, Colorado, and Stephanie Mears of Austin, Texas, who were with him.

Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became legend among peers. In 1972, Timothy Crouse featured Mears in “The Boys on the Bus,” a book chronicling the efforts and antics of reporters covering that year’s presidential campaign.

Crouse recounted how, immediately after a political debate, a reporter from The Boston Globe called out to the man from AP: “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?” The question became a catchphrase among political reporters to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,” Mears cracked in 2005.

It was a natural question. Mears had to bang out stories about campaign debates while they were still underway. Newspaper editors would see his lead on the wire before their own reporters filed their stories. So it was defensive for others on the press bus to wonder what Mears was leading with, and to ask him.

“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,” said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”

In tribute, Jules Witcover, who covered politics for The Sun, said Mears combined speed and accuracy with an eye for the telling detail.

“His uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any story and relate it in spare, lively prose showed the way for a generation of wire service disciples, and he did so with a zest for the nomad’s life on the campaign trail,” Witcover said.

At other times in his career, Mears served AP as Washington bureau chief and as the wire service’s primary news executive, the executive editor in the New York headquarters. But he missed writing and went back to it.

He left once, to be Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News, but returned to AP nine months later. “I couldn’t take the pace,” he said. “It was too slow.”

In 1977 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the election in which Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated a sitting president, Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited his office through the resignation in disgrace of Richard M. Nixon.

Winning his Pulitzer, Mears said, was “the sweetest moment in a career that is like no other line of work.”

Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in Lexington, the son of an executive of a chemical company. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1956 and within a week joined the AP in Boston.

In those days, news was written on typewriters and transmitted on teletypes. “They were slow and they clattered,” Mears once wrote, “but the din was music to me.”

His first assignment was far from the din. He single-handedly covered the Vermont Legislature. “It was fun covering a citizen legislature with a representative from every hamlet in the state” — 276 of them, he recalled years later, including one elected by his townspeople to keep the fellow from being eligible for welfare.

After retiring, Mears taught journalism for a time at the University of North Carolina and made his home there, in Chapel Hill.

His wife, Frances, died in January 2019. His first wife and their two children were killed in a house fire in 1962.