Journalism lost one of its more colorful and talented practitioners in the death of Tom Baldwin this week. A great story-teller and intrepid reporter, we were colleagues at The Associated Press and in Trenton where I hired him to be a member of our Statehouse team.
He had worked in the Middle East and South Africa for the AP as well as New York, Philadelphia and Boston. A lot of the fun of talking to journalists is discovering the little tidbits missing from stories published or broadcast, the stuff those pesky editors took out. Tom was a font of that. He would be working on something that would remind him of an adventure and off he went chapter and verse. We were spellbound.
He covered the assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, the 1982 war in Lebanon and the Iran-Iraq war, and apartheid in South Africa, among many other world events. He authored a a book, “Big Storm, Small Ship” about riding out a hurricane on a ship where he took a job because he wanted to see what it was like.
No pushover, Tom was a classic reporter right out of the movies. Once he was chasing a politician in the New Jersey Statehouse who thought he could avoid Tom by ducking into the men’s room. Tom followed him in and when he took a seat in a stall, Tom stood outside and went on with the interview.
We had a team at the Democratic convention in 2004 in Boston, Tom’s old stomping grounds. He joined us for the ride up on Amtrak, his possessions for the event in a paper bag. He led us from the train station to the hotel then disappeared into the evironment. To this day I have no idea where he stayed; he just showed up for work every day. Or what was in that paper bag.
At the ’08 Democratic convention in Denver, the staff gave me a surprise birthday party and Tom quietly arranged for AP newsman Robert Weller to attend. Weller started his AP career with me in Seattle then went to various bureaus, winding up in Johannesburg, South Africa with Tom. A people-person, Tom frequently would stop in the hallways of Trenton to chat with politicians, lobbyists, tourists, government workers and other journalists. He came across a lot of tips like that and was never without a story idea.
He retired at 67 and was 71 when he passed away. He is survived by a brother, two daughters, a widow and hordes of journalists and others who just loved what he brought to any place he was.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.