Dick Stewart; Globe editor, writer caught telling detail
After stints as the Globe's national editor, city editor, and congressional correspondent, Dick Stewart took an assignment few would seek. At 52, hair graying and thinning, he slipped off his suit and tie, donned drab clothes, and stepped into a jail cell.
On an undercover assignment to see what lay ahead for those facing tougher penalties for drunken driving, he spent six days in the Salem Jail, aided by local law enforcement authorities who crafted fake paperwork to make it look like he had been sentenced for operating under the influence.
His five-part series captured the experience of a middle-age, middle-class prisoner thrust suddenly into an existence so slovenly that guards reminded him not to let his sheets hang so low that cockroaches could climb into the bed in his cell.
Worse still was a secretary at the district attorney's office, where he had waited to be taken to jail. Told he was a felon, her face melted from friendly to fearful.
"It was demeaning," he wrote in 1983. "In one ugly second, with a single expression, she had stripped me of any semblance of dignity. . . . Most Americans have no idea what life is like behind those high walls, barred windows and doors; most have no concept of the denigrating effect of the jail house, with its constant indignities, fears, and frustrations. I would be their surrogate, living in confinement."
Mr. Stewart, who interrupted his career at the Globe during the 1972 presidential campaign to serve as Democratic candidate Edmund S. Muskie's press secretary, died Monday in St. Joseph's/ Candler Hospital in Savannah, Ga., of complications of heart surgery. He was 77 and had lived in Hilton Head, S.C., after many years in Topsfield.
"Dick had all the right instincts and all the right touches," said Edward Doherty, a former managing editor at the Globe. "He could do any kind of breaking news, but he had a great imagination for topics that just came out of his head."
That served Mr. Stewart well in 1975, when he switched from being the Globe's national editor to hitting the road as the New England correspondent.
"When they assigned him to that beat, he knew every nook and cranny in New England, right up to the Canadian border, and brought to life issues we didn't suspect existed," Doherty said. "Dick didn't need direction. You could just turn him loose on any area or topic."
Born in Framingham, Richard Henry Stewart was the son of a machinist who offered assistance to anyone who needed help.
"The word 'hate' was his personal enemy. He abhorred its use," Mr. Stewart wrote of his father in 1984. "If my brother or I used it, he would scold: 'You don't hate anybody. You might not like them, but you don't hate them.' It seemed that he liked everybody."
Mr. Stewart graduated in 1948 from Holten High School in Danvers, spent a year at Newman Preparatory School in Boston, then graduated in 1954 from Northeastern University with a bachelor of arts degree.
After six months as news director of a radio station in Holyoke, he became a reporter for the Springfield Union, switching to the Daily Hampshire Gazette in 1957. He joined the Globe three years later.
At the Globe, Mr. Stewart was a reporter, then assistant city editor, then city editor, leaving in 1966 for a year at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship. From there, he went to the Globe's Washington bureau as a congressional correspondent until April 1971, when he was named press secretary for Muskie's presidential bid.
In his book about the 1972 campaign, "The Boys on the Bus," Timothy Crouse noted that Mr. Stewart sometimes had to encourage calm when the candidate got riled: "Every time Muskie began to lose control, Stewart would say, 'Now, Ed, don't get testy!' "
Another passage caught Mr. Stewart singing "On the Street Where You Live," from the Broadway musical "My Fair Lady," characteristically in full voice.
"People would ask him to sing for them, and he had an amazing singing voice," Doherty said. "He would quiet the hall when he sang; he had that kind of voice."
Three years ago, when his daughter Jo Stewart Broderick of Middleton married, Mr. Stewart sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at the wedding "and there was not a dry eye in the place," she said. "It was beautiful."
In 1993, a couple of years after retiring, Mr. Stewart moved to Hilton Head with his wife, the former Patricia Maynard of Danvers, whom he married in 1962. She died in 1997.
Mr. Stewart's daughter said he was particularly proud of his political reporting, much of which took place in the late 1960s. But he kept capturing telling details as he neared the end of his career. Sent to Laurens, S.C., in 1988, he covered an appearance by Albert Gore Sr. as he stumped for the presidential run of his son, Al Jr., at a courthouse.
"On a wall outside the courtroom door is a large marble tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments, the ultimate warning to sinners," Mr. Stewart wrote. "In front, under the massive but still leafless oak trees, is another tablet. It is dwarfed by the towering monument to the Confederate dead only a few yards away. This one is etched in stone and carries the names of townsmen killed in the two world wars. Those who made the supreme sacrifice are listed alphabetically under 'Whites' and 'Colored.' For a Northerner there is a sense of being in a time warp, of being thrust into a tableau from another era."
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Stewart leaves his companion of 10 years, Mary Himes of Hilton Head, S.C.; two other daughters, Valerie Conroy of Old Saybrook, Conn., and Kathy of Los Angeles; a son, Richard J. of Old Saybrook, Conn.; a brother, James of Middleton; four grandsons; and three granddaughters.
A memorial service will be held tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. in Church of the Cross in Bluffton, S.C. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on Nov. 15 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Topsfield. 