My favorite obituary on Nathaniel Blumberg, the journalism icon who died on Valentine’s Day in Kalispell, Montana, is the one he wrote himself.
My next favorite was the remembrance written by a former student, Les Gapay, for the Daily Inter Lake of Kalispell. Gapay graduated from the Journalism School at the University of Montana in Missoula, in l965, when Blumberg was the dean.
Gapay knew Blumberg for four years as a student and then became friends with him as his career spanned stretches at the Missoulian in Missoula, the Sacramento Bee, Congressonal Quarterly in Washington DC., the Wall Street Journal, mostly in the Washington bureau, and then to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He changed his lifestyle and bought a cherry orchard near Bigfork and became the Bigfork correspondent for the Daily Inter Lake. He lived near the cabin where Blumberg retired and saw him often. Gapay is now a free lance writer living in the desert in Southern California at Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs. He visited Montana most summers and saw Blumberg on each visit.
I’ve added two more tributes to Blumberg:
One by James Oset, “A tough but compassionate teacher“
and one more by Wilbur Wood, “Open to change”