Former New York Post editorial page editor Bob McManus dead at 81: A journalists journalist
Bob McManus, the wry and eminently fair voice of the New York Post for over a decade, died Saturday at NYU Langone Hospital.He was 81.McManus was a Postie for 29 years — the last 12 as the influential editorial page editor, where government waste, public and private corruption, and hypocrisy in all its forms felt the “pain of his withering gaze,” as the paper noted when he retired in 2013.“He was a journalist’s journalist,” said former Post state editor Fredric U.
Dicker.McManus died three days short of his 82nd birthday of complications from bile duct cancer, his family said.Robert LaVelle McManus Jr.was born in Buffalo, the oldest of nine siblings to Robert L. McManus Sr.
and Jeanette Manning.He was introduced to journalism early in life to by his father, an award-winning reporter at Binghamton and Albany newspapers who went on to become a top aide and press secretary for the late Gov.
Nelson Rockefeller.“Bob had memories of going to work with his dad on Saturdays,” said Mary McManus, his wife of 24 years.“Newspapers were in his blood.”McManus was raised in Binghamton and, after a bout with polio at 12, moved to Albany with his family.
He graduated Vincentian Institute high school, where by his own admission he was “academically undistinguished,” his wife said.He was always a hard worker — in high school he finagled a full-time job as manager of the “pets and plants” department at W.T.Grants department store while a student.After graduation he enlisted in the US Navy and served four years — first on a destroyer, the USS Joseph P.
Kennedy Jr., and then on a submarine, the USS Sablefish.He was proud of his time in the highly-selective “silent service,” and was a member of the NYC Base of the United States Submarine Veterans.He returned to Albany, and got his first crack at the new business, as a copy boy at the morning Times Union, while he took classes at Siena College.
He quickly moved up the ranks to become an award...