Doug Robinson, longtime Inquirer city editor and New York Times reporter, dies at 90

Doug Robinson, 90, a former Philadelphia Inquirer city editor and New York Times reporter, died from lung cancer Saturday at his daughter’s home in New Hampshire.

Mr. Robinson began building his 40-year journalism career in 1955 when he covered Hollywood for the New York Times. He would go on to report on many of the biggest stories of the day: the Vietnam War, the Charles Manson murder trial, the Beatles’ first trip to the U.S., and the Civil Rights Movement, covering the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. so closely that King knew him by name.

Mr. Robinson was underwhelmed by the Beatles. “He couldn’t understand half of what they said and couldn’t tell them apart,” said Rebecca, one of his daughters, “and for him, it wasn’t much of a story.”

He moved to New York City in the late 1950s and then was posted for a year to Vietnam, where he delivered powerful combat coverage of the war for the Times. He would work alongside Gene Roberts, who would become the executive editor of The Inquirer starting in 1972.

Mr. Robinson returned to the U.S. from Vietnam, taking up a post in the Times’ Washington bureau as the Watergate scandal broke.

At one point, he had a temporary change of ambition and became an aide for Lowell Weicker, the Connecticut senator who was the first Republican to call for President Richard M. Nixon to resign for his role in Watergate.

But working in politics — even behind the scenes — wore quickly on him, with family and friends attesting that Mr. Robinson was too much his own man to be a senator’s staffer.

“Weicker demanded that Doug carry his bags and Doug quit,” said William K. Marimow, a former editor of The Inquirer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for the paper.

Mr. Robinson returned to journalism, this time in Philadelphia. Roberts was now at the helm of The Inquirer and hired him as city editor in 1978. In that role, Mr. Robinson was wisecracking, unflappable and charismatic. He would later become the paper’s state editor, directing coverage of the governor’s office and political news in Harrisburg.

“He was completely a newspaper person,” Roberts said Saturday. “He got in early in his career,” and except for the brief period that he was a senatorial aide, built his life around the newsroom.

Mr. Robinson was a raconteur, with a sharp wit and deadpan delivery. He cared deeply for his staff, those close to him said, and generally took a light-handed approach to editing, but could colorfully lambast a story now and then.

Once, Marimow recalled, Mr. Robinson read a draft of a complicated story of his and remarked, “Bill, this story is like a fish at the bottom of the aquarium — dead. Is there something you can do to liven it up?”

“I was insulted, but I was amused,” Marimow said.

As a former colleague recalled, Mr. Robinson once complained that certain other editors at the paper “could drain the color out of autumn.”

As part of his job, Mr. Robinson would check in every morning with the veteran Inquirer reporter who supposedly covered Philadelphia police out of the force’s headquarters, the Roundhouse.

“Just got here. Everything’s quiet,” the reporter would invariably respond. One day after the call, Mr. Robinson immediately dialed the reporter’s home in New Jersey. When the reporter picked up the phone, Mr. Robinson asked, “Everything still quiet?”

Mr. Robinson and his wife, Marlene, were well-known for the annual parties they threw at their converted boathouse home in Bensalem that overlooked the Delaware River, where he would invite The Inquirer’s 500-some newsroom employees, and more than half would take him up on his offer.

“He was truly a steadfast and loyal friend who never failed to get in touch,” said Linda Austin, a former business editor and assistant managing editor of finance at The Inquirer who was friends with Robinson for 34 years.

He had a fondness for the water, remaining at his Bensalem home after retiring from the paper in the ’90s. He moved once from that point, but it wasn’t far — just to New Jersey, directly on the other side of the Delaware River. He could see his old home from his new one, his daughter said.

Retirement was mostly a quiet affair, filled with days of reading and doing the New York Times crossword everyday in red pen.

Mr. Robinson, born March 17, 1930, met Marlene Meder, from Oklahoma City, in 1952 when they were students at Los Angeles State College. They married a year later. Marlene had their first child, Cynthia Robinson, in California, and their second, Rebecca, in New York in 1959. While Mr. Robinson reported from Vietnam, the rest of the family lived in Bangkok, Thailand.

In recent years, Marlene, a former science teacher, developed dementia, daughter Rebecca said.

Rebecca moved her parents to New Hampshire and placed her mother in an assisted-living facility that would provide extra support. She moved her father into her own home. He was diagnosed with lung cancer last summer.

After developing a severe skin reaction to cancer treatment, he was in the hospital for five days in October, and in hospice after that. His last wish was to see Marlene. With both suited up in blue surgical gowns, face masks, face shields, and gloves, the two held hands during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It wasn’t really what my dad was hoping for,” Rebecca said. “He wanted to hold her hand and instead he’s holding a blue glove.”

In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by three grandchildren.

Mr. Robinson wanted to be cremated and have no service or memorial, his daughter said. The family said it would instead welcome donations to the Concord Visiting Nurse Association Hospice Program in Concord, N.H.