St. Louis journalist Robert W. Duffy dies at 79

By Paul Wagman >>

Robert “Bob” Duffy, one of St. Louis’s best-known and best-loved journalists for decades, died Friday, Feb. 7, at Barnes Hospital of complications from cancer. He was 79. 

His husband, Marty Kaplan, and several close friends were at his bedside.

Duffy was known for his breadth of learning, whimsical and searing wit, fiercely held convictions, gift for writing and deeply affectionate heart.

“Over three decades at the Post-Dispatch and then at the St. Louis Beacon and St. Louis Public Radio, Bobby did as much as any writer in town to reveal the community to itself,” said Margaret Freivogel, a longtime colleague at both the Post-Dispatch and the Beacon.  “He did that through his writing about both the built environment — as the Post’s architecture critic – and about the people who lived in it — primarily through his features and in-depth obituaries of people whose lives would otherwise have escaped attention.”

Emily Pulitzer, a close friend for more than 60 years, said he understood the community he covered “as well as anyone I know.” 

“He had such a great imagination and sense of humor that he sparkled – and made every event he was connected to just delightful,” Pulitzer said.

Many readers of Duffy’s work in the Post-Dispatch and Beacon would likely also call his writing delightful — in an elegant sort of way. Here, for example, is his introduction to a 1992 story about the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood:

“It rubs elbows and shoulders with Forest Park and Washington University and, if it stretches a bit, the Delmar Loop.   Some of the streets (and a hidden river) that run through it bear names that call forth ghosts of our city’s French heritage; magic dust from the 1904 World’s Fair blew over it and gave it some of its special character.

It is a neighborhood embroidered with shining memories for those who have moved away from it; for those who have remained steadfastly and those who have migrated to it, it is a place that stirs a pride approaching militancy.

This is Skinker DeBaliviere …”   

But he could also bite. Indignant about the pending destruction of the Century Building downtown to make room for a parking garage, he wrote:

“Everyone concerned – developers, politicians, bankers, citizens – needs to keep Saturday, Feb. 29, 1999, in mind, the day The Arena crumpled like a mortally wounded horse, and grown men and women wept.  … As time goes on, those who destroy them (great old buildings) do so at their peril – especially when the primary determination for knocking them down is profit, that tarted-up, worn-out old whore disguised by the name Progress.”

Robert William Duffy was born and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of Francis Hardeman Duffy, who raised him by herself, and grandson of a former mayor of Little Rock whose wealth had been vaporized in the Depression. Forced by her altered circumstances into the workplace, Francis became a legal secretary and later encouraged her son to become a paper boy, delivering the Arkansas Gazette, whose liberal politics she admired and passed onto her son.  

Duffy moved to St. Louis to attend Washington University and graduated with a degree in English in 1967.  After a brief stint in graduate school and an assortment of writing-related jobs in insurance and other industries, he joined the Post-Dispatch in 1973 as a reporter in the suburban section, the lowest rung on the newsroom ladder.  After a couple of years, however, he began covering fashion, and his trajectory as a reporter covering arts-related subjects was set.

In the course of his 32-year career at the paper, Duffy wrote about painting and sculpture, classical music, opera, theater, and literature, and photography; in 1978 and 1979, he served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in that latter category.  Among his titles over that long span were architecture critic, arts editor and cultural news editor, as well night city desk reporter,  editorial writer and editor of the Everyday Magazine. 

Among the highlights, he said in a 2022 interview with the CWEA Griffin (a newspaper for the Central West End), were a piece he wrote about a collection of porcelains owned by Hall of Fame catcher Ted Simmons, and an interview he conducted with the artist Ellsworth Kelly in connection with an exhibition of Kelly’s work at the St. Louis Art Museum in 1983.  

But all of that was only his day job.  In 1981, Duffy took a role as an extra in a production by the then just five-year-old Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In a piece he wrote years later, he called it his “supernumerarical debut,” adding, “The opera [by a contemporary Japanese composer] was so wonderfully exotic that many of us in the cast thought it would lay an exotically monumental egg, and that, accompanied by the plucked-string sounds of the koto, the show would send audience members pushing and shoving to escape the opera house at intermission and stampede Western fashion on home.” 

But the audience turned out to love it, and Duffy himself was so smitten that “this gig prompted me to run away and join the opera.” He left the paper to do Opera Theatre’s public relations and fundraising.  Only a year later, however, he returned to the paper, “when it became clear that newspapering, not the great and exciting world of opera, was my métier.” Smoothing his return was the Post’s editor and publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, who had become, like Pulitzer’s wife, a close personal friend.

The opera was not the end of Duffy’s extracurricular activities, however. Beginning in about 1990, he became an adjunct instructor at Washington University, teaching, for 32 years, in the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, University College, and College of Arts and Sciences.  In recent years, he taught a course called “Communication that Works,” which was designed to give practical business skills to undergraduates not interested in business school. 

He loved teaching, he often said, in large part because he loved working with young people. If he had a legacy, he once said, it would be in the interns he had worked with who had gone on to careers at places like The New York Times and NPR.  And his rapport with the very young — who appealed to his playful nature — was also extraordinary.  Among his friends, Duffy was known for conspiring in mischief with their young children and being willing to offer occasional parental breaks by scooping their children up for adventures like a trip to the Zoo.

Duffy’s career at the Post-Dispatch ended after the paper was acquired by Lee Enterprises in 2005 and he took a buyout. He then spent the next few years working with Margaret and William Freivogel, Richard Weil, Richard Weiss and others in launching one of the country’s first online, nonprofit newspapers, the St. Louis Beacon.

The Beacon provided in-depth, long-form coverage of St. Louis for five years, during which Duffy served as a critic and reporter. Drawing on his remarkable connections with the St. Louis arts community, he also spearheaded several extraordinary fundraisers, not least a New Year’s Day 2011 performance at The Sheldon of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” that featured Saint Louis Symphony conductor David Robertson and the soprano Christine Brewer.  

During this period and for a few years thereafter – after the Beacon was absorbed into St. Louis Public Radio — he also wrote several notable obituaries of people whose deaths would otherwise have escaped attention like the one about scientists and leftist Daniel Howard Kohl and one about creative philanthropist Evelyn Edison Newman.

And all the while he was also contributing articles to national magazines, such as U.S. News and World Report, Smithsonian, Metropolis, and Modernism, and contributing essays or chapters to several books on architectural and urban-design subjects.

After retiring from St. Louis Public Radio in 2016 Duffy continued working on some personal writing projects, as well as resuming his oboe lessons. He fought off his poor health with every ounce of his strength, managing still to exude playfulness and joy at a dinner party at the home of close friends on Jan. 17.  At the end of that party, perhaps sensing the end might be near, he told a friend, “I’ve had a wonderful life.”

Two years prior to his retirement, he was named “Media Person of the Year” by the St. Louis Press Club.  And some seven years later, in 2023, the Landmarks Association of St. Louis honored him with its H. Meade Summers, Jr. Award for his contributions to the cause of historic preservation. 

In presenting the Summers Award, Andrew Weil, the Landmark Association’s executive director, cited Duffy’s efforts to oppose the demolition – sometimes successfully, sometimes not — of several of St. Louis’s great old buildings, including the Century Building, the Ambassador Theater, the Old Post Office, the Wainwright Building, the Veterans Administration building downtown and others.

“For decades, Bob has held an incisive and witty and often a humbling mirror up to St. Louis and consistently asked who – what – do we want to be as a community? What do we want to look like? What do we respect about our heritage and what should we leave to the next generations? Do we want to be a community that puts its best foot forward, or a community that shoots itself in in its best foot? “

He added, “In aggregate, this body of work had an enormous impact on the way people in St. Louis thought and think about design and architecture and urban planning.  What a luxury we had in having such a thoughtful and articulate critic who was not afraid to wave a passionate flag on behalf of St. Louis and its unique sense of place.”  

News of Duffy’s death stirred an outpouring of tributes on social media from his former colleagues, who paid homage to his gentlemanly courtesy, collegial supportiveness, creativity, hard work, intellect and skill.  And some, such as Phyllis Brasch Librach, recalled the kind of story that perhaps could no longer happen in today’s stripped-down newsrooms, but that captured some of the unforgettable playfulness in the man.

“I knew Mr. Duffy, as I will always address him, as a polished, polite professional, and accomplished prankster.  In 1979 Rocky Sickmann, a Marine Corps sergeant from Krakow, Missouri, was among the 52 Americans taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.  When the hostages were finally released 444 days later, Sally Bixby Defty frantically tried to interview Sickmann in Germany before he landed at Lambert to a hero’s reception. She had written for months about how people in St. Louis, and around the country, had tied yellow ribbons on trees to remember the hostages. 

Mr. Duffy, Sally’s dear friend, knew the interview would be a big scoop for Sally and the paper. 
I never found out why … but Duffy tapped me as an accomplice to pull off his practical joke. I was the muffled voice faking an overseas operator asking Sally to “Hold for Rocky Sickmann” as Duffy watched her astonished reaction when … he never picked up. 

In the end, Mr. Duffy and Ms. Defty had a good laugh, and I made two great newsroom friends. And by the way, Sickmann married his high school sweetheart and had three children and four grandchildren.”  

A memorial service will be scheduled at a later date.  Donations are welcome to the Landmarks Association of St. Louis and the Washington University School of Medicine, Division of Oncology.

Paul Wagman is a former Post-Dispatch reporter and FleishmanHillard executive who is now an independent reporter, editor and communications consultant. Richard H. Weiss contributed reporting to this story. Weiss is a former editor at the Post-Dispatch and founder of Before Ferguson Beyond Ferguson and River City Journalism Fund.

This story has been updated.