"Where do we get such men?" 

The words of Adm. Tarrant at the close of "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" came to a poster [1] on gawker.com. Other tributes came pouring in at the news of Bob Greene's death this week:

* "Bob was a big-story guy whose zeal to right wrongs was larger than life. He worked at Newsday from 1955 to 1992, a time of explosive, formative growth for the paper and Long Island. He was always at the center of what has made the paper great." - John Mancini, [2] Newsday's editor.

* "For much of his career, he could outthink, out-hustle, out-report, outeat, outdrink and outwork any other journalist in the country. But if his excesses were occasionally unbridled, they were driven by his passion to get a good story and root out the bad guys. ... He could get excited about an investigation of public corruption or a bizarre animal story. We once spent weeks following a story about a dog on 'death row' that Bob believed was 'innocent.'" - Howard Schneider [3], former Newsday editor, now dean of the journalism school at Stony Brook University.

* "His size, his bravado, his high-impact journalism, his flaunting of expense-account living, all combined to create a persona that seemed to be drawn in equal parts from The Front Page, The Sting, and All The President’s Men." - Anthony Marro [4]in Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2002.

Greene won his first Pulitzer in 1970 for exposing land scandals in Long Island; his second came in 1974 for a series that tracked heroin from Turkey to Long Island. Greene also led a team of volunteers from Investigative Reporters and Editors [5] to investigate the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles [6], one of IRE's founding members. The Arizona Project [7]resulted in a 23-part series that won several prizes, including a special award from Sigma Delta Chi.

Bob Greene, early multimedia reporter, taping the evening news with Karen Hasby, for "Inside Newsday" in this 1983 Newsday photo.

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