Excerpted from the Register-Guard, September 4, 2002.

John Conrad, who devoted his journalism career to the Register-Guard as a reporter and editor for 33 years, died Sept. 3, 2002, after suffering a stroke two days earlier. He was 57.

“The sporting community has lost a very close friend,” University of Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti says.

Conrad’s strength and competitiveness—whether chasing down a story, playing golf or quarterbacking the sports department’s flag football team many years ago—were remarkable, and he was a regular noontime runner who was extremely fit.

More than that, he was a respected journalist and the most loyal of friends.

“John was one of those really good people, a consummate professional,” Register-Guard editor and publisher Tony Baker says. “He helped make our sports pages consistently top-notch, and he certainly made those who worked around him better.”

Reared in Bandon, where he was a star high school athlete as well as a prep journalist, Conrad was a 1967 graduate of the University of Oregon, where he lettered in baseball as a pitcher. He worked for the Salem Capital-Journal before joining the Register-Guard sports department in 1969.

During the 1970s, Conrad was a key member of the sports staff, under the leadership of thensports editor Blaine Newnham, that created one of the nation’s best sports sections.

The section was noted for its intensive coverage of major events such as the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials, for its insightful reporting on local teams, and for its trendsetting use of photographs.

“John was a tenacious competitor as an athlete and a journalist,” says Newnham, now a sports columnist and associate editor at the Seattle Times. “Heck, in the ’70s we didn’t get beat on many stories or in many flag football games, not with John covering the Ducks and playing quarterback. ...

“We worked hard and played hard, and no one did either better than John. I’ll miss him, and so will Eugene.”

While covering track and field for the newspaper, Conrad reported on the three Olympic Trials held in Eugene and on numerous NCAA championships, and on the Oregon careers of standouts such as Mac Wilkins and the late Steve Prefontaine. He also covered the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

Conrad’s many other beats over the years have included coverage of Oregon football and of Oregon men’s basketball.

As a football writer, Conrad chronicled Oregon’s tough years in the late 1970s and ’80s, and the Ducks’ rise to the 1994 Pac10 Conference championship and a berth in the Rose Bowl.

“I just thought he was one of the better people in the business,” former Oregon football coach Rich Brooks says. “He was fair, he was supportive, but not a homer in his coverage. If something needed to be said that was critical, he wasn’t afraid to say it.

“I respected and admired the work that he did.”

In basketball, Conrad covered the playing days of Ernie Kent, as a member of Oregon’s fabled Kamikaze Kids in the mid-1970s, and Kent’s return to his alma mater as the Oregon coach who led the Ducks to the Elite Eight in 2002.

“I know for me, he will be missed,” Kent says. “When you have a beat writer with you for so long, it’s like he’s part of your family, and for me that goes back to when I was a player.

Conrad was promoted to the position of sports editor in 1984. In addition to continuing to cover beats—most recently, Oregon men’s basketball and local golf—he directed the Register-Guard’s sports staff, maintaining an emphasis on local coverage, from high schools through the collegiate ranks, and significantly upgrading coverage of women’s sports.

“Strong local coverage, including an emphasis on women’s sports, was a hallmark of John’s tenure as editor,” Baker says. “Time and again someone will remark to me, `You guys have the best sports section around.’ And these are people who travel a lot. John was instrumental in making sure his section covered a lot of bases every day.

“He was a classic ‘leader by example.’ When resources were short or times were otherwise difficult, John never complained. He just said ‘Guys, we’re not done yet.’”

“No one worked harder to ensure that readers got what they bargained for by picking up the RG sports section.”

The winner of various awards—he was voted Oregon’s sports writer of the year in 1982—Conrad most valued solid, unpretentious local journalism that informed readers about the teams and programs in Lane County.

At heart, he was a conservative, blue-collar boy from Bandon who liked country music, fishing and meat-and-potatoes sports stories, but he was also the kind of editor who allowed the talents of his reporters to flourish, even if their styles were different than his.

He was also caring, conscientious and inherently fair.

“Over the years, I’d thought critics had been much too hard on Rich Brooks,” Conrad wrote in the introduction to “Roses for Oregon,” the Register-Guard’s account of the 1994 Rose Bowl season. “I think the guy can coach. I think he hired good people, and I believe he makes every effort to recruit athletes who will be good citizens as well as good players. He has been loyal to the UO, and he has represented it well. … I don’t think a lot of fans realize just how tough it is to win consistently at Oregon.”

“The thing that stands out in my mind is that in all those years, John always had a smile and always had a positive word to say,” says Neal Zoumboukos, Oregon’s offensive line coach, who’d known Conrad since serving as an assistant at Oregon State in 1979.

“The relationship between coaches and sportswriters isn’t always portrayed as a close one, it’s more adversarial, but with John’s demeanor, everybody over here counted him as a friend.

Beyond being a journalist, Conrad was also a citizen of his community. He served on the committee to select entrants for the UO athletic department’s hall of fame.

Kyle Kristopher Guyer, ’03

Kyle Kristopher Guyer was remembered by family and friends at a memorial service in Rouch, Ore., last June—but the University and the School of Journalism remembered him as well, posthumously granting him the degree he had earned before his death.

Guyer, 23, was a senior, and had already begun to celebrate his graduation from the J-school with his classmates from the electronic media sequence. He was found dead in his apartment in Eugene on Sunday, June 1, just a few days before graduation.

While at the J-school, Guyer had been a music critic and one of the founding participants in Duck U, a cable access television show.

Gary Turley, MA ‘89

Gary Turley, MA ’89, died Feb. 11, 2003 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 50. After completing his master’s degree, Turley worked as an editor for a travel magazine before becoming managing editor of Mercator’s World magazine. A lifelong Eugene resident and sports fan, Turley was the author of “Having Fun in Eugene” in Eugene 1945-2000: Decisions That Made A Community, published by the Eugene City Club in 2002. Upon his death, Turley was remembered by a colleague as “one of the most important ambassadors of the history of cartography, geography and geographical exploration. In fact, he and his magazine were in the vanguard of making our discipline relevant, exciting and even fun.” He is survived by his wife, Kim, and daughter, Katherine.

Joan Marie Ross, ’83
Joan Marie Ross, ’83, died July 20, 2002. She owned her own design and marketing company and volunteered for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research in Seattle. In addition to her professional accomplishments, she enjoyed hiking, biking and surfing.

Diana Lee Dye Williams, ’49
Diana Lee Dye Williams, ’49, died May 27, 2002. She worked for Mademoiselle Magazine in New York City from 1950 to 1964. She was an avid supporter of the University and happily attended her fiftieth class reunion in 1999.

Oliver C. Larson, ’48

Oliver C. Larson, ’48, died Sept. 9, 2002. After serving in the Aleutian Islands in World War II, he returned to Oregon to complete his education, graduating from the school in 1948. He managed chambers of commerce in Lebanon, Springfield, Tacoma and Portland, where he was the chief executive officer in 1962.

Jean A. Yoder (Lawrence), ’47

Jean A. Yoder (Lawrence), ’47, died July 12, 2002. After retirement in 1982, she and her husband Marlen Yoder traveled extensively, visiting 20 countries and all 50 states.

Betty Bushman, ’46
Betty Bushman, ’46, died Oct. 30, 2002. She was a newspaper reporter and enjoyed traveling and writing.

James W. Frost, ’42
James W. Frost, ’42, died May 16, 2002. He taught in the J-school from 1955 to 1961 after working in marketing for the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and CBS Radio. He returned to the business world to work with Meredith Publishing and the Television Bureau of Advertising.