by Sandra Blakeslee
Alton died of prostate and bone cancer on May 11 in a hospice at North Shore Hospital on Long Island. To the end, he believed that he would recover and be able to play tennis again, hugging the net because at 83 he could no longer “fast-ass” his way around the court.
Alton was one of the greatest science writers of our time. His career spanned 50 years, roughly from World War II through the end of the 1980’s, when American science and technology transformed the nation. In his words, “There were so many exciting stories. Along came the atomic age with bombs and power plants. The space age with men on the Moon. The beginnings, with transistors and solid-state physics, of computers and calculators and CRT’s. And TV!”
Oh my, he was handsome and dashing. I’ve been going through his papers and old photographs. The young Alton with dark hair sitting in a newsroom in front of a battered typewriter, his hat nearby, as if in a scene from “The Front Page.” Alton in Antarctica with snow on his newly grown beard. The mature Alton with silver in his hair and that wicked twinkle in his eye. Almost to the end he wrote on typewriters. Computers were alien and he refused our entreaties to buy a simple Macintosh. Imagine what he did all those years without a delete key!
Like most science writers of his generation, Alton covered everything. He reported the first use of a heart-lung machine, the Salk polio vaccine, the Kinsey report, the early days of the space program and lots of astronomy. Here is how he described his work shortly before his death:
Being a science writer is wonderful fun.
You report and write about an ever-expanding world of knowledge and ideas from the minds and efforts of scientists, physicians, engineers, teachers, philosophers and others. You are privileged to feed your brain with discoveries and insights from the labors of specialists devoting themselves to everything from viruses to galaxies, the intricate innards of atoms to mysteries of human behavior dictated from within our skulls.
You partake, firsthand, at a never-ending smorgasbord of knowledge ranging
from quarks to quasars, anthropology to zoology and most in between. And
so much of it is a surprise, totally unexpected, a harvest from men and
women who asked “Why” or “What could be done,” or said,
“Let’s try this.”
In an unfinished memoir of his years as a science reporter—a work he called “The Education of a Dumbbell”—Alton wrote:
I was born naive, as is everyone. It just took me longer to get over it. I was innocent of the worlds of science and medicine and logic. I had taken one science course in college, in chemistry, and failed to make a cake of soap in a laboratory assignment (though winding up with an “A”). Maybe I invented liquid soap in 1931.
A few weeks after the Associated Press transferred me from the foreign news desk to make me a full time science writer, and I had written a few stories under my byline, “By Alton Blakeslee, Associated Press Science Writer,” an editor from the general desk—the awesome control point for the flow of AP stories by teletype, came to my desk, and said: “You’re a science writer. Tell me, what makes the Earth wobble?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Earth. It wobbles. The North Pole doesn’t always point to the North Star.
“Gee, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Said he, positively, “It’s nothing to worry about. It’s called precession. What I want to know is, what causes it?”
I threw in my innocence towel. “I’ve never heard of it. Do you need to know now?”
He said he didn’t, just curiosity from flea-bite interest in astronomy. He left when I assured him that when I found out, I’d let him know. And I did find out long afterward, and when I told him the answer, he didn’t remember our conversation.
That Instant Authority aura endures. Some few years later, another general desk editor came by and said, “You’re a science writer. Tell me, how does a snake go to the bathroom?”
I waited for the punchline.
None came.
Conjuring up an image of a snake, its tongue or jaws snaggling in some food, and the food likely being processed down the length of its body, I said: “It probably has an aperture at its rear end.” “One or two?” he demanded. I said I didn’t know, but could call a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History, and likely find out.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, and walked away. I avoided him thereafter.
Talk about writing talent. Alton had it and was rewarded by winning too many accolades for me to mention here. If there was a journalism award, he won it. Scores of trophies and plaques adorned his basement office at our family homestead in Port Washington, Long Island.
Alton fell in love with journalism early in life. His father, Howard Blakeslee, was also a newspaperman. Alton recalls “I sensed it, learned it from my father, though I don’t recall having talked with him about it. He seemed so full of his career, so enthusiastic, especially after becoming science editor of the Associated Press. There were so many of his newspaper friends who visited our home. To a naive boy, they were special people, some of whom by hindsight appear no longer intellectual heroes or so special as individuals. But they were NEWSPAPERMEN!”
So, after graduating from Columbia University in 1935, Alton joined the Wilmington Journal and began writing. He joined the AP in 1939 and shortly afterwards was sent to the foreign cable desk in New York. It was a heady experience:
The wire network reached almost everywhere. A teletype operator transcribed a story onto a moving tape that fed through a transmitter, and activated receiving machines in each newspaper on the line, at 60 words a minute, the state-of-the art wonder of the day. It was good training in versatility and writing under pressure.
[One day] I was in charge of the cable desk, busy with three other staffers
handling a large volume of news. Sometime in the afternoon, the London printer
blurted out “FLASH!” American troops had entered Rome. 
Everyone had been wondering whether there would be a battle there, with destruction of priceless monuments. This meant, no. I agreed this bit of news was worth a FLASH, turned to my typewriter and—as a calm, level-headed newspaper man—quickly wrote “F.L.U.S.H!!!!
U.S. Army Enters Rome.”
The calmer teletype operator, the indispensable “Puncher”, saved me, making it the nobler FLASH! And our flood of copy started. A few minutes later, my phone rang. It was the London Express, in offices just above us. “I say, old man,“ the British accent sounded, “in view of your dismal performance yesterday”—there had been a false alarm on the wire about the war ending—“can we put any credence in the Flash you have just transmitted?”
I replied and hung up abruptly. Milt Besser, sitting beside me, asked “Who was that?” I said, “London Express.” Milt said, “You know, you answered him in four words and only two weren’t expletives.”
And we went back to covering the big war, as best we could.
Alton credited Howard for teaching him how to write simply and clearly about complex subjects. But through all those years, he said, “I remember only two easy leads.” On writing about a young scientist who had won a prize for creating the most nearly perfect vacuum yet achieved in the lab, Al wrote “A young scientist today won $1,000 for making the most of nothing.” The second lead was about astronomy, when Prof. Fritz Zwicky showed Alton and other reporters a picture of what he said was colliding galaxies, “and we got him to estimate how many stars blew up some two hundred million years ago, how many of them had planets around them and how many of those planets might have had intelligent life. Thinking of the packet ships bringing news from England to the Colonies, the lead was “News of a great disaster in space has just reached Earth.”
But a high point of Alton’s life—the stories he returned to in later years when he met new people who had not heard all his yarns—was the 1946-47 Antarctic expedition with Admiral Byrd.
A 20,000-mile journey to the bottom of the world and back begins on a November afternoon in 1946 when J.R. “Buddy” Roberts, AP foreign news editor, sits down by your desk and asks, “Do you mind cold weather?”
“No.”
“Then how would you like to go to Little America with Admiral Byrd?”
“Well...(You’ve never been more than 80 miles from the office on any assignment) ..well, sure.”
“Good,” said Buddy, “You sail from Norfolk in twelve days. And oh yeah, you’ll be gone four to five months.”
I read up a bit on Antarctica, a frozen continent of 5.5 million square miles, the size of the United States and Mexico combined. It’s a forbidding, demanding part of the world, heretofore visited only by small groups of explorers,, like Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackelton, Roald Amundsen of Norway and Britain’s Robert Falcon Scott in their race to discover the South Pole (Amundsen won and Scott died) and Admiral Byrd, with their daring exploits and bravery.
This time in 1946, it will be an assault by 4,000 men aboard 11 Navy ships and some dozen airplanes in Operation Highjump, under nominal command of Admiral Richard E. Byrd (for publicity value, a man who was a household word back then.) The operations command, and credit for its success, would go to Admiral Richard E. Cruzen.
Save for a few veterans of Byrd’s three previous trips to Little America—actually just a snowy dot on the edge of an iceshelf—the adventure is new and strange to all of us, to some more than others, such as the young sailor posted as a lookout on the starboard bow when the command ship, the Mount Olympus, is sailing through a blizzard at night in iceberg country.
I crawled on the deck toward him and shouted, “WHAT ARE YOU DO-ING?’ “LOOK-ING FOR ICE-BERGS!” he yells back. “EV-ER SEEN AN ICE-BERG?” “HELL, NO! I NE-VER SEEN SNOW BE-FORE. AH’M FROM SOUTH CARO-LINA!” I got his name and hometown, where likely this was a page-one item.
Practically everything was newsy about his venture, and I was to file about 100,000 words before homecoming in mid-April. Only one newsman had ever been there before, Russell Own of the New York Times, who spent the winter of 1928-29 at Little America with Byrd on his first expedition. So Antarctica was little known to the American public, even to knowing where it was. (Maybe partly because on those spinning plastic globes that once graced many living rooms, Antarctica was the place where you inserted the light bulb in the bottom and the continent disappeared.)
Of all the stories Alton filed from Antarctica that year, two of my favorites are:
Mount Olympus at Little America, Jan. 19—all right now, Blakeslee, keep calm. The problem’s not insurmountable. You’ve done it before, and others are getting dressed in the same rig.
First, long underwear. But it’s been laundered and shrunk and grabs your legs like a Notre Dame tackler after Doc Blanchard. Next, khaki shirt and trousers. Simple.
Next a pair of heavy wool socks. Next, alpaca-lined overalls with high bibs. Now strangle yourself with a turtleneck sweater. Now the parka. No wait. How about shoes? But you can’t bend down. Take off the big overalls.
Much better. On with the field shoes. Off with the field shoes. You’re going ashore for hours on the ice, chum. That means shoepacs. On with shoepacs. These have nice thick rubber soles with tread like new automobile tires. They are rubber up over the instep, then leather half way to the knees with felt inner sole. Lace and tie shoepacs. Untie, unlace shoepacs. You forgot you have to wear two pair of socks. Okay, second pair of bigger socks now are on over smaller pair. Tie the shoepacs.
Disaster! Same old mistake. Overalls have narrow ankle and can’t be put on over shoepacs. Off with shoepacs and top pair of socks. On with overalls. On again with top socks and shoepacs, amid grunts.
How about heavy windbreak? Forget windbreak. How about hat with earmuffs? No, No! It’s on backwards. The long part goes down the back of the neck, not in front like a sunbonnet. Hat corrected. Parka hood fits over that too tightly. Hat goes into parka pocket. Sunglasses into parka pocket.
Off we go. Back we come. Pick up wool mittens and leather mittens. Off we go, happy in the knowledge we’ll stay warm standing still, but gloomy over prospects of having to walk and partially disrobe to avoid Turkish bath sweat from exercising.
Pretty good record this morning, though. Next time, try it when better awake after a couple of cups of coffee.
And this one:
While the Tent Town was being assembled, Bob Reuben of NBC and I went for a stroll, safely away from the edge of the Barrier, but fairly far from the camp. In violation of safety rules, we didn’t rope ourselves together, didn’t walk in single file, as precautions against crevasses.
We came across, and patted, a huge docile Weddell seal, which must have had a nearby blow hole, but that fact didn’t impress two nitwits. Then, some 150 yards away, we saw a dark line on the snow. It appeared to be a rope or cable, like a ship’s cable, but what could it be doing there?
Heavy footed with all our gear, we stomped over, placing one foot on each side of the “rope: and peered down between our legs. Our “rope” was an open crack in the surface, the top of a crevasse. Each lip extended sidewise, and down, down into a beautiful blue abyss, whose bottom we couldn’t see in the instant we stayed for inspection. We tiptoed away.
Light striking the open crack made it appear like a long dark rope. Two Antarctic novices had grown up mighty quickly.
Alton retired from the AP in 1977 and went straight to work for the American Cancer Society as a consultant. He continued to write for them and to freelance through the 1980’s—and of course play tennis four times a week. Also at this time, he began yet another career as a journalism teacher. He was great at it. After his death, my family got many letters from former students saying how important Al had been to them, how he had encouraged them, how generous he had been. I think he loved teaching, though it scared him. He used to say that he told them everything he knew in the first ten minutes. The rest of the course was a scam.
I found some of his hardly scammy notes in the basement soon after he died.
"What can I tell students of today who want to write and report, to be part of “journalism?” Just the simplest things I myself finally learned.
"Readers are innocent, not ignorant. You must push your own enthusiasm button or why should your story interest anyone else? Define technical and funny terms and use them again but only in that same story, not the next one, respecting the innocence of the next readers and listeners. God, you only learned this wonderful insightful information yourself just a couple of hours ago, so don’t play God. What you leave out of a story is more important than what you leave in."
In his later years, Alton was involved in one escapade that caught the attention and imagination of many people—The American Tentative Society. This organization was hatched in the wee hours of the morning, over many bottles of Jack Daniels, in Santa Rosa, California where another AP writer named Rennie Taylor, my dad and Pat McGrady (the legendary organizer of American Cancer Society boondoggles) got together on occasion. Rennie felt that most Americans view science as facts cast in stone rather than as an ever-changing, tentative enterprise. In his will, he stipulated that his estate be used to set up the ATS to honor scientists whose work demonstrates the tentative nature of our knowledge. Alton was president and had great fun, through the years, throwing luncheons in New York, honoring some really great scientists. They drank toasts to Rennie, of course, and did more serious work like supporting young science writers. ATS was disbanded a few years ago and the money went to CASW programs.
Alton suffered great doubts in the last years of his life and often said that what he had done amounted to nothing. It was depression, of course, which he battled all his life (and self-medicated with copious amounts of bourbon or vodka.) How he could have believed he “amounted to nothing” was and is incomprehensible; his work stands as a testament to his talent and influence.
Alton liked to say, “when I began science writing, I was known as Howard Blakeslee’s son. Then, for a time, I was myself. Now I am known as Sandy Blakeslee’s father.” He’d pretend this made him less significant, that he was not as important as his father or daughter, but to me his little joke evoked the image of a sandwich, with Howard and myself as bread slices and Alton as the really great stuff in between.
"Looking at medicine and physicians as a patient rather than a science writer, I wish I had mentioned in stories the cost of the wonderful tertiary medical advances we covered. And how so much is beyond the reach of millions of us."
"Alton and Jack Geiger were regulars ar Pat McGrady's American Cancer Society seminars. The three were also among the originators of Hotel Room Jai Alai. It involved using hotel glasses to fling ice cubes back and forth across the room. It was a wonderful sport--especially late at night--but it never made the Olympics.
"I think he lived in two ways. Fun and humor. And extreme seriousness about science writing, which he did so well that his copy was always clear and comprehensible to almost any reader.
"He had a good rule for covering a meeting. You have to marry the meeting."
