Lew Scarr, a longtime Union-Tribune reporter whose storytelling range covered topics as momentous as a presidential assassination and as mundane as beige socks, died April 3 at his home in Mission Hills.
He was 96. The cause of death was cancer, according to his son Mike.
Starting in the early 1950s, Scarr spent 40 years writing for newspapers in San Diego, first with the Evening Tribune, then with the morning Union, and finally with the merged Union-Tribune.
Early on, he was sent to cover major news stories across the country, including James Meredith’s ission as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, and the Apollo 11 mission that took off from Florida and put the first humans on the moon in 1969.
He also spent nearly a decade on the medical beat and was a columnist and feature writer. In newsrooms, he was known for his versatility and his way with words, prized for lead paragraphs that drew readers into stories and for endings that often left them smiling.
Here’s the opening of a weather report from September 1984, in the middle of a heat wave:
“The whole county is like some hot, humid, stagnant Casablanca saloon, and the air above us turns ever so slowly like some paddle-bladed fan that doesn’t even move the flies, and day after day it is played again and again, over and over.”
And this, from October 1987, when he was writing about cars:
“Our first car was a 1928 Buick. It had wheels with wooden spokes and a front grille that looked like a tombstone full of holes, and you climbed up into it as if into a truck, whose ride and handling it resembled a lot.
“Our latest car is a 1987 Nissan 300ZX, which does not have a grille at all. It is all pinched down in front, like a lot of today’s cars, looking as if it went in for a nose job and they took off too much. You step down into a Z as if you were entering a sunken bathtub.”
Lewis Furness Scarr was born June 2, 1926, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the second child of Furniss, a banker, and Blanche, a homemaker. The family moved to Santa Monica when he was a child so his father could manage a relative’s business interests.
After a two-year stint in the Navy at the end of World War II, he went to Los Angeles City College, where he met his future wife, Lila Lee Phillips. He got a bachelor’s degree in English at Occidental College and started his newspaper career at the Alhambra Post Advocate, making $30 a week.
The Post Advocate was owned by Copley Press, which also ran the papers in San Diego. In 1953, Scarr ed the staff at the Tribune.
He left after about six years for a better-paying public relations job in the aerospace industry, but soon grew tired of it. He went back to newspapers, this time with the Union, and quickly became the go-to reporter on breaking news stories.
Fires, train wrecks, mine collapses — he covered them all, often as the “color guy,” writing secondary stories known as sidebars that were more about the look and feel of an event and its aftermath than they were about the straight facts of who, what, when, where and why.
None made a bigger impression on him than the Kennedy assassination.
He and another reporter, Peter Kaye, flew to Dallas on the company jet right after it happened. Scarr talked to witnesses who were in Dealey Plaza during the shooting. He interviewed police officers who arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin. He interviewed Oswald’s landlady, who said, “He minded his own business, but he was always pleasant.”
Scarr’s eye for detail and dialogue served him well as a columnist and feature writer. He wrote about telephone operators, shoeshine stands and the bow ties he regularly wore. Beauty pageants and burials. Zoo animals and fruit flies. UFOs and those beige socks, which he wore for years and came to despise for their blandness.
“He could write about anything,” said Gina Lubrano, a newsroom colleague and longtime friend.
One of his biggest scoops never got published. It was in 1962, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union staring each other down in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Scarr, already in Florida to cover a space launch that kept getting postponed, drove toward Key West and stumbled across an Army convoy.
He interviewed the soldiers about where they were from and what weapons they were carrying. Then he filed a story about an apparent U.S. invasion force headed toward Cuba.
The story got spiked, deemed too sensitive to national security to print. Two days later, the crisis had eased. No invasion, no story.
His final assignment was cars, reviewing new ones for a weekly automobile section — everything from Bentleys to Yugos. He avoided gearhead jargon, choosing instead language like this, at the start of a story about the newly redesigned BMW 325i: “One of the little ones in the BMW family has put on long pants.”
Scarr retired in early 1992, when the Tribune and the Union merged, but continued to review cars as a freelancer for two years.
When he wasn’t writing, he liked to exercise, travel, read books and watch movies.
His wife of 66 years, Lila Lee, died in 2016. A son, Doug, also predeceased him. Survivors include daughter Nancy Quines of San Diego, sons Greg Scarr of Kerman, Ca., and Mike Scarr of Los Angeles; 11 grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.
Services will be private.
Staff research manager Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this story.
