Robert M. Conrad, a lifelong newspaperman and one of Connecticut's most influential political journalists from the 1960s through the 1980s, died Monday at Sheriden Woods Health Care Center in his hometown of Bristol. He was 91.
The byline of Bob Conrad appeared above countless political scoops and witty observations during an era when cross-town rivalries raged between big newspapers such as the now-defunct Hartford Times and the Courant.
Conrad was the Times' star and he battled former Courant columnist Jack Zaiman for years over who would be first to tell the state which candidates would head the state parties' election tickets - as Conrad did in 1973 with Ella Grasso, who was elected governor the following year. "I'd do anything to beat Zaiman," Conrad recalled in 1985, in a Courant profile written by his friend, Charles F. J. Morse, on the occasion of Conrad's semi-retirement from daily political writing at the New Britain Herald, where he worked after the Times closed.
Conrad was a great talker and extremely humorous in private - always a gentleman, gracious even on the first meeting with reporters decades younger than himself who showed up at the same political event as he. He didn't say anything more than he needed to at public press conferences, because he usually knew what was going to be said and might have already reported it. He got the information either from the political heavyweights staging the press conference or from other sources who those heavyweights wished wouldn't have talked to him.
"Don't ever walk around a building - walk through it," Conrad used to say. "You never know who you'll run into."
An eye for the colorful detail always served Conrad well. He used to talk about how once, during a concert at the Bushnell Memorial auditorium, he went backstage and saw a Hartford detective firing 12-gauge shotgun shells into a steel barrel to add some thunderous emphasis to the "1812 Overture" finale. Morse reported in his 1985 Courant profile that it was one of Conrad's favorite stories - especially the ending, when the policeman was called out to take a bow.