Howard Blakeslee was born on March 21, 1880, in New Dungeness, Washington, United States, the son of Jesse Walter and Jennie Howard Blakeslee. His mother had been a Civil War nurse, while Jesse Blakeslee was, at the time of his son's birth, a missionary to the Indians in the territory of Washington. A few years later the family moved to Charles City, Iowa, and from there to Detroit, Michigan.
Howard Blakeslee graduated from high school in Detroit and then entered the University of Michigan. He was expelled in his senior year as a result of his reporting in the Michigan Daily, which displeased university officials. But in recognition of his work as a science reporter, the university awarded him an honorary master of science degree in 1935.
Blakeslee began his journalistic career in 1901, when he became a feature writer for the Detroit Journal. From 1903 to 1905 he was a sportswriter for Detroit and Chicago newspapers. On July 4, 1905, he became a staff member of the Associated Press (AP) in New York and subsequently served in key editorial positions in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and other cities before becoming AP science editor in 1928. Blakeslee also had a brief career as a war correspondent. He spent several months in 1916 with Gen. John J. Pershing in Mexico during his pursuit of Francisco ("Pancho") Villa.
Blakeslee was one of the first to venture into a field in which the mass media had been regarded with suspicion and distrust, he did much to break down the barriers and to make the reporting of scientific developments an increasingly important aspect of modern journalism. Blakeslee nevertheless encountered some of the problems that had helped create the unfavorable attitudes toward the mass media so common among scientists. On one occasion, while covering a meeting of the American Medical Association about cardiovascular disease, he began a sentence with "These arteries . " but added an extra letter at the end of the first word and crossed it out with an "x. " A baffled AP telegraph operator, unable to find Blakeslee, sent the wording "The sex arteries " and that was how it appeared in many newspapers.
Blakeslee's reporting of science news during and after World War II became especially identified with the development and testing of the atomic bomb. He reported the tests in Bikini in the summer of 1946 and had returned from the 1952 test at Yucca Flat, Nevada, only ten days before his death. To offset his lack of scientific training he read voraciously; family members report vivid memories of watching him at work, surrounded by journals and treatises. He recognized the problems of covering complicated scientific developments in a manner that would not only be comprehensible to newspaper readers but would also fall within the space limitations imposed by writing for a news service. He died in Port Washington, New York.
Howard Blakeslee won his reputation as a science reporter and editor. The significance of this new field in American journalism was officially recognized when Blakeslee and four other science writers who had covered their specialty at the Harvard University Tercentenary were jointly awarded the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. He was also the author of Atomic Progress, The Hydrogen Race (1951) and The Atomic Future, a book in tabloid form distributed by the Associated Press to member newspapers on May 3, 1946. The Howard W. Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association is named in his honor.
Quotations: "If a story is kept to 250 words or less, it has a good chance to appear on page one. The more words, the farther back in the newspaper it will appear, or be left out altogether. "
Blakeslee was active physically despite a heart condition. As a teenager he was warned by doctors to "take it easy. " He avoided overstraining his heart but continued to participate in sports.
On March 19, 1906, Blakeslee married Marguerite Alton Fortune. They had one son. After her death, in 1936, Blakeslee married Rosamond Robinson, of Boston, Massachussets; they had three children.
