Wally Dobbins wasn’t yet a teenager when he began helping his mother hand-set type for a newspaper.
He made a career in journalism, and on the marble tombstone he designed for himself and his wife, also a journalist, are the outline of a typewriter and the words “Journalists of the Old School.” The stone was cut from one used in the newspaper business.
Dobbins died Jan. 5 at a care center in Eckert, one day short of his 91st birthday.
He finished his career at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, where he taught and had administrative positions for more than two decades.
“He always put the welfare of the students first,” said Martin Wenger, a former Mesa State colleague.
“He was utterly upright in everything he did, worked as hard as the students and he expected your very best,” said Kirk Rider, now a lawyer in Grand Junction. He was editor of the yearbook when Dobbins was at Mesa State.
“You just felt like you couldn’t disappoint him,” said Rider, adding that no student wanted to see Dobbins’ disappointed look if the student failed a task.
Dobbins was a kid when he began helping his mother, Lillian Meador Dobbins, herself a third-generation newspaper person.
Her husband, J.W. Dobbins, was an undertaker and furniture-maker, and she put out a weekly paper in England, Ark. She didn’t have enough type to fill a full page, so she set half of the front page and then the other half. Her press was big enough to accommodate a full page, said David Dobbins, Wallace Dobbins’ son.
Wallace Dobbins was born in England, Ark., on Jan. 6, 1920, graduated from high school there and worked on the school paper.
He got a job at the Johnson County Weekly Graphic in Clarksville, Ark., where he met Anna Carolyn Bush, the society editor. They eloped on Nov. 5, 1939.
The two worked at various newspapers in several states, publishing their own weekly papers in Raton, N.M., and in Fruita and Olathe. They moved around for better job possibilities, their son said.
“They’d change states for a $1-a-week raise,” David Dobbins said.
During World War II, they lived in Seattle, working in the aircraft industry, then came back to Colorado. Dobbins earned a degree at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and later a master’s degree at Western State College in Gunnison.
He got a job in Montrose and then began teaching at Mesa in Grand Junction, where he stayed 22 years. While there, he published a paper about campus news.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a grandson and two great-grandchildren. His wife died in 2006.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
