Robert Ray Comstock, a fixture in the New Jersey press corps from the 1950s through the 1980s who served as Executive Editor of The Record for more than a decade, died Thursday. He was 93.
Comstock also had stints working as the press director for Gov. Brendan Byrne, as an associate professor at Rutgers University, and after leaving journalism, working in public relations.
Comstock died of complications from COVID-19.
Described by one former reporter as running The Record’s newsroom with “an iron fist and a velvet glove,” Comstock oversaw the newspaper in the pre-internet age when print was still king. His tenure at the helm of the paper covered everything from the Iran hostage crisis to President Ronald Reagan being shot to the Challenger space shuttle explosion and the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s.
Column: Please leave classics alone Harris Blackwood
There were two landmark movies in 1939. One was “Gone With The Wind,” and the other was “The Wizard of Oz.”
A few years ago, somebody tried to make a sequel to “Gone with the Wind.” Let me put it this way: Have you seen it on TV lately? I didn’t think so.
Now, one of the big movie companies has announced plans for a redo of “The Wizard of Oz.” To use a line from “Gone with the Wind,” “It ain’t fittin’, it just ain’t fittin’.”
Sometimes, perfection should be recognized for what it is.