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.