Robert Irving ‘Bob’ Benjamin, longtime Sun journalist who forayed into local politics, dies

Dan Belson, Baltimore Sun
·5 min read
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Robert Irving “Bob” Benjamin, a longtime staff member at The Sun who went into local politics after his journalistic pursuits, died of complications from pancreatic cancer Feb. 28 at his Catonsville home. The once-editor of T. Rowe Price’s flagship investment publication was 74.

Mr. Benjamin, a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor at The Sun, was remembered as a journalist driven by his eclectic interests and curiosity about the world. He was a determined reporter and demanded thorough work as an editor. Nothing gave him more pleasure than figuring out how to tell a long, complicated story.

“He was demanding; he pushed … under his watch, there was some really impactful journalism” at The Sun, said former staff writer and editor Howard Libit, who remained friends with his former editor after Mr. Benjamin left the paper in 2006 for a job at T. Rowe Price.

Mr. Benjamin was born in 1949 in Cincinnati to Irving S. Benjamin, a Latvian immigrant who became a serial entrepreneur, and Betty E. Benjamin, a national leader in Jewish causes and development director at Hebrew Union College.

The younger Mr. Benjamin graduated from Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills High School, where he disliked learning Latin — though later in life, he attributed his decadeslong career as a writer to his participation in the mandatory classes, also crediting his life in journalism to a sense of not being as well-educated as he would have liked.

Mr. Benjamin later graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and also studied at the University of Texas’ School of Journalism; the University of Hawaii; the Beijing Languages Institute; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

He first became a reporter in 1977 for The Cincinnati Post, which closed roughly three decades later. In 1981, he came to Baltimore and started working at The Sun, where he would serve as the lead education writer, a statewide investigative reporter, the Beijing bureau chief, the Howard County bureau chief, the Maryland editor and on the editorial board over his quarter-century at the newspaper.

Whether it was a short, daily story about a Columbia Association meeting or a several-part investigative series, Mr. Benjamin held stories to rigorous standards.

“He was a stickler on everything” — word choice, story structure and the sources involved, said Libit, who worked under Mr. Benjamin at The Sun’s Howard County bureau and now directs the Baltimore Jewish Council.

Mr. Benjamin was consumed with accuracy and fairness outside journalism as well, said his longtime partner, Renee Baruch, who noted that the writer’s life is also defined by his endless curiosity — he always “wanted to know about everything.”

Working in journalism provided Mr. Benjamin advanced training in education issues, Asian studies and financial planning, as well as deeply specific topics such as asbestos removal and Indonesian puppet theater.

Mr. Benjamin lived in Beijing and worked there as a correspondent for The Sun during a pivotal time in China, covering the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the country’s subsequent emergence as an industrial juggernaut. He was also in India when former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, in Pakistan when Benazir Bhutto lost her last election bid and in Singapore when leader Lee Kuan Yew supported the decision to cane an American teenager for vandalism.

Mr. Benjamin wrote one of the first books focusing on high-achieving elementary schools in low-income areas — “Making Schools Work, A Reporter’s Journey Through Some of America’s Most Remarkable Schools” — to identify what worked for pupils who were often left behind.

His investigative reporting uncovered environmental crimes at the Aberdeen Proving Ground that led to the first federal convictions of civilian Defense Department employees for such violations. As an editor, he shepherded a yearlong project investigating the state’s “boot camp” for juvenile offenders — a judge ordered the camp closed before the final piece of the four-part series was published.

Mr. Benjamin first served in media relations when he left The Sun for T. Rowe Price, but he soon started editing the investment management firm’s premier publication, The Price Report, for which he applied his editing prowess to break down intricate topics into words easily digested by the general public.

“He brought storytelling to complex financial analysis,” Mr. Libit said.

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Mr. Benjamin retired in early 2020 after 13 years at T. Rowe Price. Although he said he mostly disliked covering politics as a journalist, he became active in the political world in his later life, prompted by Donald Trump’s rise to the White House. He was elected in 2018 to a four-year term on the Baltimore County State Democratic Central Committee for legislative District 12 and served from 2018 to 2020 as president of the Baltimore County Progressive Democrats Club, also being named the county’s “Democratic Advocate of the Year” in 2019.

Mr. Benjamin reduced his political involvement after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2021 but continued to serve on the board of the Baltimore Curriculum Project, the state’s largest charter school operator. He funded that nonprofit’s perpetual endowment for an annual award to a teacher for excellence in using direct instruction, an intensive phonics method he had researched for his 1981 book, to teach reading.

Through surgery, radiology, chemotherapy and other cancer treatments, Mr. Benjamin persevered for three years.

Mr. Benjamin’s cancer fight “was a roller coaster,” Ms. Baruch said, noting that Mr. Benjamin “loved life” and tried to take full advantage of the periods when he was declared cancer-free, while knowing that its return was inevitable.

A private graveside service was held after Mr. Benjamin’s death, and a public memorial service is planned for a later date.

In addition to Ms. Baruch, of New York, Mr. Benjamin is survived by two daughters, Lily Coleman of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and Julia Benjamin, of San Francisco; a sister, Cheryl Greene, of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; and a grandson, Theodore Coleman. A prior marriage to Jeanne Garland ended in divorce.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Mr. Benjamin’s role on The Sun’s editorial board. He was a member of the board and an editorial writer.

The Sun regrets the error.