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Retired Associated Press reporter Bob Greene, 89, of Minot met two U.S. presidents and traveled around the world covering professional tennis. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

On a recent postcard-perfect Maine summer afternoon, Bob Greene spun tales that spanned decades of history. He witnessed and lived the civil rights era, attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, met presidents and sports stars.

Joe Lawlor (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

For the last 22 years of his career as a journalist, Greene, a Portland native and now 89, covered tennis for The Associated Press. He reported on the sport’s “golden era” of John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, to name just a few top players.

As a huge tennis fan (and a mediocre player), hearing those stories was like being up 40-Love and hitting an ace out wide.

Greene went to the same church in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood in New York City as the late Arthur Ashe, an ambassador for the sport, civil rights leader and humanitarian. The main stadium at the U.S. Open in New York is named in Ashe’s honor.

But the stories mean something deeper to me than just a recounting of famous names and places.

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I met Bob in person this month for the first time, and he’s already a hero of mine.

Greene, of Minot, can make the past seem like the present, and brought home the lesson to me that we are all connected.

All the good, all the bad, all the in-between.

He flashes an easy smile when telling a joke and can summon a tiny detail about a story he covered 60 years ago.

Greene grew up on Munjoy Hill in Portland, graduating from Portland High School in 1953. After high school, he attended Virginia State University and then transferred to the University of Kansas.

He didn’t graduate college because he landed a job at the Hoosier Herald, a Black newspaper in Indianapolis. In those days, having a degree in journalism wasn’t considered necessary before launching a career, Greene told me. What mattered, he said, was being able to report, write, edit, lay out pages and spell.

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Bob could do all of that and more. He worked for newspapers like the Hoosier Herald and the Kansas City Call before landing with The Associated Press in Kansas City in 1965. His AP career included stints in Milwaukee; Washington, D.C.; Portland, Maine; and New York.

MEETING PRESIDENTS, COVERING MLK’S FUNERAL

Greene, as a Black man, experienced the discrimination of the pre-civil rights era, including not being permitted to sit at segregated lunch counters in the South. He stopped riding the bus in Kansas City because he was forced to ride in the back.

As a journalist, he wrote about civil rights protests, lynchings and the many ways the nation was changing in the mid- to late-20th century. He met former presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, and covered Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.

Greene said when he met Truman in Independence, Missouri, at the Truman presidential library in the late 1950s, he told the former president about the civil rights lunch counter protests in Independence. The white press at the time refused to cover them, he said, and Truman didn’t know they were happening.

“Truman thanked me for telling him about it,” Greene said.

After his one-on-one interview with Truman, Greene said, “I realized for the first time in my career as a journalist the very important role we have to let the public know what people are saying.”

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Greene also collaborated with a team of AP reporters covering King’s funeral in Atlanta. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

“My main job was sitting in the church and keeping track of the people coming by to view the casket,” Greene said.

Greene remembers New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, came to the funeral. He said Kennedy wouldn’t look directly at the casket, instead looking around the church. Two months after King’s death, Kennedy was assassinated in California while he was running for president.

Greene also met former President Johnson at an event at the University of Texas in 1972, about a month before Johnson died. Greene told me in a follow-up call that growing up in Portland, he couldn’t have imagined he would “go to as many places or meet as many people as I did.”

“I was very, very fortunate to be part of history,” Greene said.

LONG SPORTS CAREER

Greene enjoyed covering sports, so when he had the chance in 1980 to be a sports reporter with the AP in Milwaukee, he took it. He saw the emergence of a new NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks. The Bucks signed a rookie in 1969 — known then as Lew Alcindor – but who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He won a championship with the Bucks and achieved basketball immortality with the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s.

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In 1970, point guard Oscar Robertson joined the Bucks, and Greene remembered him from his days at the Hoosier Herald. At the Herald, Greene was in his early 20s and Robertson was a senior in high school, already making waves on the basketball court.

“I remember Oscar. We double-dated one time,” Greene said, laughing. They went roller skating.

The world is, indeed, a small place.

Retired Associated Press reporter Bob Greene, 89, of Minot has a collection of press credentials that he saved from his years of covering professional tennis. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

But it was tennis where Greene did the bulk of his sports writing. He interviewed Billie Jean King years before her famous “Battle of the Sexes” match in 1973 at the Houston Astrodome when she defeated Bobby Riggs.

“She was a good salesperson,” Greene said, an understatement for the tennis icon and founder of the Women’s Tennis Association.

Greene saw some of the famous matches in the McEnroe-Borg rivalry, including Borg’s last meaningful match at the 1981 U.S. Open. Despondent over losing to McEnroe and burned out from tennis, Borg left the tennis center at Flushing Meadows in New York City before the awards ceremony.

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“We didn’t know right away that Borg was gone,” Greene said. “We found out later he had just gotten in his car and left.”

Greene also reported on Jimmy Connors’ famous 1991 run to the U.S. Open semifinals at age 39. Connors fed off the energy of the crowd, arguing with umpires, pumping his arms and twirling his racquet to get the crowds cheering at — for tennis — a deafening pitch.

“Jimmy always knew how to play the crowd,” Greene said. “But I think what he was doing mostly was giving himself time to catch his breath.”

Among the other tennis greats Greene covered were McEnroe, who he said was fascinating, had good stories to tell beyond tennis, and “treated after-match press conferences like a psychiatrist’s couch,” and Ashe. Greene said Ashe “knew he was an icon” but was as gentle and polite to talk to as his public persona. Ashe died in 1993 from complications of AIDS.

In the late 1990s, Greene reported on the rise of sisters and tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams.

Greene’s life outside of his journalism career includes marrying twice and becoming a widower twice. He has five children — two have since died — and 15 grandchildren. He’s become an amateur historian and enjoys researching Maine and Black history.

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When he retired from the AP in 2002, Greene knew Maine was the place he wanted to live. Where it all started.

Greene is an eighth-generation Mainer, dating to the 1700s.

“Where else but Maine?” Greene said.

Glad you’re here Bob. And thanks for the stories.

Joe Lawlor writes about health and human services for the Press Herald. A 24-year newspaper veteran, Lawlor has worked in Ohio, Michigan and Virginia before relocating to Maine in 2013 to join the Press...

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