Cleartime Editor Joe McKnight, and Paul Finch and Warren Lerude contributed to this story. Finch was an AP bureau chief in Caracas, Mexico City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Lerude reported for the AP in San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Reno. Both live in Reno.

Bob Geiger is arguably the oldest person alive to have worked for The Associated Press and he recalls stories from early in his 40-year stint with the AP as if he wrote them yesterday.

But Geiger isn’t stuck in the past. Alert and active, he’s an avid newspaper and magazine reader and scouts around the Manor at Lakeside, a seniors’ apartment complex in Reno, looking for possible stories to write on his old Underwood No. 5 typewriter.

The best story of all would seem to be Geiger himself, who turned 100 on Jan. 21, 2003. His journalistic achievements ranged from Dust Bowl coverage — his stories were the first to use the phrase — to World War II combat reporting and, finally, two decades of political writing in Washington, D.C.

Geiger got his first reporting job in Grand Junction, Colo., and moved on to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. He married his childhood sweetheart, Marjorie, in 1925 and joined the AP in Denver in 1929. He also worked in Cheyenne, Wyo., and in Albuquerque, N.M., and in the mid-1930s, with the start of AP Wirephoto, helped to expand the service to western states as photo features editor for the Rocky Mountain region.

Geiger also originated “Picture Show,” a service that provided photo pages to small newspapers, and corresponded frequently with AP General Manager and Wirephoto champion Kent Cooper. He later became part of AP’s expanding Newsfeatures team as a western features writer.

Geiger doesn’t brag about his career. He won’t even take full credit for the “Dust Bowl” term. He says the late Ed Stanley, a former Kansas City bureau chief, told him he added it while editing his one of his many stories on America’s great drought in 1935.

But Geiger will say that he wouldn’t do a thing differently — except to jump at a plum news assignment in Tokyo that the war-weary reporter passed up in 1945.

His vivid descriptions today of decades-old events tell a lot about Geiger, why the son of a Denver, Colo., stonemason-turned building contractor loved newswriting and stuck with it for as long as he did. He’s good at using words to describe overwhelming events and circumstances.

Recalling an assignment to write another “Dust Bowl” story and get pictures of a dust storm, Geiger told about getting caught in the middle of a storm in Oklahoma that blacked out the daytime sky.

“It was a horrible thing, a bad one, solid, dirty-looking air,” he said, describing how he and a photographer, Henry Eisenhand, had to drive at a snail’s pace several miles to safety, along the way picking up a couple and their two children whose car ran off the road and tipped over.

Geiger, who was driving, told Eisenhand to open the passenger-side door and reach down until he could feel the gravel road — or grass if the car started running off the road.

“If I got over too far, he would yell to get back,” Geiger said. “It took us an hour and a half to drive three or four miles. If you go through it, you’ll never forget it.”

Safe in Boise City, Okla., they handed the film, wrapped tightly to keep dust out, to a trucker headed for Kansas City. The pictures were soon on the wire.

When Geiger volunteered for combat reporting duty during World War II, he was first sent to Guam, where American soldiers had just defeated Japanese troops that had held the island.

His best story while on Guam was a chilling account about a couple who, like many others islanders, were forced to do slave labor. When the Japanese realized they were losing the island, they rounded up more than 300 Guamanians, took them to an isolated area and machine-gunned them. The husband avoided the round-up, and later found his wounded wife, corpses piled on her, waving for help.

Geiger befriended the couple, and asked why the husband called his wife a “pistol-packin’ momma.” She showed him a chicken coop behind their home, and told how starving Japanese soldiers would come out of hiding at night looking for food. “She sat there with a Marine carbine and picked them off,” he said. “She had five notches in her rifle when I talked to her.”

Geiger spent nearly a year covering the war in the Pacific. Ironically, his closest call came when he was trying to return to the U.S. He tried unsuccessfully to board the USS Indianapolis at Tinian Island. The ship, which had just delivered atomic bomb components, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine two days after leaving Guam and many of its crew drowned or were devoured by sharks.

Instead, Geiger boarded a small British aircraft carrier that was headed stateside with 400 wounded Marines.

“I was the only reporter aboard,” he recalls. “I got a lot of good stories from them while we were en route.”

After the war, Geiger was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he spent 23 years mainly writing features and handling a variety of other news assignments during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations. He retired in 1968, at age 65, and moved to an 89-acre farm in Pennsylvania — “where I raised some ponies and raised some hell with my grandchildren.” He has seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Geiger moved to Reno three years ago to be near his daughter and her family. Another daughter died recently. His wife died at age 89 in 1992.

How does he account for his good health? Geiger says he played a lot of baseball and basketball and ran track in high school. “I didn’t set any records in track — my legs were too short,” he says.

Geiger quit smoking half a century ago, and never drank much. His father lived until he was 93, although no one else in the family is particularly long-lived.

Asked whether he was physically active as an adult, Geiger said he spent a lot of time fly fishing. And, he said with a laugh, “With the AP, anybody stays active.” (Nov. 18, 2002)

Bob Geiger, 855 Brinkby Avenue, Apt. 208, Reno, Nev. 89509 (775) 825-5199