Bob Russ dies

Update, 2 p.m. Saturday: Bob Russ died at about 10:15 this morning. He spent Friday afternoon and evening calling friends and saying good-bye, his sister, Joanmarie said. Funeral arrangements will be announced later. * Original story, 7 a.m. ThursdayWell wishers welcome Bob Russ is gravely ill. The man who writes "Matters of Life and Death," a weekly column in the Register that might be the media company's most popular column ever in its nearly 200 years publishing a newspaper, was moved to a care center in Alliance on Monday, his sister Joanmarie said. Anyone who knows Russ knows he's been up against it before and came back. So many people are hoping that happens again. About eight years ago, Bob was near death but an organ transplant saved his life. He survived, got healthy again, remarried, got divorced but adopted two children from his second marriage. Those children, Winnie and Mickey, and his eldest daughter, Mary, who like her father is a writer, mean everything to Bob. He's fighting to stay alive because he does not want to leave them. Bob often wrote about his health challenges, but he also wrote about his family, fishing, a hobby he loved, music and his record collection that he cataloged, always ready to talk about the artists and the history of music with a deep understanding about it. Bob was city editor at the Register in the 1990s, and before that, he worked at the Norwalk Reflector and later he worked for the Canton Repository. In addition to his Life Matters column, Bob wrote outdoors columns and columns about fishing, a pastime and lifelong passion he learned from his father. Russ, who has a deep radio voice, also had a radio program at one time about fishing. Russ hired Register executive editor Matt Westerhold in 1994 as a reporter. "I owe my career to Bob Russ. He taught me. He guided me," Westerhold said. "He was much more than a boss. He is a friend. He cares about the craft of journalism, and he cares about reflecting the community in our paper. Good, bad and ugly. He's a great journalist." Through the years, Russ hired dozens of reporters at the newspapers where he worked. He never grew tired of coaching them, nurturing them or inspiring them to be in service to the community by telling the stories the community needed to hear. "Tell Bob I love him," former Register reporter Kris Weiss, who covered the city beat in the mid-1990s, wrote at a social media update about Bob's condition made by his sister. "Tell him I love him. I am thinking of him. I'm (sending) him good vibes from Florida," another former reporter, Melanie Stawicki Azam, wrote. "Great buddy, dad, music maniac, journalist, a friend of the people," wrote Bill Mishler, a journalist who also worked for the Register when Bob did. "(He) set an awesome, high standard (and) made the world a better place than he found it." Readers and friends can send Bob well wishes at: Bob Russ, c/o Community Care Center, Room 169, 200 East State St., Alliance OH 44601.