Lew Scarr, a longtime Union-Tribune reporter whose storytelling range covered topics as momentous as a presidential assassination and as mundane as beige socks, died April 3 at his home in Mission Hills.Starting in the early 1950s, Scarr spent 40 years writing for newspapers in San Diego, first with the Evening Tribune, then with the morning Union, and finally with the merged Union-Tribune.
“Our latest car is a 1987 Nissan 300ZX, which does not have a grille at all. It is all pinched down in front, like a lot of today’s cars, looking as if it went in for a nose job and they took off too much. You step down into a Z as if you were entering a sunken bathtub.” The Post Advocate was owned by Copley Press, which also ran the papers in San Diego. In 1953, Scarr joined the staff at the Tribune.
Scarr’s eye for detail and dialogue served him well as a columnist and feature writer. He wrote about telephone operators, shoeshine stands and the bow ties he regularly wore. Beauty pageants and burials. Zoo animals and fruit flies. UFOs and those beige socks, which he wore for years and came to despise for their blandness.One of his biggest scoops never got published. It was in 1962, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union staring each other down in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.