Ron 'Nobby' Clarke, the archetypal Reuters Man

The archetypal Reuters Man when I joined as a part-time news dictationist in 1979 and one of a very, very few US correspondents we had back then. His wordsmithing was stellar and dictating skills perfect and conscientious - he knew to end a sentence with "full point, new paragraph" rather than keep that vital knowledge for the next breath. But he didn't need to dictate much because he had a terminal to the mainframe IN HIS HOUSE - unheard of in those pre-PC days. I only met him once - in the world of Reuters even that might have been unlikely - but he was one of the few people who had an outsized influence on me, defining what it meant to be journalist. Full point, end it. ■