Having spent more than three decades as a reporter and editor at The Associated Press, Marty Anderson has been involved with journalism since joining the IU High School Journalism Institute in 1951.
Anderson enrolled at IU in 1952 and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism five years later. As someone who worked evenings for most of his career, he is nostalgic about the many late nights he spent in the “back shop” at the Indiana Daily Student, where the next day’s edition got its final look.
While at IU, Anderson also was a member of Lambda Chi social fraternity and Scabbard and Blade, an ROTC military honor society. After graduation, Anderson served in active reserve at Fort Knox, Ky., and afterward went straight to work for the AP three days after returning home to Indianapolis.
Over the next 33 years at AP, Anderson covered breaking news in Indiana, including several historic plane crashes and a propane gas explosion during a Holiday on Ice show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds Coliseum in 1963.
He also covered the Beatles’ only Indiana appearance there the following year. He reported on the event while sitting high up in the bleachers and later at a news conference.
Throughout his career, Anderson never married and had been a caretaker for his parents. But after retirement, he helped to organize his 50th high school reunion in 2002, where he became reacquainted with fellow Thomas Howe High School alumna Ann Sterns Baldridge.
He had taken Baldridge to his senior prom, but never gathered the courage to call her afterwards. They married on his birthday in 2003 and had wonderful years together until her death in 2006.
In 2010, Anderson donated $1.75 million to the IU School of Journalism, the largest individual gift the school has ever received. Through two charitable gift annuities and a bequest, Anderson is endowing the Ann and Marty Anderson Scholarship in Journalism to honor his late wife and to help students who otherwise might not have the financial resources to complete their journalism degrees.
Ann and Marty Anderson
