IN MEMORIUM: JEAN ROBERTS THE RETORT’S LONG TIME MANAGING EDITOR A Tribute by E. Thomas Strom
The obituary section of the Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021, Dallas Morning News contained an obituary that was quite late arriving, referring to a Sept. 26, 2020 death. Yet for long time readers of The Southwest Retort, this late-reported death was quite significant, because the subject was the original Managing Editor of The Southwest Retort, Jean Roberts. It was Jean Roberts who made this small regional magazine over a period of 32 years into the ground-breaking publication it became and continues to be. Amazingly, Jean matched the longevity of our magazine with longevity of her own. While the month and day of her birth were not given in the obituary, the year was. It seems quite clear that Jean lived to be about 103 years old!!
for a radio station. She became editor of publications for the Tulsa plant of Douglas Aircraft. Here she oversaw a magazine with a circulation of 100,000. After the war she became public relations director for the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce. She moved to Dallas in 1947 to become executive director of Scene magazine. In 1951 Jean became Managing Editor of The Southwest Retort, retiring in 1983.
Fortunately, we have access to Jean’s memories of the early days of The Southwest Retort, because she described them on p. 7 in the golden anniversary Retort issue of Oct. 1998. (Readers, thanks to Jim Marshall of UNT, all issues of our magazine are available online through the UNT library.) Here we summarize pertinent material from Jean’s obituary and from her recollections published in The Retort. Jean was born in Lima, OH, in 1917. She spent her early childhood in Tulsa, OK, later moved to Los Angeles, and graduated from Hollywood High in 1935. She attended the University of Tulsa, where she was President of Chi Omega Sorority, helped launch the “Experimental Theater,” and graduated in 1939 with a degree in Business Administration. She began work as an account executive and later became a promotions manager
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Jean married Robert M. “Bob” Roberts in 1950. Bob was a World War II veteran who had earned the Bronze Star for exceptional valor in many of the biggest battles of the South Pacific. Bob had a successful career at Proctor and Gamble, and this led to Jean’s association with The Retort. (See below.) After they both retired, Jean and Bob traveled extensively, established scholarships at the University of Tulsa and Oklahoma State,
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