Don Bolles - Biography

Biography

Bolles grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and attended Teaneck High School, graduating in the class of 1946. He pursued a newspaper career, in the footsteps of his father (chief of the Associated Press bureau in New Jersey) and grandfather. He graduated from Beloit College with a degree in government, where he was editor of the campus newspaper, and received a President's Award for personal achievement. After a stint in the United States Army in the Korean War assigned to an anti-aircraft unit, he joined the Associated Press as a sports editor and rewriter in New York, New Jersey and Kentucky.

In 1962 he was hired by the Arizona Republic newspaper, published at the time by Eugene C. Pulliam, where he quickly found a spot on the investigative beat and gained a reputation for dogged reporting of influence peddling, bribery, and land swindles. Former colleagues say he seemed to grow disillusioned about his job in late 1975 and early 1976, and that he had requested to be taken off the investigative beat, moving to coverage of Phoenix City Hall and then the state Legislature.

Two marriages produced five children, four from the first and one from the second.

Bolles was the brother of Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the best-selling job-hunting book, What Color is Your Parachute? He shares a grandfather, Stephen Bolles, with humanist theoretician Edmund Blair Bolles. His daughter, Frances Bolles Haynes, has co-authored four books on job hunting.