Barbi Robison, a Salt Lake Tribune reporter and features editor who over three decades expanded the notions of what news Utah women wanted to read — beyond society dispatches to covering the day’s issues — has died.
Barbi Robison spent more than three decades writing for and editing The Salt Lake Tribune’s features section — once called “lifestyle” and “the women’s section” — and expanded the idea of what Utah women wanted to read.
Barbi Robison, a Salt Lake Tribune reporter and features editor who over three decades expanded the notions of what news Utah women wanted to read — beyond society dispatches to covering the day’s issues — has died.
Robison died Monday at a care facility in Salt Lake City, several days after suffering a stroke, friends said. She was 91.
Robison’s daughter, Nancy Fisher, said that when her mother was editing the section — whose name changed from “the women’s section” to “lifestyle” to “features” — “she turned the women’s pages from gala events and who was there to things like birth control, and stories about other things women would be interested in.”
Judy B. Rollins, Robison’s deputy editor from the early 1970s to 1993, recalled in a 1999 Tribune article that “Barbi’s desk was considered a frontier. She pushed the limit, but always insisted on good taste.”
In 1960, when Robison was a cub reporter at The Tribune, her assignments reflected what was expected in the women’s section: A how-to for preparing for that year’s census; a story about a Salt Lake City man who lost 100 pounds in a year; and profiles of the wives of the players and managers of the Salt Lake Bees baseball team.
She covered a 1960 Utah visit of Lady Bird Johnson, when her husband Lyndon was running for the Democratic nomination for president. (LBJ eventually signed on to be John F. Kennedy’s running mate.) Two years later, Robison and another Tribune reporter, Carolyn Habbeshaw, covered a Tribune-sponsored celebrity bowling event and wrote about bowling against pro football great Johnny Unitas.
“She loved her reporting job,” her daughter said. “They’d send her out and she’d ride around in a tank.”
Changing topics, stubborn sexism
As the ’60s progressed, Robison covered more serious topics — like the growing role of women in the workforce.
By 1969, Robison was promoted to women’s editor of The Tribune, and put in charge of six journalists, all of them women. They included two of the paper’s legends: Society writer Hazel Parkinson (who died in 1995) and food writer Donna Lou Morgan (who died in 2003). Sometime in the 1980s, the job title changed to lifestyle editor.
In 1981, when Rollins wrote about the 25th anniversary of the founding of La Leche League, a group that advocates for breastfeeding moms, Robison approved a discreet photo of a mother feeding her child. “We got dozens of calls about how ‘dirty’ we were,” Robison recalled in 1999.
As an editor, Robison continued to write features — rodeo was a topic she returned to a few times — and the occasional opinion column.
In 1986, she wrote a column about sexual harassment in the workplace. She concluded with a no-nonsense message: “For all of you in the office who are saying, ‘Guess I can’t talk to you the same way I used to,’ the answer is, ‘I didn’t like it before. I don’t like it now, and I sure as heck am not going to like it in the future. Do you have a good attorney?’”
Robison “had to tolerate an awful lot of stuff from the very sexist newsroom,” said Mike Korologos, a longtime friend who worked at The Tribune from 1955 to 1980 — as a copy boy, sportswriter and eventually as assistant to then-editor Art Deck.
“Men dominated. Those guys were tough guys,” Korologos said. “And she would hold her ground with those guys. … If the guys would start getting frisky with her staff, she would protect her staff. … Like a mama bear with her cubs.”
Robison retired from The Tribune in 1993. Her last task was to merge The Tribune’s lifestyle writers and the arts & entertainment desk into a single features department. Rollins succeeded Robison, and was features editor until she retired in 1999.
Fisher said her mother wrote her own obituary, which she started with a declaration: “It was a helluva ride, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
From Oregon to Idaho to Utah
Barbara Ann Robison was born July 15, 1933, in Portland, Oregon, to Keith and Marjorie Work Robison. She grew up in poverty, and her life was changed when a mentor Robison called “a fairy godfather” took her under his wing, and “showed her there could be a different way of life,” Fisher said.
Robison attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, and the University of Utah.
She entered journalism in the 1950s, in what Robison wrote was “its golden age.” She started as a sportswriter, one of the first women in the country with that job, she wrote.
Robison worked for papers in Caldwell (where Fisher was born) and Boise, Idaho, as well as La Grande, Oregon, and Tacoma, Washington. Then she arrived at The Salt Lake Tribune.
The earliest Tribune story with her byline that is available in the University of Utah’s digitized newspaper database was published on Jan. 18, 1960, in what was then called the “For Women” page. She wrote about the minor annoyances some Utah families have — like getting the wrong mail — when their name is similar to someone else’s.
Her byline then was Barbi Fouch. Robison was married twice — once to Ralph Fouch, an Idaho car salesman, and later to Robert Ellefsen, a longtime Tribune copy editor. Both marriages ended in divorce. She used both married names in print for a time, but by 1980, she permanently switched her byline back to Robison.
For much of her career, Fisher said Robison worked as a single mother, “trying to raise a kid in a society that kind of frowned on working women. So she was definitely driven to succeed.”
When Robison retired, her daughter said, she moved to a small ranch in Fruitland, in Duchesne County. She shared that ranch with Harold “Corky” Wollen, a printer who worked in the shared pressroom of The Tribune and the Deseret News. Wollen, who died in 2011, was “my soulmate and my best friend,” Robison wrote.
Robison is survived by her daughter, Nancy Fisher, of Seward, Alaska; two granddaughters, Amanda Stigall and Carri Fisher; and two great-grandsons, Ian and Reid Stigall; and by her sisters, Kathy Moore of Salt Lake City and Janet Pride of Hollister, California.
At Robison’s request, there will be no funeral service.