Judy Bolch

People are always surprised at how cool my mom, Judy Bolch, is. Mothers aren’t supposed to be cool. But she is. Having just retired (or at least she claims she’s retired) from a career as an award-winning journalist and then as a university professor at one of the world’s premier journalism schools, the sixty-six-year-old splits time between the glamour of New York City and the green of Portland, home of her grandson, Henry. She is a heroine to many: the journalists she worked with, the students she taught, and especially to the two children she raised. And she is a redhead, or at least was before nature turned it gray and then she turned it blonde.

Judy Bolch was born Dorothy Judith Butler on February 23, 1942 in Sparkman, Arkansas, to Mary Jo and Joseph Butler. She was their first and only child and was delivered on the dining room table.

For elementary school Judy attended a two-room schoolhouse: the first through third grades were in one room, the fourth through sixth in the other. Precocious Judy not only skipped second grade but was given her own personalized reading class during recess, which surely contributed to her envious literary skills and her pitiful athletic skills.

Without siblings Judy was often lonely, once placing a pocket knife under the mailman’s tire so he would get a flat and be forced to stay at her house longer (the success of her scheme did not earn the approval of the mailman nor of her parents).

As Judy grew up the size of her school buildings got larger. She graduated from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1963, double-majoring in Journalism and English. She continued her education at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, earning a Master’s in English.

During the summer before graduate school Judy met her future husband, Thomas Bolch. Following her graduation in 1965, the two were married. Judy then worked for various newspapers in North Carolina for the next few years before having her first child, Jonathan, in December 1969.

When Judy left journalism to have her baby she vowed she was “quitting forever” to become a full-time mom. This lasted all of ten months as she found that she missed work too much. She got a job teaching English and Journalism at North Carolina State University, and taught there for seven years. During that time, in February 1974, she had her second child, Benjamin. 

In January 1977 Judy returned to the newspaper world, taking a job with the Raleigh Times in North Carolina as a feature writer. For the next twenty years she would stay in the same building, working for the two daily papers in Raleigh, the News & Observer (the morning paper), and the Raleigh Times (the afternoon paper). She worked as a features writer, an editorial writer, and then was asked to become the editor of the features section, known then as the “Women of the Times.” Before she would accept the job, Judy insisted that they change the name to something more gender-neutral (n her suggestion it became the “Scene”).

In 1979 Judy and Thomas Bolch divorced, with Judy taking custody of Jonathan and Ben. Judy continued to work full-time as she raised her two sons, taking care of them through high school and funding the majority of their college and graduate educations at prestigious (read: expensive) institutions.

Judy continued as Scene editor for eleven years. During her tenure the section won the nation’s most prestigious prize in its size category for a features section, the Penney-Missouri Award.

Following her success at Scene, Judy was promoted to Assistant Managing Editor and then Managing Editor of the News & Observer. Also during that time Judy was invited twice to New York City as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize.

After 20 consecutive years in Raleigh newspapers, Judy was eager for a change and considered getting a PhD in journalism. She wanted to apply to the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the nation’s first journalism school and one of the top journalism schools in the world, and called someone she knew there to inquire about their program. The person assumed she was calling to apply for a newly-chaired professorship. So Judy applied both to the PhD program and for the professorship and became the only person in the school’s history to ever be accepted simultaneously as a PhD student and as a chaired, tenured, professor. She took the professorship, becoming the school’s first Houston Harte Chair in Journalism.

During her eleven years teaching at Missouri, Judy taught writing and editing. She helped start the Reynolds Journalism Institute and ran the school’s New York program, allowing her to split time between Manhattan and Missouri. She also taught in the school’s London and China programs. Her experience in academia has filled her with an urge to write an “academic murder mystery” as she sees it as ripe for parody.

Other career achievements include co-authoring a textbook on investigative reporting and editing three books. In addition, she has read, in the author’s estimation, approximately 333,333 books (although an accurate number is difficult to gauge as she re-reads her favorites several times). She is known to bring a stack of library books taller than her children for a week at the beach (and to get through them before the week is over). Her favorite authors include Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton.

Judy has a particular fondness for mysteries, with her favorite mystery writers being Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James. While teaching in London in 1999, Judy won the P. D. James Literary Detective Fiction Quiz, devised and hosted by P. D. James herself. Imagine the surprise of the Brits having an American (with a Southern accent, no less), march to the stage to claim this prize. Knowing my mom—what she is capable of and what she has done—I was not surprised in the least.

Written by Jonathan Bolch, her son