Bronze Star, Pulitzer Prize recipient Robert Mullins to be buried in Boulder City
Robert M. Mullins, a decorated World War II soldier and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will be buried Wednesday at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City.
He died June 8 in Leesburg, Virginia, 25 miles east of where his daughter lives in Berryville, Virginia. He was 91.
“He truly was the most unique and magnificent man I ever met in my life,” said Gina Mullins-Cohen, his only child.
Mullins had lived in retirement in Las Vegas from 1996 until 2013.
“He did amazing things,” she said Tuesday, noting that he “was a big advocate for under-served people in health care.”
When the family lived in Salt Lake City, where he worked 30 years for the Deseret News, he would deliver medicine to diabetics who didn’t have transportation, said Mullins-Cohen. She and her father and mother, Donna Marie Mullins, had moved to Salt Lake City from Price, Utah, when she was 5 years old.
Robert Marion Mullins was born Dec. 16, 1924 in Scofield, Utah.
He served as a staff sergeant in the Army during World War II in France, Germany and Austria. He was awarded a Bronze Star medal for valor for pulling wounded soldiers to safety in the line of fire.
“After that he was very much a pacifist. He was very much anti-war,” Mullins-Cohen said.
He graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor of science degree in 1950 and was hired the following year by the Deseret News. He later was assigned to the newspaper’s bureau in Price, Utah, where in 1961 he covered a story about a murder and kidnapping at Dead Horse Point near Moab, Utah.
For his investigative work to identify the murder suspect and filing stories on deadline from a remote area by relaying his copy through a teletype person in Grand Junction, Colorado, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1962, his daughter said.
“My dad was on his trail and the police were following my dad,” she said.
In retirement, he played golf and wrote short fiction stories. He was working on a novel before he died.
Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Find him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2
