Saul Pett; AP Reporter Won Pulitzer Prize for Features

Saul Pett, whose intricately plotted feature stories stretched the rules of American newspaper writing and won him the Pulitzer Prize, died Sunday at 75.

A veteran of 45 years with the Associated Press, Pett died of cancer at a friend’s home in McLean, Va.

Striving, he once said, to show “not only what happened . . . but what it was like to have been there,” Pett first made his name with a dramatically detailed account of a car-train crash that killed seven high school students in 1959.

At 3,500 words--long for its time and for the wire service--the piece was so extensive that the Associated Press distributed it by mail rather than clog up its news wires.

Pett went on to write from across the United States and around the world, providing the AP’s clients with deeply researched and colorfully written coverage of people, places and events.

Following the irascible Nikita Khrushchev across the United States on a 1959 visit during the depths of the Cold War, he wrote that the Soviet leader was “like a long-feuding neighbor who drops in suddenly, ignores your discomfort, helps himself to cheese and crackers and blithely asks why we don’t have these get-togethers more often.”

He profiled every sitting president from Harry S. Truman to George Bush, and wrote as well about the retired Herbert Hoover.

His profile of the writer Dorothy Parker at age 70 began: “‘Are you married, my dear?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘Then you won’t mind zipping me up.’ ”

In 1982, in an 8,570-word portrayal of the growth of the federal bureaucracy, he wrote that the government was “a big, bumbling, generous, naive, inquisitive, acquisitive, intrusive, meddlesome giant with a heart of gold and holes in his pockets . . . somewhere between capitalism and socialism . . . a thumping complex of guilt trying mightily to make up for past sins to the satisfaction of nobody.”

It won him the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

Born in Passaic, N.J., the son of a Polish immigrants, Pett graduated in 1940 from the University of Missouri journalism school, where he met his wife, Leanore, who died in 1978. Survivors include three daughters, a grandson and a brother.

Richard E. Meyer, then an AP reporter and now a Times staff writer, remembers his advice: “A good story is its own best reason for being, at its own best length. Down at the lower right-hand corner of your typewriter is a period. When you get done, use it.”