OUT HERE

“Out Here” by award-winning journalist, Bob Hill is a heartfelt and sometimes humorous memoir that takes readers across America’s back roads and main streets to meet unforgettable characters in unexpected places. From a storied journalism career spanning nearly six decades, Hill’s essays weave together encounters with icons like Muhammad Ali and Loretta Lynn with intimate glimpses of everyday heroes. This collection not only celebrates the people and places that define America but also reflects Hill’s unique storytelling voice—honest, compassionate, and deeply resonant.

Author of fourteen books and more than 4,000 newspaper columns, winner of the Ernie Pyle Legacy Award from The National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and nicely settled on eight acres of Southern Indiana farmland and gardens, former Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Bob Hill has made “Out Here” both a lifestyle and a book title.

Or as Kentucky novelist, poet, essayist, environmental author, cultural critic, and very-happy-at-home farmer Wendell Berry wrote to Hill of his effort: “This book is not recommended for people who need to quit reading and go to work. Out Here clearly is the right place for you.”

Hill, who never had a formal writing or journalism course, went to Rice University on a basketball scholarship. Graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce, his early failures in capitalism included selling baseball bats in a Montgomery Ward store in Houston and ordering parts for police cars in a monster Chrysler assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois.

His next stop provided needed happiness as editor of his hometown Northern Illinois weeklies, the Sycamore Sun Tribune and True Republican, where he wrote his first columns longhand with a pencil. Learning to type with two fingers, he moved on to the police beat of the nearby Rockford Morning Star writing of floods, murders, house fires and lost children before talking his way into writing more columns.

This led to his 33-year career at the Louisville newspapers, at first covering busing insurrection, the KKK, coal mine disasters, and more house fires. Then came columns about Louisville and Southern Indiana, as well as becoming the Kentucky Columnist writing stories from all the state’s 120 counties.

They included columns of opinion, humor, calculated nonsense, political satire – is there any other kind? – as well as time spent with Muhammad Ali and walking up Butcher Hollow at twilight to Loretta Lynn’s house. Wandering the state for years, he interviewed a couple married 80 years and still living together, a mountain woodworker determined to make his own casket and walking alongside the son of a slave trying to find his parents’ graves in thick woods. He later covered a U.S. Supreme Court story about a Louisville teenager convicted of killing a fast-food employee and could he receive the death sentence for a crime committed at 17.

His fourteen books include “Double Jeopardy,” a best-selling book featured on NPR and Geraldo about a Louisville man who got away with murder, and “Always Moving Forward,” a book about David Jones, a man who grew up in blue-collar Louisville to co-found Humana, the $90 billion insurance company.

His job offers included becoming sports editor for the Kansas City Star covering all the major league sports across four seasons. He fully understood the opportunities – and why so many others take them - but preferred to remain “Out Here” in Southern Indiana living in a 160-yearold farmhouse with Janet Hill, his wife of 63 years, where they raised their two children. Call it sappy if you like, but Hill always explained he preferred to watch his own children in their activities and games rather than missing them while forever crossing the country as a sports columnist to watch other parents’ talented children play professional games.