John Strohmeyer, who chronicled the demise of Bethlehem, Pa. turbulent steel industry and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials dissipating racial tensions in that city, died at 85 on Wednesday of heart failure in Crystal River, Fla., where he spent his winters with his wife, Sylvia Broady.

Strohmeyer came to Alaska in 1987 as a nationally known journalist to fill the Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage for two years and stayed on as a writer-in-residence at the university and to fish the Kenai whenever possible. His latest book, "Fish, Politics and Avarice," is currently in production and chronicles the state of commercial and sport fishing in America. He wrote numerous columns and Compass pieces for the Anchorage Daily News. In 2001 he wrote the copy for the pictorial history of Anchorage for the Anchorage Museum.

Born at home in Cascade, Wis., to Anna Saladunas, an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, on June 26, 1924, Strohmeyer endured a hardscrabble childhood marked by abandonment and Great Depression poverty that forever aligned him with the downtrodden and voiceless.

Strohmeyer was 5 when his coal-mining father committed suicide after a Pennsylvania mine closed, thereby leaving their family destitute. Seeking work, his mother left Strohmeyer and his brother with an acquaintance who then dropped off the boys at an orphanage. Two years later, their mother returned, remarried to steelworker and farmer Louis Strohmeyer, and the family settled in Nazareth, Pa., where Strohmeyer began his journalism career at age 16 reporting for the Nazareth Item.

He attended Moravian College in Bethlehem, working nights as a reporter for the Bethlehem Globe-Times, from 1941 to 1943, before joining the U.S. Navy, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant. With financial aid from the G.I. Bill, he graduated from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., in 1947, and a year later from The Journalism School at Columbia University, N.Y., where, as first in his class, he won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship to cover the 1948 London Olympics and the Berlin Airlift.

Upon returning to the states, he worked as an investigative reporter for the Providence Journal in Providence, R.I., where he met his wife, Nancy Jordan, an education reporter. In 1952, he won a Neiman Fellowship to Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and in 1956 returned to become editor of his hometown newspaper, The Bethlehem Globe-Times.

For 28 years, Strohmeyer managed the newspaper while writing editorials almost every day, often about the problems afflicting Bethlehem's crucial steel industry in an era when rising union power, executive malaise and foreign competition were paving the way for its eventual downfall.

But it was a 1970 bar fight that marked his career when Bethlehem police beat Puerto Rican and African-American teenagers and arrested the director of a local youth center after an unrelated brawl among white men erupted at a nearby tavern and spilled onto the street.

In a series of editorials that would later earn him the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, Strohmeyer defended the youth center director, who had been charged with conspiracy, lambasted the city police -- especially the chief for personally participating in the beatings -- and chided the city for refusing to investigate the incident.

A legal fund for the youth center director was subsequently created and, months later, the charges were dismissed and he was named by the Junior Chamber of Commerce as Bethlehem's Outstanding Man of the Year. The youth center reopened and the city took proactive steps to improve relations between the community and the police.

Strohmeyer left the Globe-Times after winning an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 1984, and in 1986 served as a McFadden Professor at Lehigh University, from which he received an honorary doctorate.

The following year, he moved to Anchorage to take the post as the Atwood Professor of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he remained as writer in residence, writing columns for the Daily News and fishing whenever possible. He also wrote two critically acclaimed books: "Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel's Struggle to Survive," on the decline of the steel industry, and "Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska," as well as a history of Anchorage.

He is survived by his wife, Sylvia, former chair of the UAA Journalism and Public Communications Department, of Anchorage; son, John of Granville, Ohio; daughter, Sarah of Middlesex, Vt. as well as eight grandchildren. His first wife, Nancy, died in 2000, and his son, Mark, in 1998.