"Getting the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize would have been nice," Hughes says. "I sat on the Pulitzer jury and know some of the investigations we did got into the top 20, but it's very hard for a regional newspaper with a funny name to win a Pulitzer. There's a lot of politicking."

Born in Wales — a place that has produced more than its share of Utahns — Hughes knew at an early age he would be a man who gets the word out.

"I was about 16 in high school in England," he says, "when the master in chemistry and physics informed me that I probably should not a pursue a career in those fields. However the English teacher said, 'If we clean up your grammar, maybe you should be a writer. That seems to be where you're going."'

And that's where he went.

After studying as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, in 1955 he became the African correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, later moving up to become an assistant foreign editor — winning a Pulitzer Prize for his international reporting before taking the reins as the editor of the paper itself in 1970.

He started writing a column for the Monitor, which he continued to write during his Deseret Morning News tenure. He will keep writing it in the future.

"He's such a legend around the Monitor, one of those luminaries of Monitor history," says Kendra Nordin, who worked on the Christian Science Monitor's opinion page for five years. "He has been a steady presence on the opinion page and is someone we rely on to supply a conservative voice to balance the section."

Nordin added that Hughes "has always felt like family to us at the Monitor, even though he has been the editor of another paper. And despite his legendary status he always graciously accepts what few edits we make to his columns (even from those of us cutting our journalistic teeth!)"

In time, Hughes would slide over to the State Department to do what he calls some "reporting in reverse" — getting the word out to 5,000 correspondents each day. Working for the U.S. government, he formed many of his most enduring and important connections, including friendships with Marvin and Bernie Kalb and George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state. Shultz would become a mentor.

Hughes' many intriguing assignments over that span are worthy of a series of books with titles like "The Radio America Years" or "Newshound at the United Nations." Eventually he took a post at BYU in the early 1990s ("masquerading as a professor of journalism," he says).