Bill Baab, the longtime Augusta Chronicle sports writer and editor with a sportsman’s heart and soul as a collector, has died. He was 90 years old.
As The Chronicle’s outdoor editor for 35 years, Baab wrote weekly newspaper columns for generations of Augusta area fishermen.
Readers followed his valued fishing information and advice almost as gospel. When Baab retired in 2000, for the first time, Tyron Morris, a resident of Waynesboro, wrote a letter to The Chronicle mourning the loss of “Reverend Bill”.
Belvedere Marine owner David Annis told The Chronicle at the time that it was not uncommon to read about one of Baab’s hot fishing spots only to find the place crowded with fishermen the very next day.
From 2000, Baab had continued to help edit The Chronicle’s sports section before briefly returning as fishing editor, stepping down in June 2022 at the age of 87. Generations of colleagues appreciated his quick wit, though not always his puns, and his vast knowledge of local history.
Baab was also a collector, an admitted “pack rat” who grew up fueling his curiosity about the world through an immersive accumulation of coins, stamps, books, and more. At age 14, he won first prize at an Augusta YMCA hobby show for his shell collection.
Baab’s collections included unusual pets. His 15-pound gopher tortoise, Goliath, followed his younger siblings to the mailbox every day, according to a 1955 Chronicle story about Baab’s hobbies. The article appeared shortly after he started working for the paper as a copy boy.
Beginning around 1969, his collector’s eye turned to old bottles, particularly those from Augusta area dairies, drugstores, and breweries that revealed small chapters of local history. He wrote and published Augusta on Glass, a history of the city told through the evolution of glass bottles, in 2007.
In 2014, he and his surviving wife, Bea, donated their 514-piece bottle collection to the Augusta History Museum. Visitors can still visit the museum exhibition “Bottles of Baab”.
William Henry Baab Jr. was born in Pennsylvania and moved with his family to Augusta in 1940 in a modest house on Heath Street in the neighborhood of Summerville.
He graduated from Boys Catholic High School in 1953 and served a brief stint in the US Navy before returning to Augusta in 1955. By 1957, he was part of the writing staff of The Chronicle covering general assignment sports, writing book reviews, and pinning a weekly boating column.
He left the paper briefly to work first in public relations for the then State of Georgia Game and Fish Commission, then as sports editor of the Thomasville Times-Enterprise in south Georgia in 1961.
Baab rejoined The Chronicle as outside editor in 1964.
Funeral arrangements are being finalized by Thomas Poteet & Sons Funeral Home on Davis Street.
Winding in years: Fishing editor Bill Baab calls it quits after 60 years in journalism
This article originally appeared on the Augusta Chronicle: Augusta outdoorsman Bill Baab marvels at local nature, history