Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns and elections for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87.

       “I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics.

       Mears died Thursday at his apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight days after being diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer, said his daughters Susan Mears of Boulder, Colorado, and Stephanie Mears of Austin, Texas.

       With him when he died, they said he was visited on his last night by a minister, with whom Mears discussed Alf Landon, the losing Republican candidate for the 1936 presidential election, just a year after Mears' birth.

       Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became a legend among peers. In 1972, Timothy Crouse included Mears in “The Boys on the Bus,” a book chronicling the antics of reporters covering the 1972 campaign.

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       Crouse recounted how, immediately after a political debate, a reporter from The Boston Globe called out to the man from the AP: “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?" The question became a catchphrase to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,” Mears cracked in 2005.