After working as a night reporter for the now-defunct Bethlehem Globe-Times in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania while attending Moravian College, he spent three years in the United States Navy during World War II, ultimately attaining the rank of lieutenant.
A graduate of Muhlenberg College (1947) and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1948), Strohmeyer was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 1952–1953 academic year while employed by The Providence Journal.
[1] He won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship[2] in 1984 to research and write about the decline of the American steel industry, a project that evolved into Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel's Struggle to Survive, published by Adler & Adler in 1986 and University of Pittsburgh Press in 1994.
While there, Strohmeyer wrote Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska.
[3] Strohmeyer died of heart failure on March 3, 2010, in Crystal River, Florida.