Robert E. Dallos; Longtime Financial Writer for The Times

Robert E. Dallos, a prizewinning financial writer and 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times, died Sunday while vacationing in Budapest. He was 59.

The cause of his death was a heart attack. Dallos had worked the final 10 years of his career with serious heart problems.

His first attack led to a favorite anecdote in the New York bureau where he was based. His colleagues realized he was in grave condition, but Dallos soon called one of them from the hospital’s intensive care unit. He had seen the name “J. Dempsey” on the unit’s admissions board.

“Is that Jack Dempsey, the boxer?” he asked a nurse. She said it was. He reached for the phone. “He said we had an exclusive on it,” recalled colleague John Goldman. “And at that point, I knew Bob would be OK.”

Before joining The Times, Dallos worked for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He began his career in journalism with United Press International in 1958. “At 5 p.m. on June 8, I graduated from Boston University, and at 6 a.m. on June 9, I started at UPI,” he told Editor & Publisher magazine, which profiled him in 1972.

In 1988, Dallos received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University’s college of communications. He had already won several journalism prizes, including the John Hancock Insurance Co. Business Writing Award. He and Ronald L. Soble wrote the book “The Impossible Dream,” about massive fraud at the Equity Funding Corp.

He was a past president of both the New York Financial Writers’ Assn. and the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Dallos also taught. At various times, he was an adjunct professor at Columbia University, New York University, Fordham University and Manhattanville College.

He is survived by his wife, Carol Dallos; their children, Lisa, Jeffrey and Andrew, and his mother, Gertrude Dallos. In lieu of flowers the family requests donations to the Clarke School for the Deaf, Round Hill Road, Northampton, Mass. 01060.