A BULLDOZER STIRS FLORIDA JOURNALISTS’ MEMORIES
The Clearwater Sun: A Death in The Family
A Portend of Changing American Journalism?
Last updated Monday August 4th, 2008CLEARWATER SUN MEMORIES
Not long ago,the building that had housed The Clearwater Sun was razed.
Photo By TERRY SMILJANICH
The mayor had complained that it had become an eyesore, and given that it had been empty for nearly two decades, that’s hardly surprising. The Sun had folded in the late 1980s, unable to compete with the much larger St. Petersburg Times and, to a lesser extent, the Tampa Tribune.
The closing of The Sun, which at the time was owned by Hearst, left Clearwater - a growing city on Florida’s booming west coast - without its own local newspaper. Although the St. Petersburg Times’ Clearwater edition is well written, well presented and well received, it remains essentially a newspaper run by a company 25 miles away. It is not, nor can it ever be, the same as a hometown paper.
When news of the building’s demise spread, a few former Sun employees agreed to contribute essays about their memories of the newspaper to this website.
This is a compilation of those essays. - Al Hutchison.
WITH ONE EXCEPTION, IT WAS A NOTABLE SECTION
By CRAIG STANKE
Craig Stanke spent much of his 20 years in newspapers in Florida, working at the Bradenton Herald, Clearwater Sun, Jupiter Daily Journal, Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, Miami Herald, Florida Times-Union and Jacksonville Journal and Palm Beach Post, with one eight-year detour to the Los Angeles Times. He has been working for what began as CBS SportsLine and is now CBSSports.com.
I was surprised to learn that the Clearwater Sun building had been razed.
Ron Stuart was also one of the best editors I ever had. He could be a hard-ass -- let him try to deny it -- but he was usually right, and he was also ultimately a good colleague and friend. Once, he called me right on deadline on a Friday night and asked if I was going to make it; I told him it was going to be close, but I needed to get back to composing. When we finally closed up five minutes late, I returned to sports and he was on the phone again and told me to be in his office at 9 a.m. Monday.
So I was there, of course, expecting to be fired when he walked in, looked at me and said, "What are you doing here?" I told him he had told me to be there, and he said, "Why?" And I said, well, I suppose it was because we missed deadline by five minutes on Friday night. And he said, "Well, don’t do it again." And that was that. One of my best friends at the Sun, and later my roommate for a while in Fort Lauderdale, was Richard Leiby, who took the Scientology torch from the earlier guys and became one of the foremost reporters on it. He wound up at the Washington Post.
Even though most of my work at the Sun was in sports -- I was an assistant sports editor and wrote a column -- I certainly remember the day of the Sunshine Skyway collapse. Everybody in every department pitched in, and I’m certain at this point that it will be the only Extra I will ever be a part of.
One other oddity of my Sun career. I left sports briefly and became news editor, putting out the A section, and on either my first night or -- one of them -- in news, Ronald Reagan was shot.
So I leapt into action with all my design savvy and expert news judgment. We cleared out open pages. We got some expert commentary outside of AP. We ran maps and charts and lots of photos, including a great one of all the federal guys brandishing all those guns right after the shooting as our lead on 1A.
And we went through several editions and refined and just put out a fabulous section. It was only missing one thing:
There wasn’t a single photo of Ronald Reagan.
Fortunately, Stuart wasn’t there then, so he wasn’t around to kill me.
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SCIENTOLOGY WAS THE BIGGEST STORY WHEN I WAS THERE
By MIKE PRIDE
(Mike Pride recently retired after 30 years at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, where he served first as managing editor and then editor. Last year he was co-chairman of the committee that selects the Pulitzer Prizes.)
In 1963, I was a senior at Clearwater High School. I knew the sports staff at the Sun -- Sports Editor Bill Currie, Steady Eddie Haver, Ron Young, John Lankford -- and occasionally helped out there. One afternoon I was in English class when it was announced over the intercom that John F. Kennedy had been shot. With two pals, I ran out of class, jumped in the jeep of one of the friends and rode to the Sun. I was in the wire room when the Western Union machines began bing-bing-binging and the bulletins reported that the president was dead.
During the early ’60s, I was a sports stringer, shuffling back and forth between the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times. Occasionally I double-dipped and wrote a second story on my game for the Sun under a pseudonym. Sometimes I was Maurice Peabody, sometimes Homer Glick.
In 1966, at the age of 19, I was a two-time college dropout working on the Sun sports desk while waiting to be drafted. One day I quit on the spot to head for New York. Rather than tell Currie to his face, I left him a resignation note dripping with sarcasm and arrogance.
As sports editor of the Sun in the spring of 1973, I had the good fun of directing coverage of the Philadelphia Phillies. The Atlanta Braves came to town. Hank Aaron was one homer shy of Babe Ruth, and the media hounded him everywhere he went. He hid out before the game in Clearwater, but I knew Jack Russell Stadium pretty well and made my way to the Braves locker room. Only one player was there, but I sat quietly for a minute or two and, sure enough, Aaron walked in. When he saw me and my notepad, he rolled his eyes. Suddenly I felt terrible for him. I asked two or three obvious questions, just enough for the obvious column I would write. I thanked him and left, feeling like the trespasser I was.
In April 1973, Terry Plumb, the managing editor, called me at home one night and asked if I wanted to be city editor of the Sun. I had worked only in sports and wasn’t sure what a city editor did. I asked Terry for a brief job description. Then I said yes.
Scientology was the biggest story during my tenure as city editor. In 1975, using an apple-pie corporate name, L. Ron Hubbard and company bought the Fort Harrison Hotel and the Bank of Clearwater building. Reporter Mark Sableman came close to figuring out who the new owners actually were, but in the end the Scientologists unmasked themselves by dropping off a press release early one morning. Within four hours, Sableman and others had filled that day’s front page with stories about the purchase and about Scientology.
Besides their secretive ways, two things made covering the Scientologists hard. First, they were confrontational and unpleasant (Hubbard’s doctrine described journalists as "Merchants of Chaos"). Second, our city desk clerk was a Scientology spy. We wrote nearly 200 stories during the year after we disclosed the Scientologists’ presence, and they always seemed to know what we were up to. They publicly humiliated Tom Coat, a desk editor who had agreed to go to Tampa to take the first Scientology course for a Sun series (his outing made for a better series, actually). They attacked Sableman’s reputation. They threatened lawsuits. With pages-long accounts of "errors," they challenged the accuracy of every substantial story we did. And more than once Fred Rock, a Scientology press-office hack, stood over my desk badgering me as I edited a story for that day’s edition. One morning I got in a shoving match with Rock. We knew the newsroom had been infiltrated, but we never guessed the spy was the friendly, efficient, sympathetic "June Phillips." We learned this only years later from FBI files.
We do things when we’re young that we wouldn’t do when we are seasoned. That’s the only explanation for my assigning Linda Parker, a petite southern belle with ice-water in her veins, to go on a shoplifting spree at Sears. She left the store on stolen roller skates with a stolen ax hanging inside the raincoat she had stolen. And she wrote a good yarn about mall security.
I have lots of personal memories of the Sun: Tom Keyser’s rise as a columnist and our good times together; softball with Rico, Tom, the Keefer and many others; the cementing of my long friendship with Al Hutchison; the kindness of the old guard in my earliest days there; the sad demise of Bill Currie; and Ted, the partially blind G-metal photo engraver, roller-skating across the newsroom to pick up pictures.
One time, Tom Henschel, the outdoors writer who succeeded Joe Devlin, took several of us on a picnic to one of the spoil islands in Clearwater Bay. Late that night, the mosquitoes began to get the better of us. We doused the campfire, packed up to leave and headed for Henschel’s boat. The tide had gone out, and the boat was on dry land, 50 feet from the water. You’d think an outdoor writer would have checked the tides.
For all the great journalism we got done, somehow that excursion typifies my years at the Sun.
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IT WAS BALL STATE VS. HARVARD
By BOB DRIVER
(Bob Driver was an editorial writer and columnist for The Sun. He now lives in Leominster, Mass.)
Wrecking crews recently demolished the old Clearwater Sun building on Myrtle Avenue. The property’s owners took their time getting around to it. The Sun published its final pages about 18 years ago, after a long and valiant struggle against the never-ending economic/editorial/readership forces that continue to make print journalism an iffy profession, or business, or whatever else it is.
I went to work for the Sun on May 1, 1978. It was one of the happiest days of my life, and for the ensuing 11 years I worked my frazzled butt off to help keep the newspaper alive. We all did. We had to. We were up against an able and ambitious competitor, the St. Pete Times. Its goal, as I seemed to discern it during the 1980s, was to disable and then euthanize every Florida west coast daily newspaper between Sarasota and Tallahassee. The Times’ chief tactic was simply to out-perform the competition. It usually works.
But not always. Repeatedly, the Sun’s reporters scooped the Times and other media on local stories and issues. Those were happy, satisfying occasions in the Sun newsroom. The feeling was not so much David-vs.-Goliath as it was Ball State- vs.-Harvard, the knot-hole gang vs. the well-heeled preppies.
The Sun’s management decisions sometimes helped its decline. I detected my first hint of trouble on the day the publisher okayed the removal of half the fluorescent lights in the newsroom as a way to cut costs. Forcing reporters to squint as they write their stories is not the way to improve a newspaper’s quality. Some observers say the Sun slit its own throat on the day it changed from an afternoon paper to a morning paper. I doubt if that made much difference to the Sun’s ultimate fate. Afternoon deliveries had become increasingly difficult as Clearwater’s population and traffic problems grew. Total firepower, not delivery times, was what counted most.
One of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t take better notes about the men and women I worked with at the Sun. They were a diverse and colorful crew. They’re now scattered to the winds. Many went to other newspapers. Mike Pride achieved distinction as the editor of the Concord, N.H. Monitor. Ron Stuart, the best of several editors I worked for, handles press relations for the Pinellas-Pasco court system. Chip Bok the Sun’s editorial-page cartoonist for a too-brief time, is now one of the top syndicated political cartoonists in the nation . Jerry George, a Sun reporter in 1984-85, is the executive editor and Los Angeles bureau chief for the National Enquirer.
The Sun served Clearwater well. Probably its proudest achievement - at least during my tenure - was to alert the city and the world to the nature of the Church of Scientology, which in the mid-1970s sneaked into town wearing a disguise. As editorial page editor, I must have written a hundred pieces about the Scions, few of them complimentary. I’ll never forget the day the Scientologists donned Nazi uniforms and picketed the Sun. Today’s church is much better behaved, now that it has accepted its basic role as a tightly run, profit-oriented commercial enterprise.
The Sun ceased daily publication in 1989. The Hearst Corporation maintained a weekly for another year. Then it, too, died. Hearst donated the Sun’s editorial remains to the Clearwater Public Library, where interested folks can still look up stories about people, places and things from the old days.
Would I be willing to repeat my days at the Sun? Some of them, perhaps.
But it’s a dispiriting thing to watch something good go downhill and fade away. One long voyage aboard a Titanic is usually enough. Even so, it was a memorable trip. I wish a permanent plaque or inscribed rock could be installed at the old Sun site, saying something like, "Here once lived a tough old lady, who did her damndest for those who cared about her." (Send Bob Driver an e-mail at tralee71@comcast.net.)
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THE PUBLISHER RODE A MULE
By AL HUTCHISON(Hutchison was the first managing editor hired under The Sun’s new ownership in 1972 and was later promoted to editor, then vice president and general manager. He left to become publisher of The Recorder, a 15,000-circulation daily in Greenfield, Mass., in 1976. Now retired, he lives in Inverness, Fla.)
For me, the news that the old Clearwater Sun building on South Myrtle Avenue had been razed raised a lot of memories, good and bad. I’d been The Sun’s managing editor, then editor, for the better part of five years in the early 1970s.
I had graduated from Clearwater High School and met and married my wife, Jackie, in Clearwater, so I knew the paper. I knew it was so mediocre for so long I wasn’t sure that going to work there would be a good career move. In fact, during my job interview, I had expressed reservations about leaving a good position (Sunday magazine editor) at the Tampa Tribune to work for a paper of such dubious journalistic merit.
“Why do you think I’m interviewing candidates for managing editor?” Jim Hale, the new publisher, demanded in his East Texas accent. “We’re going to make this into a newspaper we can be proud of. I know we’ve got a long way to go, and we have to start with the right managing editor.”
From there on, the interview went well enough, but for a long time I heard nothing from Hale. Then one day he called me in Tampa and asked if I knew where Bern’s Steak House was. Of course, I told him. It’s the best restaurant in the city.
“Meet me there at 7 o’clock tonight,” he said and hung up. I did, and as we ate (and drank) he offered me the job and spelled out the terms. I accepted on the spot. There were three reasons: First, being editor of the Trib’s Sunday magazine didn’t strike me as a particularly attractive long-term engagement. Second, by then I was fascinated by Hale’s personality, which would later prove to be both a delight and a distraction of mammoth proportions. The third reason was probably the most persuasive: I’d be working for my hometown newspaper.
I could write a book about Jim Hale, and in fact I may just do that. Unfortunately, he died in 2003, back home in Texas, just before Jackie (Hale always called her “Poo” and he always called me ‘Hutchingsen”) and I were about to drive out there to spend some time with him at his “spread.” On the phone he’d told me about how much fun he had riding around on his mule. So I asked him to send a photo. Jackie and I just had to see him perched on the back of a farm animal. He sent the photo. The “mule” turned out to be a small tractor.
On one earlier and unforgettable occasion, Hale and I were driving to lunch on Clearwater Beach when he told me he wanted me to buy his boat, a 25-foot cabin cruiser. I already owned a sailboat and had no interest in Hale’s vessel (oh, the stories I could, and may someday, tell about our adventures on that boat), but I didn’t want to put it quite that way.
“I can’t afford to buy your boat,” I told him, truthfully.
“That’s not a problem, Hutchingsen,” he replied. “I’ll give you a big enough raise that you’ll be able to afford it.”
“Go ahead and give me the raise, because obviously you believe I’ve earned it,” I said, “but I’m still not going to buy your damned boat!”
I didn’t get the raise and he kept his boat. But lunch was good.
Working for Hale had proved to be a real test of my patience, my still-developing management skills and especially my temper. We had numerous arguments, and to this day, not that it matters, I’m certain he was always wrong and I was always right. So when he left to become publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (from there he went on to be publisher of the Kansas City Star), I was happy for him and for myself.
Upon resigning, Hale assured me it was all arranged with his boss, Carmage Walls, that I’d succeed him as publisher of The Sun. But between his departure and my promised promotion, things went pear-shaped. Walls unexpectedly was replaced by a man named Tom Ricketson, who came to town and told me he needed to know more about me. Also, he explained, he’d promised the job to his kid brother, Johnny, an acquaintance of mine who worked in the classified advertising department at The Ledger in Lakeland, Florida.
Tom said he wanted to be fair, though, so on a Friday he invited me to lunch “so I can get to know you better.” We spent three hours in the Garden Seat Restaurant and not once did he ask about me. Instead, he spent the entire time telling me what a great and deserving brother Johnny was. I went home that night and told Jackie to forget all about me being promoted to publisher.
On Monday, the first person I saw at the office was Johnny Ricketson. I shook his hand, congratulated him and promised to do whatever I could to help him in his new job. At that point, Tom came out of Hale’s old office and put his hand on my shoulder.
“It was a really tough decision,” he told me, gravely, “but I went to church yesterday, and God told me I had to honor my promise to my brother.”
“I can’t compete with that,” I replied, and that was that.
John Ricketson turned out to be a really nice guy. We got along famously and played together on the company softball team. Jackie and I really liked him. But when I was offered a publisher’s job in New England in 1976, I grabbed it immediately. I remember telling John of my decision in the dugout between innings of a softball game.
Even after I left, John allowed me to stay in a condominium owned by the newspaper and consulted me on the decision to switch from afternoon to morning publication. He once took our three kids scalloping and he cared for them while Jackie and I went off to an international conference in London. I have nothing but affection for him.
Looking back, I’m most proud of the people I hired at The Sun, people like Mike Pride, Terry Plumb, Malcolm Gibson, Mark Sableman, Ron Stuart and others who have gone on to distinguished careers elsewhere.
And I think that on my watch we turned it into a pretty good newspaper. But in the long run, it couldn’t compete with the much larger St. Petersburg Times (which built a big new bureau right across the street) and the advertising revenue wasn’t enough to keep The Sun alive.
I think Clearwater was richer for having its own hometown paper and poorer since it ceased publishing. I know I am richer for having been part of it, if only for a few years. They probably were some of its best years.
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"HAVE YOU SEEN THE MORNING SUN?"
By RON STUART
In 1974, I was hired as The Clearwater Sun’s managing editor and Al Hutchison, the editor, and I agreed on my start date. On the night before I drove over from my former home in Cocoa and tried to get settled. I was so nervous that I bought Pepto Bismol to settle my stomach.
The next morning, as I got ready to leave for work, Jim Hale, the publisher, called to report that Hutch had been called out of town for a few days and that I could not start until he returned. Later I found out that although Hale had assured Hutch he would introduce me, he decided he’d rather not. Being told to go back to Cocoa and await Hutch’s call didn’t help my stomach. A few days later, Hutch and I got back together and I began what was a very positive experience.
Early on, we were pushing deadline on a Saturday night. I was trying to help move things along. Charlie George - the production manager - announced that unless the last page was ready on time, he would start the press with a blank spot on the page. “You’re going to have to whip my ass first!” I told him. He just stood there and glared at me, his face getting redder each minute, until the type was set and the page locked up. For years, the story was told (and exaggerated) at the nearby Tick Tock Lounge and often someone from production would buy me a drink because of it.
A second credibility-builder was the way we handled Richard Nixon’s resignation. The Sun staff was not used to seeing so much effort put into a national story. I did what I had learned at Cocoa, asking for extra news space, getting the key people together and developing ideas for local stories, including sending a reporter to Disney World to watch the changes at the Hall of Presidents. We produced a very readable paper, even though it came out almost 24 hours after the president’s resignation.
Many memories involve stories about the Church of Scientology. We were the first to report that the secretive group that had purchased the Fort Harrison Hotel was L. Ron Hubbard’s cult. The Scientologists had to admit we were on to them after their front organization - United Churches of Florida, I think - accepted a registered letter addressed to Hubbard at its post office address. I think it was Mark Sableman’s idea and I remember Sableman, Mike Pride and me fine-tuning the plan.
Scientologist representatives frequently insisted they were being mistreated by the Sun and their complaints were responsible for several memorable incidents, none more humorous than their reaction to the dartboard the staff had given me with Hubbard’s photo in the bullseye. They (Scientology leaders) went all the way to the Sun’s corporate headquarters in Greensboro, N. C., to complain. But, ironically, the dartboard had been inspired by their attempt at satire in the form of a poster for a fictional movie, “All the Mayor’s Men” (the popular movie “All the President’s Men” had recently been released). Their poster featured a caricature of me with my feet on the desk tossing darts at a dartboard labeled “Scientology.” I still have the dartboard and a copy of the poster.
And few can forget Scientologists in Nazi uniforms goose-stepping in front of The Sun’s building. I was in Tampa attending a meeting of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. My peers wanted to know what great news event got me called out of the meeting (this well before cell phones). For the first time, other Florida newspapers showed interest in what until then had been a local story.
I felt satisfaction when the FBI confirmed the Scientologists had infiltrated our newsroom. June Phillips was hired by the advertising department, which in turn recommended her for an open clerk’s position in the newsroom. People thought I was paranoid when I said Scientologists were tapping our phones or had a spy among us. Here are some of my favorite Scientology-related memories:
• The night the Scientologists followed me in one of their vans all the way from a soccer game in Tampa into downtown Clearwater. They dropped the pursuit when I drove into the parking lot of the Clearwater Police Department.
• A packed stadium (for an anti-Scientology rally organized, I think, by a radio station) hearing a Baptist minister mention that “courageous Mr. Stuart, editor of our local newspaper.”
• The ribbing I took when a court ordered the release of files seized in a raid on the Scientologists’ Washington office. The file on me said: I must be paying for some great sin because I ate so many meals at McDonald’s (they obviously weren’t familiar with Sun’s pay scale); and I had once dated a nymphomaniac.
• The glow on Mike Pride’s face when we learned we had won a slew of Florida Press Association awards, mostly for our coverage of the Scientologists. No news organization had ever dominated the annual awards like that. I think it was then that the Sun was accepted by many of our readers and peers as a credible newspaper, completing what Al Hutchison had begun by hiring legitimate journalists.
• A year or so later, our rival, the St. Petersburg Times, was awarded - I did not say “earned” or “won” - a Pulitzer Prize for its series on Scientology. The series contained little, if any, information that had not been previously reported by Sableman, Steve Advokat and other Sun reporters. We had never even discussed nominating our work for a Pulitzer.
As for non-Scientologist memories, here are a few that stand out:
• Telling the staff that Mike Pride was leaving. By then, Jim Hale, Al Hutchison - and I think Terry Plumb - had already left. All were losses, but none hit harder than Mike’s.
• No one was more in tune with what we needed to do to produce a readable, credible newspaper on a daily basis. With Hutchison and Hale replaced by people with little knowledge of the community and even less awareness of what it was like to compete in the toughest newspaper market in the state, a slide was imminent.
• The Sun converted to morning publication and although some people think it could have survived as an afternoon newspaper, they’re myopic. A smart marketing campaign (“Have you seen the morning Sun?”) gave us initial successes. The paid circulation in that first year after conversion was the highest in the Sun’s history (it exceeded 50,000, I think), but management kept emphasizing the bottom line, leaving little doubt about the pending demise.
• Early in our days as a morning newspaper there was a riot out at the perennially overcrowded jail in Clearwater. For a while, prisoners controlled a section of the jail, and it was very tense. It was our first chance to compete with the Times on the same news cycle on a local story, and we proved we belonged.
• The last big breaking news story that I worked on was the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway and again the Sun’s staff kicked ass. I remember being rousted out of a sound sleep and the panic I heard in the Coast Guardsman’s voice when I called to find out what was going on. Since the bridge went down early in the morning both papers had all day to work on the story, and we prevailed with a big fact that came from good old sound reporting and digging. Our copyrighted story led with the fact that the same pilot who was guiding the ship that fateful morning had been guiding another ship that had hit the same bridge a few weeks earlier, with far fewer consequences. We also put out an extra edition that day, and it quickly sold out. People were lined up to buy them at the Sun office, and every rack in the city was empty.
A framed copy of the extra front page hangs on the wall of my office at the Pinellas Criminal Justice Center, and it often is a conversation piece with reporters. I’m amazed that some of the younger ones have never heard of an “extra.” God forbid what happens when I mention “hot type.”
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