The Charlotte News from Charlotte, North Carolina • 7

The Charlotte News Friday November 1 1985 7A REMEMBERING THE NEWS At the end EMEMBE INC THE NEWSAt the end 14- 41 I I 11 1 11 i 41' 4 '1 0 'CI I A i 4i4 i 4 it14 i 6' 1 4 N' I 4 -4 'fl'-'9Y1t i 1 i re 'ie it7 7-- i 1 4444 I 4401'74-7: I (- --i 1 i 4 0 (6! 1 7 "'t 1 it--4 I 1 -1 -eia 1i: --)L411i '14 -0 r-si 2 (''' 11 s- i i Gr: '0 et "ke I 'f Tiv -t: --e'4414f44- i 4 't 64 4 I 'I i I A NI ti -l 1 I' ''''5V -li I 11) 4i 4 i i bil 114-12: I a 0 is syt -----4 441'' A I etTA LI-- -I 11 i Bill Blake and his nun Tarry --Ialiwarinra Ttla tds 10AA Bill Blake and his pup Terry 3 delivering The News In 1964 And Milinda Hendrick 'fr'91Ytt' 1 'ff in 1974 Butterscotch Staff photos by Jeep Hunter delivers the paper on her pony bi Miler t7 continued from page IA The News farelpfell its Reba Vaughan head of volunteers for the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services: "I'm devastated by its closing It's going to be hard for one paper to give us both local and national coverage as well as The News did it I felt so personally involved with the paper If there was something local you were looking for The News would have it" Beaumert Whitton retired president of Southeastern Construction Co: "I delivered The Charlotte News In the fifth grade when it cost a quarter a week I always felt The Observer was the paper of record but The News was the one where I read about Boy Scout doings in which I was very interested about high school football teams and so on It was a hometown paper I will surely miss it" Dr Clifton Webber dentist: "The Charlotte News has become a part of my family I've been here since 1961 and I've continuously subscribed "I think an afternoon paper makes a difference Charlotte's a growing place and in many instances you could read what's happening in The Charlotte News sooner than (you could) in The Observer because it was there the same day The paper's going to be missed" Jack Wood retired men's clothier: "It's a sad day to be without The Charlotte News I grew up with it as a kid It was my main source of news We felt it was our neighbor it was so involved in the community The people at The News were themselves involved in community affairs It was like associating with your neighbors when you read that paper" Caroline Myers director of Crisis Assistance Ministry: "Back in the early days when I was teaching when we got home from work we toak only The News because it was fresher I always read it in the afternoon Then we continued to take it because it had a local flavor we enjoyed I may have agreed with The Observer editorial stands more because I'm more on the liberal side But The News's editorials were always very fair and open" Slug Claiborne Charlotte restaurateur: "The News's editorials have suited me a lot better than those at the paper my brother (Observer Associate Editor Jack Claiborne) writes for The News was more conservative and mid-American I believe in competition Whether they were both Knight papers or not the competition was there Rolfe Neill is a great newspaper publisher but I'm going to have some difficulty buying the proposition that The Observer will be a better paper because The News is no longer around Anybody who believes that will believe that an absolute monarchy is the best form of government" The spirits of News employees dimmed in the final days and that was perhaps the saddest thing to see But people did their work and behaved as if every edition counted And every one did "Readers had no way of knowing how gutsy the staff performance was when the final decisions were being made" says John Epperheimer executive editor for news in the last year before the two papers merged operations "We couldn't go anywhere in town without somebody saying: 'Hey what's going to happen to The I'm amazed at the dedication of our people and at what a good job we did" So now it's gone and the people who worked for the paper are feeling a little lost today Jeep Hunter spoke for them all earlier this week: "It's like part of my life has just slipped away The News has been my job and my life" The newspaper in your hands is now a relic an historical document It Is part of the spirit of a specific time and place and of a way of life that's passing even as you read this But it's more than that even Like a good friend The Charlotte News was always more than any of us ever knew it ground with blood on his white shirt I took his picture then leaned over and said: 'These pictures will be In The Charlotte News this afternoon if you'll tell me your name your family will know you survived' He looked up and said: 'I was the co-pilot I was flying the plane' Hunter's pictures of the disaster went around the world Readers could never know or guess the effort required of a comparatively small staff to gather the facts of the crash itself to ascertain events preceding it to report the scene at the airport and the condition of injured and dying at the hospitals to gather and develop pictures and finally wrap everything into prose pictures and headlines that would faithfully tell that awful story And it was all done in a few hours "I was on the city desk at the time" Hill recalls "Everyone from copy carriers to the editor pitched in We scrambled the squadron and made the first edition with story and pictures" The News's coverage won first prize for spot news in the NC Press Association contest and a special Associated Press Managing Editors' Award The same year The News won second place in the state press contest for its series on Army recruiting scandals in North Carolina The News always had its share of colorful personalities One sports writer in the '60s proud of his physique used to come to work in T-shirts with the sleeves cut out to display his muscles The same writer often wore a black opera 'cape with scarlet lining to parties and occasionally to work At one party after several beers he mounted a balcony railing flapped his cape and announced his intention to fly away He was restrained Bob Qlincy Observer sports columnist was well-known for his intolerance of stupid machinery When he was sports editor of The News in the 1950s and early '60s he once threw a newsroom typewriter out a window because it wouldn't behave Often angered by a balky drop-gate in the company parking lot Quincy once stepped out of his car ripped the drop-arm from its hinges and beat the stubborn mechanism mercilessly WJ Cash a News editorial writer in the 1930s and early '40s and author of the classic study "The Mind of the South" was also a man of intense feelings He hated Nazis and when the Germans In-I vaded Poland in 1939 he took it ek personally "He threw a tantrum in the newsroom Cash walking around screaming about what a terrible thing it was" recalls longtime news editor Bill Weisner "He wrote some really strong anti-Nazi editorials over the years" Wister for decades the dean of entertainment writers in this region was also known for his lively weather stories They sometimes featured jokes games and even snippets of song Always a colorful dresser one of Wister's favorite ensembles was a red vest (reversible to black) burgundy slacks and sportcoat pink socks and green or white shoes "I thought pink once a month" he says "I had a pink shirt and pink tie too It was a real nice tie' Once in an annual review of a visiting circus he playfully quoted a lion as saying: "One of these days that crazy SOB of a lion tamer is going to kill somebody" The lion trainer a large Spaniard named Pablo strode into the newsroom with his wife the next day demanding an apology "We tried to appease him explaining that the thing about the lion was a joke" says Doug Smith then the city editor "But the guy wanted a retraction Emery said: 'Hell I didn't say it the lion We told Em not to quote any more lions" lantly out of the darkroom shoulder his cameras and head for the place it was happening And if we saw anybody on The Observer doing that one of us would follow him out of the darkroom and keep right behind him all the way out the building to see where he was going" When Kodak came out with its first batch 9f extremely fast film in the 1950s News photographers sat down to figure out how it could be used as a weapon against The Observer Jeep Hunter remembers a big football game between Central High and Harding High that was the new weapon's first test "We rented an airplane and made a night aerial shot of the football stadium packed with 12000 spectators The next day The Observer came out with routine photo coverage of the game and we came out with a big splash on the front page of the packed stadium at night from the air" made possible by the fast film "When people saw it their eyes really lit up" When The Observer bought an expensive camera to take large panoramic shots The News felt briefly outclassed "We couldn't afford one" says Hunter "so what we did was take wide-angle views with the old Speed-Graphic cameras then paste a bunch of them side by side across the page We got the same effect using the old cameras It was competitive man I'll tell you" The two newsrooms shared the same radio frequency in the '70s leading to on-air shouting matches at times as both papers fought to report breaking stories by radio Sandy Hill one-time News assistant city editor (now Observer entertainment editor) recalls a tense morning when she screamed at an Observer editor to "get the hell off the air!" so The News could make deadline The editor complied and The News made its deadline Life in the newsroom was both informal and high-strung and the energy sometimes spilled over in ways that had little to do with getting out a paper Former Editor Stewart Spencer now executive editor of the Fort Wayne Ind News-Sentinel remembers when two sports writers got into an argument One of them angrily swept everything off the other's desk onto the floor then poured glue all over the desk and set it afire "Those things happened now and then" Spencer says "because the pace was so fast at The News: It was a place where on most days there was a great deal of energy at work And when the paper was at its best a lot of that showed through" No local story The 'News ever reported was bigger or more tragic than the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 212 It happened near the Charlotte airport at 7:23 am on Sept II 1974 Sixty-three persons died outright and three others were fatally injured In a few moments a soft late-summer morning turned into a nightmare that engulfed not only a plane but a city The News's coverage was a supreme example of its ability to report news accurately and sensitively under intense pressure Jeep Hunter was driving to work that morning on South Boulevard when he spotted a tall column of smoke in southwest Charlotte "I called the city desk on the radio and said if they had nothing for me to do I thought there was a fire in south Charlotte and I'd go to it They said go ahead and I started for the smoke Three minutes later they came on the radio and said 'My Lord it's an Eastern plane Get out there as fast as you can'" Hunter was the first press person on the scene before police closed off the area to the public "As I was going in I saw a fire marshal and an Eastern female employee The fire marshal said 'No pictures' When they say no pictures the first thing I always do is take pictures The woman turned out to be Colette Watson the stewardess on the plane who survived the crash without a scratch "There was a man lying on the It was one of Wister's habits in Idle moments to sit at his desk ripping off bits of the day's newspaper with his teeth chewing them up and exclaiming: "The trouble with damn modern newspapers is that they don't have any characters left!" And he was perilously close to being right Beginning in the late 1960s editors of The News "strove very hard for warmth and reader involvement" says Spencer "We did that partly to give The News its own personality and partly because of evidence that a lot of readers felt their papers to be pretty arrogant and aloof" One of the most successful efforts at reader involvement was the Call Quest column begun in 1965 It was an "action-line" operation that sought solutions to problems posed by readers Its mini-investigations brought results and made readers feel they had a friend ready to go to bat for them Call Quest required enterprise playful imagination and skill with words On Nov 1 1971 a reader signing himself "Jaded" wrote to say he'd won a state poetry contest some months before but had never received the $10 prize for his poem All he'd gotten was a form saying he owed state taxes on the $10 Where was the prize money? Hill then working part-time for Quest got the contest sponsors to mail the reader his check Then she explained the snafu in verse: "They mailed your check a year ago "Where it went they do not know "But another one is on the way "And you should get it any day" Not great poetry but "Jaded" must have felt pretty good about it At Christmastime Call Quest matched needy families with people who wanted to help them then delivered the donations of food clothing and toys to the families That operation did not displace The News's much older charity the Empty Stocking Fund During 54 years the Empty Stocking Fund raised tens of thousands of dollars for food and Christmas gifts for poor families The Personal Chat column begun in 1968 allowed readers to use code names and write in about their feelings or personal problems including illness divorce depressicn drug addiction mintage miseries etc Other readers then wrote in response offering comment advice and encouragement It was readers talking to readers But interest in those features eventually waned and by 1973 a pattern of declining circulation was evident Editors by then had begun a series of promotions games and contests to try to reverse the tide They also switched to a "soft" feature approach to the news playing human-interest material in prominent positions and highlighting Executive Editor Darrell Sifford's interview column Sifford who now writes a syndicated column for the Philadelphia Inquirer dealt with emotion-laden issues: sex marriage wilkAto44 money religion parent-child re- lationsnips etc 01 vht 1 Some columns 1 141 garnered strong t0 reader reactions 0-pi like those about mate- Nt i swapping and dk' i affairs at the of fice Sifford "We were fighting a downward trend" says Sitford "and we resorted to things we wouldn't have done in other circumstances Some of the sexually explicit stuff I wrote was done to try to yell at an audience and say: 'Hey! We're I sometimes felt I was talking to a void" Smith says The News "would Jump on any craze" in those years "We went so far in that (feature) direction that it was hard to see we were getting too soft that readers were getting tired of it There were days when you picked up The News and were hard put to find a hard news story in it" Editors switched back to a more traditional mix of news and features about 1977 but the decline in readership and revenues continued despite ad campaigns new design increased use of color an expanded staff new features and other strategies "The News finally became a Mecklenburg County-only newspaper" says Williams the marketing chief When the paper's circulation fell below 50000 he says its economic viability came seriously into question "That used to be the magic number in our own minds the number we wanted to stay above" News circulation first dipped below 50000 in December 1980 Merger of the Observer and News operations in 1983 was a stop-gap measure There wasn't much confidence The News could be turned around but a merged operation would save employees' jobs until a closing was unavoidable when staff levels could be trimmed through attrition The News finally died of a multitude of ills most of them the same ills that have killed 26 other afternoon papers in the past five years and spurred conversion of 69 others to morning publications A crucial factor was the changed lifestyles and work schedules of its readers In an increasingly white-collar town and region more and more people went to work later in the morning and got home later in the evening so their newspaper-reading time tended to be in the mornings Meanwhile readers' choices of how to spend their evening hours were split among more and more activities: TV and cable TV more and specialized magazines video games cassette movies participatory sports The evening paper began to get lost in the shuffle Another factor was duplicated readership between The News and The Charlotte Observer In the past 10 or 15 years most people who bought The News also bought The Observer and fewer and fewer remained willing in an era of rising prices to pay for two papers Younger families bought The Observer because it fit their schedules and perhaps because it focused less intensively on local happenings Those developments led to major losses in News revenue Advertisers decided it wasn't worth the expense to buy space in the paper because of its shrinking circulation When the major advertisers fell away smaller ones followed Most of the paper's features will be carried now in an expanded Charlotte Observer So the question may be asked: Will an afternoon paper be missed at all? What does its death mean to this town this region? A small sampling of opinion suggests it will be missed for three main reasons: It was a familiar friend that spoke intimately about Charlotte-Mecklenburg its neighborhoods and its people for many years it was a separate competitive editorial voice that made both papers better and the community livelier and The News's Green Section TV listing was consistently one of the most popular items in either daily paper Here's what a few people are saying: Frances Hadley Charlotte native and retired kindergarten teacher: "I wept over the announcement of The News's folding I've read it for over 60 years It's the only paper we've ever taken at our house and I always looked forward to coming home evenings and sitting down with my paper I'm going to miss that And there's no comparison between The Observer's TV magazine and The News's If they could just leave us a little bit of The Charlotte News by keeping the Green Section" The Rev George Battle member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education and pastor of Gethsemane AME Zion Church: "The first thing I thought about when I read that The News was closing was: 'Hey I'm going to be missing a member of my family' The News was Charlotte's paper It belonged to this community It was the conscience and the voice of Charlotteans" turn out three or four stories a week News reporters routinely wrote five six or seven "When we came down from Church street (in 1959)" says Wister "we had about eight reporters and we worked The slogan of the paper then was 'Today's News Today' and by God if something happened in the city it had better be in that day's paper It was bloody-nose head-to-head competition" Rita Simpson county public information director since the early '70s was a reporter at different times for both The Observer and The News The competi- i tion she says tt pervaded every department be- tf 2 a fore 1983 when tle vx) the newsroom staffs were merged 7- 0 4 "News staff- ers had to work Simpson extremely hard for everything they got whether It was the break on a story an advertising contract or a new subscription As a reporter you had to work your tail off to get a story ahead of the competition because In spite of how much people in this town loved The News they wanted their stories to appear in The Observer first" Shortages of money space and equipment fed an insatiable desire to "score one against the Big It wasn't simply a desire to beat The Observer' it was a churning hunger shared by reporters editors and copy editors The furious competitive drive arose partly from envy of The Observer's greater resources which was expressed by News people as a genial contempt It arose partly from reverse snobbery too: the notion that because The News labored with less it must be a better paper staffed by better people But the competitive thrust came mainly from pride of accomplishment a readiness to meet any challenge And it was shared by some of the printers and pressmen who continued to feel kinship with The News even after both papers came under the same ownership James Hyder 35-year veteran pressman for both papers expressed that loyalty this week "The News was a redheaded stepchild from the day it was bought by The Observer" he said yelling over the roar of the presses "At my house we always read The News cover to cover I'm serious I love the crossword puzzles the features everything about it I love the layout of The News Oh I love it It's clean it's open it catches your eye" Wages job security working conditions and equipment improved when the Knights bought The News in 1959 But there were still disagreeable chores to be performed "Every year" says Wister "we had a dreadful Progress edition to put out every February It was an attempt to pick up extra revenue i We'd write 1 stories about the progress of c1 li different bus i- 't 444 nesses ad A -4401- vertising pap that's what it 4 7 I was But we A had a good old-fashioned Wister camaraderie in the newsroom which is what great newspapers have always been about' Photographers at both papers felt the competition as keenly as the writers because they shared the same darkroom Photographer and lab engineer Elmer Horton recalls the use the two staffs made of a police scanner that was always crackling in the darkroom as they worked "Whenever a News photogra! pher heard something good on the radio he'd casually turn down the volume then he'd walk noncha.