THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 25, 1995 TAG: 9508250772
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: THE LEDGER-STAR: FINAL EDITION
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 397 lines
From the start it noticed the little stories as much as the big, treated its readers as neighbors, listened more to the working stiff than to his boss.
The four-page Public Ledger made no pretense of being a highbrow newspaper of record when its first edition rolled off a hand-cranked press in 1876. It reveled in yarns of hearth and workplace, in tales told well.
In return, Hampton Roads made it a mainstay of evening life. It has remained that in war and peace, in boom and bust, through Reconstruction, Prohibition, Great Depression and technological revolution.
Until today.
The offspring of that little broadsheet of 119 years ago today publishes its final edition.
To the roster of evening papers killed by shrinking readership and rising costs, add the name of The Ledger-Star.
For months one of the South's oldest afternoon newspapers has reached only a tiny fraction of the 104,000 households it informed and amused 20 years ago.
Like evening dailies before it, The Ledger-Star saw its circulation wither with the advent of television, its popularity fade amid the demands of an ever-busier, complicated world.
Its contents, however excellent, could not save it - a notion that crystalized even as the paper's staff unveiled such innovations as the TV greensheet, the Virginia Beach Beacon and the Daily Break.
``We wrestled with this for a long time,'' said Frank Batten, chairman of Landmark Communications Inc., which owns the Ledger and its morning sister, The Virginian-Pilot. ``The thinner the afternoon paper's circulation, the more difficult it is to distribute, and the more expensive it is to distribute.
``It's really only been within the year that we made the final judgment that we would have to close it.''
With its passing, The Ledger-Star's resources have become part of The Virginian-Pilot. ``I would think that the community has actually gained with the reinvestment of resources to the Pilot,'' editor Cole C. Campbell said. ``In terms of the relationship between a community and a newspaper, it's a time of transition more than a time of loss.''
Change is an old acquaintance to The Ledger and its readers: The newspaper has evolved from three separate journals, while the region around it has grown from brawling, boozy port town to busy metropolis.
Against this backdrop, a few things about it have never changed.
The paper has always delighted in newsgathering, and in going to sometimes-wild lengths to do it. Charlton Harrell, among its first female reporters, swam a half-mile across Willoughby Bay to reach a flood-stranded family for a 1936 story. J. Goodenow ``Goody'' Tyler climbed the mast of a burning ship to get a picture the same year.
While covering a drought, columnist Carl Cahill ruined a fine corduroy jacket in a plane crash into the Dismal Swamp. Cub reporter Jack Dorsey was pinned down by gunfire from a holed-up bad guy, and later survived an on-the-job helicopter crash.
``It wasn't work,'' said Dorsey, now The Pilot's military writer. ``You woke up in the morning and you wanted to get down there.''
Its desire to get stories right and get them first never wavered. ``We took great joy in breaking the story,'' said Frank Callaham, a retired reporter and editorial writer. ``Competition really served as a spur to be more aggressive in going out and getting the news.''
And The Ledger never took itself too seriously. ``It was a fresh paper, and it was fun,'' recalled Sandra M. Rowe, its top editor in the 1980s and now the editor of The Portland Oregonian. ``Our reporters were young, they were smart, they were feisty as hell. They were real risk-takers.''
The Ledger's earliest readers had few clues that the paper would become an evening ritual for generations: Its Democratic bias was unhidden, its layout crowded, its competition - two other evening dailies, two big morning papers - fierce.
But it cost only a penny in 1876 - half the price of its rivals - and passed on the news in a friendly, chatty voice.
When a Norfolk dandy laughing with his lady-love blew his false teeth onto the sidewalk, Hampton Roads learned of it on the Public Ledger's front page.
In the same way the region met Ned Maupin, a Portsmouth druggist who tried to feed a live chicken to his pet alligator. ``The chicken was put in a box with the varmint when a fight ensued,'' the front-page item advised, ``and Mr. Alligator was badly whipped.''
Even no news was news. ``Nothing interesting at the Navy Yard,'' the Public Ledger reported, ``except the handsome ladies who visit it nearly every day.''
Inside, pages were packed with poetry, short fiction, telegraph dispatches, travelogues, theatrical notes and admonishments on proper public behavior. ``Persons who stand on street corners, or sit upon bank steps, and spit tobacco juice on the sidewalks, have very little consideration for ladies who have to walk over such filth,'' it scolded.
Norfolk and Portsmouth, home to 32,000, responded with subscriptions and advertising. With $1,500 in its checkbook and 11 on its staff, the Public Ledger almost immediately became a Monday-through-Saturday staple.
Polite but plain-spoken, The Ledger survived as a half-dozen competitors came and went. Then, in 1894, the Star - another parent of the modern Ledger-Star - appeared across the river in Portsmouth.
In Norfolk, a brash new daily followed two years later. This was the evening Dispatch, which confessed flat-out that its aim was ``to earn a living for its publishers and their families.'' Fearless and fast, its passion for battlefield scoops during the Spanish-American War won it a reputation for late-breaking news. It also broke convention by seeking black business, even opening an office in a predominantly black neighborhood.
Bruised by its rival, the Public Ledger's owners sold out. Now in charge was Samuel L. Slover, the 29-year-old publisher of the Newport News Times-Herald, who had won control of that once-unprofitable paper by singlehandedly turning it around.
Slover's new Ledger was every bit as aggressive as the Dispatch, and he crammed inside pages with pictures and contests and sports stories. In four months the papers were neck-and-neck in advertising. In a year the Ledger's circulation had nearly tripled.
Rattled, the Dispatch's owner sold out in 1906.
So began the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, a name that would remain a part of daily life for 50 years and still evokes smiles from past subscribers.
"Local news was its big thing," said Harry Barranger Jr., who started reading The Ledger-Dispatch while he was in the Navy. "I only got the eveing paper. After supper, I'd grab that paper."
The Ledger-Dispatch became the biggest paper in town. With Slover at its helm, the paper flourished as the Jamestown Exposition drew hundreds of thousands to the area, as the Norfolk Naval Base rose from the old fairgrounds, and as suburbs began to spread slowly from downtown Norfolk and Portsmouth.
World War I ended, the Navy airship Roma crashed at Sewells Point, Charles Lindbergh reached Paris, Adolph Hitler rose to power: The Ledger raced to relay each dramatic development.
And it did it well. When the Depression prompted Slover to merge with the competing Virginian-Pilot in 1932, it was the Ledger-Dispatch, not the morning paper, that dominated the partnership.
Readers didn't notice. Working in separate newsrooms, the Pilot staff favored national and international news, while the Ledger continued to aim its writing at the little guy.
No surprise, then, that before moving to a new Brambleton Avenue home in 1937, the paper augmented its World Series coverage with an enormous scoreboard outside its Plume Street office. Every detail of the game appeared on this electric baseball diamond, down to the count faced by each batter.
``There was a big crowd of people standing around in the street and on the sidewalks, just watching that board,'' Frank Batten, Slover's nephew, recalled of a boyhood visit. ``That was my first encounter with the newspaper office, and also my first encounter with the electronic media.''
With the outbreak of World War II, the paper's news staff went off to battle, and a host of jobs traditionally held by men were handed to women. Charlton Harrell and Mary Hopkins excelled at news beats, Harrell winning five Virginia Press Association awards for her writing in 1942 alone. Hopkins even served awhile as sports editor, an unheard-of assignment for a woman.
``They said, `We'll never put a woman on the police beat,'' said Hopkins, now 75 and retired in Elizabeth City, N.C. ``Well, about six months later they put me on the police beat. They said they'd never have a woman sports editor, and I did that. And they said they'd never have a woman court reporter, and I did that for 12 years.''
After the war, as before, The Ledger struggled with the demands unique to putting out an evening paper - demands that in the pre-electronic age bordered on the impossible.
Six days a week, reporters would race into the newsroom from courthouses, city halls, police stations, accident scenes.
To make first edition, they had to find, report and write the news by 9:30 a.m. They'd compose their sentences even as they typed them onto rough-textured copy paper, sometimes banging them out in less than 15 minutes while a screaming editor hovered inches away.
``The writing was shorter - you didn't have time to be ponderous,'' said Ronald L. Speer, who now oversees the Pilot's North Carolina operation.
``I remember typing as fast as I could, trying to listen to a reporter dictate a story to me, with an editor holding the top end of the paper,'' reporter Shirley Brinkley said. ``The moment I finished the page, he literally snatched it out of the typewriter.''
Finished stories flew to the city editor, who scanned the copy for mistakes. From there they landed on The Ledger's two horseshoe-shaped copy desks, already swamped with half-finished pages and too-long headlines and missing photos. Tension mounted as the deadline loomed.
``My mother wouldn't call me on deadline,'' former sports editor Turner Dozier said.
``It was chaos, everybody going in every direction,'' laughed Jerry Alley, a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. ``One day (reporter and editor) Tony Stein fainted in the newsroom, just fainted dead away at deadline, right between the city desk and the copy desk. And there was no way to get our copy over to the copy desk except to step over Tony.
``So that's what we did: We just stepped over him, until deadline had passed, and then we took care of him.''
Still ahead was getting the stories into print. They now left the newsroom for composing - a vast, noisy room filled with smoke, the smell of molten lead and a platoon of jouncing, clattering, ceiling-high contraptions called Linotypes.
These and other machines transformed stories into metal plates. Minutes later, plates attached, the locomotive-sized presses started with a shudder that coursed through the building.
Up in the newsroom, the walls and floor hummed. Editors had already sent the second edition pages to composing and now wrestled with the paper's third incarnation. At The Ledger's height, there would be six or more editions, some requiring alteration to huge chunks of the paper.
``It was a madhouse, I'm going to tell you,'' said Jack Carper, The Ledger's longtime makeup editor. ``Some days we'd make over as many as 22 pages. It was a tough job.''
And still, it wasn't finished. Printed, cut and folded, the day's paper raced on conveyers to the mailroom, where it was stuffed with inserts and lashed into bundles and sent on to the loading dock. By just after lunch the first edition was ready for delivery, and at 5 p.m. the final, ``Blue Streak'' edition was being hawked in downtown Norfolk.
In The Ledger's final 20 years, technological advances erased much of the sweat that went into publishing. Computerized typesetting and photographic printing replaced lead type. Linotypes became museum pieces.
But in both long-gone and modern times, The Ledger next wound up in the hands of a paperboy. In the end, the combined toil of hundreds of journeymen and professionals was entrusted to a kid on a bike with a canvas bag thrown over his shoulder.
``I've always thought of that as a miracle, a miracle achieved every day by people, many of whom were free spirits, working with an enormous amount of discipline and energy,'' former editor and publisher Perry Morgan said. ``It was a daily miracle in which people tried to do something very well, very fast, and to keep on doing it, and in some cases to devote their lives to doing it.
``Whatever faults a newspaper might have - however one can fault evening newspapers - the supreme fact was that even a mediocre newspaper was a damn fine achievement.''
Despite their common ownership, The Ledger and Pilot newsrooms and editorial pages remained stubbornly independent. To put it mildly.
For decades after the merger, a long hallway split the newspaper building's second floor in two. To its east stretched The Ledger newsroom; to the west, The Pilot's. Eventually, they took up separate floors.
``You went to work for one or the other, but you didn't go from one to the other,'' said copy editor David Kippenbrock. ``It was almost as if an invisible strand of barbed wire ran down the middle of the hall. We didn't know one another. We didn't want to know one another.''
``They were the enemy,'' reporter and editor Kay McGraw said, ``and we regularly beat The Pilot's butt.''
Until the 1950s, however, neither newsroom had won the heart of Portsmouth, still a scrappily separatist city. There reigned the 60-year-old Star, another workingman's paper with a strong emphasis on waterfront news and police reports.
The Star took pains to involve black readers, and boasted a black columnist, Lee F. Rodgers, decades before that became commonplace. In the eyes of its black and white readers alike, Hampton Roads might be the purview of the ``Norfolk newspapers,'' but Portsmouth belonged to the Star.
That changed when, in 1954, Slover appointed Frank Batten publisher of the Norfolk papers. Within six months, the new management bought the Portsmouth daily.
The afternoon paper's name became the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch and Portsmouth Star, which over time was streamlined to Ledger-Star. Star readers rebelled, briefly supporting the upstart Portsmouth Times, but within a year the city had adopted the new journal. That loyalty would stay firm for years, no doubt bolstered by the presence of former Star writers like columnist Rodgers and sportswriter Eddie Rogers.
Meanwhile, the battle with The Pilot continued. Ledger sportswriters, convinced their morning counterparts were stealing their stories, planted a fake one and waited for it to appear in the other paper. ``Sure enough, they took the bait,'' Turner Dozier laughed. ``We nailed them cold.''
The paper introduced a host of new features: The green-papered Television Week, which gave the Saturday paper a mammoth readership; the Virginia Beach Beacon, unveiled in 1962, presaging the suburban coverage that was a Ledger strength for 25 years; the Joy Fund, a Christmas charity that helped tens of thousands of needy Hampton Roads families; and, in 1979, the Daily Break, which revamped the old notion of a ``women's section'' into modern features of varied, in-depth writing.
Always, the paper pushed to get the story first. ``We had more human beings and fewer geniuses,'' Mary Hopkins said. ``But we knew what to do: We went out and found news.''
Without a fresh angle, a story that appeared in The Pilot first wouldn't get prominent ``display'' in The Ledger, and it might not run at all. Five years after the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, Tony Stein asked reporter Jim Stiff to write a piece commemorating the event.
``It was to run on a Monday,'' Stein said. ``The Sunday before, The Pilot ran an anniversary piece. So I took Jim's long and very good story and put it in my desk drawer.
``Five years later, I took it out of my desk, crossed out the words ``Five years ago today,'' wrote ``Ten years ago today,'' and put it in the paper exactly as it had been written.''
Through these years, before and after college degrees became industry standards, The Ledger newsroom accumulated characters - ex-G.I.s handy with words, book-smart misfits, tough-talking wiseguys addicted to coffee and stress.
They slouched behind Navy-gray desks, lips clamped on cigarettes, index fingers jabbing battered Underwoods, talking and laughing over the endless clack-a-clack of the Teletypes. They ground out butts on the tile floor and edited copy with soft-lead pencils. A few stole nips from flasks tucked in their desks. Shouting and arguments and practical jokes abounded.
``The great thing about newspapers,'' Cahill said, ``is that everybody who worked for newspapers was an oddball.''
``My wife's mother told her, `Don't marry a newspaperman,' '' said Dorsey, who joined the Ledger staff as a copyboy in 1962. ``She said, `They're eccentric. They're weird.'
``And we are. There are some unique personalities that have come into that newsroom.''
Among them: Rodgers, the former Star writer who cranked out the paper's ``Colored Notes'' column several times a week. Not only did he work in the old Star building on High Street, he actually lived there, sleeping each night in an overstuffed chair in his office.
Cahill, a sardonic columnist who, after losing a bid for a raise, bought a classified ad in his own paper seeking other employment.
The late Tom Hanes, a top editor whose temper once flared as he spoke to a reader who threatened to cancel his subscription. ``The hell you will!'' Hanes bellowed. ``I'm canceling you! You can't have my newspaper!''
Charles Reilly, former managing editor and ex-Coast Guardsman, who insisted that copyboys scrub his desktop every night. ``I complained to him that I didn't think that was in my job description,'' former copyboy Howard Stotz said. ``He made it quite clear that my job description was whatever he said it was.''
William Fitzpatrick, now retired, an editor with so strong a sense of propriety that he ordered all belly buttons airbrushed out of photos.
And Tony Stein, a magnet for accidents. Stein was nearly throttled when his tie slipped into a photo laminating machine, stepped into trashcans when excited, and started so many newsroom fires with his pipe that copyboys stationed an extinguisher beside his desk.
``They would take guys off the street,'' said Turner Dozier, who watched colleagues come and go for 43 years. ``People could come in out of nowhere and look for a job, and they'd give you a shot.''
That might explain the brief but memorable career of Jack F. Rollins, a Ledger reporter and amateur prizefighter who stole The Ledger's staff car in 1952. Arrested with the car weeks later in Colorado, Rollins begged to be tried in Denver. ``I'd rather take my punishment here,'' he told the court, ``than go back and face the managing editor.''
Today those characters, that competition, those stories are what remains of the Ledger's best years. And, like any old friend, the newspaper is perhaps better remembered at its zenith, when it was fresh and aggressive, than at its end.
Its newsroom merged with The Pilot's in 1982, when the cost of maintaining two staffs became too great a burden, and the evening paper was never quite the same afterward: Though editors strove to keep it different, to imprint it with its own style, the fact was that one staff produced both newspapers, and over the years the differences between them evaporated.
As editor Campbell noted, ``The Ledger stopped functioning as an independent newspaper over a 20-year period.''
With luck and its readers' charity, it will be that strong, scrappy Ledger of old that survives in the region's memory. The Ledger that took such deep pride in its home. The Ledger thirsty for news and speed. That advocate for the shipyard worker, the sailor, the neighborhood merchant, the struggling parent.
With the same good fortune, some of its traits will live on in The Virginian-Pilot - its urgency, the personal relationship it nurtured with its readers.
The old Ledger had such urgency. "I was always partial to teh afternoon paper, because it had the latest news," said Norfolk's Anne Milteer, a subscriber for 50 years. "I wanted to know what was happening."
And The Ledger had such a personal relationship. To understand that, one need only talk to Jerry Blair. A paperboy in 1926 and 1927, he can still drive through West Ghent and point out where his customers lived, what their names were, where they worked.
``I always liked the full name, Ledger-Dispatch,'' said Blair, who remembers selling extras when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. ``It was the wireless dispatches from around the world that made the news.
``Imagine the thrill felt by a 15-year-old boy running down a busy street in downtown Norfolk yelling, `Extra paper! Read all about the Yankees win the Series!'
`` `Ledger-Dispatch, mister?' '' MEMO: Final editions of The Ledger-Star will be available in a number of
outlets, including 7-Eleven stores, Farm Fresh, Rack & Sack, Belo,
Uni-Mart, and from the newspaper circulation department. To purchase a
copy, call 446-9000.
ILLUSTRATION: [Newspaper Front Pages]
BORJES COLLECTION/1950 Kirn Memorial Library
In the 1950s, The Ledger's delivery culminated a long, hectic and
stressful day's work for hundreds of people who viewed journalism as
a calling.
Mike Williams - a SpeedGraphic camera at his side - works a story
for the Portsmouth Star in the early 1950s. The Star was one of
three papers that gave birth to the modern Ledger-Star.
PHOTO BY HOWARD STOTZ
About 1960: Charles Reilly, seated center, and J. Goodenow "Goody"
Tyler, far right, confer with colleagues in a newsroom that depended
on typewriters and pencils rather that computers. The pace produced
short tempers, foul mouths - and great humor.
THE LEDGER STAR
The Public Ledger's owners sold out to Samuel L. Slover, the
29-year-old publisher of the Newport News Times-Herald, who had won
control of that once-unprofitable paper by singlehandedly turning it
around.
Slover's new Ledger was every bit as aggressive as the Dispatch, and
he crammed inside pages with pictures and contests and sports
stories. In four months the papers were neck-and-neck in
advertising. In a year the Ledger's circulation had nearly tripled.
Rattled, the Dispatch's owner sold out in 1906.
by CNB