The Last Obit
Died: The Dallas Times Herald, age 112, of natural causes. Survivors include a veteran columnist, who recalls better days.
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In 1958 McKnight made the master stroke that transformed Dallas’ newspapering, bringing sports columnist Blackie Sherrod to Dallas from the Fort Worth Press. Sherrod, revered for his witty writing, had an equal talent for management and journalistic insight. He brought with him to Dallas Dan Jenkins, Gary Cartwright, and Bud Shrake. Sherrod’s hiring marked the beginning of the Herald’s development into a writer’s newspaper, a personality that would in time take it to the top of Texas journalism. The sportswriters’ innovations, energy, and goose-bump writing brought the sports section first to parity with the Morning News and then to supremacy. In Big D’s priorities, sports was just about all that mattered. Through Sherrod’s example, the rest of the paper got brighter and more innovative. The pay was still bad, though. Nearly everyone moonlighted — for political candidates, drive-through animal parks, and PR agencies, or by editing other companies’ house organs and publications. You could also moonlight at the Herald, making overtime by writing puff stories on department stores with grocery chains for the special sections the paper published.
That was the situation that greeted and appalled Tom Johnson, Ken Johnson, and Will Jarrett when they arrived in the mid-seventies to run the Herald’s news operation for its new owners, the Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles. They banned most moonlighting, upgraded salaries, demanded quality, and added more writers. A new brand of journalism (for Dallas at least) cut through decades of passivity and faintheartedness. It was hard-edged and it sparkled like a sword — a double-edged sword, as it turned out. Dallas had never had a tough, neither-fear-nor-favor newspaper, and it wasn’t ready for one. “I think that was the beginning of the end,” says Frank Luksa, echoing a theory of many of his colleagues. “It scared the city’s leadership, having a paper that wouldn’t do their bidding.”
The Times Herald started making all the lists of best papers, but it alienated the Dallas establishment with its aggressiveness and its “outsiderness.” That perception was encouraged by the Morning News, which was getting its nose bloodied. The News followed its enemy in deciding to spend money to make money, and what resulted was the most intense newspaper war of the times. Tom Johnson’s forbearance and Will Jarrett’s minimalist management made the Times Herald a columnist’s delight — mavericks like Molly Ivins, Bill Porterfield, and Jim Henderson came in the wake of the earlier era’s alumni like Jim Lehrer, A. C. Greene, and Seth Kantor.
I missed six of the best years of the war, from 1979 to 1985, when I was off dabbling in broadcasting and traveling for two years with my family. While I was gone, Times Mirror added a morning edition of the Herald, causing years of subscription headaches and driving off many suburban readers. Management alienated Sherrod, who defected to the News. The News began to win the circulation war in the suburbs for the first time. Times Mirror sold the Herald to the acquisition wunderkind William Dean Singleton in 1986. Times Mirror had piped out a lot of profit and was trying to loot the pension fund on a technicality when it was foiled, ironically, in a federal suit filed by some of the investigative bulldogs it had trained.
Singleton’s choice as editor was David Burgin, and the Herald again burned with the kind of brief incandescence that precedes a light bulb’s end. Bullish and volcanic, he too was a columnist’s editor with writing talents of his own. He was given to turns of phrase that were tentative but memorable: “USA Today looks like a Hawaiian shirt”; “Never read a column by a guy named Rick” (a dictum that was 75 percent ominous in my case); “That’s what the back of the paper is for — stories about India.” But he was trying to put out a superior paper with inferior resources. Before his arrival in Dallas, upwards of 120 staffers had moved on, signing their names over a few weeks to a giant card labeled “Bailing Out.”
I had been brought back by Tom Johnson and Will Jarrett in 1985, presumably to shore up the Herald’s Dallas identity. That year a stag Christmastime gathering held by Stanley Marcus, his former NorthPark Neiman’s manager Ben Eisner told me, “I really miss reading your column, Dick.” I said, “Why, Ben, didn’t you know I came back to the Herald last June?” “Yeah,” he said, “I knew, but I don’t read the Times Herald anymore.” Neither did most of the men in the room that day. The hard-nosed Herald had lost first the affection, then the respect, then the readership, and ultimately the advertising dollars, of the Dallas decision makers.
The Herald went into a free-fall in 1988, when Singleton — who abruptly needed some large equity following his flamboyant purchases of the Houston Post and the Denver Post in the same week — sold the paper to former New Jersey associate John Buzzetta. Burgin was replaced as editor by Roy Bode, who was given even fewer resources and who exacerbated his predicament with what seemed like corporate-death-wish decisions. Bode’s first move was to cancel the column of Dan Jenkins, who had been brought back aboard by Burgin. Friends of Burgin, including myself and the gritty columnist Laura Miller, went into eclipse. Miller was fired; I was consigned to a lifestyle section that doubled as a columnist’s equivalent of an elephants’ burial ground. The section came to be referred to as the Jonestown of journalism. First to go was the communal sense of humor. Poses and pomposities that once had been the subject of ridicule became sacrosanct; we could no longer make fun of ourselves.
Bode doted on the digest, the collection of brief items on the front page of a section. He preferred hard news to column writing, the Herald’s stock in trade. One day in 1989, Bud Shrake said he had been stunned to pick up an edition of the Herald, turn to the sports section, and not find a single columnist.
That was about the time we sensed tiny auguries of the end, when the purchasing department switched from buying Liquid Paper to Sid and Ethel’s White-Out Fluid. Directives came from human resources, all beginning “In an effort to improve employee benefits …” and ending with an announcement of a reduction or cancellation of a benefit program.
“Bode thought hard news was going to turn the paper around,” says Burgin. “Well, baloney. Talent was going to do it more than anything. So what does he do? He takes the paper’s one major strength — columnists — and he sabotages it.”
In his statement on the death of the paper in December 8, Bode cited the crippling effects of the recession and bleak prospects of any resurgence as the reasons for the closing. Yes, that too.
So little time, so many redistricting stories to write. Sayonara, you all. SAMPLE.
This just in from the Times Herald board of economics: It’s officially a recession. FISHER.
Jim Beam whiskey and wine missing from features. That was to share, not for one person to take. Please return ASAP. Desperate need back here. LMILLER
Driving home that night, wondering where my career would take me next, I found some solace in the fact that the Herald had at least perished on a historical weekend. Everyone was already in a somber mood from the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the Times Herald, having lived for 112 years, survived 43 years longer and one day later than the much bigger, more widely known — and similarly insolent — Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I wondered if I could get that obit past the copy desk.
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