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It Wasn’t Easy For Charless

One ever-present problem was the frequent scarcity of news because of the irregularity and non-appearance of the mail from the East. At such times the editor was compelled to search for material to fill the columns of the Gazette. Another was the question of money and the pressing need of subscribers who would be willing to offer more than merely their names to the subscription list of the Gazette. The columns of the paper frequently bore notices such as this:

“The editor begs leave to inform those subscribers to the Gazette who are in arrears almost two years that he is made of flesh and blood, that Cameleon like he does not live on air, but endeavors to subsist like other folks, for this indulgence he is indebted to those who subscribed with an intention of keeping the ribs of the press oiled, and wished him to keep up that antique custom, eating and drinking.” (Missouri Gazette 4/19/1810)

(Excerpted from Early St. Louis Newspapers, 1808-1950, by Dorothy Grace Brown 6/1931).

Joseph Charless sold his paper [Gazette] and retired from editorial life in St. Louis. Under his skillful guardianship, the Missouri Gazette had grown from a twelve-column paper printed on a sheet of foolscap to twice that size printed on an imperial sheet. The number of subscribers consistently increased, from 174 at its beginning in 1808, to 1,000 by 1820. It was due to his tenacity of purpose, his untiring industry, ability and tact, and a strength of will which no disasters or threats could overcome, that Joseph Charless became a recognized influence in St. Louis during his lifetime, and his paper a living testimony to his energy and ability long after his death.

Upon the retirement of Charless, James C. Cummins became the new proprietor and editor of the Gazette. His first change was to substitute for the former motto of the paper another, “Principles Not Persons”, which he considered “more generally applicable to the duties of a newspaper editor.” The following year the office of the Gazette was moved from the southeast corner of Fifth and Market, where it had been since early in 1820, to a house on Main Street, “nearly opposite the Copper and Tinware Manufactory of Messrs. Neal and Liggett”…

Cummins closed his account with the Missouri Gazette on March 6, 1822, just eighteen months after his purchase of the paper from Joseph Charless. On that day Edward Charless, son of the founder, became its new proprietor and editor, and a few weeks later [he] changed its name to the Missouri Republican.

(Exerpted from Early St. Louis Newspapers, 1808-1850 by Dorothy Grace Brown, June 1931). 

We see a copy of the “Missouri Advocate and St. Louis Public Advertiser.” The first two pages are taken up with a verbatim copy of an Address by Henry Clay in Kentucky. He ends his address thus, “That I have often misconceived your true interests is highly probable. That I have sacrificed them to the object of personal aggrandizement I utterly deny. And for the purity of my motives, however in other respects I may be unworthy to approach the Throne of Grace and Mercy, I appeal to the justice of my God with all the confidence which can flow from a consciousness of perfect rectitude.”

On page three the news begins. “With feelings which could only be created by a similar occasion we announce today the arrival of General Lafayette on the steamboat Natchez. Thrice welcome thou Son of Liberty and Companion of Washington to the Home of the Free.”

Here is another news item, “Our readers will see that the Allies have become tired of waiting for the death of King Ferdinand of Spain and have resolved to take out letters of administration and divide the old man’s estate while living. This is a novel proceeding and may be filled with many advantages unknown to the old method of settling affairs.”

Then there is an article urging that St. Louis be made a port of entry. “Seeing no possible objection to the measure, but on the contrary everything urging the adoption of it, we trust that our Government will not hesitate to grant a request so reasonable and necessary to our immediate welfare and prosperity.”

And then, “The Proprietor of the Mansion House Livery Stable respectfully informs the citizens of St. Louis that he is now prepared to accommodate then with Carriages, Barouches, Dearborns, Gigs and Saddle Horses.”

Next follows a “St. Louis Wholesale Prices Current.” Here we read that ham was 5 to 8 cents a pound, corn 18 to 20 cents a bushel, lard 6 to 8 cents a pound and whiskey 25 to 28 cents per gallon.

Then there were quotations of “Exchange.” United States “paper” was from 1 to 2 per cent premium. Drafts on Philadelphia and New York, par. Illinois State Bank, 68 per cent discount. Missouri Loan Office, 25 per cent discount. Commonwealth of Kentucky, 50 percent discount.

“Valuable Real Estate for Sale. The late residence of Col. Elias Rector near the mounds, containing Eight Arpens of Land, situate immediately north of the City of St. Louis. A good dwelling house, barn, stable, carriage house, ice house, garden, and an excellent well of water.”

(From The St. Louis Story by McCune Gill, 1952.)

After being based in St. Louis for 122 years, the Sporting News has ceased publication here.

It was moved July 5 [2008] to Charlotte, NC., the home of its owner since 2006, American City Business Journals.

The venerable sports newspaper, founded in 1886 by Alfred H. Spink, had only about 30 employees left in its Chesterfield office at the end. More than half agreed to make the move but others decided to leave the company; three staffers were to stay here, working out of their homes.

The Spink family had run Sporting News for many decades with a wide readership that gave St. Louis national attention. It was called “The Bible of Baseball” because of the statistics it ran of the games, teams and players. It covered other sports as well, mainly football, hockey, horse racing and boxing. The print version will be reduced in September from a weekly to every two weeks.

American City publishes the St. Louis Business Journal and a variety of other business and sports publications. Last summer, it merged its online New York and St. Louis operations of SportingNews.com to Charlotte.

The company said it was set to launch a new format on July 23 which would be the first free digital daily sports paper, called SportingNewsToday. This follows a trend of other publications to concentrate on their online communications in the face of increased competition from ESPN, Sports Illustrated and other web sites.

By Roy Malone

(Printed with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 7/2008).
 

Corporate Owner Moves a St. Louis Institution

What has St. Louis lost with the passing of The Sporting News?

For one thing, “The” was dropped from the title a decade ago when the publication switched from its traditional newsprint appearance to a glossy look.

Sporting News is now [2008] based in Charlotte, NC., where on July 23, a free, online daily – that’s seven days a week – called Sporting News Today made its debut. Starting in September, officials said, the Sporting News in its magazine form will be published only twice a month, instead of weekly.

American City Business Journals of Charlotte, which purchased Sporting News is 2006, moved most of the archives a month ago from the Chesterfield office that was its last outpost here. An online staff that had been in St. Louis as part of sportingnews.com moved to Charlotte a year ago. In the latest migration, 17 staffers accepted relocation to North Carolina. Dennis Dillon and Stan McNeal were retained as St. Louis correspondents. Others faced retirement or career change.

“I am looking for work,” said Steve Gietschier, who was an archivist for the State of South Carolina before moving in 1986 to TSN in St. Louis to bring order to the mountain of books, photographs and sports memorabilia that had accumulated in TSN’s first 100 years. He created the Sporting News Research Center.

As if job worries weren’t enough, Gietschier and wife Donna had to forgo a scheduled trip to New York this summer to watch their beloved Mets in the final season of Shea Stadium.

Hard Departure
“I guess I’m retired,” said John Rawlings, who in late July was writing a final article for The Sporting News. Rawlings moved from the San Jose Mercury-News in 1990 to become managing editor. He left as editorial director/senior vice president – after working for Times Mirror Corp., the Paul Allen-founded Vulcan Media, and then American City.

In his sports media column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dan Caesar quoted Rawlings as saying, “It’s hard to see friends leave. But I’m excited for people who are going to working on two new products…I wish we could have changed faster. I felt like we were close a couple of times. We never got over the hump.

During its 122 years here, The Sporting News was called the “Bible of Baseball” by sports devotees. It helped put St. Louis on the map similar to the way Anheuser-Busch has. For at least 60 years, it had operated closely with organized baseball in publishing news of the game in its weekly reports and supplemented that with yearly guides, registers, record books, the National League Green Book and the American League Red Book. The absence of these materials this spring created a minor panic among sportswriters, broadcasters and collectors who had grown accustomed to having that vital information at their fingertips.

Under the Times Mirror ownership and the leadership of CEO Richard Waters, who arrived in 1982, TSN reached a weekly circulation record of one million copies during the week of March 17, 1986 – the publication’s 100th birthday. Times Mirror president Robert Erburu and his wife flew in from Los Angeles for the centennial dinner at the St. Louis Club, and Ernie Hayes was at the organ, making a million sounds. Circulation had been 750,000 before the TSN anniversary, so perhaps newsstand sales were enough to hit seven figures.

The sports highlights of that decade were more than enough to keep TSN afloat – the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, NY., the ’84 Summer Games in Los Angeles, Pete Rose surpassing Stan Musial’s National League record for most career hits (in ’81) and then Ty Cobb’s major league career high (on Sept. 11, 1985). In 1989, there was Rose’s lifetime suspension from baseball on charges of betting on games while he was managing the Cincinnati Reds.

Ty Cobb’s Record
In 1981, The Sporting News was at the center of another baseball storm after publishing a story that Paul Mac Farlane, then TSN’s historian, said he would “blow the cover off baseball.” Mac Farlane, who was compiling the seventh edition of Daguerreotypes, the complete records of major league stars and executives, found that Ty Cobb’s career numbers needed a slight adjustment because of a bookkeeping error that had been made in 1910.

Record books credited Cobb with winning 12 American League batting titles, nine in succession (1907-15), on his way to a career average of .367 and a total of 4,191 hits. Every baseball fan knew those last two figures by heart.

But whoa! TSN had acquired a collection of notebooks used by Leonard Gettelson, who edited baseball record books, including such annuals as “The Little Red Book of Major League Baseball” and “One for the Book.” A daily log book used in production of the official averages for the AL lay idle until Mac Farlane discovered an extra entry for Cobb in a late-season Detroit Tigers’ game in 1910. Cobb had gone 2 for 3 in an incomplete game that should have been erased from the records. With those numbers counted, the Georgia Peach finished the season with 196 hits in 509 at-bats, a .385 average. Without that entry, he would have been 194 for 506, a .383 mark.

Does it matter much? Well, no, except that Napoleon (Nap) Lajoie of the Cleveland Indians wound up with a .384 average, going 227 for 591, and should have been the batting champion. Well, no, except that Cobb’s career hits total should have been 4,189 instead of 4,191. So Pete Rose could have gone into the 1985 season, in which he seemed sure to top Cobb’s career total, with 4,190 stamped across his forehead instead of 4,192 (Rose had a total of 4,256 hits when he finished as a player in 1986).

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and baseball’s Records Committee refused to make a change in Cobb’s totals, declaring that this was water over the dam. Nonetheless, Mac Farlane went ahead with the new edition of Daguerreotypes. Since that time, record books compiled by members of the Society of Baseball Research (with much help from computers) and others have recognized the 1910 glitch and accepted Mac’s revelation. Ironically, an eighth edition of Daguerreotypes, published in 1990, after Mac’s retirement, restored Cobb’s glory.

Players Would Drop In
The Sporting News had a handful of downtown St. Louis addresses before it moved to rented space at 2018 Washington Ave. in 1948.

Often, big-name players who arrived by train at Union Station to play the Cardinals or the Browns would walk in off the street to visit TSN staffers or to grab the latest issue of baseball’s “Bible.”

J.G. Taylor Spink was publisher for 48 years before his death in 1962, and he built strong ties with baseball’s establishment. His dad, Charles Spink, was co-founder of The Sporting News along with his brother, Al Spink.

The Spink family hosted dinner parties at their Clayton home for league officials, umpires and retired players. Ty Cobb exchanged correspondence with Taylor Spink, advising him to buy Coca-Cola stock. Those letters remain in the archives that were relocated to Charlotte, NC.

C.C. Johnson Spink, who became publisher after his father’s death, moved the company in 1969 from 2018 Washington to 1212 North Lindbergh Blvd., a half-hour drive from downtown. Johnson commissioned a new, low building with open-air courtyards – from a photo he’d taken on a trip to Spain.

Johnson Spink spent 43 years with TSN, which he sold to the Times Mirror Co. on Jan. 11, 1977. He remained as editor-publisher for five years and as a consultant thereafter. Richard Waters, who had been a Readers’ Digest vice-president, became president and CEO in March 1982. There were no Spink heirs to continue publication.

The new building and plant improved the production facilities, but the distance from downtown reduced the number of walk-in visits by celebrities. Among the notables in the 1980s was W.H. Kinsella, author of “Shoeless Joe,” a baseball fantasy that was adapted for the movie “Field of Dreams.”

Kinsella wanted to look through TSN’s index card file, hping to confirm that a relative from western Canada had been involved in pro baseball. He found “Sinister Dick” Kinsella, who had been an umpire, a scout for the New York Giants and operator of the Springfield, IL., club in the Three-I League.

The Illinois Kinsella recommended Earl Obenshain of Decatur, who was hired as TSN editor after Ring Lardner quit the job in 1911. Lardner went to the East Coast, and his series of stories about a dimwit first baseman named Jack Keefe was compiled and published in 1916 as “You Know Me, Al.” And that wasn’t Al Spink, co-founder of TSN in 1886 and great uncle of Johnson Spink.

Basketball’s Karl Malone, whose flight had a layover at Lambert St. Louis Airport on NBA draft day in 1985, took a cab from the airport to TSN to find out where he’d been picked. (The Louisiana Tech star was taken by the Utah Jazz with the 13th selection.) Malone became known as the game’s consummate power forward and finished his career as the league’s No. 2 all-time scorer. He earned more than $100 million in salary – putting him in the limousine league.

Managing Editor Dick Kaegel, in the early 1980s, hired Larry King as a columnist. King had been tossing bouquets to TSN as host of Mutual radio’s all-night talk show based in Washington, DC. King’s telegrams arrived each Tuesday, sans punctuation, capitalization and, often, with no clue about which item was to be the lede. There were plugs for some author’s “good summer read” and for a restaurant in DC.

Every King column contained a quip or reaction from a celebrity, and this required careful editing. If it was an A-list person speaking – Frank Sinatra, for instance – the quote would begin, “Well, Larry…” or “You know, Larry…” This same kind of salutation later seemed to develop on the “Larry King Live” television show. If a guest preceded each answer with “Mr. King,” the man in the suspenders responded, “You may call me Larry.”

By Bob McCoy

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/2008).
 

A Look at Three of the Men Who Wrote the Articles

George Brown was the highest-salaried newspaper reporter in St. Louis about 1875. He came here with some experiences on an English paper, but wholly unacquainted with this country. Yet he stepped into a good position within a week and advanced rapidly to star place on the local staff. One day the door of Mr. [William] Hyde’s room at the Republican office opened. A stout young man entered just far enough to expose his presence and without a word of introduction, asked:

“Want a reporter?”

“Not today,” said Mr. Hyde, without looking up from his paper.

The visitor began to back out and was just about to close the door when the editor called after him:

“Hold on! If you want to show what you can do, you may go up to Dr. Finney’s church tomorrow morning and make a report of his sermon.”

“How much do you want?” asked Brown in the matter of fact manner which was his striking characteristic.

“Half a column,” replied the editor. Not another word was said. The door closed. The editor told his city editor, Mr. MacAdam, of the occurrence.

On Monday morning Mr. Hyde, looking over the paper, saw the sermon story occupying exactly half a column to the line. In a little while George Brown came in. Mr. Hyde nodded to him and said:

“I told you to give us half a column on Dr. Finney, didn’t I?”

“Yes sir, I did,” said Brown

“I see you did,” continued Mr. Hyde. “But tell me; how did you happen to make just half a column, no more, no less?”
With not a smile or suggestion in tone that he had done anything more than what was ordinary, Brown replied: “I took a copy of your paper and folded it once so as to make a half column. I counted the lines in the half column. I counted the words in enough lines to strike an average. I multiplied the number of lines by that average, and then I wrote just that number of words about the sermon.”

Mr. Hyde was a man of few words and of quick action. He employed Brown.

Reporter, city editor, manager, Frank R. O’Neil was a figure in the newspaper life of St. Louis. The quality of his work was far above the ordinary. His associates first discovered his talent and then came the public appreciation. What Frank O’Neil wrote could be identified by the daily reader. The man enjoyed his work. He was wonderfully accurate in statements and rigidly faithful in portrayal. More than this he had a capacity for turning out “good copy” which was the envy of his fellows. The revelations of life to the newspaper man sometimes beget cynicism and hardness. Frank R. O’Neil never lost his inborn kindness of heart.

Weaknesses of human nature strengthened his feeling of charity. He never glossed wrong doing in his writing. Perhaps a more politic man would have won greater personal renown with those who did not know him so well, but he would not have won to such a degree the confidence, the admiration, the love of those with whom he worked day by day. In 1883, after the death of Jesse James, when Frank James had a price of $10,000 on his head and was being hunted by detectives, O’Neil met with the noted bandit, through arrangement of a mutual friend, remaining with him for two days, and, under a promise not to reveal his whereabouts, returned to St. Louis and wrote a graphic interview with him, which he held for release, faithful to his promise, until James surrendered, when it was published.

In 1878, during the yellow fever epidemic in the South, Quarantine Station, below Jefferson Barracks, full of refugees, became infected, scores of deaths being reported daily. The people of the city were panic stricken. Health Commissioner Francis invited the newspapers to send reporters to the station to investigate conditions. O’Neil and two other reporters accepted the dangerous assignment, spending an entire day there. On their return O’Neil wrote a vivid description of the prevailing conditions, which was widely copied. Just as he finished this story, O’Neil was sent to cover an assignment at the Insane Asylum, where several patients had been mysteriously poisoned. He returned in time to write a graphic two-column account of this for the regular edition, thus in one day having accomplished a task that ordinarily would tax the capacity of several men.

When Frank R. O’Neil and Clarence N. Howell were the central figures of the Republican local staff, a kid reporter was taken on. He was a slender boy, laughing-eyed, interrogation-faced. He was at the age and of the temperament to absorb knowledge. He had adopted mankind for his study and the newspaper office for his school room. The boy looked up to O’Neil and Howell with all the admiration and confidence the youthful collegian gives to favorite professors. His daily assignment was the school board offices in the old Polytechnic building at Seventh and Locust streets. A cultured woman, a lady of breeding, Mrs. Bernoudy, who had charge of the office of the superintendent of schools saw what the boy needed. She talked books to him. She opened to his mind the opportunities for reading. In time knew more of what the public library contained than any other one person except the librarian, himself, Mr. Crunden.  The faculty to self-educate runs strong in the Irish blood. The boy reporter gained from his reading, first, information of wide range, then style of expression and finally, ideas which put him on the road to become the writer of more than local fame. The evolution of William Marion Reedy belongs to the history of St. Louis journalism.

(Originally published in St. Louis, the Fourth City by Walter Barlow Stevens, 1911).