Larry Coffman-Print

Larry Coffman • March 17, 2009

Death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s printed pages—I’m sure—triggered an array of emotions and memories among long-time local residents. It did for me...

One recent night, lying there in the darkness, my mind conjured up vivid memories of that second-floor newsroom at The Seattle Times building on Fairview Avenue. I could see the faces and movements of my one-time colleagues as clearly as if I was viewing them in one of today’s ubiquitous online videos.

Entering the huge square space through the hip-level gate at the front desk, the cacophony of several dozen clattering typewriters and the blanket of smoke from a nearly equal number of cigarettes, cigars and pipes were the norm back in those years from 1966 to 1968 when I worked there as a reporter.

Just to my right at the entrance was the office of fatherly managing editor Henry McLeod, who hired me for the princely sum of $200 a week, on the advice of Jim King, his darkly handsome assistant ME, who discovered me laboring in the suburbs for the legendary weekly newspaper magnate John L. Fournier.

Farther right was the office of Ross Cunningham, whose oft-stinging editorials quickened the pulse of politics and business in the city that he overlooked from his corner window. His cohort in editorial opining, Herb Robinson, first made his reputation as a commentator on KOMO-TV but jumped to The Times in a day when newspapers, radio and TV were uncooperative rivals.

Even so, The Times allowed a remote daily newscast for KVI radio by tall Bob Roberts, his golden pipes kept in tune by ample amounts of alcohol and cigarettes. I’ll always cherish the glowing comments he made about the work of a then-20-something reporter, fresh in from the south county. [I’d been hired originally to open The Times’ first-ever suburban bureau in Kent, right under the nose of the feisty Fournier, who shunned me for years, until just before his death. I replaced silver-haired Dick Moody as the “urban-affairs” reporter when Dick launched the Troubleshooter column.]

To my left at the entrance was the “women’s department,” dominated by the large presence of one June Anderson Almquist. Her entrance into any gathering—in the newsroom or elsewhere—could never go unnoticed.

The far right-corner office housed sports editor Georg Meyers, Gil Lyons, who covered the pro-sports beat and golf (and is an occasional golfing partner today), the lanky Dick Rockne and east coast transplant Hy Zimmerman, whose facility for alliteration in his daily columns I always admired.

Rotund man-about-town columnist John Redden sat in a small office adjacent to the sports area. I’ll always remember his hilarious story about being on the ski slopes one day and having to answer the call of nature behind a bush. Afterward, he skied down to meet his friends at the bottom, only to be humiliated when one of them pointed to a steaming turd still stuck to one of his skis!

Equally humorous was the time grizzled old Bob (Freeway) Barr [so named for his coverage of the state DOT beat] nearly set himself on fire. Bob always had a cigarette dangling from his lips and another one or two still smoldering in the ashtray on his desk. One day, he emptied the ashtray into his trashcan, only to have it catch fire. In an attempt to quell the flames, Bob jammed his foot into the can and it became stuck; the whole newsroom came to a halt, roaring with laughter at the sight of Bob doing a war-dance with the flames licking at his backside. For the record, it ended well.

However, the accident that Paul Staples had when his riding lawnmower exploded in flames had a tragic result, leaving his face horribly scarred and disfigured, yet he returned to his job as a reporter, working alongside his wife Alice, who covered the real estate beat.

Seated side-by-side in the back were the two hard-living newsroom stars, Don Hannula and the more heralded Dick Larsen. Dick made his mark covering—and befriending—Seattle serial killer Ted Bundy, and sending must-read political dispatches from Olympia. Hannula was the reporter’s reporter and my personal hero, though I never told him so. He could handle everything from a heart-wrenching feature story to a dangerous undercover investigation—and did so again and again.

Also in the back was the horseshoe, where Michael J. Parks and others would sit in the “slot” handing out copy to headline writers. Parks later went on to become an outstanding business writer and left to purchase and publish the venerable Marples Newsletter, which continues in existence today.

Stan Patty and Bob Twiss, another pair of Times icons, were in the far left corner. In their careers, they forgot more about Alaska and The Boeing Co. (their respective beats) than most experts knew. Behind them was the entrance to the photographers’ office and darkroom. An eclectic group it was—led by Joe Scaylea, whose photographs of Mt. Rainier are legend. It included rambunctious Vic Condiotti, swarthy Larry Dion, young Greg Gilbert, Ron DeRosa and others.

Adjacent to the newsroom were the back shop, where the hot lead flowed, got cast into “slugs” of type and then neatly encased in a rectangular metal “chase,” and the library, home to the article clippings and microfiche that were the standard research resources,
long before Google was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

I saved the center area of the newsroom for last because it represents my whole reason for writing this plaint to the P-I’s passing. There sat one Mel Sayre, the prototypical city editor who bore a striking resemblance to a bulldog, in both appearance and demeanor. But he had a heart of gold, especially away from the office after a couple of drinks. Yet those occasional kind words at an off-site party did little to calm my rookie nerves when I had to deal with him each weekday, especially as the 11a.m. main-edition deadline approached. However, the angst always began a couple of hours earlier.

Enroute to the office each morning from Kirkland, I’d stop by the newsstand for a copy of the P-I, then the morning newspaper counterpart of the evening Times—when the competition was fierce and unfriendly and a Joint Operating Agreement was unthinkable. On a good day, my direct competitor at The P-I, Mike Conant, had a story or two stuck back in the inside pages of what was then a fat paper. On a bad day, he had a Page 1 scoop that I had either missed or been beaten on by a matter of hours because of the P-I’s time advantage. I used to like traffic jams coming across the 520 bridge on those bad days because it gave me more time to figure out what I was going to say when I had to face Mel.

Now, Conant was a good reporter and an estimable competitor, but he had a way of picking up some little item way down in a story that I’d gotten before him and blowing it up from another angle, often to Page 1 proportions. But I somehow got more bulldog than heart-of-gold whenever I tried to explain that to Mel.

It was an especially good day when I’d approach Mel’s desk with my copy and he’d grab it—his sweaty, bald head lowered, puffing furiously on a cigarette as he read—then look up and say, “Good job, kid, I’m gonna start it on Page 1!” I could still recall the good feelings that surged through me on those occasions—as I lay there in the darkness, 40+ years later.

My feelings of sadness today are far more powerful and profound than my feelings of elation back then—simply because most of those valued newspaper peers, the production processes that I studied and worked so hard to learn and the paramount position of the daily newspaper all have passed into irretrievable history.

For me, the demise of the print P-I feels every bit like a death in the family.