In Tennessee: Death of an Afternoon

By Gregory Jaynes

Sadly, this seems to be happening too much now in America: the weaker newspaper in a two-paper town shuts down. Then the stronger announces--before the body is even cold--that it will be expanding. More pages. More personnel (including, charitably, some off the stiff). And, more important, more color.

This does not seem to be going on: "Where are you off to?" "I'm tearing down to the newsstand, sweetie. The paper has a new full-color weather map of the entire country!"

To what newspapers tend to call a "veteran observer"--and a fond one at that--the emphasis on jazzy design changes in all these post-mortem announcements has an air of desperation, like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie: "I can be taller! I can be shorter!" Come now, get hold of yourself; be what you are. The reader has to appreciate more pages, more opinions, but he is not likely to be fooled by a newspaper whose looks have been tinkered with so as to ape a television screen. Besides, the color reception in most papers is uneven. Ever count the number of helmets that quarterback appears to be wearing, the number of eyes on that beauty queen? A case in point seems due about here.

The Memphis Press-Scimitar (as in sword) folded on Halloween. It was known as a blue-collar paper. The next morning, the Commercial Appeal, which is not known as a blue-collar paper, announced that among the many changes to come, the newspaper would be made "easier to read." To boot, a full one-fourth of the front page was occupied by a color photograph of a black man picking cotton, a quaint idea in an enormous amount of space. Alas, it seemed, a newspaper had finally reached a par with television: it had managed to torment one's intelligence.

If anything distinguished the Memphis closing from a cortege of other newspaper deaths in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Sarasota, Fla., Tampa, Washington and, provided a buyer is not found soon, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, it was the Press-Scimitar's swinish attitude toward reporters from outside. The Press-Scimitar would shove a camera in the face of a dying leukemia victim, yet when it came time for itself to perish, Editor Milton R. Britten wrote in a memo, "I don't want anybody with pompadours and gleaming teeth in our newsroom with Minicams on the last day. Nor do I want any local or nonlocal journalists on our floor." He went on to say that he did not "want to submit any of our troops to the indignity of having them crawling around the newsroom." In the end, staffers shouted profanities at local TV film crews, one woman blithely unplugged their lights, a reporter poured beer into a radio correspondent's accessory bag, and the political editor called a "nonlocal journalist" a word that only comes to a civil mind in the smallest room of one's house. As A.J. Liebling wrote, "Newspapering, despite urgent prodding from schools of journalism, has always lagged behind the learned professions on the march to seemliness."

Well, so much for being offended, and on with the tale.

The Press-Scimitar was once a lusty voice in a bawdy town on a river bluff. A typically irreverent headline: MOUNDS OF EVIDENCE BARED IN TOPLESS CASE! It set new lows in participatory journalism. In the 1960s it bedecked its most fetching female reporter in the stingiest miniskirt available, sent her sashaying down Main Street, photographed the event and published the pictures across the top of Page One under the screaming pronouncement LOVE IS A MINI-SPLENDORED THING! For all this silliness, it had a down-home feel to it, and readers who stuck with it professed to prefer its casualness to the seriousness of the morning alternative. A sweet potato that looked just like Charles de Gaulle was news enough for them.

Over the past decade, however, the ranks of the devotees began to shrink. The paper grew phlegmatic, just as the downtown around it slid into decline, just as downtowns practically everywhere did the same. (To its credit, or tenacity, the Press-Scimitar was wheezing "Forward, Memphis!" to its dying day.) Circulation fell from 127,000 in 1973 to "less than 80,000" this year. Downtown itself was turned into a mall to compete with suburban malls--the same kind of desperate and characterless rearrangement happening all over the country--and still suburbanites clung to the perception of a ubiquitous downtown scene as one in which a man with a wallet is being chased by a man with a brick. Landmark buildings began to disappear, as did, the other day, an old newspaper.

The last edition included a litany of the Press-Scimitar's successes in its 103 years. It had been particularly effective in crusades against corruption in city government, for bringing Tennessee Valley Authority power to Memphis and for conservation. There was also as much information as was known about what was going to happen to the 157 employees who had been told to hit the street. Some had found jobs, some had not, and some were retiring. There was a letter from Ronald Reagan that sort of contradicted a policy the President had in force at the time: "We have always believed that a free press provides the best road to the truth and the betterment of society."

Elsewhere in the paper there were emotional farewells from columnists, some of whom, like the sole good athlete on a last-place team, had been allowed an astonishing amount of latitude over the years. At a time when a Memphis radio station was infuriating a bloated local boy, Elvis Presley, with a weight-mocking song called Just One More Jelly Doughnut, whose background refrain went, "He's gonna pop!" a Press-Scimitar columnist was actually begging in the paper for Elvis to give him a Cadillac. The singer was not moved.

And there was a fine page of anecdotes about all the eccentrics who had passed through the newsroom since the days when Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur were working on that wonderful play. Editorial-Page Editor Charles Roper, who compiled the memoir, recalled that someone went berserk in the composing room one day and the police had to be summoned. The cops got off on the wrong floor, confronted the nearest writer, Bob Johnson, and said, "We understand you have a crazy man up here." Johnson waved an arm about the room and said, "Take your pick."

"We felt like a family," reporter after reporter said upon leaving the building that final day. As they trudged out, a van pulled up from the city's Pink Palace Museum and took away a Press-Scimitar vending machine with a truly final edition in the window. "We feel like vultures," said Curator Ronald Craw ford Brister. "People hate to see us coming." He noted that when the Firestone plant closed earlier this year, he had had to drop by and pick up the first tire produced there, in 1937, as well as the last tread off the assembly line.

In a bar across the street from the paper, they struck up a wake, the last in a round of such affairs. They had twice given themselves a slide show of their faces at work, to a recording of Nat King Cole singing, "Pretend you're happy when you're blue." "It was the most relaxed place I ever worked," said a tearful obituary writer. "It was money," said a belligerent political reporter, getting no argument. "All Scripps-Howard thought about was money."

Scripps-Howard is the Cincinnati-based chain that owned the Press-Scimitar, and it made no secret that it shut the paper to pour its resources into its other Memphis paper, the Commercial Appeal, and to make more money. With the cessation of the Press-Scimitar, the Commercial Appeal raised its advertising rate 10%. The "Howard" in the name of the chain belonged to the late Roy Howard, who once set America on fire by wrongly filing, on Nov. 7, 1918, the end of World War I. Armistice came four days later. Howard was a small man who kept a mirror in his office, in front of which he would invite people of comparable size to stand beside him to prove he was not so little after all. The Scripps-Howard motto, under Howard and today, is "Give light and the people will find their own way." Next to the motto, in the pages of its newspapers, is a likeness of a lighthouse.

On the way out of the building the day that the Press-Scimitar went under, Assistant City Editor Jim Cole looked back and asked, "By the way, will the last person leaving please turn out the lighthouse?"

--By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.