I remember everything about the day I started working at the Sun-Sentinel, 35 years ago. Ready? (Long editor’s letter ahead.)
I parked in the company’s dirt lot along the New River in downtown Fort Lauderdale – where The Las Olas Grand Condominium stands now – walked under the SE Third Avenue drawbridge (still there), flashed my new employee badge at security and took the elevator up into the blockhouse of a newspaper office building/printing press on East Las Olas Boulevard, where the 42-story Las Olas River House stands today.
My new boss, Heather Lajewski, walked me through the sprawling, bustling newsroom (hundreds of people worked there in 1990) to the features copy desk on the far side of the room. She showed me where I would sit – which happened to be next to a fellow University of Kansas grad, Gretchen Day(-Bryant).
Somebody will probably correct me, but I think there were 12 of us on the features desk then. Heather introduced me to all of them, with a few words about each. I remember Ann Carter, another new desk mate, introducing me to a quiet page designer at the far end of the desk. “That’s Greg Carannante,” she said. “The ’60s were very good to him.’’ (They were.)
Heather took me around next to meet all of the editors and writers for Showtime, Lifestyle, Home & Garden, Travel, Food, Arts & Leisure, etc. – and then we went to work, editing their stories and building all of the hundreds of features pages each week in the 450,000-circulation (or so) daily newspaper.
Somebody will probably correct me, but I think at least seven people read each story before it appeared in print then: The writer (presumably, though not always a given), an assistant section editor, the section editor, two features copy editors (me), the assistant features desk editor, the features desk editor and, sometimes, the assistant managing editor – or even the managing editor. That does not include the occasional “good catch’’ by someone looking out for us in the composing room – who’d call the desk and wonder, “did you mean to write ‘Sedona’ instead of ‘Sonoma’ in this wine story headline?” (I did not.)
What you see pictured above – the “Sun-Sentinel Smartscan Request form’’ – is a relic of that time. We features desk editors had to fill one out for each of the hundreds of photos that appeared in the newspaper each week. So in this rare, borderline historic document, you can see that I sized a photo from the deathless 1991 Orion Pictures film “F/X2,” starring Bryan Brown, to fill a 4.19-inch x 3-inch hole on pg. 4 of the Arts & Leisure section of the May 12, 1991, newspaper. If you go check the archives in the public library, children, you’ll actually see your dad’s handiwork there on pg. 4 of the A&L section for all eternity! (Unless I confused it with a photo of Sedona – in which case, never mind!)
It took me an intolerably long time to master this skill – as my (sometimes) patient desk mates and the composing room could easily confirm – but I eventually figured out how to get photos to fit without appearing upside down or sideways or with a picture of Sedona instead of Bryan Brown.
So, this is where I started, 35 years ago, with a copy of (Jayhawk journalism professor) John Bremner’s “Words on Words” by my side, squeezed into a tiny space next to (Jayhawk) Gretchen Day(-Bryant) in a sprawling newsroom full of hundreds of people – copy editing stories, writing headlines, making sure the photos fit – just a tiny part of the Greatest Editing Machine ever assembled. (Notwithstanding the Sedona-Sonoma debacle.)
And because (I guess) I showed my bosses I could learn such skills, they kept asking me to try new things – and to do more. My wife, Cecile, and I were new parents within a year after I started working here, with day-care bills to pay, and a friend at work said the way to get ahead at the Sun-Sentinel was to always ask – to quote Billy Idol from “Rebel Yell” – for “more, more, more!” So I did.
When the travel editor, Thomas Swick, was looking for staff stories for his Travel section, I asked to do that (and my story about a Bastille Day party in France was my first byline in the Sun-Sentinel – thank you, Tom!) When an opportunity to write stories for Lifestyle Editor Stuart Purdy came around, I asked to do that (and one of them got picked up by The Washington Post – thank you, Stuart!) When an assistant features editor job opened up, I asked to do that, too. Then features editor.
Then my first magazine experience, a cover story on the Pier 66 that I wrote on a rotation with the staff of Sunshine, the Sun-Sentinel’s weekly magazine, with Editor John Parkyn and Assistant Editor Dave Wieczorek. Then as editor of Sunshine, when Mr. Parkyn retired, with my friend from the features desk, Greg, who was now the art director there; and my friend Dave, who, thank goodness, stayed on as assistant magazine editor.
Then founding editor of City & Shore, the Sun-Sentinel’s new magazine – thank you, Dan Norman; thank you Greg and John Dolen; and thank you Elizabeth Rahe, who has edited all of my columns (including this one) since the first one. Then founding publisher and editor (with founding associate publisher Lori Jacoby and account executive Valerie Feder) of spinoff City & Shore magazines PRIME and Explore Florida & the Caribbean and a couple of books, Looking Back and Looking Back II, and our first all-digital magazine with current publisher Caroline Pinsker, designed by my friend and art director Anderson Greene.
The Sun Sentinel has always challenged me and rewarded my effort along the way – even today, as editor in chief of City & Shore’s suite of magazines – and I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked so long here at what’s now the South Florida Sun Sentinel (no hyphen since 2008) with so many wonderful, talented colleagues – many of whom have become my friends.
I’m still working with one of them, Gretchen Day-Bryant, who’s now the editor of the whole newspaper!
So what am I starting next? More of the same – just not as much. This 25th anniversary issue is the last general issue of City & Shore, as the Sun Sentinel Co. focuses on niche publications going forward. I’ll be editing two of those – both C&S spinoffs – PRIME (in March and October) and Explore Florida & the Caribbean (in May and November) this year, my first of “semi-retirement.’’ I’m also going to try to write a book – there, I’ve said it – about what, I’m not yet sure.
Maybe about my 44 years in South Florida, or what it’s like to start a magazine or about the day 35 years ago I started working at my beloved Sun-Sentinel.
That’ll be easy. Because I remember everything.
Online bonus: My scrapbook
I wanted to be an astronaut. Then a geologist. Then a paleontologist. Then, wait, an astronaut again.
At no point in my early life did I think of becoming a magazine editor. Too bad because I know now it’s really what I’ve always wanted to do. I just didn’t know it when I was an astronaut-in-training.
As a magazine editor going on 30 years – first for Sunshine, the Sun-Sentinel’s weekly Sunday magazine, then as founding editor of City & Shore, PRIME and Explore Florida & the Caribbean – I’ve gotten to do things I never would have dreamed. Better than being an astronaut, geologist, paleontologist or astronaut again? I think so.
Like the time Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin taught me over dinner how to sign the three words that are most important to her, “Courage, dreams and success.” Or Ted Koppel, the definitive TV newsman when I was a kid, telling me over dinner that the story we did on him was the best he’d read. Ted Koppel! (Really nice guy, too.) Or Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the only speaker in the series we sponsored a few years ago with Broward College who sold out the Broward Center venue, who couldn’t have been a more inspiring speaker – or kinder person to come back to speak with us again for this special 25th anniversary issue.
Does it get any better than that? Wait.
There was the time I drove a $518,255 Lamborghini Aventador 155 mph on a West Palm Beach racetrack for a story on luxury for the magazine. (About as close to being an astronaut as I’m ever going to get.) Or the time I shot hoops with the World Champion Miami Heat’s Alonzo Mourning, Dwyane Wade, Shane Battier and fellow Kansas Jayhawk Ray Allen at AmericanAirlines Arena – and actually scored a point!
“That was a really nice shot!’’ said Allen, possibly astonished. (I quit while I was ahead.)
I could talk about the time I was invited to be a judge at the American Fine Wine Competition. (Sampling 630 wines is hard work. Really!) Or the time I rode my bike from Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach and back for a Kids in Distress charity event. “You helped a child today,” a volunteer said at the end of the 100-mile ride. It felt good – even better to get off the bike.
Or the time cellist Yo-Yo Ma sent me an autographed CD because of my column “Beeping With the Enemy,’’ in which I confessed that my watch alarm had gone off during a particularly sublime account of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor at Miami’s Arsht Center. Agggh!
“Please accept this CD as a token of my appreciation for your honesty – and willingness to share it publicly – and for being a patron of the arts,” a note with the CD read. I felt better, though still mortified.
Though maybe not as much as the time I accepted a dare one October to wear a pair of pink heels to walk in support of breast cancer awareness. I wasn’t mortified because of the cause, which I’m proud to support. It was because I broke my wife, Cecile’s, shoes during the walk.
“Those were my favorites!” she said. I was really mortified then. And there were no subsequent autographed CDs.
I could go on, but waves of art directors over the years (two in particular, my friends Greg Carannante and Anderson Greene) have encouraged me to show, not tell. So here’s a partial scrapbook from my 30 years as a magazine editor. Something I never thought I’d be.
All pressed now into my memory, forever.
