Newspaper remembrance

Newsboys' remembrance gathering includes bench-sitters Fred Rasmussen (left) and Ernie Imhoff. (Photo by Jim Burger)

Newsboys killed in 1924

honored at gravesite

on disaster anniversary

Toasts, tears are offered for them

... and for those killed at the Annapolis Capital

Time has a way of defeating memory, but a small group of diehard newspaper folks have kept alive an annual remembrance for five teenage boys lost in a tragedy nearly a century ago when the Chesapeake Bay steamboat Three Rivers caught fire off Cove Point in southern Maryland.

The victims were among the 59 members of The Evening Sun Newsboys Band,returning from a performance on the bay steamer on the Fourth of July in 1924. Five adults also perished in the disaster.

The boys rest under a semicircle of gravestones flanked by stone benches, all facing a seven-foot-high granite memorial and copper sculpture in Baltimore's huge Loudon Park Cemetery -- also the gravesite, in another section, of the famed  Evening Sun writer H.L. Mencken.

For many years, the evening newspaper held a memorial service there for the boys, and the tradition was revived about 1994 by a group of staffers including its last managing editor, Ernest F. Imhoff. The Evening Sun itself formally died -- some say it was murdered -- in 1995, four years after its staff, operation and content were merged with the surviving morning Sun, leading to a rapid decline in circulation.

Ernie worked for decades at the evening paper, and was its city editor on a snowy winter night in 1969 when I, as a cub reporter for the then-competing morning  paper, was covering a massive church fire across the street from his home in Baltimore's Bolton Hill neighborhood. He invited me in from the cold, and offered a drink... brandy, as I recall.

I like to think of myself as an Evening Sun alum, despite having worked 40 years for the morning paper. I was acting night metro editor when, at the stroke of midnight one night in 1991, their staffs were officially wed. And I managed to get a few bylines on its front page during the final years of publication.

Now in his early 80s, his gait slowed enough to need a cane, Ernie is still presiding over the ceremony at Loudon Park, and was among 16 people who turned out at 9 a.m. today at the newsboys' burial site. It was also a family reunion, of sorts, because newspaper veterans have that kind of a bond -- dedication to their profession, and to each other. 

Dave Cohn calls out names of the newsboys, one headstone at a time. (Jim Burger photo)

There was news to share about the declining health of a colleague unable to attend, and lament for others who have died in the past year. There were toasts with whiskey and rye (and cold bottles of water for the few nondrinkers), and a reading by retired Evening Sun copy desk chief Dave Cohn of part of the newsboys' story.

It included the names of the dead, recited as Dave walked from headstone to headstone: Walter Clark Millikin and Thomas Ashby Pilker Jr., both age 13; Lester Alfred Seligman and Vernon Edward Jefferson, both 15; and the oldest of them, Nelson Appleton Miles, 17.

They were among the army of kids in that far-gone era who delivered the news.

Rasmussen and Joan Jacobson offer comfort as Ernie Imhoff speaks of the Annapolis Capital victims. (Jim Burger photo)

Ernie, tears welling up in his eyes, said their names should never be forgotten -- nor should those of the five others who were killed last week when a crazy man with a grudge opened fire with a shotgun at the Annapolis Capital, which is owned by the Baltimore Sun.

They were Rob Hiaasen, 59, assistant managing editor and former Sun reporter; Wendi Winters, 65, community reporter and special publications editor; Gerald Fischman, 61, editorial page editor; John McNamara, 56, staff writer and longtime sports reporter; and Rebecca Smith, 34, a sales assistant hired just eight months ago.

They, too, delivered the news.

Perhaps someday there will be a memorial place for all of them as well, in addition to the one in our hearts.

About 500 people attended a life celebration for Annapolis Capital shooting victim Rob Hiaasen Monday evening, and services for the other four are scheduled for this week and next. (Panorama photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Celebrating Police Blotter

Baltimore Sun staff honors
veteran reporter Richard Irwin
for 30 years of crime news

In a morale boost for a troubled newsroom, the staff of The Baltimore Sun had cause for a little celebration Thursday night: The 30th anniversary of longtime cops reporter Richard Irwin’s Police Blotter.

Likely the continuously most-read element inside the newspaper, along with obituaries, the local version of Police Blotter first appeared in the Baltimore News American in February 1979. Its authors were Dick Irwin, Bill Lally and Robert Blatchley.

Seven years later, Hearst Corp. shut down the News American – an afternoon daily that competed head-on with the Baltimore Evening Sun and, to a lesser extent, the morning paper that was then simply called The Sun (Baltimore was formally added to its name and front-page design only a few months ago).

Dick Irwin was surprised when The Evening Sun called, offering a job. It was the same job Dick had just lost with the demise of his newspaper, as a police reporter chiefly responsible for the Blotter. And when The Evening Sun was euthanized by then-owner Times Mirror Corp., the morning newspaper became Dick’s home.

It was my privilege during six years as night metro editor to work with Dick, editing his Police Blotter and shepherding it into the Maryland section from 2001 to 2007. And it was especially wonderful to witness his dedication, night after night, making telephone calls to every police station in the city and Baltimore County in search of the crime reports that were the grist for Blotter – not the murders that make headlines, although he would write them as separate stories, but the endless procession of vandalism, burglary, armed robbery, auto theft, trespassing… even assaults, rapes and lesser shootings… that are so much an unfortunate part of the urban America experience.

Why is it so popular with readers? I always figured it was close to home, reporting police district by police district the crimes that are happening to our neighbors and, on rare occasions, even to newsroom staffers. No one, it seems, is immune to being a crime victim. It could happen to you.

Dick always took it as a personal affront when police would refuse to divulge what he rightfully insisted was public information – people have a right to know details about the crimes committed in their communities, the names of people arrested (heaven help us all when police in this nation can make secret arrests), even the names of cops who, rightfully or not, shoot people. And he loves reporting on cops who perform their jobs especially well, solving crimes or helping a community, and rarely would get public credit anywhere else.

For thirty years, Dick Irwin has been fighting for that noble cause, into the wee hours when most of us are asleep. He arrives in the newsroom around 5 p.m., and when the final edition is done near 2 a.m., he’s still there, making the calls to gather information for the next day’s paper, one police station at a time.

Occasionally, there’ll be a cop who doesn’t recognize the name of Dick Irwin. It’s a cop who will never make detective.

You can find a longer report on the Police Blotter anniversary, a brief video interview of Dick Irwin, and a collection of some entertaining Blotter highlights compiled over the years by now-retired chief makeup editor Tom Gibbons and myself, at crime columnist Peter Hermann’s Baltimore Sun blog at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.hermann20feb20,0,550771.column

On an uphappier note

The Baltimore Sun is shrinking again – not just in staffing through continuing buyouts and layoffs, but in the size of the newspaper itself. Take a good look at next Tuesday’s edition when, if the change goes according to plan, the newspaper will be an inch and a quarter narrower. This will make the newspaper seem more vertical in appearance, but it will be smaller.

According to folks I talked to who are familiar with the technical aspects, the shrinkage is a result of reducing the size of the press “web” by five inches – reducing the width of the enormous rolls of paper, called newsprint, that wind through the high-speed, three-story-high presses, saving some costs in materials.

In whole numbers, the paper is now about a foot wide. Next Tuesday, it’ll be close to 11 inches. The tabloid width used by the free daily Baltimore Examiner, which went out of business last week, was a little over 10 inches. But at least the much greater length of The Sun will be unchanged, for now.

And soon to come will be a second page of the newspaper produced entirely in Chicago – baseball news in the Sports section. The Real Muck reported recently on Tribune Company’s imposition of a standard “nation & world” page across most of its chain of newspapers, a change detectable by the jarringly different (and ugly) typefaces used by the Chicago Tribune mother ship. Word is that changes wrought by multiple redesign projects aimed at making The Baltimore Sun look better will largely be undone in the effort by Tribune to cut costs by making all of its newspapers look the same. (And while the union-jurisdiction jobs of writers, copy editors and page designers are being eliminated in Baltimore, the work is being shifted to non-union personnel in Chicago.)

A supposed goal of Tribune to maintain the unique character of each of the company’s newspapers is lamentably dead. I wonder how many readers these days will notice, or care.

As a former colleague still at The Sun told me this week, “I hope we get sold soon.”

It might be the only hope Baltimore has for an independent, locally produced newspaper that fully reflects the needs of its readership.

Today's fortune cookie message

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Daily number: 538 (I get that same number in at least a third of these cookies. Very strange. But I play 322 and 812 when the gambling impulse strikes me. In any case, the latest doses of the Szechuan Cafe's orange chicken and hot and sour soup were excellent.)