It is sad but scarcely surprising to learn that the crisis of the
ink-and-paper media industry is taking its toll on what once was
one of the broadsheets’ grand old Southern dames — the
Richmond Times-Dispatch. On April 2, hemorrhaging money,
the paper laid off 59 employees, many of them senior writers and
editors as well as the esteemed editorial cartoonist, Gary
Brookins.
The newspaper has published continuously since 1850 — 11 years
before the “late unpleasantness” commemorated by Richmond’s
stately Monument Avenue — and has been dominated by the genteel
Bryan family for most of its history.
In 1979, when I went to work in the magnolia-shaded building on
East Grace Street as an editorial writer in a little office next
to Brookins’ studio, there was a reverent air of yesteryear about
the Times-Dispatch and Richmond’s socio-political life
in general. The prevailing joke was, “How many Richmonders does
it take to change a light bulb?”
Answer: Five. One to change the light bulb, another to pour
juleps, and three more to drink and reminisce about how great the
old light bulb had been.
There was no other automobile in town like the humpbacked black
Mercedes belonging to company chairman David Tennant Bryan. Local
legend had it that Mr. Bryan had obtained the car as a wedding
present in the cataclysmic year when Franklin Roosevelt sent
Herbert Hoover into exile. Many a morning or evening I would
witness the unmistakable sight of Mr. Bryan driving between his
West End home and the newspaper office.
A few weeks into the job, the editorial page editor informed me
that Mr. Bryan wanted to see me. Mr. Bryan had been CEO of the
company for 35 years, and I was all of 24 years old. I was
already becoming aware of what an outsider I was to the
community. Not a Richmonder, not a Virginian, not even a
Southerner, I was from what I imagine the St. A’s boys in
Charlottesville considered the dark satanic mills of Midwestern
urban industrialism.
Tall, white-haired, bow-tied, patrician, the old man greeted me.
“I have read this editorial in this morning’s paper and I
understand you wrote it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Bryan proceeded to explain that I had misused the word
“convince.”
“For the meaning you were intending to convey,” he instructed me,
“never use ‘convince.’ The word is ‘persuade.’”
“Yes, sir, and thank you very much, sir.” So did I get to keep my
job?
“And welcome to the Times-Dispatch. We are happy to have
you here.”
The local U.S. Congressman, David Satterfield, a Democrat, was to
the right of just about any conservative Republican in captivity.
Senior U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd, Jr., ran for election as an
Independent but caucused with the Democratic majority and thus
held key subcommittee chairmanships. No Bernie Sanders, he was
every inch as conservative as his friend from neighboring North
Carolina, Jesse Helms.
The octogenarian editor emeritus, a prolific author of books,
popped into the office from time to time to thumb through
yellowed clippings from the morgue. He was the very eponym of the
Old Dominion, Virginius Dabney. In 1922, he joined the Bryans’
afternoon Richmond daily, the News Leader, where his
writing won the admiration of H.L. Mencken. Eventually he
migrated across the hall to the Times-Dispatch, where he
was editor from 1936 to 1969.
“V” Dabney was a liberal by the standards of the first half of
Richmond’s 20th century, but he spent the last of his
years trying to “prove” the unverifiable proposition that his
direct ancestor Thomas Jefferson “never had sex with that woman,”
Sally Hemings. At the helm of the News Leader during
Dabney’s salad days was the eminent historian Douglas Southall
Freeman, not a liberal in anyone’s book. At the beginning of the
1950s, as Dr. Freeman — yes, a Ph.D. historian — prepared for
retirement, he and Tennant Bryan recruited and groomed a young
writer named James Jackson Kilpatrick to take the editor’s chair.
During the 1970s, one of the most effective figures in
conservative politics was the News Leader cartoonist
Jeff MacNelly, a young genius who made the whole world convulse
with laughter at the ridiculousness of Jimmy Carter, Fidel
Castro, Muammar Khadafy and the other fish-in-the-barrel we
smart-aleck editorial writers would bombard with rhetorical
buckshot. Tennant Bryan himself was not a mere businessman but a
conservative intellectual who helped make the Age of Reagan
possible through wise leadership on the board of the Hoover
Institution. Mr. Bryan would preside over the executive committee
of Media General, publisher of the Richmond and Tampa newspapers
and a holder of lucrative cable television franchises, during the
closure of the News Leader in 1992, and until a year
before his death in 1998. His son, John Stewart Bryan III, leads
the company today.
The Richmond newspapers used to take in dollars — Yankee,
Confederate, and, in a gesture of Realpolitik following
the Lost Cause, Mr. Lincoln’s Legal Tender Notes — as though
there were no tomorrow, fittingly for enterprises whose spiritual
world was a chivalrous Old South where every dawn greeted a
shining new yesterday. Those times and their dispatches are gone
with the insalubrious currents that used to waft from the Bryans’
shuttered newsprint mills. Before the nonagenarians Tennant Bryan
and “V” Dabney passed away, Virginians elected an
African-American governor. Today the state’s chief executive is a
liberal Democrat and former social worker from the upper Midwest.
The odds-on favorite to become the next occupant of the
Governor’s Mansion is a hustling newcomer to the Old Dominion,
late of Syracuse, New York, the Clinton machine’s prodigious bag
man Terry McAuliffe.
But still we have our memories. Some of the things I find
unsettling about the blogging world are instant, unedited, and
often very rude and unintelligent “comments” that readers are
allowed to post.
As the low man on the totem pole of the editorial page of the
ultra-traditional Times-Dispatch three decades ago, I
had the chore to edit letters to the editor — “The Voice of the
People,” as the feature was called. In that place and time, the
People’s utterances were heavily, I mean heavily,
edited.
Every day I rummaged through a fat canvas bag of U.S. Mail.
Always it was abounding with correspondence from inmates of the
Virginia State Penitentiary; I came to be able to tell just by
the handwriting which lifer was striving to have his say in the
civic discourse. But these were not our only contributors with
ample time and torrential streams of consciousness. An atheist
from the Shenandoah Valley hamlet of Grottoes, Virginia, sent a
steady flow of missives, some of which I had to publish because I
learned from my elders that it was a Times-Dispatch
tradition to print the occasional outburst from this fellow,
probably a UVA or William & Mary fraternity brother of one of
the executives upstairs. With every letter selected for
publication — even from a correspondent whose name and
oeuvre I knew like the back of my hand — a scrupulous
member of our clerical staff telephoned to make absolutely sure
the letter and its author were authentic. Then I edited the
letters, mercilessly if need be, to put them into readable and
grammatically correct style.
As a young dévoté of Mencken and protégé of The American
Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, I considered it an obligation
of common sense to have a private laugh, alone or with Gary
Brookins, before consigning to the trash can letters that were
manifestly the work of cranks.
Then one morning my editor summoned me to his office. I stared
anxiously through the picture window, regarding on the cracked
earth hundreds, maybe thousands, of browning, indestructible
leaves from Mr. Bryan’s proud magnolia.
“Did you get a letter from Miss ______? And not publish it?”
I searched my memory. “Oh, yes, I think that’s the name of
someone who sends these long, rambling things advocating total,
unilateral U.S. disarmament.”
“So? You mean to tell me you did receive a letter from
Miss _____ and you threw it away?”
“Well, yes — yes, sir. I didn’t think that’s the kind
of letter we publish.”
“Son, don’t you know who she is? Let me tell you something. Miss
______ is President Tyler’s granddaughter.”
“President Tyler? He was President in 1841, and this is
1981. His granddaughter?”
“Yes, his granddaughter. And our newspaper always
publishes letters from persons of the stature of a granddaughter
of President Tyler.”
(Gentle Reader, I am not pulling your leg. Richmond’s own United
States President, the Thurmondesque John Tyler, born in 1790, had
15 legitimate children from his two marriages and continued
procreating for as long as he could hold back the grim reaper —
a very long time. Not only did he have a living granddaughter in
Richmond 30 years ago, but Wikipedia, the archive of choice for
the New Age Dabneys and Freemans, indicates two of his grandsons
are still above ground and breathing today, in the Year of Our
Lord 2009. Who knows, maybe one of these marvels of longevity
will make a snarky blog post in response to this article. C’mon,
guys, have a free-for-all: “Fair Play for Cuba”; “Save the
Whales”; “Cap and Trade” — bring it on. Far be it from me to
censor a President’s grandchild!)
No number of Richmonders — not a thousand, not a hundred
thousand — ever can replace the spent lights and silenced bells
of the old cast-iron teletypes, the coffee- and Bourbon-stained
seersucker suits, the antebellum manners and customs, the
obsolete ways we used to live and communicate. As the characters
of Flann O’Brien are wont to say, “we will never see their likes
again.”
(Joseph Duggan was an editorial writer for the
Richmond Times-Dispatch from 1979 to 1981, when he moved to
New York City, believing, in the rash and confused state of
youth, “I’ve been going to sleep in a city that never wakes
up.”)
