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Chapter 21 - "Mr. Tribune" Appears
Chapter 21 - "Mr. Tribune" Appears
THE ROUTINE employment of a secretary in the spring of 1913 turned out to be the most important action Thomas Kearns ever took with respect to the future of The Salt Lake Tribune and the perpetuation of the controlling ownership of the newspaper within his own family.
The new secretary was a 26-year-old railroad employee then stationed in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He had lived for a short time in Salt Lake City three years earlier, liked what he saw and had developed a desire to return. A special attraction of the city was a young girl, Eleanor F. Crawford, who became his wife in 1914. He apparently met and talked with former Senator Kearns when he was stationed in Salt Lake City with the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad and he had been recommended by Senator Clark of Montana. On May 26 he received a letter from Kearns inquiring about his availability and promptly responded with a formal application for employment, written on the letterhead of the Pere Marquette Railroad Company, which then employed him.
The letter, dated May 26:
Shortly thereafter Fitzpatrick was notified that Senator Kearns would be at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago on a specified date and would like to meet him there. As later recalled by Fitzpatrick, Kearns' first question was when could he report for work and a date was agreed upon. Thus the young secretary embarked upon a career in the service of The Tribune and the Kearns family which continued until his death on September 11, 1960. His background provides clues to some of his characteristics; but in many ways he was an inscrutable man, a complex mixture of antithetical traits which, to employees, could be baffling, exasperating and endearing all at the same time. Different persons, or the same person at different times and under varying circumstances, could get an impression that he was predominantly tough or soft; aggressive or shy; adamant or flexible; frank or secretive; aloof or gregarious; autocratic or democratic. A demanding perfectionist at heart, he was not easy to work for, but he was exhilarating.
Born January 18, 1887, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he was the eldest of the six children of James Henry and Mary (Goulden) Fitzpatrick. His father was a railroad engineer operating out of Pottsville. A bitter strike which occurred in the year of John's birth left the father both out of work and blacklisted from railroad employment. The railroad managements stood firm against rehiring their own known strikers but, needing skilled workmen, were not too careful about hiring blacklisted men from other areas. So James Henry Fitzpatrick, with other engineers, solved their dilemma by going to Burlington, Iowa, to fill the jobs of engineers blacklisted there while the Burlington engineers moved to Pennsylvania to fill the vacancies at Pottsville.
This, and similar experiences of his father in trade unionism, undoubtedly contributed to Fitzpatrick's sympathy for and genuine acceptance of unions and collective bargaining at a time when most executives with his responsibilities stubbornly resisted or reluctantly bowed to unionism. But his philosophical and practical sympathy for collective bargaining did not extend to all areas of employment. In the newspaper business, for example, he firmly believed that production workers in the backshop should be organized. But he could not understand why editorial employees would want to be represented by a bargaining committee rather than by themselves, individually. Neither could some of his editorial employees who sensed that they would fare better in individual than in collective bargaining.
After graduating from Burlington High School and attending a business college for a short time, Fitzpatrick went to work in the railroad industry and remained there until he was employed by Senator Kearns. He retained throughout his life a sentimental attachment for and a strong interest in railroads, and his railroad training and experience served him well as a newspaper publisher. One particular area in which his early experience proved useful was that of diplomacy. As secretary to a railroad man who was recognized as a genius in operations but a catastrophe in public relations, Fitzpatrick worked to keep his boss out of trouble and to repair public relations damage if he failed. It might well have been this phase of his early experience which led him to follow throughout his life a practice which he frequently recommended to Tribune associates: to hold the tongue when anger gained ascendancy over judgment; to commit the angry response to writing; to place it in a desk overnight; to read it next morning and then destroy it. The practice no doubt served him well. On the debit side it left a void in the history of The Tribune so far as written documentation is concerned during the forty-odd years of his stewardship.
Fitzpatrick, or "J. F." as he was more often addressed, or "Mr. Smith" as he was sometimes identified within The Tribune newsrooms, did not always follow the "write it and destroy it" practice he so highly recommended. In dealing with editorial employees, for example, or with others, including advertisers, he could be awesomely uninhibited when he felt the occasion warranted plain speaking. He could, and often did, denounce stupidities with an Irish eloquence which one would never suspect he possessed until one experienced his verbal lash. The physical signal of an approaching storm was a slight flush rising from the lower neck upwards and an outward slant of both eyes. When the storm was over, it was over, and the victim might soon thereafter become the recipient of a warming commendation for something well done. Rank, incidentally, did not protect one from his 'chew-outs." He could be harsher with a top associate than with a subordinate far down the organizational line. Commendations too were distributed without regard to rank.
Don Howard, a veteran employee of the Telegram and The Tribune who was assembling material for a history of The Tribune when he died April 15, 1967, left his impressions of Fitzpatrick in a paragraph referring to a drawing of The Tribune publisher in the Mint Cafe. The cafe, located near The Tribune Building, was patronized by a cross-section of downtown Salt Lake, and Fitzpatrick frequently lunched there to broaden his contacts and thereby guard against the error of assuming that what he heard at the Alta Club, the city's most prestigious men's club, represented prevailing public opinion. Howard, after noting the presence of the Fitzpatrick sketch among those of sports world characters, entertainers and men-about-town, wrote:
Another long-time Tribune employee, who shall remain anonymous because his experience was illustrative rather than unusual, interrupted the recital of a complaint against his employer with an apologetic recollection of his first meeting with Fitzpatrick. He recalled that a few months after he started working full-time for The Tribune a recurring health problem required hospitalization for an unknown period of time. To him it looked like a disaster. Having been an employee for so short a time, he assumed that his job was gone. There was no medical or hospital insurance at that time to soften the blow of unexpected bills and, in a state of depression, he was lying in bed wondering how he could possibly meet his financial obligations when Fitzpatrick and Arthur C. Deck, executive editor of The Tribune, walked in. Fitzpatrick, who was far less eloquent on occasions of this kind than when he was reacting to a blunder embarrassing to The Tribune, expressed sympathy and said: "Now, the only thing you have to worry about is getting well. And don't come back until you are well. You are still on the payroll, your job will be waiting for you when you are able to return, and arrangements will be made so you can pay your bills."
If there was one thing above all others that Fitzpatrick expected and demanded of his employees it was loyalty to The Tribune, but not the degree of loyalty he gave it, for that would be demanding the unreasonable and the unattainable. An employee could disagree with the policy of the newspaper and so express himself without offense to the publisher. He could criticize particular aspects of the newspaper and sometimes find the publisher in agreement. But any employee who questioned the integrity of The Tribune, inside or outside the organization, simply placed himself beyond the pale of the publisher's tolerance. The offender probably would not be discharged but would be welcome to leave at any time, and, having left, he would not be re-employed. It was not an attitude of "the king can do no wrong" but rather a belief that those who questioned the king's integrity, honesty and intentions, should not be in the service of the king.
Examples of Tribune employees protecting the interests of the newspaper delighted him, wherever found. On one occasion while walking through the newsrooms he stopped an office boy delivering papers to desks of editors and writers and asked for a copy. The boy politely but firmly told him the papers were for members of the staff and could not be given away to anyone else. Fitzpatrick indicated his understanding of the situation and instructed the editor to increase the boy's salary and watch him in the future.
Fitzpatrick's aversion to personal publicity or public acclaim bordered on the obsessive, and it sometimes created problems and embarrassments for his associates. He would not permit the use of his name in The Tribune when, as a matter of news coverage, it should have been used. Had he been arrested for drunken driving his name would undoubtedly have been used at his direction. Any news item carrying the names of the publisher or the owner of The Tribune was known in the news department as a "mandatory refer;" that is, it was to be referred to the editor in charge and, by him, to Fitzpatrick or someone delegated by him to act if he were away and could not be reached. The name of the owning family might survive the "refer" but the name of the publisher was almost certain to be deleted, particularly if it was used in a commendatory connotation.
When the University of Utah in 1949 conferred an honorary degree of doctor of laws upon him he at first declined to permit the use of his picture in The Tribune. He agreed to waive his role of censor in that particular instance only after associates convinced him that the absence of his picture might embarrass other recipients of honorary degrees.
When he was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of public service by Brigham Young University in 1956 this characteristic was thus noted in the presentation:
On another occasion, when a dinner was given to honor a group of men who had played important roles in bringing about something of great economic importance to Utah and the Intermountain area, Fitzpatrick instructed The Tribune editor that his name was not to appear in the news coverage of the event by The Tribune. The editor and a Tribune reporter assigned to the dinner were reluctant to comply with the instruction because they knew, as did the honored guests, that Fitzpatrick had played perhaps the most important role of all. The editor and reporter knew their publisher too well to ignore the instruction without first testing what his reaction would be. So the reporter, within Fitzpatrick's hearing, suggested to the editor that in this case the publisher should waive his authority and permit the editor to make the decision as a matter of news judgment. Fitzpatrick's eyes took the slightly outward turn and the warning flush crept across his neck. "If my name appears in this story," he said in a low voice, "The Tribune will tomorrow be looking for a new editor and reporter, and I mean it." Whether or not he really meant it, the editor and reporter believed that he did and his name did not appear in the next morning's Tribune.
Among Fitzpatrick's many notable characteristics was a disciplined determination to learn. To learn the newspaper business, or any other, by starting at the bottom and working up to the top requires intelligence and ambition. But to come in at the top, as Fitzpatrick did, and then burrow down to the bottom to learn all the facets of the business, calls for a higher order of intelligence, ambition and disciplined concentration. That is what Fitzpatrick did. He delved into the mechanical production, circulation; distribution, advertising, business management, newsgathering and editorial departments of the newspaper to acquire a detailed knowledge of each. No matter in which department one worked, one was mistaken to assume that Fitzpatrick did not know what was going on or did not have ideas about what should be going on just because he had started newspaper work as the publisher. 5 It was a constant source of amazement to associates as to how, as one editorial writer put it, "he can keep on top of everything, as he does." The most pressing challenge to the political editor, for one, was trying to keep ahead of the publisher in political news. He frequently found himself in the humbling position of receiving his first leads on important upcoming developments from his publisher who had never even been a reporter. Employees in other fields had similar experiences.
While Fitzpatrick's interest and knowledge encompassed the entire newspaper operation, editorial employees always felt that he was, at heart, an editorial man. That is, he viewed a newspaper as something more than a profit-making business. To him a newspaper had public responsibilities and obligations which could not be satisfied by commercial success alone. He recognized that commercial success was, in the long run, essential to the discharge of the public responsibilities; and he worked as hard to keep The Tribune economically strong as he did to improve it as a newspaper. But the end product to be striven for was a newspaper which met its public responsibilities, and not merely a profitable business.
Both with respect to The Tribune and the area which it serves he took the long-range view. That is why in periods of depression he deemed it more essential to maintain the quality of the newspaper than to maintain its level of profits. To him this was not an impractical, idealistic policy but a thoroughly pragmatic one.
This philosophy can be illustrated by his position on a water development program when the Salt Lake area was threatened with a severe and continuing shortage. One proposed solution involved a transmountain diversion of Colorado River Basin water into the Great Basin. Another involved various water-savings projects within the Great Basin and the diversion into the Salt Lake system of water flowing from the Silver King Coalition Mines property in Park City. Use of the Silver King water would have necessitated a purchase of very substantial size from the mining company whose principal owner was the same Kearns Corporation which owned The Tribune.
Fitzpatrick carefully weighed the merits and demerits of the proposed programs, and presumably his responsibilities to the Kearns family corporation. His conclusion was that the projects to conserve and develop water already within the Great Basin, including the Silver King source, could be undertaken twentyfive, fifty or 100 years in the future when it was needed; but failure to start getting Colorado River water allotted under compact could, and probably would, mean its loss forever. Thus, the long-range interest of the area served by The Tribune would best be served by the transmountain diversion project. And whatever best served the interests of its territory best served the interests of The Tribune. So, he instructed the editor to give unqualified and aggressive support to the program which would bring in Colorado River water.
Intense and serious-minded as he was, Fitzpatrick nevertheless had a relaxing sense of humor and loved a good practical joke. One he often recalled long after the event, and with growing relish, involved a Kearns Corporation employee and the 1936 election. J. E. McGinty, manager of the Kearns Building for many years, was a dedicated Democrat long before Franklin D. Roosevelt came along. With Roosevelt as head of the party, McGinty became both a dedicated and impassioned Democrat who could not comprehend how any intelligent person with any interest at all in humanity could favor Governor Alfred M. Landon over the great F.D.R.
Shortly before the election, Fitzpatrick had The Tribune staff make up a front page carrying a multi-column, smiling picture of McGinty, proudly displaying on his chest a huge sunflower campaign badge used in the Landon campaign. Two copies of the newspaper with the McGinty front page were run off the press. One was delivered to his home and the other placed on his desk in the Kearns Building. When he arrived at his office he looked at The Tribune on his desk to make sure that what he had seen at home was not, as he surely hoped it was, an aberration or a horrible nightmare. He charged into Fitzpatrick's office, slammed The Tribune down on the desk, announced that he was through working for any outfit that would slander a man as he had been slandered and vowed he would sue The Tribune for all it, and its owners, and its publisher were worth. Fitzpatrick soothingly sympathized with his distress, explained that he, the publisher, did not know in advance what was going to appear in the news pages and suggested that the matter would have to be taken up with the editor. He picked up his telephone, called Bert Heal, the editor, and conversed with him briefly and then, hanging up the phone, gravely informed McGinty: "Heal says that you can't sue for libel on a picture."
McGinty exploded with a string of unprintable expletives telling Heal where he could go. Even after he had been convinced that only two copies of the offending page had been printed and that he was in possession of both, McGinty remained unconvinced for a few days that the joke was funny. The day after election he could view it with tolerance, and even enjoyment, inasmuch as the candidate supported editorially by Fitzpatrick (Landon) carried only two states and lost Utah by almost three to one.
Not all Tribune employees saw Fitzpatrick in the same light. Some were exposed too much to his autocratic side and too little to his democratic side to comprehend the whole man. But as a generalization, it can be said that those who had the opportunity to experience his displeasure and his pleasure most were the ones who held him in highest esteem. That, it seems to the writer, is the meaningful measure of his character.
