6/7/23

JACK MONAGHAN
REMEMBERED

 JACK MONAGHAN, who died May 4 at 89, was a newspaper editor of the “old school.”
   “Old school” is a cliché, and one that always needs an explanation, first as whether it’s a compliment, and secondly, what it actually means, thereby using  precious space in a story and toying with a reader’s fragile attention span.
   It’s unclear how Jack would have treated this cliché if he were editing this piece, as he did during the last century as managing editor of The Evening Bulletin, the more robust and lively of Rhode Island’s  two sibling dailies, the other being the morning Providence Journal.  Both papers were owned by the same company, but they had different personalities, reflecting the eccentricities of their editors, like Jack.

   Reporters never knew how Jack might react to our stories.  He had standards, not a good omen for a story centered on a cliché.  But numerous other factors were always at work:  whether a deadline was closing in; how many other stories he was juggling; and what kind of a mood Jack was in – which was mostly upbeat, because  he absolutely loved newspapers and the fact that he was working for one of the best.
  What wasn’t in question was that Jack was in charge. Totally, absolutely, indisputably, the boss. Yes, he would listen to a reporter defend his story – just not for very long. And it surely wouldn’t be a negotiation.
   Jack was not among the new breed of collaborative editors eager to bat around the pros and cons of a story  with a reporter, seminar style.  Jack also disliked long stories, especially the narrative kind that were gaining favor throughout the industry, mammoth expositions that not only consumed entire inside pages, but whose writers sometimes took their sweet time in getting to the point.

  Jack was a hard news guy, devoted to breaking news stories that started out with scant facts early in the Bulletin’s news cycle and were developed steadily the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, constantly being updated and rewritten,  edition by edition,  until they were as complete a masterpiece as possible by the final, premier City Edition. What especially moved him were stories with a political element – especially if they were discomfiting to a powerful, but sketchy office holder, who wouldn't want the City Edition version in his scrap book.
  Jack was fair – both as a journalist (a word he likely considered pompous) and as a  boss. But if he was a challenging editor, who demanded both excellence and loyalty, he returned the favor, not only as an editor, but as a friend.

  That friend part confounded those of us who were “Jack’s reporters” – a handful of general assignment/ “rewrite” staffers tied  to our  phones and typewriters, and later computers, to churn out stories on deadline.
    That's because - to use another cliché -  Mr. Tough Editor turned out to be a softie, an unusually warm friend. He not only fraternized with the troops, he verged on the sentimental (a line he would have excised from this  story).
   Below, I’ve included some personal recollections, followed by  a long excerpt about Jack  from a memoir by the late C. Fraser Smith, one of the Journal-Bulletin’s towering journalists and a Monaghan contemporary,  describing what it was like to work at outstanding newspapers like the Providence Journal and The Evening Bulletin in their heyday.
   Unfortunately for Jack, this makes for just the kind of long-winded pieces that he abhorred, but in this instance, is helpless to prevent.

 MY AWARD-WINNING SUIT
   When there were lots of thriving newspapers, the Associated Press and United Press International news services, plus various professional associations, gave out lots of prizes for best deadline story, best feature, best blurb written on a computer and so forth, and I happened to win one, which was to be handed out at  hotel dinner in  the near future.
   Jack decided that I needed a suit for the occasion. I’m not sure why, but it’s possible that it was because reporters were slouches when it came to clothes, and Jack did not want the Journal-Bulletin’s table to be embarrassed when I walked up to recieve my plaque and no money.
   So, one day after the City Edition was wrapped up, he walked me to a downtown clothing store, Briggs Limited, where he was on a first-name basis with the owner and instructed “Briggs” to work up a suitable suit for his young associate, wool, dark blue with faint pin pinstripes and a three-button vest. I, and certainly not the newspaper, had to pay for it. But I relished the outing – it felt like Jack was my own father, taking me to buy my first grownup outfit. It wasn’t my first suit, but it was the best one I ever owned, and I still wear it a half century later.
 
JACK & FRIENDS' CANOE TRIPS

---

  Jack loved the outdoors, and especially canoe trips that involved expeditions to northern-tier New England rivers and lakes. Every summer, he organized trips that included some of his former Brown University classmates, plus members of the newsroom staff. I’m not sure whether members of either group were as enthusiastic about these outings as Jack, and if they felt the outings were truly optional.
   Jack planned each one – where they would happen, and when, what equipment was needed and what meals would be served (Jack was an above average camp cook) and the logistics of how we would get to the put-in point – and, hopefully return.
   Some trips were more successful than others. It rained during the first one, soaking ill-prepared paddlers, some of whom suffered mild hypothermia. Jack made a command change of plans, in which we “camped” in a nearby motel and went home slightly ahead of schedule, the next day. On another occasion, gentle rapids swamped one or more of the canoes. Another trip felt like we were sleeping on rocks, which made sense, because our tents were pitched on a mini-range of lakeside boulders.
   Even as the current trip was ending, Jack was concocting the next one. He distributed group photos in the off-season so that the crews might remember the upsides of the trips and forget the rest.
   The fact is that canoeing with Jack really was a highlight of the summer, providng in the same sense of satisfaction you’d get after accomplishing something worthwhile, like  putting out an exceptional  edition of The Evening Bulletin.

WHAT DID JACK THINK OF “HIS” REPORTERS?
   Because Jack was objective to a fault, you could be on his team for years, but never sure where you ranked.
   For example, I was often slow in turning out feature stories, which the rewrite crew worked on after the City Edition’s deadline. My pace infuriated Jack, who wanted stories yesterday, to use another cliché. He once took a story away from me and gave it to another reporter to finish.
   And he couldn’t stand to see a reporter transcribing a tape-recorded interview. I was a prime offender, because I was a terrible note-taker with an even worse memory, but  obsessed with getting quotes exactly.
   Whereas, Jack, a Brown University classics major, who was  in “intelligence” during his Army service, was a brilliant guy who remembered everything.
   Jack also was possessed of  a  “what-have-you- got-for-me-today” attitude, which gave no credit for stories you thought were terrific, but that were yesterday’s news, no longer remembered either by readers or editors. So,  you were constantly on edge, working , but never confident, of meeting Jack’s demanding requirements.
   I got a hint of where I stood one day when, with some excitement, Jack told me that I was to write a small Page One blurb announcing that the Journal-Bulletin   was switching to an entirely  computerized system; this blurb, Jack said, was historic, because the tiny story was the first demonstration of how it actually was done.
   That Jack wanted me to write this blurb, on a computer, was a compliment.
   I think.

  JACK &  JOAN.  CHIP &  MARGO.   AND PHOEBE

JACK, with Margo and Bob Chiappinelli at their 50th wedding anniversary party last summer. Jack and his late wife, Joan, had brought them together.

    Jack adored his wife, Joan. His official obituary says that they were married for 53 years, and that they traveled widely.  Joan died in 2019. Her loss was deep, painful and obvious. Jack often spoke about her, never with tears, although you wouldn’t have minded if there were.
   One of the couple’s accomplishments was bringing together Bob and Margo Chiappinelli. “Chip,” whose byline was S. Robert Chiappinelli, was a top-tier feature writer and columnist, who disliked the negative, critical, gotcha character of most  news stories – the kind that Jack relished. Nevertheless, Chip’s talent wasn’t lost on his editor. Last year, Jack, not an eager public speaker, retold the story of the Chiappinelli's “arranged” marriage – by Jack and Joan – which he narrated  at their 50th wedding anniversary. He read from a script, which went on at considerable length, and which was expertly crafted.
   Jack was a big fan of Phoebe, our late Labrador-Husky mix, who was universally described as “sweet.” Jack made several trips from his home in Cumberland to visit us in Newport. I suspect that Phoebe justified  such a trip – an Odyssey in Rhode Island terms. 
   Phoebe was the central fixture in an anti-Trump blog that I wrote, with fresh photos of Phoebe included in each posting, along with “her”  alarmed observations  about the seditious president. Jack was a faithful reader, and he would generously flag grammatical and spelling errors. After Phoebe died, I converted the blog into personal column, minus the Phoebe photos. The editor’s corrections likewise went missing.

 FRASER SMITH ON JACK MONAGHAN

---

JACK MONAGHAN, center, with Ham Davis, left, and Fraser Smith, at the Geezers' luncheon where Fraser talked about his journalism memoir.

   C. Fraser Smith was one of the giants of a generation of Journal-Bulletin writers that included Jack Monaghan. He covered city politics and developed a poverty beat during the national war on poverty, and for a year, he moved his family in a troubled public high-rise housing complex, so readers could get a taste of what that was like. He went on to work at the Baltimore Sun, and later for an NPR station in Maryland, and wrote books.
   In 2019, he published a “The Daily Miracle – A Memoir of Newspapering.” The book includes a number of pages about Jack. Fraser  came to Rhode Island to promote the book, and visited the monthly luncheon of “The Geezers,” a gathering of ex-Journal people which, for this occasion, included Ham Davis, the onetime chief of the Journal-Bulletin’s Washington bureau, who’d come down from his home in Burlington, Vt.
Fraser died two years ago this month. Here’s what he wrote about Jack:

    We all worked for Jack Monaghan, who ran the Providence afternoon paper, The Evening Bulletin, He had the requisite edgy focus of an old schooler, augmented by the focus of the soccer goalie, which he had been for Brown University.
   Every morning he stalked the newsroom floor, foraging for stories.
   “We have a paper to get out. Maybe you remember.”
   Every reporter working that day took the question as if it  were directed at him or her (not so much). And it was.
   No, I would say, occasionally, lowering my head in the hope he would keep walking.
   “That a firm no?” he would ask. I said yes often enough (so that)  I could get away with a no. But we lived in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately-world.
   On occasion, when the copy search failed, Jack's boss would suggest going back to our notes in search of something he referred to as “tight, light and bright” –  something cryptic. He meant concise, not mysterious. Duh.
  Jack stayed on us. He knew we would never have as long as we wanted to “work” a story. He knew we might have to file something that would have been better with more time. He knew this as well as we did, but the paper had to come out.
* * *
   His father had been an editor of the Pawtucket Times, a paper of 44,000 circulation, well below the Providence Journal's number, about 150,000 when I was there. Having heard his father talk of every imaginable newspaper issue and working there as a teenage copy kid, he had more knowledge of the job and the culture of newspapers than most of us, new or veteran. Jack was a representative of that group of newspaper people who give journalism, generation after generation of practitioners born to the job.    There was a kind of built-in replenishment.
 
* * *
   Monaghan liked the license, the entre reporters were granted. We could go in and talk to governors and mayors. It made you think you could do something useful, something important.
   He had an early taste of the political world as well. (Many, if not all editors, had been on the street. They covered the beats. The system thereby reinforced itself and provided a path upward if you wanted to go that way. It made newspapers one of those self-sufficient organizations. People learned the work and the ethical guidelines.  Where will all that school come from In the future?)
   On one election day as a “runner,” he ferried information, turn-out out estimates, voting machine problems, if any, from polling places to the (Pawtucket Times) city desk. In addition to the various candidate races that year, voters were being asked to approve changes to the city charter, the basic rules of running government. Democrats, who knew the existing rules by heart, opposed changes that would have removed their advantage, at least for a while.
   One of the polling places was across from the Democratic Party wardroom or headquarters on Pawtucket Ave. The party had managed to be located near what mattered most to them.
   After the polls closed, city police took the paper ballots to City Hall. But maybe not directly to City Hall, not on this night at least.
   Young Jack followed the cops …  and watched them walk to the Democratic wardroom, a blatant, outrageous hijacking. Through a window, he watched party men replace some of the ballots with new ones marked “no” on the charter question.
   The editor's son reported what he had seen. The stakes were high. The city's governing document might be affected. But what he saw could go no farther. He was just a high school kid. If you're going to report something seriously corrupt, your reporter had to be a reporter, a professional.
   As it turned out, the charter changes were approved. And the Democrats were spared embarrassment or worse.
   * * *
   After Brown, he worked seven years for his father's paper before getting hired by the Journal.
   He covered some of the early years of the War on Poverty aggressively enough to become a prime irritant to Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy family member and the program’s national director. Shriver tried to hire Monaghan – a compliment, to be sure. For Shriver, it may have been a two-fer. He'd get a good PR guy and he'd lose an annoying reporter who was asking the right questions. That sort of preemptive approach happened often as some reporters left for higher wages in private (and) public jobs.
   Jack declined. He had a young family and no interest in moving to Washington, DC.
   All the while, life in the Newsroom as in the rest of society was changing. The newspaper needed black reporters. So Monaghan and the Journal's only black reporter toured the country looking for good black reporters.
   “The Times was always there first, so the people we wanted, we couldn't get.” he said.
  * * *
   For me and others at the paper, Monaghan earned a career award during one of the newspaper’s days of ignominy. The paper decided to invest in a refurbishment of the city's premier hotel, the Biltmore, across the street from City Hall and down the shallow hill from the rail station.
   When the work was done, the editor sent out one of the papers columnists, Tony Lioce, to write a feature.
“Really nice,” Lioce wrote, “but bring your checkbook.”
   The managers of the newspaper were not amused. They ordered a punishment. Lioce would no longer have a column, and he was forthwith reassigned to the Newport Bureau. This was not the worst place in the world to work, but it was a clear demotion. In truth, it hurt the paper more than Lioce. His prose enlivened every offering, gave it reach beyond the straight-ahead newspaper style. (He was a bit closer to Hunter Thompson's model.)
   Pretty embarrassing – if publisher types could be embarrassed….
   Monaghan thought he was dealing with a columnist, a writer with a columnist’s license to write with flare. Apparently, they thought Lioce would know what they wanted or didn't want. Maybe he did.   
   But until then, he thought his newspaper wanted columnists to exercise their mandate. It was not the first time they had displayed their misunderstanding of their newspaper’s role.
   Jack defended the column, defended Lioce and upheld the newspaper’s professionalism. He found himself in a certain degree of bad odor with ownership for a time -   for doing his job. Not a happy story, but one that showed principle could survive, if not cleanly. Monaghan got “stand-up” cred. 

  At another point in the memoir, Fraser recounts the appearance in the newsroom of an organized crime enforcer named Dickie Callei, accompanied by his lawyer, a state legislator and  future chief justice of the  Rhode Island Supreme Court, Joseph A. Bevilacqua.
   Fraser gives two versions of what Callei wanted from the paper. Jack’s was that Callei was upset that the paper wasn’t using enough of his criminal record, which he wanted known so as to scare his targets. 

---

 He (Monaghan) called Bevilacqua to his desk.
“Get this thug out of here,” he told the lawmaker. They left. But    Callei came back that afternoon.
   “Now, I'm going to die,” Monaghan thought.
    Callie walked up to his desk. And apologized.
   “Sorry about this morning,” he said.