Michael Pakenham, the former book editor of the Baltimore Sun, died the other day, at 85. The Sunday book page, which he handled for years with wit and intelligence, preceded him into death by about a decade.
So it goes in the newspaper business these forlorn days.
Not long ago, I had lunch at Attman’s Deli on Lombard Street with Rob Kasper. Remember Rob? For several decades, he wrote a delightful “Happy Eater” column for The Sun. Now he’s retired.
“Nobody’s writing the stuff you used to do,” I said, declaring the obvious.
“How could they?” he said. “That entire section of the paper doesn’t even exist anymore.”
We are mere weeks until the end comes for The Sun’s physical shift from its old Calvert Street offices – where they’ve been covering the news since Harry Truman was president — to newer, smaller digs down at Port Covington.
The move is infinitely sad, but not exactly shocking. As newspapers gasp and wheeze all across the country, trying to keep up with modern technology, the paper’s circulation has suffered, its ad revenues have plummeted, and they’re attempting to give us full coverage of the metro area with a news staff that’s roughly one-third the size it was in the paper’s heyday.
People didn’t realize how good The Sun was until it stopped being so good.
All of this is said in great sadness. I had my issues with a few former editors at The Sun, but anybody who believes in the importance of the First Amendment has to root for these underdogs still slogging away at the paper. There are editors there holding high the paper’s ancient standards for truth and fairness. And they’ve got some reporters who have done some first-rate work under exhausting conditions.
The Calvert Street offices are now too big, and too expensive, to maintain. As scores and scores of veteran professionals were forced into retirement, the place reportedly took on a haunted feel.
There are so many empty desks that one veteran staffer has joked, “The place looks like a furniture warehouse.”
The new place, down in South Baltimore’s Port Covington, will have a different feel to it. Maybe it’ll even be a better feel. There’s a lot riding on it – not only for the paper itself, but for all those who depend on quality news coverage to tell us the truth about our community.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.
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