All: This is My Last Day - Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2
For 75 years United Press International was known as one of the world's leading news organizations. The wire service, which was founded in 1907 as United Press, gathered news from bureaus around the world and delivered it to a worldwide client base.
On June 3, 1982, Scripps-Howard sold UPI to Doug Ruhe and Bill Geissler for $1. At the time, Ruhe was 38 and Geissler 36 and practically unknown. They took over a news organization of more than 1,500 employees in more than 200 bureaus around the world.

A Wall Street Journal story that appeared in the Washington Star in 1979 bore the headline:
UPI, Its 17 Years of Losses Mounting, Banks on Scripps and Satellites.

The lead paragraph stated:
Jerry McGinn isn’t doing much traveling any more, but it has nothing to do with the gasoline crunch.
McGinn is the manager of the Spokane, Wash., bureau of United Press International, the second largest news service in the country. Over the last two years, he says, his travel budget has been cut 10 percent to 15 percent because “the company is losing money” and “we’re told to keep it down on spending.” So, he adds, he hasn’t “been out of Spokane in a year.”

According to the Wall Street Journal story, UPI had a deficit of $2.5 million in 1978 and had a total loss of $17 million since 1961, its most recent profitable year. While citing "some observers" who said UPI was struggling for survival, it said UPI officials insisted that they had remedies for their problems and that they were counting on continued support from the E.W. Scripps Co., which owned 95 percent of UPI.

Jerry expanded on the story with me:
Here's my story on this.
I remember that story very well. It was on page one, left column, of the Wall Street Journal. I was told later that was THE spot for THE lead story each day in that paper. One friend unfolded that story out of his wallet about 20 years ago and said, "Jerry, you are the only person I know whose name showed up in the Wall Street Journal. That's why I saved this." Yes, he was tipsy, but sincere.
The WSJ author called me at the UPI-Seattle bureau one day and said he had been given my name by a Unipresser in New York who said I would probably answer questions about the status of UPI when no one there would. He refused to tell me who had given him my name.
I said I'd give it a go. So we talked for about 10 minutes.
When the story broke, and the prominent spot in the WSJ sunk in, UPI brass went crazy. I was told later Scripps was pissed, too. They thought they had put a lid on the listing if not the sinking of UPI. They were wrong.
My favorite reaction was from my wife, Chris, when she saw it. She said: "Well, darlin', you've always wanted to see your name on page one of the WSJ. Now you are there."
The president of UPI, Rod Beaton, ordered me fired immediately, according to my immediate boss, state manager Marty Heerwald. I was told he was apoplectic that one of his reporters would talk to another member of the news media. I laughed out loud when Marty, a strong supporter, told me that.
I explained to Marty, and later in a letter to (UPI management), that that was what we do for a living: interview people. I had never turned down a client interview before and didn't think, since I had been recommended by New York, that I should blow this guy off, either. They then demanded to know who in New York had recommended I be called. I said honestly that I did not know. I still don't.
In any event, I apparently had supporters in New York (I was definitely on Editor-in-Chief H.L.Stevenson's good list because he offered to move me east if I so desired, a couple of different times) because it blew over. I was a member of the WSG (Wire Service Guild), too, and they stepped in and (guild officers Kevin Keane and Dan Carmichael) said they'd have a huge problem if the brass tried to can me. The guild would not stand for it.
Keane and Carmichael were gifts to us working stiffs.
The only real big dust-up that occurred after that was during an EdiCon in Portland, Ore., hosted by Billy Joe McFarland (Portland, Ore.), Marty Heerwald (Seattle), myself (Spokane) and which featured (Pacific Division Manager) Reeve Hennion, UPI President Bob Page, Bill Lyon, New York pictures editor, and H.L. Stevenson. Plus all the owners and editors of a dozen or more Washington and Oregon newspapers.
Bill Lyon, who fancied himself (I learned) as a tough guy (and a wise guy wannabe), was very icy around me after we were introduced. As we and our wives had cocktails and mingled before dinner and generally mixed with our Washington-Oregon editors, I could see he was itching to have a chat with me. He liked to stare and he assumed I was in fear. I knew he was angry but, frankly, had no idea what was up at that point.
Lyon was also getting pretty sloshed.
Finally, Lyon got his opening and he came over and basically called me a traitor to UPI and asked in front of a few standers-by how in hell I would dare talk to the WSJ the way I did. I told him what happened and it just made him madder.
He said something like, "In New York, you'd have your ass handed to you."
I'd had it by then and told him to go fuck himself. In front of HLS, Page, Hennion and some others. He leaned in and so did I. He suggested we go outside and I said I would be delighted. And at that point I would have been delighted.
Someone separated us and Lyon's last words to me were, "If you were in New York, I'd put a hit on you."
I said if his friends weren't holding him at that moment I'd kick the shit out of him and enjoy it immensely. He continued to try to stare me down the rest of the night.
But that was it.
Except the next day Lyon apologized and I accepted. I told him I was sorry, too, sorry that I didn't kick his ass when he threatened to get me killed. He smiled sheepishly but it was clear we were not going to be friends. Ever. Ironically, we wound up working on features and what used to be called (I think) national horizons packages and the artwork that went with them. Got along fine vis a vis the message wire.
I understand from others after that that he was a bit of bully in New York but was a damned good shooter (photographer). Photogs, I guess, respected him. But that was the end of our association, even though there was a bit of a buzz going around the EdiCon at the time.
Jerry was "invited" to leave UPI on April 26, 1985, a date that became known as the Friday Night Massacre. But he said he did not get the Western Union telegram telling him of his departure until Saturday morning. "I put a smiley face sticker on it, framed it and it was featured on the wall at my desk for several years thereafter."
Unipresser Ed Hart believes UPI's demise "was assured in the spring of 1984 with the sale, lease or whatever it was of the UPI Photo Library to Bettmann. Not only was this invaluable asset physically moved more than a mile away from our headquarters in the Daily News Building on Manhattan's East Side, its staff of professional researchers was dismissed. The replacements were young and inexperienced.”
Ed explained:
“These replacements had no knowledge of photography, no knowledge of the news business and were discouraged by their management from asking the one or two Unipressers in their office any questions about the library or the wire service itself.
“We were reminded daily that we (UPI employees) were Bettmann's ‘guests.’ An adversarial relationship developed even before I agreed to Ted Majeski's request to represent UPI in Bettmann's office on East 21st Street. That relationship and Bettmann's attitude as expressed by its two managers, was soon felt by our clients.
“’We don't make any money from UPI's clients,’ I was told repeatedly, and I was there, so I was to blame. Also, ‘You (UPI) order too many pictures.’
“For every picture we used from what had been ‘our’ file we paid Bettmann $35. Yes, we matched obits, sports, spot news with filers. I once asked a Bettmann manager to examine one of our fax rolls and tell me which of the pictures was ‘too much.’ Of course she didn't reply.
“I was in the position of trying to explain to our clients why they weren't getting their requests on time and why Bettmann's researchers couldn't find stuff our researchers had located within minutes and I was running out of excuses.
“Some of our clients were calling the AP photo library to ask our former librarians who had been hired by Grandma where to locate photos they knew we had but Bettmann couldn't find.
“Our clients voted with their money. They weren't getting what they paid for.
“In 1983, UPI had a million dollars from its Photo Library sales. And that was with what one ‘veteran’ has described as an ‘arcane filing system.’ Those sales were also achieved without cross-filing (cataloging), according to the same ‘veteran’ who never worked in or with our library when it was ours.
“I remember describing the Bettmann situation to one of our general deskers, someone I had worked with for years. ‘Wow,’ he commented, ‘They really screwed you.’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘They screwed US!’
“Seven years later and 44 years after I started at Acme Newspictures I wrote my goodbye message. It was short. It read, ‘73 et 30.’ It was signed ‘eh/nxp’ (Ed Hart, New York photos).”
By the new millennium UPI was barely a whisper in the news community, a victim of years of incompetent and greedy owners, who in their attempts to climb out of debt only dug the hole deeper. In the process, they trashed hundreds of loyal, dedicated, talented print, broadcast and photography journalists. An excellent book has been published that details the grim details of how this once proud wire service was decimated and subjected to a slow and cruel death -- Down To The Wire, UPI's Fight for Survival, by Ronald E. Cohen, Washington bureau chief and managing editor, and Gregory Gordon, an 18-year veteran who headed UPI's investigative team.
This book does not attempt to duplicate what Ron and Greg accomplished.
Instead, it is dedicated to the hundreds of Unipressers who were yanked from
their jobs or who were forced to leave because of the uncertainty under
which they worked beginning in the mid-1980s. It is told in their words,
expressed in what had become a tradition at UPI -- the farewell messages.
Many of us had worked for years, sometimes decades, without meeting the
hundreds of colleagues stationed in bureaus around the nation and around the
world. We knew each other by our work and by our names. But, we became an
extended family and the farewell messages contained in this book were
good-byes to our brothers and sisters. Their messages were poignant, angry,
nostalgic, scared. And they carried a common theme: No matter their feelings
about why they were leaving, almost all of them expressed their love for the
work they did, the people they did it with and the logo under which they
worked -- UPI.

The messages are arranged chronologically and include the debate that raged
on the internal UPI message wires in 1990 over the company's second request
that Unipressers take a pay cut, this time of 35 percent of their pay.

On April 28, 1985, UPI filed for Chapter 11 and was officially bankrupt.
Although many owners in the subsequent years attempted to reverse the
downward spin, the company never recovered.
Mexican publisher Mario Vazquez-Rana purchased UPI in 1985. His money kept
the wire service alive, but the euphoria quickly disintegrated.

The messages usually were written all lower-case. I have for the most part
kept them in their original form as they were filed, including with many of
their message wire abbreviations and shorthand.

They begin with the farewell message posted by Cohen in 1986 after he was
fired.

To all Unipressers

Today is my last day with UPI. Since I no longer fit into the company's
plans, I finally must acknowledge my family's long-time question, "What do
you want to be when you grow up?"

Twenty-five years can be an eternity, or it can be an instant. To me, it
seems but a moment ago that I walked into UPI's Hartford bureau, was plunked
down into a sculpture of ancient metal and stuffing generously called a
chair, and learned I had five minutes to assemble, punch and begin
transmitting the 8:30 a.m. Connecticut news roundup. I never had seen a
teletype machine before. Welcome to UPI.

My three years as managing editor have been both tumultuous and surpassingly
gratifying. Most of the industry wrote our obit in April of 1985, but
Unipressers reached into deep reserves of enterprise and professionalism and
defiantly shouted, "Surrender, hell!"

Thumbing our noses at the external Cassandras and our internal turmoil, we
brilliantly covered such stories as the TWA and Achille Lauro hijackings;
the Tokyo, Dallas and Milwaukee plane crashes; the Mexico City earthquake;
the Challenger disaster.

Even while we crafted the magnificent, we uncomplainingly churned out the
mundane -- performing the vital but less glamorous tasks that told the world
we not only were alive and well, but kicking too.

I have said it many times, and I will say it again; Chapter 11 bespoke of
the guts and the talent of Unipressers more eloquently than any period in
our long and legendary past.

I am profoundly proud of what we accomplished together. Nobody can ever take
that away.
I know that, whatever happens, you will acquit yourselves with honor and
grace, and I am confident that, in UPI's continuing struggle for survival,
you will bear the torch proudly and high, and never quit reaching for the
dream -- always just beyond your fingertips.

I will miss UPI, but especially I will miss all of you.

It is an honor to have been your colleague, and a privilege to call you
friends.
73s, and 30.
Ron Cohen-wa
The "wa" was the call letters to designate the Washington, D.C., bureau.

Ron's message created a message wire orgy. Unipressers from around the world
flooded the message wire with notes of outrage, condolences, tearful
good-byes. They were collected and printed out and pasted on the walls
surrounding the door to what had been his office.

Another top management victim was Maxwell McCrohon, who had come to UPI from
The Chicago Tribune where he had been the newspaper's editor. But after
three years at UPI, McCrohon found himself at odds with Vazquez-Rana, who
had frozen him out of the decision-making process.

On Nov. 11, 1986, McCrohon filed his farewell message.

To all UPI staff

Working with you over the last three years has been a most rewarding
experience.

The respect I had for UPI even before I joined you has grown as I personally
encountered your professionalism all over the world. Frankly, I have never
seen such dedication to an institution and an ideal. Working together,
you're going to make it a success.

Print, pictures and graphics, broadcast and radio -- you're a bloody fine
outfit.

It has been a privilege.
Much good luck.
Sincerely,
Max McCrohon
1986, started with a bang -- literally. On Jan. 28, 1986, the U.S. spaceship Challenger exploded. The world's worst nuclear accident occurred in April in Chernobyl, the Soviet Union, and the Fox Network was launched in America. Vice President George Bush said, “I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli. Now look, this is the last statement I’m going to have on broccoli. There are truckloads of broccoli at this very minute descending on Washington. My family is divided. For the broccoli vote out there: Barbara loves broccoli. She has tried to make me eat it. She eats it all the time herself. So she can go out and meet the caravan of broccoli that’s coming in.” Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger married into a prominent Democratic family when he married Maria Shriver and Haley's Comet returned. The two incidents apparently were not related.

In 1987, Baby Jessica McClure fell down a well and was rescued, Margaret Thatcher was re-elected in London, the U.S. stock market plummeted 22 percent on Oct. 19 and condom commercials began to appear on television. The U.S. budget reached the trillion-dollar mark and Robert Bork of President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre fame was denied a Supreme Court appointment. Gary Hart didn't fare much better. His political career was destroyed with his involvement with Donna Rice.

At UPI, the departures continued in 1987. But, first, there were arrivals. Toward the end of 1986, Milt Benjamin, a former UPI reporter in Boston and Washington, was lured from his job as foreign editor at the Washington Post. And early in 1987, Benjamin introduced UPI's new managing editors: Barry Sussman, who had directed the Post's Watergate coverage, Ben Cason, Washington Post assistant managing editor, and Kim Willenson, a Newsweek reporter who had covered the Vietnam War for UPI.

Their tenure did not last long. They immediately ran into conflicts with Vazquez-Rana, who had given Cason marching orders to cut 250 editorial jobs.

Nov 3, 1987
To: the staff and the subscribers of UPI
from: Ben Cason
Barry Sussman
Kim Willenson
With this letter the three of us announce our resignations from United Press International, effective Nov. 20, 1987.
We take this action with deep regret, but with the conviction that we can no longer assure the quality and integrity of the UPI report. It is not our desire to pursue these matters here or in any other public forum.
We came to UPI ten months ago with plans to improve the report, and feel we have helped to do so. We learned very quickly that there existed, long before we arrived, a talented, energetic, devoted staff that has made many sacrifices in the name of putting out a quality news report.
These men and women have performed superbly under adverse conditions. The staff of UPI is capable of setting a national standard for fast, accurate, thoughtful and enterprising coverage of the news. Its efforts deserve continued support from the nation’s news media.
That backing, in the months ahead, will be vital to the survival of strong competition in American reporting of national and international news.
We have arranged our departures, including the provision of advance notice of his announcement to the company’s present ownership, to allow successors to be located without a loss of editorial continuity. We wish the people of UPI every success, and ask UPI’s subscribers to give the new editorial management of UPI a chance to prove that the company remains deserving of their patronage.

Then it was time for the grunts of the wire service and the floodgates opened.

all
it is with sadness that today i end my 22-year career with upi, half of it
as national political writer. in a job that has taken me to virtually every
upi bureau in the nation, i have worked alongside the greatest crew of
professional journalists i will ever encounter, and in the process
i have made hundreds of friends i shall take along with me. 73's (Clay)
richards-wa
11-20-87

all
upi is such a rare place. there are people all over who i think of as
friends, and it comes as a start to realize how many i've never met -- over
the years the message wire starts to feel like real conversation.
in 11 years at this joint, from the deep onite to the luxurious dayside, the
one thing i've never been is bored. excited, angry, delighted or despairing,
yes. but bored, no. the work has always been meaningful -- journalism on the
guerrilla edge of the profession.
the official slogan used to be "around the world, around the clock with
upi." on the onite at upr (radio), we stuck by the more realistic "we may
doze, but we never close."
we've come too near to closing too many times in the past several years. but
once again we're pulling out of a crisis with upi's quality and integrity
intact. you're the people who make the wire run, and now the company's
editorial leaders are people who know that fact in their guts because
they've been in the trenches for decades.
i'll be rooting hard for all of you, my friends met and unmet.
73s, (Judy) dugan-upr (UPI Radio)-gendesk-waftus (features)
11-20-87

all
here i go quitting again after 8 1/2 years with upi. 5 years with a client,
then 3 more back at upi (returning rite after the pay cut). i sorta hate to
leave just when things are starting to get interesting (as in the old
Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times).
i reckon i'd still be here, come what may, if i hadn't fallen in love with
drake-kp (Kansas City, Mo.) the 60-plus miles between buros was unbearable,
and she's too special to let slip away. she becomes braden-kp on saturday.
spending nearly 10 years in the statehouse buo of an ap-stronghold
state -- face to face with the folks from the cooperative -- you become familiar
with the arrogance that comes from nearly unchallenged power. an ap-only
world is a frightening prospect.
from that vantage point, i offer an observation to u, u overworked,
often-unappreciated gang of ruffians.
u are among the few persons on the planet whose efforts truly could have an
influence on the future of this free people. seldom does an individual have
a chance to make a difference.
that and 40 cents will buy you a cup of coffee, but it also sets u apart
from the mundane mass of nine-to-fivers in their gray little world of
mortgages and manicured lawns.
keep smiling. it drives 'em crazy.
73s
braden-ac (Topeka, Kan.)
10-22-87

By the end of 1987, UPI had shrunk to less than 900 employees. Its 4,500 newspaper and broadcast clients numbered less than 2,400.