Another great column by retiring St. Augustine Record Opinion Editor Jim Sutton, with more on his Flagler College years under racist segregationist former St. Augustine Record Publisher A.H. "Hoppy" Tebeault, and Flagler College President (later state representative and now Chancellor) WILLIAM LEE PROCTOR, a/k/a "MASSA PROCTOR."
By Jim Sutton
Posted Dec 6, 2019 at 2:07 PM
St. Augustine may be the best place on earth.
My first day here was a trip to Flagler College in the early 1970s. I was 17. Seems they were short on boys and long on girls — and were looking to even things out. It was a spectacular recruiting tool.
Halfway through my college years I spent some time on what might be termed a forced sabbatical. A year later, Dr. Bill Proctor was my salvation, allowing me back in when no one else was interested. And since that time, he has become a kind of mentor by proxy. He didn’t have to lecture me other than that one dressing down. He gave me closet support. I needed only to watch him to set my moral compass.
It was former The Record Publisher Hoop Tebault, who bullied me into the newspaper business. We’d been like Batman and the Joker (he was Batman) for years: I on the college newspaper staff, he the boss of it all. The battles were epic. Few mortals ever won one with him.
But after succumbing to a providential graduation, Mr. Tebault pushed me to a publisher buddy of his in Madison, Florida. I got a job. When I showed up at the White Springs Leader for my first day as a reporter, the secretary, Kaci, told me breathlessly the editor had pilfered the petty cash box and disappeared over the weekend. I drove back to tell my boss, Tommy Greene, the situation. He stuck out a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt and said, “Congratulations, boy, you’re the editor.”
At a newspaper banquet a year later, I discovered I was the youngest editor in the history of the Florida Press Association. For two years I ran The White Springs Leader and the Mayo Free Press — both nestled in the bosom of the Suwannee River — and where the big news was flue cured tobacco, hail, churches, deer season and especially who cooked-down the best cane syrup. One secret was never cutting it before the first frost.
I came home to St. Augustine and The Record in the fall of 1980. It was coincidence that my then-hometown Mayo High School faced my now-hometown Hastings High in the state Class B football playoffs that year.
Tom King was the editor here at the time; a fine man who figured out quickly that whatever my future in journalism, it might best be practiced outside.
So my beat included covering Corky Ringspot (a pesky nematode) on tri-county potatoes, the spots on the tails of redfish and the Hastings Town Council. I did anonymous restaurant reviews on the side for a time, as well as covering the downtown nightlife — and there was some wicked good licks going down at Scarlett’s and the White Lion in those days.
Every slice of St. Augustine was mine for the writing. Too many of the people I admired and who helped “learn me” the rules and the ropes are passed and gone. But I always hoped something of them was left in copy I turned in.
And there are so many city and county folks I owe so much to still around.
I’ve always loathed the term “journalist.” That’s something somebody made up to make reporters believe they’re worth more than they are.
No. A good reporter is worth three journalists. Get the facts, and get your philosophical baggage out of the way.
Taking sides is the job of the Opinion page. The newsroom and the opinion desk are kept as separate as the newsroom and the advertising department in any good newspaper.
Funny story. Maybe 20 years ago, we had hired a female ad director who was a member of the Mormon Church. On her first day in a department head meeting, I had no idea of her religious grounding, and in polite conversation mentioned that New York Times Editor Howell Raines once referred to the sales staff there as “whores in the temple of journalism.”
I left the room before it got awkward.
The Opinion desk is a great job if you like to think about things and have a thickish epidermis. It’s an old newspaper joke that the Opinion job is a good one because you don’t have to let facts get in the way of a good story.
The one duty I never looked forward to was endorsement meetings every two years. That’s when candidates come in for a talk and you later have to tell readers who you believe can do the best job — and generally why. You hurt feeling. You step on aspirations.
Among the more memorable was the gentleman that was Gov. Lawton Chiles — who’d also served in the Senate with my dad. He always had his longtime bodyguard with him at the old Record building on Cordova. And you could see he was thinking when he answered you.
Among the more colorful was U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown who always scheduled her meetings first thing in the morning and asked me every two years if I’d have a Hardee’s sausage biscuit ready, with grape jelly. I did. Hardee’s is gone, and she’s doing a nickel in the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex near Wildwood.
From the perspective of two opposing candidates, the newspaper is always wrong exactly half the time in its endorsements. And many readers want to believe an editorial board has some hidden agenda one way or the other in its selection.
The bare truth is a newspaper never “gets” anything out of a political endorsement other than several enemies and one ingrate.
But all along the way I have enjoyed being so close to the triumphs and tragedies of our county. I have become friends with folks whom I’ve never met other than on phone calls or in Letters to the Editor.
Wednesday will be my last day here at The Record.
I’ll continue doing the fishing column from home; for a while, anyway. You can reach me with reports or photos at creekratstaug@gmail.com. I’ll now have time to do more about fishing than talking about it. If you think that’s a hint, you’re right.
Letters and complaints send to letters@staugustine.com.
I don’t know how to thank you all for your cussedness and/or support over these years (and those Christmas cookies, Clara).
Don’t give up the good fights. We have much to fight for, and way too much to lose if we don’t.
And thanks for having me.
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