Keate era likely greatest in newspaper’s history
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Robert and Donald Cromie are the publishers most associated with The Vancouver Sun. Robert because he saved the paper when it looked like it was going under in 1917, Donald because he was in charge when the Sun overtook The Province to become Vancouver’s biggest paper in the 1940s and ’50s.
Unlike the Cromies, Stuart Keate didn’t own the paper — he was just a hired gun. But the Keate era from 1964 to 1978 will probably go down as the best in the paper’s history.
Keate was a journalist that ascended to the executive suite, but never let business get in the way of journalism. In his era the papers made record profits and developed some of Canada’s best columnists, from Allan Fotheringham to Denny Boyd, Bob Hunter to Marjorie Nicholls.
“He established a very close relationship between the newspaper and the community, not only because the paper under him interested itself in the life of the community but he because he participated in high profile community affairs,” wrote former Sun editor Frank Rutter after Keate’s death in 1987.
“The state of mutual respect rubbed off on the journalists. They respected a man who was himself a proven journalist and he respected them. It was a happy time, for journalism and for Vancouver.
“His slogan was ‘The Sun has the writers.’ It did, and he could sure pick ’em.”
James Stuart Keate was born in Vancouver on Oct. 13, 1913. He got his start at the Ubyssey student newspaper in the early 1930s, and when he graduated in 1935 became a sportswriter at The Province, then a feature writer at the Toronto Star.
During the Second World War he served as a war correspondent and information officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. After the war he worked for Time Life magazines in New York and Montreal.
In 1950 he came back to B.C. to become publisher of the Victoria Times, and in 1964 moved to Vancouver. The same year he was elected president of The Canadian Press, as well as president of the Canadian Daily Newspaper Publishers Association.
He was a gifted writer. When Howard Hughes showed up at the Bayshore Hotel in 1972, he recounted meeting Hughes in 1946, the same day Hughes was almost killed in a plane crash. Hughes was so charmed he had his PR guy set up a phone call with Keate. Hughes talked for almost an hour, but requested that Keate not write anything about it, because Hughes would be deluged with media requests.
It would have been the biggest scoop of Keate’s career, but he agreed to keep it secret and didn’t write about the phone call until after Hughes died in 1976.