The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
Courier Journal reporter Sheldon Shafer dies
Journalist dies at age 79 following 44-year career
Longtime Courier Journal reporter Sheldon Shafer, whose byline graced the pages of The Courier Journal more than 25,000 times in a remarkable 44year career, died early Monday morning after months of declining health following a fall at his home in St. Matthews last November.
He was 79 years old.
He is scheduled to be inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame on Tuesday.
Shafer was hired by the newspaper in 1973 as a copy editor, and in late 1974 he was moved into a reporting role where he flourished, often churning out multiple news stories in a single day and developing a deep list of sources who trusted him implicitly.
Fittingly, on his first day he earned a byline, Shafer had two of them: “Man arraigned in death of cabbie” and “Mazzoli tells of hopes for the 94th Congress.”
Shafer kept his source list in a small black book in the top drawer of his desk. Each morning, he’d pull it out and make calls to make sure he wasn’t being scooped by any other reporter in town.
“What’s going on, big guy,” he’d ask over and over as he dialed.
For much of his career, he focused on downtown development, but there wasn’t a story about Barney Bright’s Louisville Clock that Shafer wasn’t all over, and he took it as a personal insult if he didn’t break stories of new births at the Louisville Zoo.
You could fill a mid-sized American city with all the projects he wrote about that were never completed, from the proposed Shippingport Square, to the proposed 5 Riverfront Plaza to the proposed Vencor Tower to the proposed Museum Plaza to a proposed 50-story office tower at Second and Main.
He rarely wrote the kind of stories that angered the people he covered — instead, when he got a tip of a politician doing something he shouldn’t, he would often bang out a short note on an IBM Selectric typewriter and discretely hand it to another reporter.
In later years after computers replaced typewriters, he would type the note out on his keypad and summon another reporter to his desk and point at the message he had pecked out on the computer screen.
“It was so easy to be his friend,” said former state Sen. David Karem, who Shafer covered for decades when Karem headed up Louisville’s Waterfront Development Corporation. “In retrospect, it was a wonderful life that he led, not just for himself and his family but for the community.”
Shafer delighted in telling the story of one of the few people he angered with what he had written — the late developer Al Schneider after he wrote of the criticism of one of Schneider’s rather ugly buildings.
Schneider, he said, swore to never speak to him again and kept his word until one day Shafer called him for comment on a piece he was writing.
“Sheldon, Merry Christmas,” Schneider told him after Schneider’s secretary patched him through, before ending the call with an expletive and hanging up.
Sheldon Scott Shafer was born in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, area in 1944. He was the youngest of two children.
He graduated from Indiana University in 1966 after serving as the editorin-chief of the Indiana Daily Student during his senior year. There he met Craig Klugman, who served as his night editor at the paper and shared an apartment with him above a liquor store in Bloomington.
“He was a prince among men,” said
Klugman. The two men served as the best man at each other’s weddings.
“I always said he was the smartest guy I ever knew,” Klugman said. “And he always said I obviously didn’t know any smart guys.”
Shafer joined the U.S. Army, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant and was assigned to Army Security, serving at Fort Sheridan, near Chicago, the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and in Sinop, Turkey.
When he returned to the States, he spent three years as a copy editor, sportswriter and local government reporter at his hometown Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.
After that, he moved to Louisville. That same year, he married the love of his life, Rebecca Lynn Hostetler. Becky, as she was known, and Shafer met on a blind date, said Liz Snyder, Becky’s sister.
It was a love affair for the ages. Becky died last summer.
“It was after Becky died, he just went downhill,” Snyder said. “I don’t think he cared anymore.”
Over the years he covered planning and zoning and development issues, Jefferson Fiscal Court and different aspects of city government and merged government.
And he couldn’t write enough, sometimes shopping stories to other editors when his editor told him not to write something because there wasn’t enough room in the newspaper.
When he wasn’t writing stories or calling sources, there was a better-thaneven chance that he was working the phones setting up his next bridge game or checking the statistics of his beloved Chicago White Sox.
Before smoking was banned in the newsroom, Shafer would pound out story after story, with a swirl of smoke circling his head.
He’d regale those who sat near him with really bad jokes (What is red and smells like blue paint? Red paint) or he’d occasionally blurt out a non-sensical punchline without wasting the time it took to set it up. (“I’ll have tea two.”)
One of his favorite things to cover was the rebirth of Louisville’s riverfront with the Waterfront Park.
When he turned 70 in 2014, thenMayor Greg Fischer and former Mayors Jerry Abramson and Dave Armstrong gathered to dedicate a swing at the park in his honor.
Abramson, who knew Shafer for nearly 50 years, described him as a throwback to an earlier time. “He was a “Joe Friday type reporter,” Abramson said. “Just the facts.”
Shafter retired Nov. 17, 2017, after 44 years at The Courier Journal, having written what he estimated to be 25,000 stories – likely a record for anyone in the history of the newspaper.
His last stories appeared in the newspaper Nov. 19, 2017, and fittingly, just as it had been on his first day as a reporter, he had two stories: “Duluth Trading store joins Whiskey Row” and “Oxmoor Mall area might get apartments.”
Shafer’s oldest daughter, Sarah, collapsed and died on a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, on Aug. 19, 2020. For the next 11 months, Shafer and his wife Becky, reared their grandson, Theo Shafer, until his adoption by one of Sarah’s friends could be completed.
On July 26 of last year, Shafer’s wife, Becky, died of cancer. Then on Oct. 29, Shafer’s sister, Lee Muncie, died in Fort Wayne.
“After that, he called me about once a month and asked me to come stay with him because he was lonely,” Snyder said.
On Thanksgiving, he wrote on Facebook, “Hardly anyone left to celebrate Thanksgiving with.”
Three days later he fell at home, breaking his 12th thoracic vertebrae.
He recovered some, but about three weeks ago, he tried to get out of bed and walk.
“That’s what kind of did him in,” Snyder said.
He’s survived by his daughter, Emily Shafer, his grandson, Theo, who lives in China; Snyder and two nephews.