Our legendary staff:
From Jack Scott to ‘ Edith Adams’ to Roy Peterson, a look at writers, photographers and cartoonists who left their mark.
Working at a daily newspaper is en ephemeral business. Yesterday’s front page story is cast aside for the latest news, and more often than not, reporters and photographers are forgotten by the masses after they leave the paper.
Still, there are several people whose legacy at The Vancouver Sun transcends their era. At the top of the list would be Robert Cromie, who rescued The Sun from bankruptcy in 1917.
Cromie had no newspaper experience when he took control of the paper, which had suffered during the recession that hit the city during the First World War. But he made all the right moves to turn the paper around.
After borrowing money from the publisher of the Seattle Times, he bought out the rival News Advertiser ( in 1917) and Vancouver World ( in 1924) to increase circulation. In 1926, he pulled a switcheroo with the rival evening Star, swapping press times to turn the morning Sun into an evening paper with a circulation of 56,000 — five times the circulation when he took it over.
Cromie was a savvy promoter. When a new building or business opened, he would produce a special page or section marking the occasion, securing lots of ads in the process.
But he was just as interested in the editorial side of the paper as he was in the business side. Cromie was a crusading publisher whose newspaper fought for an equalization of grain rates from Vancouver and championed health crazes such as fasting and an orange juice diet. He travelled widely, wrote pamphlets on world events, and befriended many of the big names of his day, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Amelia Earhart.
Cromie died in 1936 at 48, but his family continued to run The Sun until 1964. His son Don Cromie was at the helm when The Vancouver Sun passed The Province to become Vancouver’s biggest paper in 1947.
Don Cromie
Don Cromie was somewhat eccentric: whatever struck his fancy, staff had to do. The most outrageous Cromie missive came in 1957, when he sent the photo department up to the skies over Vancouver in a DC- 3 passenger airplane to try to photograph the Russian Sputnik satellite.
“It was very hard dealing with him — you never really knew what he’d do next,” former Sun editor Alex Macgillivray recalled when Cromie died in 1993. “He would have made a beautiful king.”
But he loved newspapers, and his tenure is seen as the golden era of the paper.
It was during the Don Cromie era that The Sun produced many of its greatest columnists, such as the two Jacks: Scott and Wasserman.
Jack Scott
Flipping through the Jack Scott photo file is a gas. He was constantly on the move, whether it was loading his wife and kids into a woody wagon for a cross- Canada drive or flying down to Bolivia to check out llamas.
The caption for the llama photo reads “Sturdy Jack finds thin air of Bolivia a bit hard to take but he summons strength to snap a picture of one of the strange creatures of the mountains.”
In another photo, a barechested Jack blows a horn in mountainous terrain while a woman reaches out to him, like Tarzan and Jane.
He looks like a movie star in a 1954 head shot, save for one detail; he has a lit smoke in his right hand.
Scott’s Our Town column anchored what they called the second front page in the late 1940s and 1950s.
He was often sent overseas to cover the top news stories of the era, but his column was folksy and informal, stories of his family, friends and his city.
When Scott died in 1980, onetime Sun writer Pierre Berton called him “the most graceful writer I have known.”
Jack Wasserman
Jack Wasserman was arguably the most popular columnist in Vancouver Sun history. He wasn’t a natural writer like Scott, but in the 1950s and ’ 60s Wasserman was essential reading if you wanted to find out what was happening in the city’s nightlife.
Every night Wasserman would roam through Vancouver’s nightclubs and restaurants in search of tidbits. When he came up short, he’d pay his Sun colleagues a buck an item to flesh out his column.
Through Wasserman, readers felt like they’d been at the Cave, the Marco Polo, or the Palomar ’ til the wee small hours, hanging with the stars. San Francisco had Herb Caen; Vancouver had Jack Wasserman.
Wasserman was a showman to the end, dying from a heart attack while giving a speech at a roast for forest tycoon Gordon Gibson. The audience laughed, thinking it was a gag.
Years of being The Sun’s hard- living “saloon writer” had taken its toll: Wasserman was only 50 when he died. The city honoured his memory by renaming a two- block strip of Hornby Street Wasserman’s Beat, because that’s where he plied his trade in long- gone clubs.