The inside scoop:
Journalists go to all sorts of lengths to get the scoop or the photo … and sometimes the story behind the news is better than the news itself.
The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik into space on Oct. 4, 1957, sent many people around the world into a tizzy.
One was Don Cromie, then owner and publisher of The Vancouver Sun. The paper went over the moon with Sputnik stories, graphics and photos.
Cromie was still not satisfied — he wanted his paper to get the world’s first photo of Sputnik in orbit. The problem was, the Vancouver weather wasn’t cooperating.
“It was cloudy and overcast [ when it was launched], and we were quite happy, because there was no chance of spotting Sputnik,” recalls former Sun photographer George Diack. “Well, the next day Cromie was extremely unhappy. He said, ‘ Why didn’t we charter a plane, get up in the air and get some pictures of Sputnik?’ ” So they did. On Oct. 8, four Sun photographers and two reporters were dispatched to the airport at night, where they chartered a Canadian Pacific Airlines DC- 3 and flew 18,000 feet into the sky to try to spot the Soviet spacecraft.
As backup, Diack and Ray Allan were sent to the top of Grouse Mountain to try to photograph Sputnik from there.
The “satellite special” made a second flight at 5 a. m. Oct. 9. And when The Sun’s first edition came out that afternoon, the headline read: “Red Satellite Seen by Crew on Sun Plane.”
Pilot Bob Kerr and Sun photographer Deni Eagland both reported spotting a bright object blaze across the sky about 5: 28 a. m. Unfortunately, it was gone within a few seconds, before Eagland could train his camera on it.
But when they returned to Earth and developed some film shot by Danny Scott, there was a white streak across the sky. The Sun ran it on the front page with the caption: “Is this the satellite?” It wasn’t. Diack says Scott had done a shot on the ground “as a backup picture in case they didn’t see anything. He opened the shutter as he walked by the plane. I don’t know if it was the wing light or not, but there was some kind of light on the plane, and he opened the shutter for a time exposure, waved the camera in front of the light, and that was the streak. The powers that be at The Sun didn’t know what it was or how it was taken. So they said, ‘ It might be Sputnik, it might not be.’ ”
And the truth has never been told, until now.
The Sputnik story is just one of the epic tales from The Sun’s 100- year history.
Playing it Straight
One of the best was recounted by Tom Ardies in a booklet put together by former Sun reporter Jack Lee for a reunion of 1950s Sun and Province staff.
The Sun’s then- managing editor, Hal Straight, had sent out an edict demanding shorter “ledes” ( journalese for opening paragraphs) to each story. So Arnie Myers submitted a story with a one- word lede: “Dead.”
The second paragraph read: “That’s what the man found in the lane was.”
Myers’s nothin’- but- the- facts prose was a far cry from many Sun stories in the 1950s, when Ardies said the paper specialized in purple prose.
“If a boy had his hands blown off,” wrote Ardies, “a story would begin something like this. ‘ He’ll never wear a wedding ring, or play catch with his kids, or know the firm handshake of a friend.’ And then it would get really colourful.”
Grounds for firing
The same reunion booklet includes a Rich Eustis story about how he got fired. Fresh out of the University of B. C., Eustis was working late one night when the police scanner blurted out a report of a man on a ledge.
Eustis found a drunk on a first-storey ledge being coaxed back indoors by a couple of cops. He didn’t file anything, because nothing really happened. But that was an era when newspapers wouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
“The Province pumped up the story, ‘ piping it’ as in pipe dream,” Eustis wrote.
“The Sun dayside [ staff] picked it up, gave it a steroid injection, and by the time I came in the next day, our first edition carried a three- inch headline above a story that told how two policemen had risked their lives to save a would- be suicide on a ledge high above Pender Street, while hundreds of anxious spectators cheered at the happy outcome.
“A copy of this effort was in my mailbox. [ Editor] Earl Smith had written across it: ‘ I’m surprised you didn’t recognize this as top story.’
“I wrote on it, next to his note, ‘ I’m surprised you didn’t recognize this as bull----,’ and sent it back. I received my pink slip by return mail.”
Eustis moved to Los Angeles and went on to become a producer for TV shows such as Head of the Class and the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. He won an Emmy for producing a John Denver special.
The one that got away
A lot of Sun staff went on to star elsewhere, including Pierre Berton, Allan Fotheringham, Jack Webster, Dick Beddoes and Barry Broadfoot. Douglas Coupland once freelanced “budget gourmet” restaurant reviews for The Sun, and artist Jeff Wall did some illustrations.
One writer who didn’t get hired was Hunter S. Thompson, who applied for a job at The Sun after reading a Time magazine story about the marvellous things Jack Scott had done for the paper after he became editor in September 1958.
Thompson went on to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and was credited with the creation of gonzo journalism, but it’s tough to fault the paper for a hiring oversight given Thompson’s pitch. In the letter, which was included in a recently released collection of Thompson’s papers, he said he wanted the job even though the industry was overrun with “dullards, bums and hacks, hag- ridden with myopia, apathy and complacence.”
Well, he was a football guy
Jack Scott was a Vancouver institution in the 1940s and ’ 50s. He wrote a folksy column called Our Town and journeyed across the land, doing big stories and travelogues about vacations with his family.
Apparently he didn’t see eye-to-eye with Erwin Swangard.