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Front pages, objects from Miami Herald’s 117 years on display at Gables Museum
The Coral Gables Museum has assembled an exhibit of front pages, photographs and artifacts from the Miami Herald’s 117-year history.
When curators at the Coral Gables Museum began assembling an exhibit of front pages, photographs and artifacts from the Miami Herald’s 117-year history, the company was still producing printed newspapers seven days a week from its expansive Doral headquarters. Its parent company had not yet filed for bankruptcy protection.
And the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet come into terrifying existence, consuming the media company’s coverage, undermining its bottom line — and forcing the Gables museum temporarily to close its doors.
Like editors remaking a front page on the fly for a big breaking story, the museum’s staff took advantage of the closure to retool and update portions of the exhibit to reflect the urgency of today’s news and the rapid changes occurring simultaneously at the Herald. They added two new front pages to the lineup as the pandemic first surged in South Florida, bringing the exhibit to the edge of the still-present moment.
In another, last-minute addition, co-curator Malcolm Lauredo stacked bundled copies of the Herald and El Nuevo Herald in columns 10 feet high at the gallery entrance to reflect another altered reality. Half the 180 bundles came from Herald’s Doral printing plant. The others were printed by a competitor, the South Florida SunSentinel, after the Herald closed its production plant and stopped publishing a Saturday print edition in a pair of costsaving moves.
“Headlines!” is a timely reminder of the continued relevance and essential importance of traditional news organizations to the communities they cover, Gables museum director and exhibit co-curator John Allen said. The exhibit ranges over more than a century
of banner headlines, from the hurricanes that ravaged the young city in 1906 and 1926 to the Herald’s investigative revelations in 2018 and 2019 about the failures of federal prosecutors in the case of mass sexual molester Jeffrey Epstein.
It also documents the oftenwrenching evolution behind the headlines for the Herald and the business of news-gathering and publishing in Miami, no less than for the city the newspaper has covered since its
1903 launch, Allen and Lauredo said.
The story’s all here, from name changes and an early business crisis that almost put an end to the fledgling enterprise to technological changes and the landmark creation in 1963 of One Herald Plaza, then the largest and most advanced newspaper facility in the world. The new headquarters was hailed as a harbinger of the transformational growth Miami was soon to experience, even if not necessarily in the way anyone expected.
As the exhibit finally opened three months late on June 22, reporters, photographers, editors and business staff were moving out of the Herald’s 7-year-old Doral offices following the company’s decision to cut short its lease, in part to preserve the remaining reporting staff. (The company plans to lease temporary offices until it can find a long-term newsroom and office space. Since March, its staff has worked remotely as a safety measure amid the pandemic.)
“By the end of the process, we had seen this radical change,” Lauredo, the museum’s chief historian, said. “The exhibit reflects how journalism has always changed, and this is only the latest of those changes.”
But the exhibit is also designed to reflect the continuity of the critical enterprise. Every day while the exhibit is up, through October, a bundle of fresh Miami Herald papers will be delivered to the museum and stacked in the gallery. That is confirmation that the Herald hasn’t gone anywhere.
The exhibit is a tribute to the unusual and enduring power of the printed front page to capture history for posterity as it’s made. As the company and news industry switch to digital-first publication, the Herald is expanding its reach to millions more readers than in its print days, even if profitability has yet to follow.
The exhibition presents what Lauredo called “history through a local lens” — 84 front pages, starting with the first the curators could find and reproduce, from Jan 2, 1904, when the newspaper was called the Miami Evening Record. The pages are supplemented by extensive sidebar exhibits about the Herald’s pressmen, publishers, paper boys and Pulitzer Prizes (the newspaper has won 22).
“This beautifully curated exhibit tells the history of Miami through the pages of the Miami Herald, in times of triumph as well as adversity,” said the Herald’s publisher and executive editor, Aminda Marqués González, who helped the museum organize the show with Alexandra Villoch, who was publisher when the effort was launched. “Our histories are interwoven. We are grateful for the commitment and extraordinary effort and vision of John Allen, Malcolm Lauredo and the entire museum staff.”
Refracting world events through a Miami point of view, the pages include some must-haves: The sinking of the Titanic in 1912; U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 and the signing of the Armistice the following year; the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941; the deaths of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler; Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba in 1959 and his death in 2016; the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the tumultuous ’60s; the Apollo 11 landing on the moon; the destruction of the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists.
Under the lead headlines sit stories that also helped define their eras, including the drafting of Elvis Presley into the Army in 1958 and the death of actor Rock Hudson from AIDS in 1985, as well as the passing flotsam and trivia that mirror the changing mores and interests of readers and helped complete the varied frontpage menu of news of the day. For decades, the short jokes and one-liners of “Today’s Chuckle” — lame and at times discordant by today’s standards — ran every day in a small box near the bottom of the front page.
There are big local news banners as well, of course: The failed FDR assassination attempt in Bayfront Park in 1933 by an anarchist. The 1979 fatal shootout among rival narcos at Dadeland Mall. And, in 1977, “The Day It Snowed in Miami.”
Several front pages trace the violence and upheaval that shook Miami in the epochal year of 1980 and find their trenchant echoes today: The McDuffie riots after cops who fatally beat a Black motorcyclist were acquitted by an all-white, out-of-town jury. The massive Mariel boatlift from a repressive Cuba. The surge of desperate refugees from a repressive Haiti on flimsy boats that too often ended in tragedy.
Then there are happier, defining moments, often involving the city’s pro sports franchises: The Dolphins sealing their perfect season in 1973. The Marlins winning their first World Series in 1997 and the Heat their first NBA title in 2006.
And there are publishing milestones that reflect Miami’s changing demographics. The exhibit includes the first front pages of el Miami Herald, the newspaper’s Spanish-language edition, on its debut in 1976, and a revamped and expanded version as El Nuevo Herald in 1987.
“I think it tells a story of a city growing,” Allen said of the exhibit. “Even in the way the national news was reported, it definitely had a Miami slant. You can see the difference in the paper, in the reporting. It went from being kind of folksy in the 1950s and then really came of age in the ’60s as a national newspaper with [the revolution in] Cuba and the civil rights movement. Then it becomes a leader in investigative journalism in the 1970s and 1980s. So it tells the whole story of Miami in a sense.”
The exhibit is the work of the small museum’s history division, which puts together one big exhibit annually. It worked on this one for a year in association with the Herald and with support from the Knight Foundation, the legacy of brothers John S. and James L. Knight, its one-time owners and publishers. Allen called it one of most important that the 9-year-old museum, owned by the city of Coral Gables, has originated.
The museum reopened to the general public on June 24 under strict guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Allen said. Visitors must make reservations in advance online to ensure the museum can keep the number of people in the gallery to no more than 20, a fraction of normal capacity. Visitors are also asked to wear a mask and observe social distancing markers.
There’s a personal angle to the exhibit for Allen, a third-generation Miamian who worked briefly at the Herald while in college as a night manager handling circulation in the days before computers. Allen believes the newspaper won’t come to an end like its longtime rival, the Miami News, even as the way it delivers news inevitably changes.
“I grew up like so many people did getting the Herald in the morning and the News in the afternoon,” Allen said, adding he was struck by idea for the exhibit while driving. “I think the Herald will pull through.”
Alongside the front pages, the exhibit lays out how the print paper was laboriously produced over the years, most saliently at One Herald Plaza, the iconic bayfront Miami Modern behemoth the newspaper occupied until it was sold for $236 million to a Malaysian casino operator that demolished it in 2014; the site remains vacant today.
A sprightly 30-minute film produced shortly after the building’s opening plays on a loop. It documents a facility dazzling in its size, design, complexity and technical prowess, including the early use of computers in producing the newspaper and running its massive presses. The film narration boasts that six helicopters could land at once on its rooftop airstrip.
It likens the building to a small self-contained city, with a 24-hour cafeteria and hundreds of employees working in its newsroom, business operations and vast pressroom to produce 11 editions a day.
The ambition of the building and the newspaper were a testament to the forwardlooking Knight brothers. They were the third in a line of owners stretching to
1903, when it was launched by Frank Stoneman as the Miami Evening Record to compete with the established Miami Metropolis (later the Miami News).
Stoneman styled himself as a “progressive” editor battling the domination of an infant Miami by its founding father, railroad magnate Henry Flagler, and providing an alternative to the Flagler-friendly Metropolis. Stoneman refused to allow the Ku Klux Klan to advertise in his newspaper and presciently if unsuccessfully opposed the draining of the Everglades that Flagler heavily backed.
In what was to prove a groundbreaking move, Stoneman would later hire his daughter, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, as his first female reporter. She started on the society page but was gradually allowed to move into “serious” news before going on to write the classic “Everglades: River of Grass” and to play a key role in the creation of Everglades National Park.
“That is where she started to make her mark,” Allen said of Stoneman Douglas’ time at the Herald.
Stoneman’s newspaper grew rapidly along with the city incorporated only a few years earlier, until an economic panic in 1910 put the young publication into receivership. A new owner, lawyer Frank Shutts, rescued it with backing from his principal client, Flagler. But Shutts kept Stoneman on as editor.
A 1910 front page of what was now known as the Miami Morning News-Record carried a plea from Shutts that reverberates today, as Herald managers and staffers publicly ask readers to subscribe to secure the newspapers’ future. If readers did not support his newspaper, Shutts said bluntly,
“it will die.”
Advertisers and subscribers proved faithful. By 1911, renamed The Miami Herald, the newspaper prospered as the city boomed into the 1920s. Daily editions ran to hundreds of pages filled with real estate ads. The exhibit tells the story in large, close type printed directly onto gallery walls.
Under Shutts, the newspaper had to toe the Flagler line, Allen said. But after his death — “Henry M. Flagler Dead” was large-type news in 1913 — the Herald was fully liberated to cover politics as editors saw fit, he said.
That scrutiny was often unstinting. One front page carried three photographs, with taunting captions, of a dirty Dade County sheriff literally sweating through his testimony before the Congressional Kefauver commission that investigated organized crime in Miami and Miami Beach in 1950. One gallery wall describes how in 1946 the Herald, then under the leadership of legendary editor John Pennekamp, won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the paper and other news outlets to criticize the courts in editorials and cartoons.
Artifacts and ephemera from the Herald bring a tactile dimension to its history. There are powerful photo-studio lights from the 1940s providing illumination, curved metal plates once used to print its pages, and the press ID tags of the late Gene Miller, a legendary reporter and editor and a two-time Pulitzer winner.
The piece de resistance is “Uncle Bill,” a 1916 linotype machine, once used to set type, that was in service until 1965, at Herald subsidiary paper The Keynoter in the Florida Keys. After its retirement, it was rescued by pressmen and exhibited at One Herald Plaza until the company moved out in 2013.
The exhibit will be expanding with nine other artifacts donated to the HistoryMiami museum by the Herald, including a scale model of One Herald Plaza and big, chunky satellite phones used by reporters and photographers to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The COVID-19 closures prevented the transfer of the items to Coral Gables.
Even more changes are certain by the time the exhibit wraps up in October, most prominently a new owner of the Miami Herald, to be determined in a sealed-bid auction later in July.
That will no doubt be front-page news.