August 15, 1966: The New York Herald Tribune Folds

The July 15, 1953 edition

August 15, 1966, 60 years ago: The New York Herald Tribune publishes its last edition, ending a great tradition of journalism.

New York had been a newspaper city for over 100 years. Even the growth of radio hadn't stopped that. Nor had the 1924 merger of the Herald, once the paper of James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr., with the Tribune, once the paper of Horace Greeley and the leading voice of the drive to abolish slavery in America prior to the Civil War.

Nor had the merger of the morning American and the afternoon Journal, both owned by William Randolph Hearst's company, in 1937. Nor had the merger of the World, once the paper of Joseph Pulitzer and the publisher of The World Almanac, with the Telegram in 1931, or the 1950 merger of the combined "World-Telly" with The Sun, the paper that declared in an 1897 editorial, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

Nor had radio really hurt the newspaper business. Quite the contrary: Many of the early radio stations were founded by newspapers, and provided a great new source of revenue for them. Indeed, Chicago's best-known radio station, WGN, was founded by The Chicago Tribune, which named the station for the nickname it had chosen for itself: "The World's Greatest Newspaper."

But what radio didn't do, or even try to do, television, however inadvertently, did: It killed the institutions of the afternoon newspaper and the evening newspaper. It was bad enough for papers that there was a 6:00 news broadcast on local TV stations every night. But with the addition of an 11:00 news for when people were going to bed, and the promos throughout prime-time programming of a story they could watch on the news, with the tagline, "Film at 11," the need for an afternoon or an evening paper was gone.

Then came the newspaper strike of late 1962 and early 1963. New York has had newspaper strikes since, but no strike in the history of the American labor movement has hurt an industry more than this one. Several of the papers never recovered. The Mirror published its last edition on October 16, 1963.

The remaining papers did whatever they could to survive, from cutting costs by laying off famous columnists to appealing to the rising Baby Boom generation. The Journal-American, in particular, had gambled on gaining younger readers with heavy coverage of The Beatles' visits in 1964 and 1965, something you wouldn't expect a conservative broadsheet to do.

They even hired the famed "pop psychologist," Dr. Joyce Brothers, to analyze the Beatles from a distance. And they had the top entertainment columnist in New York, Dorothy Kilgallen, "The Voice of Broadway" and one of the panelists on CBS' What's My Line?, write about rock and roll for the first time.

But they lost their biggest asset on November 8, 1965, when Kilgallen died, apparently from an accidental overdose of pills, at the age of 52. The next year, a long-running power struggle between Hearst company CEO Richard Berlin and the Hearst family did the paper in. The paper's last edition was published on April 24, 1966.

The E.W. Scripps Company gave up on the World-Telegram & Sun the day before, April 23, 1966. The Daily News bought the rights to The World Almanac, and its parent company still publishes it today, although it's really a waste of money, given how easy it is to look things up on the Internet.

The Herald Tribune, long the beacon of America's "liberal Republicans," with one of the finest sports sections in the country, hung on a little longer, until August 15, 1966. It was the most direct competitor to The New York Times, which eulogized:

The death of The New York Herald Tribune stills a voice that for a century and a quarter exerted a powerful influence in the affairs of nation, state and city. It was a competitor of ours, but a competitor that sought survival on the basis of quality, originality and integrity, rather than sensationalism or doctrinaire partisanship.

For a while, the 3 papers that failed that year tried to band together: The World Journal Tribune began publishing on September 12, 1966. But instead of combining the best aspects of all 3 papers, it seemed to combine the worst ones, and the money problems of all 3. The WJT, or "Widget," never caught on, and Scripps (W-T&S) and Hearst (J-A) pulled the plug on May 5, 1967.

And so, New York City, which had 10 daily newspapers as recently as 1924, and 7 as recently as the Summer of 1963, was down to 3: The Times, the Daily News and the Post. The Daily News and the Post have each survived 2 existential crises since then, as well as their ideological flip-flop of 1976: Rupert Murdoch bought the Post, turning it from a paper for liberal intellectuals, especially Jewish ones, to a populist conservative paper, as the Daily News had been; and the News then became a liberal paper, though still taking conservative positions on crime in New York (helping Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani get elected Mayor), the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Cuba.

I like to say that the Times is the face that New York City likes to show the rest of the world, the Daily News is the face it likes to show to itself, and the Post is a face only a mother could love. But not my mother, nor hers. Grandma, a Queens native, had nothing good to say about any New York paper except the Times. In particular, she said the Mirror was "lousy."

Dave Anderson, 1929-2018

You know the old saying, "Will the last one to leave, please turn out the lights?" Dave Anderson was proud to say that, at the last Brooklyn Dodger home game, on September 24, 1957, he was the last sportswriter out of the press box, and he turned out the lights.

David Poole Anderson was born on May 6, 1929 in Troy, New York, across the Hudson River from the State capital of Albany. His father was the advertising director of The Troy Times, and his grandfather was its publisher. So, as the saying goes, he had "printer's ink in his blood."

But his father moved the family to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and got an advertising sales job with The New York Sun. Dave graduated from Xavier High School in 1947, by which point he was a messenger for The Sun. Like basketball star George Kaftan, who graduated from Xavier 2 years earlier, he went to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1951.

By that point, The Sun had merged with The New York World-Telegram. In 1953, Dave became the Brooklyn Dodgers' beat reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. In early 1955 -- timing is everything -- the paper whose giant 1941 headline introduced the phrase "WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR" to the Brooklyn lexicon went out of business, just 9 months before the Dodgers finally won the World Series. (Today, only one daily paper specifically covers one Borough alone: The Staten Island Advance.) Dave was still able to cover the '55 Dodgers, as he'd been hired by the New York Journal-American. It was while covering the Dodgers for them that he turned out the lights in the Ebbets Field press box.

In 1966, the Journal-American, the aforementioned World-Telegram & Sun, and the New York Herald Tribune all went out of business, following the New York Mirror in 1963. All of these papers were pretty much done in by the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63. As with many other New York newspaper writers, including sportswriters, Dave Anderson was hired by one of the surviving big three: The Daily News, the New York Post, or, in his case, The New York Times.

The Times gave him a regular column in 1971. The writers' associations for pro football and boxing gave him their achievement awards, the Dick McCann Memorial Award and the Nat Fleischer Award, respectively. In 1981, he became only the 2nd sportswriter to win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, after fellow Times writer Red Smith. In 1990, he was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, joining fellow Times writers Smith, Arthur Daley and John Kieran.

He retired in 2007, but still contributed an occasional column, the last being on the U.S. Open in August 2017.

He lived in Tenafly, Bergen County, New Jersey with his wife Maureen, with whom he had 3 children. After her death in 2014, he moved into an assisted living facility in nearby Cresskill. He died there yesterday, October 4, 2018, apparently of a heart attack, at age 89.

His lights have now been turned out, but his light still shines brightly.

UPDATE: His final resting place is not publicly known.