When I went to work for The Evening Sun in 1978, it was one of two afternoon papers in Baltimore. The other was the News American, the Hearst paper published in the lower end of town near the then-gritty harbor. There were clear differences between the two dailies — the News was said to have the edge in blue-collar neighborhoods like Highlandtown and Locust Point — but the competition between those two papers was far less interesting than what I was to discover inside the Calvert Street offices of The Sunpapers, as the A.S. Abell Co.’s business was then known.
There, two completely separate and independent newspapers — The Sun, more commonly referred to as the morning Sun, and The Evening Sun — existed literally side by side on the fifth floor. Each had its own staff of reporters, editors, copy editors and editorial assistants. Morning reporters occupied the north end of the newsroom and evening reporters the south. Separating them were the glass-walled wire room and the copy desk, an anonymous, H-shaped configuration of desks that would be my ‘‘office’’ for the next four years.
From early morning through midafternoon the copy
desk was occupied by Evening Sun copy editors. But about 4 p.m. and until well past midnight, it became morning Sun territory. Occasionally, The Sun’s ‘‘late man’’ and The Evening Sun’s early wire editor might cross paths about 3 a.m., but otherwise each staff behaved as though the other didn’t exist.
Besides the physical copy desk, morning and evening papers shared the library, the photo department and the wire room, all staffed by editorially ‘‘neutral’’ employees serving both newspapers. It was an unusual situation but not unheard of at a time when most cities had more than one newspaper and many had two papers under single ownership.
There were obvious differences in the two papers on Calvert Street. The Sun, at 140 years old, was steeped in tradition and breathed an air of excellence. By the late 1970s it had nine Pulitzer Prizes to its credit, albeit from the 1930s and ’40s, operated foreign bureaus in the major capitals of the world and produced consistently gray pages. It was the city’s paper of record.
The Evening Sun, on the other hand, was clearly the underdog. While it would send reporters abroad
From the December 1980 employee newsletter ‘‘Between Editions,’’ a scene from the Ugly Tie Contest. Cutline reads, ‘‘Hopefuls, but just not bad enough, listen to judges hand down the worst of it. Left to right: Horace Ayers, Frank Rackemann, Sonja Rossback, Al Haynes, Steve Purchase and Phyllis Brill.
Images on this page and next courtesy of Ross Hetrick.
Fun, fun, fun on staff of a scrappy underdog
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