This past Monday morning, Nashville Banner publisher Irby Simpkins announced that the city’s 122-year-old afternoon newspaper would cease publication at the end of the week. But in the Banner newsroom two hours later, little had changed.
The police scanner was still squawking. Computers were still blinking. And reporters were still being supreme wise-asses.
”I’m supposed to give Peyton Manning the Banner SEC Player of the Year award in a coupla weeks,“ cracked sportswriter Joe Biddle, whom many consider Nashville’s top sports columnist. ”The boy better get down here Friday or it’s going in the trash.“
Nearby, Charlie Appleton, known for his vast contacts in sheriffs’ offices and police departments throughout Middle Tennessee, was collecting bets for the Kentucky Powerball lottery. ”When the total gets high enough, a photographer up there buys us tickets,“ Appleton said. A smile crossing his face, he added, ”As you might imagine, everybody’s going to play real heavy today.“
In another part of the newsroom, a young man hunched over a computer terminal was howling. ”Someone sent me a résumé. What a boob!“ he shouted. Another reporter, scanning a list of jobs posted on the Banner’s computerized bulletin board, found something that interested him. ”It says the Chattanooga Times is hiring a "presentation editor.’ I’d make a great "presentation editor,’ “ he said. ”What the hell is a "presentation editor’ anyway?“
At 5 a.m. Monday, members of the Banner’s executive committee, the group of Banner employees who officially manage the paper, were roused by telephone calls and summoned to a 6:30 a.m. meeting with publisher Simpkins. At that meeting, they were told the news: Because of falling circulation at the paper, and because there wasn’t a turnaround strategy that made any sense, the paper was shutting down. Pat Embry, the Banner’s executive editor and a member of the executive committee, was dispatched to write a lengthy death notice for the paper’s first edition. It was the first deadline news story Embry had written in a decade.
Then, at 7 a.m., Simpkins broke the news to the entire staff. While some may have been shocked, few were surprised. ”I think everybody knew it was coming,“ said news page designer Vince Troia. ”We all just had different theories of when it would happen. Some said six weeks. Six months. Six years.“
After the announcement, reporters consoled one another, clustering in tiny bunches around the city room. At 9:20 a.m., reporter Jim Molpus sent a message across the computer system announcing a wake for the paper. ”Message 3948: Going-away party for, hell, everybody. 4-ish, at Jonathan’s.“ By early afternoon, the destination had changed, and Molpus sent another e-mail out. ”Message 8581: In my last pull of Banner weight, I talked to the owner of the Gerst Haus. He’ll have a nice area ready for us around 4.“
By late afternoon, as countless generations of Banner reporters had done before them, the newspaper’s staffers made their way to the Gerst Haus, long considered the Banner’s ”East Nashville Bureau.“ They gathered there to down fishbowls of beer, one after another, knocking them back in cold, hard swallows.
For over a century, Banner staffers, scores of them every day, have risen long before dawn, driving through the empty streets of a sleeping city, and then, as if by miracle, arriving at the Banner newsroom, a well-lit place that looked as if it were impervious to sleep. There, they would wake people from their beds, ask questions, write stories, edit copy, shoot photographs, lay out pages, and, right on schedule, produce a first edition of a five-section newspaper by lunchtime. Racing against the clock on the wall, competing against the better-armed rival paper next door, struggling to avoid the extinction suffered by so many afternoon newspapers just like their own, they published paper after paper, day after day, writing for less pay than their Tennessean competition, being read by fewer readers, and, oftentimes, reaping less glory for what they had done. Often, at the end of the day, it was all they could do to retire to the Gerst Haus to review what they had accomplished. Or, sometimes, to lick their wounds.
Over its 122-year history, the Banner developed a distinct newsroom culture that was defined, first and foremost, by the people who owned and operated it. For nine decades, the afternoon paper was ruled by the Stahlmans, a family of German immigrants who espoused a no-holds-barred, conservative Republican philosophy. After the Stahlmans, the paper was briefly owned by the Gannett corporation. And then, for the last 19 years, the Banner was shaped by Irby Simpkins, its part-owner and business-oriented publisher. Simpkins, who shared 50-50 ownership of the paper with Brownlee Currey Jr., saw the Banner through countless fights and struggles.
Although the Banner’s editorial stance was defined from on high by its owners, its voice and its personality were defined from below, by its reporters and photographers. In the last three decades of the paper’s life, when the Banner’s circulation started declining, that personality had become increasingly scrappy, kick-butt, sassy. ”We were always the overachieving underdogs,“ said Embry, the executive editor. ”We felt like we always wanted to have the edge.“
According to Tam Gordon, who earned a glowing reputation during her 13-and-a-half years covering Metro Government and the federal courts for the paper, ”This was the Banner’s voice: That you always knew you were No. 2. That you always had to work harder. You were always tough, and you were always hard-hitting.“
As countless Banner reporters and editors would learn, an afternoon newspaper had very little time to break real news: Because The Tennessean could report anything that happened in the city until about midnight, the Banner could only report events that had gone on from midnight until early in the morning. And those are the hours when not much happens. Banner reporters had to become ingenious, crafty, and, oftentimes, artful, double-dealing to develop sources and break news that the rival paper didn’t have.
The time crunch was partially responsible for the paper’s struggles, but other realities actually spelled the end of the Banner as a business. In particular, the day was gone when most people wanted to read the afternoon paper when they got home at the end of the day. Beginning in the early ’70s, the paper lost steadily in the circulation game. In the last year or so, it had gone into what looked like a total freefall.
At its healthiest point, the Banner posted circulation figures in excess of 100,000. But in just the five months since last September, circulation had plummeted an alarming 10.5 percent to something below 40,000. Only six years earlier, the paper’s circulation had been 62,000. Projections showed that in a little more than two years, the Banner’s circulation was likely to fall to a pitiful 25,000.
For Simpkins, the decision to close the paper—while an emotional one—couldn’t have been exactly rocket science. Seated in his paper’s conference room and discussing the decision, he spoke in a hoarse voice. (Not only had he just announced that he was shutting down his newspaper; his mother had just been hospitalized too.) He said he had ”turned over every rock to figure out“ an answer to the Banner’s circulation problems, but ultimately he had come to the unavoidable conclusion: ”We didn’t have a clue.“
According to Simpkins, in hopes of ending the bloodbath, there was talk of a major editorial shift, one that would have turned the Banner into a ”Middle Tennessee only“ newspaper, making it even more local than it already was. When he discussed that strategy with insiders in the news business, however, ”they said I should think instead of closing it.“ Simpkins said his immediate response was ”not only åno,’ but åheck no.’ They said it sometimes makes sense to do it with dignity and with money to help bridge the disaster. They also told me I had a responsibility to myself and to [co-owner Brownlee] Currey.“
Simpkins and Currey, along with attorney John Jay Hooker, bought the Banner in 1979 for a purchase price of $25 million. The next year, in a bitter and acrimonious business dispute, Hooker was jettisoned, and Currey and Simpkins became 100-percent owners of the paper. Simpkins oversaw business and editorial operations, while Currey’s involvement was more passive.
Simpkins said he and Currey whittled the Banner’s debt to $12.7 million, where it stands today. The entire amount is owed to Gannett Co., the parent corporation of The Tennessean. Since 1937, the two papers have been published under a joint operating agreement. Under the terms of that contract, they have shared advertising, business, and printing operations, while maintaining separate editorial staffs.
”So I initiated talks with Gannett,“ Simpkins said. Negotiations got under way in mid-January, he said, after he had consulted with Currey and a few other associates. ”Essentially,“ Simpkins said, ”the agreement is just that we stop publishing.“
Simpkins declined to say how much he and Currey were paid for their shares of the paper. Gannett, as well, declined to disclose the purchase price.
More than likely, Simpkins and Currey received healthy buy-outs for their shares in the Banner, but the end does not seem to have been easy for Simpkins. With tears clouding his glasses, he talked about the Banner’s mission under his ownership, its attempts to ”inform the electorate,“ to be a ”vehicle of communication between those in power and those who are without,“ its struggle to become a ”newspaper of record with quality writers and quality photographers.“ If his remarks sounded a trifle pre-scripted, Simpkins did not take long in getting down to the truth about his paper. ”You know,“ he said, ”one of the great things about the Banner was that we couldn’t be intimidated.“
Unlike The Tennessean, where much of the editorial content, layout, and design suggests its corporate ownership and a chronic disassociation from the community it is assigned to cover, the Banner, under Simpkins and Currey, has been inextricably tied to the city, its residents, and its institutions. Simpkins’ critics have called his policies wrongheaded and have accused him of mounting crusades driven more by his personal stakes than the betterment of the city. But he never shied away from a fight. His reporters were always encouraged to act boldly and speak loudly. And they never lost sight of the fact that they were there to cover local people and local issues.
When Simpkins became publisher in 1982, the Banner’s city room, like Nashville’s city fathers, could only stand back and watch in amazement. Compared to many of the milquetoast daily newspaper products dominating the American landscape today, the Banner under Simpkins had more fury than a paper three times its size.
The paper got into plenty of worthwhile scrapes, but others were simply jousting at windmills. Simpkins’ first widely publicized struggle came when he plunged Metro Council and the local business community into a conflict over the construction of the Third National Financial Center. The Banner took the position that Metro did not have the right to exercise eminent domain over a merchant whose tiny shop would have to be destroyed to make way for the new building.
Within months, the paper set its sights on running Glenn Ferguson, the Metro Trustee, out of office. Ferguson was extremely close to the Evans family, publishers of The Tennessean. When Banner reporters turned up all sorts of improprieties in Ferguson’s office, they smiled smugly at their competitors from the morning paper.
Later, Simpkins set in motion a much-needed, far-reaching plan for court reform in Tennessee. After hundreds of stories in the Banner, the state Legislature adopted a wide-ranging reform plan. Simpkins dispatched reporters hither and yon to investigate George Gillette, the owner of WSMV-Channel 4. He became involved in a bitter race in the state’s fourth congressional district, where his brother, Joe, was running as a Republican against Bart Gordon. Joe Simpkins lost, but the battle was nasty, brutal, and long.
In the mid-’80s, Irby Simpkins got in his car and drove out to the governor’s residence to tell fellow Republican Lamar Alexander he didn’t know a thing about running prisons. Within a week, Alexander was holding press conferences to talk about prison reform.
When Democrat Ned Ray McWherter ran against Winfield Dunn in 1986, Simpkins and his paper went all out for Dunn, and Banner reporters were dispatched to research federal farm subsidies to McWherter properties. But just months after McWherter’s victory, Ned Ray and Irby were acting like best friends.
Historically speaking, life under Irby Simpkins was never boring. When Nashville began talking about building a convention center, he raised worthwhile questions, the same sort of hard questions he would ask about Metro’s decision to help the Oilers move to town. The paper never retreated. Simpkins refused to wave the white flag of surrender.
In many ways, the paper was only living out its historical credo. The Banner was never a place for sissies.
Amidst fires, cholera outbreaks, a shaky economy, and a countryside laid waste by a civil war, the Nashville Banner began publication on April 10, 1876. The year marked the U.S. centennial, and the new paper’s logo featured an eagle gripping the nation’s flag in its talons.
According to a history of the Banner, published in 1951, the initial investment in the paper was $2,500. Its first issue ran to four pages; 3,000 papers were printed. Reporters turned in their copy in longhand, and they got by without telephones and photographs.
The paper barely made it through the year.
Inside the Banner’s offices, which were located where the downtown Arcade now intersects Fourth Avenue, three of the original stockholders feared the worst and sold out. During the second year, matters were not much improved. To get by, managers cut the typesetters’ pay. In response, the typesetters went on strike.
Three fires struck the paper in its first decade, which is the reason no copy of the Banner’s first edition exists. But fire wasn’t the worst threat against the paper. The Banner feared what most newspaper owners still fear today: a libel suit. And it was a lawsuit that ushered in a new era of ownership for the Banner, one that would last through the 1970s.
In the 1880s, the paper’s editor-in-chief was Gideon H. Baskette, who had entered the Confederate Army at age 16 and fought from Shiloh through Bentonville. But Baskette came to woe when he wrote an editorial blasting the state for its treatment of prisoners. A libel suit followed. While damages were eventually assessed at only $51, the paper’s debt had ballooned to $135,000 because of legal bills and other expenses. In need of help, Baskette turned to a vice-president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, Maj. Edward Bushrod Stahlman.
Stahlman, the son of a German schoolteacher, had arrived in America as a 10-year-old. Initially, he would chip in $55,000 to aid Baskette, but he came to own the entire paper.
Driven from Germany because of what they viewed as government persecution, the Stahlman family revered America, its freedoms and liberties. Those were the themes that would dominate the family’s editorial positions in the Banner for the next nine decades.
The Stahlman voice was loud, aggressive, no-nonsense. According to a Banner history, E.B. Stahlman was ”very fond of newspaper editorials and his friends suspected that this had as much to do with his taking over the Banner as anything else.“ Upon Maj. Stahlman’s death in 1930, ownership of the paper stayed in the family, with his grandson James G. ”Jimmy“ Stahlman being named publisher. By the 1950s, the younger Stahlman had acquired sole ownership of the Banner.
Maj. Stahlman had plunged the paper into disputes about railroad construction, prohibition, law enforcement, and an independent judiciary, but Jimmy Stahlman turned the volume up even louder, shaping the newspaper into a bully pulpit for post-World War II conservatism, both good and bad. Stahlman was a fireplug of a man. A fighter and a patriot, he had served in World War I as a private in the infantry and would serve as an officer in the Naval Reserve in World War II. His front-page column, ”From the Shoulder,“ although frequently written in verse, was filled with tough military talk, urging America to take an aggressive role. One Banner tribute described his ”phenomenal vocabulary of colorful explosives,“ as well as his ”deep conception of fundamental Americanism“ and his ”keen vision of what lies ahead.“
Stahlman also had a reputation, in many quarters, as a bigot. He attacked communism. He decried government infiltration by the Reds. He saw the world being taken over by Communists, or other insidious forces. He pledged undying support for the Bill of Rights. He vowed to crush a centralized federal government. He also didn’t see the virtues of racial integration.
Robert Churchwell remembers being hired in 1950 as the first black reporter in the Banner newsroom. In fact, he was the first black reporter at any major daily newspaper in the Southeast. Churchwell, who worked at the Banner for 31 years covering mostly education, says he was hired in an attempt to attract black readers to the paper. Before he was hired, Churchwell recalls, the Banner included a one-page ”slip“ featuring ”Happenings in the Colored Community.“ The ”slip“ page would be removed in white areas of town. Churchwell puts it succinctly: ”Under Stahlman, the Banner was a racist paper.“
Like every other city in the South in the ’50s and ’60s, Nashville was struggling with the issue of race. Invariably, the Banner took outmoded editorial positions on the issue, speaking out against James Lawson’s being allowed to continue as a student at the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, where Stahlman was on the Board of Trust. Stahlman feared a race war, decried ”agitators“ in the black community, and fomented discontent over any proposals to desegregate the city. At the height of the city’s racial tension, Stahlman went so far as to purchase rifles for his editorial board, telling them that if the newspaper were overrun in a race war, they could use the guns to protect themselves.
Stahlman’s stance on race would dog the Banner for years. Long after he was gone, reporters still struggled to repair the damage that had been done. Some would say the fissures were never completely healed.
If segregation was Stahlman’s biggest fight, his greatest foe may have been John Jay Hooker. Staunchly allied with The Tennessean, where his good friends John Seigenthaler and Amon Carter Evans were in charge as editor and owner, respectively, Hooker launched gubernatorial campaigns in 1966 and 1970. Stahlman fiercely opposed him, running front-page attacks that were in direct opposition to the front-page pro-Hooker salvos that appeared in The Tennessean.
Such disputes between the two newspapers were nothing new. From its beginnings in the 19th century, the Banner had competed vigorously with the Nashville American, which later merged with the Nashville Tennessean in 1910. Over time, the differences between the two papers became evident: The Stahl-man family was upper-crust Belle Meade, wealthy, and associated with the city’s business classes. The Tennessean, which was later purchased in 1937 by the Evans family, who were Texas Democrats, was more attuned to the common man and working-class issues.
In promoting Hooker, The Tennessean expanded circulation as far west as Jackson to get out the message. Meanwhile, Stahlman’s diatribes continued. In one article, he described Hooker arriving at the Stahlman home to make a peace offering. (According to Stahlman, Hooker had drunk his liquor and propped his feet on a table.) During the gubernatorial campaign, Stahlman assigned reporter Ken Morrell to follow Hooker, with the sole purpose of writing negative stories about him.
In 1972 Stahlman sold his paper to Gannett for $14 million. Then, in 1979, Gannett decided to sell the Banner and buy The Tennessean instead. In an ironic twist of fate, Hooker engineered the deal and joined Simpkins and Currey as one of the paper’s three owners. After landing at the Banner, Hooker walked into the newsroom, picked up the telephone, and fired Ken Morrell.
Over time, the papers’ political alignments would grow more blurry. The Banner became less Republican under Simpkins; The Tennessean, under Gannett, became less Democratic. As a result, there would be less contrast between the two papers, and their editorial voices, unfortunately, would become almost indistinguishable. With the rough edges gone, there was less for the newspaper-reading public to enjoy.
While The Tennessean sent its reporters on to The New York Times or the CBS Evening News, Banner alumni frequently moved on to run the city of Nashville, emerging as powerbrokers in business, society, and politics.
Former Gov. Lamar Alexander once worked at the Banner. So did the likes of Mike Pigott, David Fox, Keith Miles, and Tom Ingram, all of whom have played important roles in recent political campaigns in Tennessee. Rich Riebeling, a former Fulton aide; Ken Renner, a former McWherter aide; Tam Gordon, a former Bredesen aide; and Beth Fortune, a Sundquist aide, all put in time as political reporters for the Banner.
Charles Overby, a former Banner editor, is now chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center. Greg Burns, who handled finances at the Banner, is chief executive officer at O’Charley’s. Larry Brinton, WTVF-Channel 5’s ”Street Talk“ reporter, Pete Bird at the Frist Foundation, Music Row executive Walter Campbell, public relations executive Paula Lovell, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center spokesman Bill Hance are all Banner alums.
Eddie Jones, who began work at the Banner shortly after World War II, later became head of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. The late Neil Cunningham moved on to First American Bank, where he helped implement many business initiatives. Roy Neel, a Banner sportswriter, recently stepped down as chief of staff for Al Gore; he remains one of the vice president’s closest advisors.
For years, Emmie Keeble, the paper’s society editor, virtually ruled the city’s social scene, writing under the ”Betty Banner“ nom de plume. Over the years, her assistants included Alyne Massey, now an international socialite, and the late Ida Cooney, who went on to become a driving force behind the establishment of the Nashville Community Foundation.
But many of the reporters who passed through the Banner newsroom did not come from genteel families. In fact, many of them came from the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of East Nashville. ”I worked at the Banner for 47 years, starting as a copy boy,“ says Jack Gunter, who grew up just over the river in less than wealthy circumstances. Soon promoted to photographer, he found himself doing society pictures. ”Hell, I’d never seen any of those homes in Belle Meade before,“ Gunter remembers. ”I’ll never forget those times when I went out there. It wasn’t long before I knew everybody. If I had my life to live over again, I’d do it all exactly the same.“
Any newspaper is a place of colorful characters and rich legends that only grow richer with time.
”You’d look over at the coat rack a lot of times, and half of the coats would have whiskey bottles hanging out of them,“ Gunter recalls. ”Lots of folks kept half-pints in their desks,“ adds Eddie Jones, who covered the police beat for a while before being named to a new beat as the paper’s TV reporter. One day, Jones says, he got up the gumption to ask editor Charlie Moss for some equipment he needed to write his column. ”I said, åMr. Moss, if I’m gonna keep writing this, I better get a TV.’ Moss said, åYou mean you don’t have a TV and you’re our TV reporter? How the heck are you covering your beat?’ I told him, åPress releases mostly, then I go down to Harvey’s and watch them through the window.’ “
In those days, a newsroom was something out of a movie or the first act of The Front Page—typewriters clacking, Associated Press and United Press International wire machines spitting out copy, and everybody smoking. ”When you finished a cigarette, you just ground it into the linoleum floor,“ Jones recalls.
One of the most popular stunts among reporters was to drop a lighted firecracker in a wastebasket or to toss it under a fellow reporter’s chair. The explosions continued until Charlie Moss grew tired of them and issued an edict: The next person to shoot off a firecracker in the newsroom would be summarily fired.
Nevertheless, one day in the early ’50s, Moss heard yet another explosion. He rushed to the newsroom, announcing that somebody was going to be fired. As it turned out, the guilty party was Jimmy Stahlman, who had just heard that Strom Thurmond had announced his candidacy for the presidency as a Dixiecrat. To celebrate, Stahlman had set off a pint-sized cannon.
Jones remembers other pyrotechnics. In 1951, Stahlman ordered that an anthem be written to celebrate the Banner’s 75th anniversary, and bandleader Francis Craig was commissioned to write the Nashville Banner March. It was Jones’ job to have 10,000 copies of the record printed, but only a few people seemed to want them. ”What we found we could do is stick a firecracker in the middle of the record, light the fuse, and fling it over into The Tennessean newsroom,“ says Jones. ”They would burst in the air, like shrapnel.“
Jones’ and Gunter’s stories have a mythic quality about them, but they are the sort of stories newspaper people always seem to be able to tell. They are the sort of stories that will be passed along by the current generation of Banner reporters—the last generation, the ones who now find themselves suddenly unemployed.
Nashville now finds itself deprived of dozens of journalists whose words have graced the grimy newsprint on which the Banner was printed. Gone will be Mary ”Mrs. Cheap“ Hance, Beth Stein, and Ruth Ann Leach. Gone are Jeff Wilkinson, Bob Battle, Joe Biddle, Leon Alligood, Bill Snyder, and Pat Embry. Gone will be Albert Davis the copy clerk, and Tom Norman the obit writer, and Frances Meeker the religion reporter. Gone will be the photographers, who always groused about being given stupid photo assignments and being ordered to run errands. Many will get jobs—some of them at The Tennessean. But it will never be the same.
I have my own memories of those people and of life at the Banner. I remember my first day of work there in 1983. I remember that it was before dawn, and I came upon that well-lit place. I did not know how to write a lede. I did not know how to quote a source. All I did know when I walked into the Banner newsroom that first morning at 6 o’clock was that I had found a place with more energy and vitality than any place I had ever seen before. I knew I wanted to be part of it.
Like just about every other Banner reporter, I had my differences with Irby Simpkins. In the end, however, I remember the struggle as a shared one. I have run my memory through the filters of time, and now they come back to me positively.
They are stories of times that were bright and fun. Now they will be no more.
