Remembering Gil Spencer, newspaperman

CHUCK STONE might have said it best: "A tall Ichabod Crane of a man with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and a lilt in his step, Gil Spencer carried this city's soul in his heart."

The former Daily News columnist had Gil Spencer pretty well pegged in just a few words. But it would take more than a few words to capture that brilliant, eccentric, iconoclastic newsman who made the Philadelphia Daily News in his own image during his nine years as editor.

Gil ran newspapers before the Daily News and newspapers after the Daily News, but there was little doubt that he had a fondness for his hometown paper and left it in 1984 with serious reservations.

"Occasionally, somebody will ask me what I do for a living," he wrote in his weekly column in 1979. "And I'll say that I go to Broad and Callowhill, enter a large, white building, take an elevator to the seventh floor, walk into a mental institution known as the Philadelphia Daily News and watch the show."

But Gil Spencer was the show.

Frederick Gilman Spencer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, scion of a Social Register family, who, during a storied career, edited the Daily News, the Trentonian, the New York Daily News and the Denver Post, died Friday. He was 85 and lived in Manhattan.

Gil Spencer was a force to be reckoned with. And hard to overlook. He had a compelling personality and a knack for knowing news and how to present it.

Zachary Stalberg, who was Gil's executive editor and succeeded him as editor 1984, said that Gil was "the best newspaperman I ever met. And the best human being."

Beneath Gil's eccentricities and a sense of fun, Stalberg said yesterday, was a seriousness about his devotion to the Daily News and its people.

"There was a quality in him that I think many people forget - that if the newspaper or his people were under assualt in any way, he was there. He was a great leader. It was his people, right or wrong, in the best sense of that phrase.

"He was tremendous fun to be around. The toughest thing for me was getting out of his office. I would drop in in the morning and we would be talking, or ranting, or he'd be trying to teach me about horses, and next thing I knew it was 11 o'clock."

When Gil brought Stalberg in from his beat at City Hall to become city editor, "I had no idea what he saw in me. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me professionally.

"Working with him was one of the best experiences I ever had."

Stalberg had made a name for himself and the Daily News when he shook up the city by persuading then-Mayor Frank Rizzo and Democratic leader Peter J. Camiel to take lie-detector tests to see who was lying about a political deal that Rizzo supposedly had tried to engineer. Camiel passed; Rizzo failed.

Stalberg advanced to managing editor in 1977 and executive editor in 1979. He took over as editor when Gil left for New York. He is now executive director of the Committee of Seventy.

Gil was a legendary lover of the racetrack and once owned a thoroughbred named Rufus Primus.

"I knew it wasn't going to be a great day when my race horse broke from the starting gate and hit his head on the gate," he wrote in a 1984 column, as he was pondering whether to leave the Philly Daily News for the New York Daily News.

"After staggering a furlong or so like a Tasmanian wood ferret who'd eaten too many fermented berries," Gil wrote, "the horse ran the race of his life. Lost, though."

In the same column he wrote, "Every time I get as jumpy as a demented Patagonian swamp gerbil, I can just lean on the rail and figure out an exacta."

What he was trying to convey in a column riddled with quirky metaphors was how difficult it was to decide to leave the Philly Daily News, of which he had been editor since 1975, and move to the Big Apple.

Actually, he already had made the decision, as anguished as it was, but it was apparent after a few years that New York was not nearly as much fun as Philly.

Gil reportedly didn't get along with Jim Hoge, his boss in New York. Jim Willse, who was managing editor under Gil in New York, told the Denver Post that Gil had arrived at the New York paper when it "was sort of wandering." He said that Gil "gave it a much better sense of being a working-class paper in New York."

Willse obviously recognized Gil's unique character. "He was part comedian, part chaplain, part cheerleader," Willse said. "When he was in the newsroom, you knew he was there. The energy level went up; the sense of fun went up."

Gil became editor of the Denver Post in 1989.

"When he came in, we didn't know from one day to the next whether things would keep going," said Neil Westergaard, the Post's city editor at the time and now editor of the Denver Business Journal.

"He came in and just made people feel great about what they were doing. There was nothing you wouldn't try to do for this guy, to match his enthusiasm."

Gil ran the Denver Post until 1993, when he retired.

A lot of Gil's eccentric personality and erratic sense of humor emerged in his weekly columns.

A dull column, he once wrote, would "bore the socks off an ox." He pictured a disgruntled editor "sitting in a dark corner, stroking what appears to be an amulet made of Javanese ferret fur and seal whiskers."

What mad genius could come up with those allusions?

Gil was born in Philadelphia to F. Gilman Spencer, a prominent lawyer and assistant deputy state attorney general, and the former Elizabeth Hetherington. His father died in 1950 at age 54 of burns suffered in a fire in his apartment.

The son was destined for private schools, in keeping with the status of his blue-blood heritage. He was registered at birth at the exclusive Groton School, in Massachusetts. He started at Episcopal Academy and entered Groton at age 13.

He wound up at Swarthmore High School after his parents broke up. He was hardly a scholar. In fact, he was flunking every course and was stashed in the shop class.

"But they sat me over in the corner because they were afraid I might hurt myself on the machinery," he told Maury Levy for a profile in Philadelphia Magazine.

He dropped out of Swarthmore and joined the Navy. He earned a high-school diploma after the Navy.

The lack of a college education made it difficult to get a job after his service. He once wrote that an aptitude tester told him to either commit suicide or go into the newspaper business.

After striking out at various papers, he was hired as a copyboy by the Inquirer for $12 a week. He subsequently joined the Chester Times, now the Delaware County Daily Times, where he learned to be a reporter. He worked briefly as a sports reporter for the Mount Holly (N.J.) Herald before returning to Chester.

In 1951, he married Patricia Ann Ballagh. The mariage ended in divorce, and in 1965 he married Isabel Caroline Brannon, a Bryn Mawr College grad who arrived at the Daily News that year as its first female police reporter.

Isabel had worked with Gil at the Main Line Times, in Ardmore, where Gil became editor in 1959. She said that he was "the best editor I ever had. He was a combination of somebody who was fun and worked hard. He loved his staff.

"He was a very loving person," Isabel said. "He had a largeness of spirit."

Gil left the Main Line Times in 1963, and had a brief stint with the old Philadelphia Bulletin, where he didn't get along with the city editor and quit after about a year.

He became WCAU-TV's editorial director and remained for three years before he returned to newspapers as editor of the Trentonian, a tabloid in Trenton, N.J.

It was there that he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for exposing wrongdoing in New Jersey government.

He left for the Philadelphia Daily News in 1975.

"Philadelphia is weird, but it's the best town in the country to be in if you're a newspaperman," he told Levy. "Who else has Rizzo? Who else has anything close to him? It's a cuckoo town, but it's great."

Gil took over from Rolfe Neill, a Southerner who was not popular with the staff. Gil felt that he had his work cut out for him getting the staff to work together again.

He made a number of staff changes and brought in Stalberg to run the city desk, but it was Gil's personality and sense of fun, passed on to the people who worked for him, that shaped the Daily News into the frisky tabloid it became.

Besides his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Amy Becker, Blair Margel and Isabel "Charlie"; two sons, Gil Spencer IV, a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and Jonathan; 10 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Services: Celebration of life service 2 p.m. Thursday at the Church of the Ascension, 5th Avenue and 10th Street, New York.

Donations in Gil's memory may be made to: Gil Spencer Scholarship Fund, CU Foundation, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Colorado at Boulder, 4740 Walnut St., Boulder, CO 80301.