DENVER—F. Gilman Spencer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a former editor of The Denver Post, the Daily News in New York and the Philadelphia Daily News, died Friday in New York City. He was 85.
Spencer died at New York University Langone Medical Center. He had been undergoing treatment for a persistent infection.
Gil Spencer served as editor of the Post from 1989 to 1993, capping a four-decade career at newspapers in Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York. His editorials on political corruption in New Jersey for The Trentonian won a Pulitzer in 1974.
“You cannot believe the prose he used in describing the politicians we were chasing, the machines we were trying to break up,” Herbert Stern, a lawyer who was U.S. attorney prosecuting several of New Jersey’s political machines at the time, told the Post.
It was Stern who nominated Spencer for the Pulitzer.
“I was just amazed at the unabashed, unrestrained fearlessness with which he attacked the establishment. He was extraordinary,” Stern said.
Spencer served as editor at the Philadelphia Daily News for nine years, and in 1984 he moved to New York’s Daily News.
“The biggest Spencer legacy might have been that at a time when the paper was sort of wandering, he came in and gave it a much better sense of being a working class paper for New York,” said Jim Willse, who was Spencer’s managing editor in New York.
“He was the right guy at the right time. 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.”
Spencer joined the Post in 1989, convinced by William Dean Singleton, chief executive of ap, to come West at a time when the newspaper’s circulation lagged behind the Rocky Mountain News.
“The only order I was given was to settle it down and do my own thing,” Spencer told the American Journalism Review in 1995.
“When he came in, we didn’t know from one day to the next whether things would keep going,” said Neil Westergaard, who was the Post’s city editor at the time and now is 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.”
The enthusiasm was palpable, even if Denver and city-bred Spencer didn’t initially seem an obvious match. Colleagues recalled that while the Spencer touch could be colorful and breezy, his focus was on heavy-hitting, in-depth reporting. And it was as hands-on as possible.
“It was clear early he didn’t want to be there, but then it just got into his blood and the Post became his,” said Michael Connelly, former executive sports editor at the Post. “He decided he was going to obsess on the Post like he did at every other paper he edited.”
Connelly recalled when Spencer, having endured a series of sports editors, suddenly called him over and gave him his long-awaited big break.
“Without warning, Gil says, never looking up or even making eye contact, while fumbling through papers on his desk: ‘OK, you little (expletive),'” Connelly recalled. “‘You have 20 minutes with the publisher right now. Survive that, and you will be the sports editor at this paper. Fail, and you’ll be delivering (expletive) papers.”
Billie Stanton, former Denver Post Sunday editor, recalled Spencer’s delight at seeing his wife, Isabel, who was also an editor at the Daily News and the Post, jump into the fray.
“I’ll never forget the look in Gil’s eyes when he described Isabel returning to the Daily News newsroom after covering a fire,” Stanton said, “and, ‘She had cinders in her HAIR.’ The way he said it, the way his eyes lighted up, I knew then and still do that no woman ever could be more loved by a man than Isabel Spencer was by Gil.”
Spencer was born on Dec. 8, 1925, in Philadelphia. He attended Swarthmore High School and served in the Navy during World War II. He was a copy boy at The Philadelphia Inquirer and held reporting and editing jobs at The Chester Times in Pennsylvania; The Mount Holly Herald in New Jersey; The Main Line Times of Ardmore, Pa.; and The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
Spencer was a writer and editorialist at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia before becoming editor of The Trentonian in 1967.
He received the 2003 George Polk Award for career achievement.
In addition to his wife, Spencer is survived by sons Gilman, of Media, Penn., and Jonathan, of Pennington, N.J.; daughters Amy Becker, of Media, Penn., Elizabeth Mergel, of Dorchester, Mass., and Isabel Spencer, of Amherst, Mass.; 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
A service was being planned at the Church of the Ascension in lower Manhattan in New York City.
A scholarship fund is being established in Spencer’s name at the University of Colorado. Donations will be accepted at: Gil Spencer Journalism Scholarship Fund, c/o CU Foundation, 4740 Walnut St., Boulder, CO 80301.
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Information from: The Denver Post,
