Travel Blog

Yesterday was the funeral for Fred Turner, long-time sports editor of the Sun-Sentinel. I didn’t attend – didn’t want to run into the man who laid me off – but I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Fred.

I never really hung out with him, but I spent a fair amount of time in his department. You can tell a lot about a man from the people he hires. For a good few years, a kind of comedy central existed just outside Fred’s office, and I would wander over whenever there was a lull. Inevitably, Brian White would deliver an exquisitely deadpan quip. (If it was a Friday in the fall, he would tap into motion his Woody Hayes bobblehead.) Across the aisle, Steve Svekis would launch into a spot-on impersonation of some pompous athlete (or politician). In the cubicle in front of Brian’s, Bonnie DiPacio, nearly in tears, would tell an outrageous story about some clueless – and impeccably indignant – caller.

It is a sad truth of journalism that newsrooms are always funnier than newspapers. (At least they were up until a few years ago.) But the Sports section of the Sun-Sentinel managed to retain a lot of the personality of its staff – a group that ranged from the benevolent Robes Patton (a lifeshort Mormon) to the suave Dave Hyde. One of my freelancers, who lived in Miami Beach, said that whenever she’d go to the store to buy the Sunday Sun-Sentinel (which was usually when she had a story in Travel) it would be sold out by the time she got there. “People buy it for the Sports section,” the cashier always explained to her.

I’m sure I told Fred that, not that he needed the news; his section regularly raked in awards. So of course I was honored when I became a temporary member of his staff, during the week of Super Bowl XXIX. Fred had me write feature stories, one of which was about a “nude” cruise. It was a somewhat stupefying assignment. Toward the end of the evening I got up the nerve to talk to a few of the young ladies – you couldn’t really call them strippers, since they didn’t have any clothing to begin with – but I only got the name of one of them: Tiffany. Writing the story, so as not to quote anonymous sources, I gave all of the women the name Tiffany. Fred thought this was hilarious, and published the story exactly as I wrote it. And for years afterwards, whenever he’d pass me in the hall, he would ask with a grin, “Hey Tom, how’s Tiffany?”