Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9510020017
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the mid-1950s, Forrest M. Landon was a boy from upstate New York studying journalism at the University of Missouri and serving as disc jockey, announcer and newsman - among other chores - at a radio station in Columbia, Mo.
Forty years later, after having done a lot of chores for the Times-World Corp., Landon, 62, left the job of executive editor of The Roanoke Times on Saturday.
Like some other newspaper people, however, Landon will not be retiring, precisely. He will be assistant to the publisher until Jan. 1. After that, he says, the future is kind of murky, although a weekly column for the paper's editorial pages and formation of an organization to protect First Amendment rights are possibilities.
Landon was in his third-floor office last week. He wore a bow tie of the clip-on persuasion and red suspenders. He was openly suggesting that his grandchildren, Maggie, nearly 5, and Emma, nearly 1, are clearly superior to other children similarly situated.
The Landons - his wife, Barbara, is vice president of development for WBRA-TV - have two children: Jeff, 38, who is married, lives in Richmond, is responsible for the grandchildren, teaches and writes short stories; and Tracy, 35, also married and the director of a childhood center in Charlottesville.
It should be said that newspaper executives don't usually have widely used nicknames - or at least they aren't supposed to know about them. Landon is "Frosty" to everybody.
The nickname seems to fit a 10-year-old from Sidney, N.Y., who composed his own newspaper, sold the ads and peddled it on the street. However, a fellow named "Forrest" Landon is listed as the editor in a Sept. 14, 1946, edition of The Sidney Flash.
The nickname also seems to fit a kid who later was working his way through Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and was not lighting up the foreign language department. As a grocery clerk, he once ground coffee for his Spanish teacher, who was moved to say: "Mr. Landon, as a person, I admire you very much, but as a student, I loathe you."
Whether a knockout with Spanish or not, Landon went on to study journalism at Missouri. About that time, Landon said, "My father went off to work, and I never saw him again."
This didn't leave Landon bitter. He said he believes his father disappeared because he was embarrassed he couldn't afford what it cost to send his son to a large university.
In 1955, when he was 22, Landon came to Roanoke to take a news job with WDBJ-TV, which went on the air the day he came to work.
From television news, Landon went to radio station WDBJ's news department as director. The live Cronkite-like broadcasts he did in the third-floor radio newsroom, which was shared with the newspapers, amazed print reporters who stopped by on election nights. Here clearly was a young man obsessed with politics and government.
At the time, the television and radio stations were owned by the Fishburn family, which also owned the morning Roanoke Times and the afternoon World-News. Landon got into the print side of journalism when he became an editorial writer for the World-News.
He got the job even though the publisher turned down a test editorial he'd written. Landon was critical of the state's closing of Seashore State Park to avoid allowing blacks in. It was just as well the editorial didn't get printed, Landon said. He had the park on the Atlantic Ocean when it really is on the Chesapeake Bay.
After more chores, Landon became editor of the Times' editorial page.
As a television/radio reporter, Landon had covered the tumultuous era when the state organization of U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. fought public school integration to the point of closing schools as an alternative to integration of the classrooms. It is a story that still fascinates Landon.
Gov. Thomas B. Stanley of Henry County, a Byrd man when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark school desegregation decision, was part of the story. At first, Stanley seemed to accept school integration, but he then changed his mind at the heated request of Byrd, who ordered "massive resistance" to desegregation.
The editorial Landon wrote when Stanley died was thus not the usual passing-of-a-Virginia-leader type. It was highly critical of a dead man.
It ran the day of the funeral. Organization politicians went wild - not to mention the publisher.
"I showed very little mercy either to his grieving relatives or the man himself," Landon said.
But he said he stands by what he wrote, although the entire experience left him with the knowledge that "one shouldn't always shoot the wounded" - a purpose editorial writers sometimes are accused of having.
Landon then took on the duties of night managing editor of The Roanoke Times - a job that gave him a lasting admiration for copy editors.
Reporters, at one or many times in their lives, look on copy editors as picky people who willfully murder great prose.
Landon remembers the copy editors - far from elitists who would sandbag reporters - as people "trying to get things right" for the reader and for history.
Nobody has ever written a movie or a play or a novel about copy editors, Landon said. Yet, they do their job quietly and "have a quarter of a million critics the next morning."
Landon later became managing editor, then executive editor - a person who makes hard decisions and sets policies, and worries about money and also hears a lot of hard words from the public about the selection of comic strips. Landon said he won't miss the comic strip part of the job.
There are other criticisms he can understand. But "when it's not the extreme left or the extreme right," Landon says he worries. He worries when "people in the great center" believe "we're not serving the general public."
Landon said he wants younger news people to know that the American newspaper will not die.
"There's a lot of gloom and doom going on about newspapers," he said. He said young people say "bean counters will just squeeze the profits out" of newspapers and not worry about the First Amendment.
"I am absolutely a cockeyed optimist," Landon said. A newspaper, he said, "is the only glue that's around to hold a region together."
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