Longtime newspaper editor dots final i's and crosses final t's

Fort Morgan's Spencer wraps up illustrious career

By Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 31, 2007 at 12:30 a.m.

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Photo by Ahmad Terry / The Rocky

Bill Spencer is stepping down as editor of The Fort Morgan Times after more than 41 years at the helm of the newspaper, which his grandfather bought in 1907 and his father ran before him. "It's the one thing I wanted to do," Bill Spencer, 69, said of his newspaper career.

Photo by Spencer Family

R.B. Spencer, Bill Spencer's grandfather, sits in the newsroom of The Fort Morgan Times in about 1908. After buying the newspaper the year before for $8,000, R.B. Spencer converted it into a daily and served as its publisher until a few months before his death in 1965.

Robert B. Spencer

Murlin Spencer

Robert W. Spencer

Fern Spencer

Robert W. Spencer Jr.

Sue Spencer

It's 10:40 on a Wednesday morning a few feet from the newsroom at The Fort Morgan Times, and Editor Bill Spencer and his staff are going over stories for the next day.

It's a pretty typical meeting for any newspaper, but the lineup reflects life in and around this city of 11,000 on Colorado's northeastern plains. More arrests in a series of burglaries. A potential boundary squabble between rural fire districts. A follow-up on voting-machine problems. A big weekend wrestling meet. A Christmas gala at the senior center.

"OK," Spencer says as he finishes a story budget, "I think we got 'er."

Sometime tomorrow morning, a meeting like this will go on again inside the Times office at 329 Main St., but Spencer won't be there.

Spencer, 69, is stepping down as editor of the Times today after more than 41 years at the helm of the paper his grandfather bought in 1907, the paper in which his father toiled for 71 years, the paper he was destined to lead almost from the time he started sweeping the floors as a kid.

For the first time in a century, no one named Spencer will be in the Times newsroom.

* * *

I was 23, a month out of college and eager to be a reporter, when Bill Spencer offered me a job. I screamed like a guy who'd won the lottery.

"Is that a yes?" he asked, deadpan - my first glimpse at the demeanor that helped him negotiate the turbulence of putting out a paper in his hometown.

On Feb. 2, 1987, I moved into a desk about 10 feet from Bill. Between us was his wife, Sue, who helped proofread stories. Just behind Bill was his mother, Fern. She compiled a historical column - "Looking Back" - and worked as a proofreader. Just beyond Bill was the office where his publisher-father, Bob, edited wire copy, wrote obituaries and answered the phones.

I covered Morgan County government, small-town school districts and their sports teams, the courts and anything else that came along. I shot pictures, developed film when the photographer was out of town and worked as wire editor when Bob was gone, which was not often.

We practiced what has come to be known as "community journalism," which really meant we wrote about every drunken-driving arrest, every dog-at-large ticket, every fourth-grade Tootsie Roll drive, every expenditure by the county commissioners - even if it was $800 for new tires for a road grader.

It was up-close newspapering.

"You see those people - not just your readers, but the people you write about - every day in the grocery store and the hardware store and on Main Street," says Ed Otte, executive director of the Colorado Press Association.

* * *

Fort Morgan, on the South Platte River about 75 miles northeast of Denver, officially became a town in 1887. By then, its newspaper was three years old.

In 1907, an Iowa school superintendent named R.B. Spencer came to Fort Morgan, planning to buy a bank. He bought the Times instead, for $8,000, converted it to a daily paper in 1908, and served as its publisher until a few months before his death in 1965. His sons both became newspapermen: Murlin, who went off to cover World War II as a combat correspondent, and Bob, who worked virtually his entire adult life at the Times.

And after R.B. Spencer died, Bob became publisher. He hired Bill, his only son, as editor.

That was in 1966, and Bill was ready. He'd done a two-year hitch in the Navy, where he edited the base newspaper, and spent 31/2 years in California, first at the Ventura County Star-Free Press and later at the Simi Valley Sun.

"That's the one thing I wanted to do," he says of newspaper work. "And kind of each step along the way, I knew it was the right thing to do."

After he came home, he faced a number of realities.

He may have been the editor, but he wasn't exempt from the grunt work. He covered City Council meetings and high school wrestling matches, answered the phones, designed pages and wrote headlines. And he was like a minor league baseball manager. He hired young, raw reporters, developed them and helped them grow, endured the mistakes they made as they learned, and then watched them leave to do their best work at larger papers.

"It's been a bit of a frustration, but I knew that was going to happen," he says. "The really great thing is to see the success that people have had after they've been here."

Among them is Tim Crews, one of more than 50 reporters and photographers Spencer has hired throughout the years. Crews shook up Fort Morgan. He had the city's water supply tested and found it was contaminated. He got tired of the district attorney refusing to take his calls, so he got up one day at 3 a.m. and dialed the DA's home number. He took on anyone and everyone - and Spencer let him do it.

"He was tremendous," Crews says of Spencer.

Crews, still making public officials squirm with his own paper, the Sacramento Valley Mirror, describes Spencer as "one of the fairest men I've ever met" and as an editor with guts who demanded only one thing - accuracy.

During the years, Spencer has fired only a few people. One of them still considers him a great friend.

Gary Long, now an editor at a paper in Brownsville, Texas, worked at the Times in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After his brother committed suicide, Long started drinking.

"In the end, I put Bill in the position where he didn't have a choice," Long says now. "He had to let me go for my own good, which he did."

Long stopped drinking, got his life back in order, got back into the newspaper business and, one day in the early 1990s, called Spencer. It was the first time they'd talked since Long left the Times. The first words out of Spencer's mouth? "Gary, how in the world are you?"

A few blocks down Main Street, at City Hall, Spencer may as well have his own office. He's covered every City Council meeting since 1966 - more than 1,000 - and earned respect as someone who doesn't try to make a story more than it is, who focuses on issues, not personalities.

"He has a lot of credibility in the community," says Mayor Jack Darnell, a former state trooper. "When Bill Spencer says something, people don't question what he's saying."

* * *

In July 1989, I was offered a job at the Fort Collins Coloradoan. I didn't want to leave Fort Morgan, but I wanted to get to a big-city paper one day, and I knew, to do that, I needed to move on.

Although I left Fort Morgan, I never left behind what I learned there. I stayed in touch with Bill, saw him at the annual press convention, stopped in at the Times office when I was in town.

When I look back now, I miss the Times. The mornings, when the ticker tape rat-a-tat-tatted its way along, when the phones jangled, one after another, when we all pounded out stories on manual typewriters. The afternoons, when the coffee in my cup jiggled as the presses revved up, when you could smell the ink on a fresh copy of the Times.

I've been a full-time newspaper reporter for nearly 21 years now. In a lot of ways, the most fun I ever had was the 21/2 years I worked in Fort Morgan - where a calm, patient editor named Bill Spencer taught me much of what I would need to be successful.

* * *

In the 1980s, it became clear to Bill and his wife, Sue, that their son was destined to leave Fort Morgan, that his interests would take him somewhere far from journalism. And so, in 1988, the Spencer family made a difficult, but logical, decision. They sold the Times to American Publishing Co., a Canadian firm that was snapping up papers on the eastern plains. The paper was sold again, in the mid-1990s, and is now operated by a partnership jointly owned by the parent companies of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post.

Even after the sales, Bob and his wife, Fern, stayed on with the titles of "consultants." Nothing really changed. Bob still unlocked the front door every morning at 5:30 and went to work. Fern still proofread stories. They still left each evening with a stack of papers to deliver to people who'd been missed by their carriers.

And Bill still came in every day, stuck a pencil behind his ear and put out the paper.

Fern retired in 1995 and died two years later. Bob stayed at it until the spring of 2002, when he got sick. He died two weeks later, leaving Bill as the last Spencer at the Times.

Since the family sold the paper, the times and the Times have both changed.

There's the Internet, which doesn't feel much like newspapering to Bill. There are decisions that are no longer Bill's to make, such as moving the paper's printing presses to Sterling, a move that felt to Bill a little like having an arm lopped off.

And so, he eventually decided it was time to move on.

Spencer and his wife expect to spend extended periods in Tucson, Ariz., where their son, daughter-in-law and twin granddaughters, live. They expect to spend time in San Diego, where Bill was stationed in his Navy days. And although he's leaving the Times, Spencer hopes to keep a hand in journalism, maybe doing some writing or public-relations work.

Anyone who's ever been around a printing press knows it's tough to get ink off your hands.

It's even tougher to get it out of your blood.

All in the family

* Robert B. Spencer (1872-1965) - R.B., as he was known, was an Iowa school superintendent who bought The Fort Morgan Times for $8,000, assuming the job of publisher on Aug. 1, 1907. He converted the paper to a daily in 1908 and was publisher until just before his death at age 93.

* Murlin Spencer (1909-1992) - Murlin, the younger of R.B.'s two sons, worked at the Times and other papers as a reporter, then joined The Associated Press in 1937 and became a correspondent in World War II, spending 33 months in the Pacific theater.

* Robert W. Spencer (1908-2002) - Bob, as he was known, was R.B.'s oldest son. He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1931, then spent the rest of his life at the Times, working as a pressman, reporter, advertising manager and business manager before succeeding his father as publisher.

* Fern Spencer (1907-1997) - Bob's wife started helping at the Times in 1944 and stayed more than 50 years, working as circulation manager, writing the "Looking Back" column, and proofreading copy.

* Robert W. Spencer Jr. - Bill, as he is known, is Bob and Fern's only child. He grew up at the Times, sweeping the floors as a child, working in the back shop and on the presses in high school and college. After graduating from CU in 1960, he did a stint in the Navy, worked at two papers in California, then returned to Fort Morgan in 1966 as editor of the Times.

* Sue Spencer - Bill's wife, a former schoolteacher, worked for years at the Times as a proofreader and occasionally wrote articles. Her father, Dean Hammond, was the owner and publisher of two Colorado papers, the Del Norte Prospector and the Creede Candle.

vaughank@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5019

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