ROLDO: Bob Manry Crossed the Ocean Alone & Embarrassed His PD Bosses

 

By Roldo Bartimole

It was 45 years ago August. One of the biggest local stories the Plain Dealer missed. It was especially galling to the paper’s reporters, as the hero was a shy PD copy editor. I was a short-timer at the PD and saw the shame among colleagues. It said a lot about the paper’s leadership. None of it good. Much of it revealing. The truth did hurt.

Here is a piece, with some modifications, that I wrote in one of the now defunct Cleveland alternatives. Down in the story are links to actual film of the discovery at sea of Bob Manry by Ch. 5 reporter Bill Jorgenson and his cameraman Walt Glendenning. It is priceless and historic Cleveland journalism. Don’t miss it.

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Twenty-five years ago, I was a staff member of the Pee Dee when its reporters were called “tigers.” I had come to Cleveland to work for a larger urban newspaper, and had been told that Cleveland was a very progressive city and the newspaper that then called itself The Cleveland Plain Dealer was headed by a progressive, young leader – Thomas Vail, the recently named publisher of the newspaper, which his family then owned.

In 1965, Newsweek magazine headlined a piece about the Pee Dee, “Tigerish,” quoting an editor saying, we’ve got a bunch of young tigers. Vail was called “tiger-in-chief.”

Vail – described as looking “more like an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero than a publisher,” – was quoted saying with bravado, “A newspaper should lead a community. Clevelanders have always been conservative. We are going to try and force things to happen. We want our candidates elected and our programs enacted,” as if he were emperor, not editor of a newspaper.

Time Magazine earlier detailed the battle for Cleveland newspaper supremacy between the young Vail and the aging editorial czar of the former Cleveland Press, the late and famed Louis Seltzer.

Newsweek, crediting Vail with great changes at the Pee Dee, noted that “Vail has accomplished his metamorphous with a flourish of promotion.” I didn’t know then how much promotion and ‘image’ shrouded reality at the newspaper.

Thus, locked in a circulation, prestige and promotion battle with the Press, the Pee Dee was to suffer at this time its most humiliating defeat. The debacle was to make the newspaper and its staff members the butt of derision and mockery, even earning the newspaper an Esquire Dubious Achievement Award.

The incident that made the Pee Dee the subject of ridicule involved a historic feat by one of its own, a hero of an international story, one laden with drama. But instead of appearing in the Pee Dee, the events for days were headlined in the opposition Press in a journalistic coup.

In 1965, Robert Manry, a quiet 47-years old Plain Dealer copy desk editor, was to wash clean the image of the tigerish Pee Dee with a heroic adventure that attracted world attention – a trip from Falmouth, Mass. U. S. A. to Falmouth, England, 3,200 miles away.

In a tiny 13-1/2-foot boat named Tinkerbelle. And alone!

Manry told his story in a book, “Tinkerbelle – The Story of the Smallest Boat Ever to Cross the Atlantic Non-Stop.” Tinkerbelle was a 36-year old boat Manry bought via a want ad and rebuilt it. After sailing on Lake Erie to test its seaworthiness, Manry took a three-month leave from the Pee Dee in order to sail his Tinkerbelle across the ocean. It was an unpaid leave combined with vacation time.

His trip became one that was compared with Charles Lindberg’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. That trip was 33 hours and 20 minutes. Manry’s was 78 often-perilous days.

It was an adventure that caught the imagination of the world. Nationally syndicated Herblock celebrated the feat with a cartoon with two astronauts in their space suits reading a newspaper. One says to the other, “Say that guy made it across the Atlantic in the sailboat okay.”

Manry wrote of his desire in the book: “This was a curious idea,” he says of the journey. “Where it came from I don’t know. It may have arisen from an awareness of behavior I was ashamed of, an unlovely shortcomings in my life ashore, linked with a hope that in the compressed life of a sea cruise I could, perhaps, redeem myself.”

“I had to concede that my voyage would benefit few persons other than myself, except insofar as it might, momentarily lift some who heard of it out of the routine of their own lives, but it did give me a segment of existence that, God willing, I might fashion into something nearer to a work of art than my life on land had been. This idea gratified me strangely although I knew perfectly well that at sea alone, I would of necessity be an unsocial being.”

Manry, described as a shy, retiring man, lined up no deal for cashing in on his trip. He writes: “No one had given me financial assistance and I wasn’t sponsored by anyone, not even the Plain Dealer, my own newspaper. Nor was I actuated by the expectation of vast monetary gains, although I did dare to hope that I might, by writing articles or a book, recoup the cost of the voyage and, if I was lucky, make enough more to help my children through college without going deeply into debt.”

Manry wrote of his trials and tribulations of hallucinations of a ‘hitchhiker’ who took him on a side trip to an non-existent island in the ocean, of being spotted by ships, including awaking to see a submarine alongside Tinkerbelle, of a cracked rudder in mid-ocean, and more dangerous, of being tossed out of Tinkerbelle into the Atlantic. Six times!

In one description of being tossed, Manry later wrote: “I flailed my arms and legs, fighting to gain the surface. I wasn’t exactly frightened, it had all taken place too fast for that. But the horrible thought of sharks passed through my mind and I was gripped by the awesome feeling of being suspended over an abyss as I recalled that not long before I figured out from the chart that the sea was about three miles deep at that spot. No use trying to touch bottom and pushing myself up to the surface.”

“My lungs were at the bursting point when, at last, my head broke out of the water and I gasped for air. I expected to find Tinkerbelle floating bottom up, her mast submerged and pointed straight at the ocean floor, but she had righted herself and was riding the waves again like a gull. We were no more than eight to 10 feet apart,” wrote Manry, who caught the lifeline around his waist and hauled himself back “to my loyal friend,” not for the last time either.

The remarkable character of Manry was clearly exposed by his recitation of his acceptance of food from a ship, about two-thirds across the Atlantic. The food was dropped to him in a canvas bag tied to a life jacket. Manry tells of the treat: “I had to eat the chicken and potato right away because there ‘was no refrigeration on Tinkerbelle. And what a meal it was… it was extremely generous of the Captain to give me all that food. I appreciated it immensely, but I couldn’t help worrying that maybe one of the Glory’s officers didn’t get enough to eat at dinner that day because of the Captain’s kindness to me. I sincerely hope not.”

I can’t think of many people, who alone for 68 days at sea, would worry about whether a little food might be depriving someone who obviously would have sufficient supplies.

The Belgulf Glory dipped its flag in salute and gave three blasts of its steam whistle as it left Manry to his journey.

It wasn’t many days after this that Manry saw a trawler approaching him with “a man in a handsome turtle-necked sweater whose face looked vaguely familiar. And behind him stood another man who was operating what I took to be a motion picture camera.”

Gradually, it dawned on Manry who this man was – Bill Jorgenson of WEWS-TV, Channel 5, Cleveland. “And I couldn’t imagine what he was doing there, surely he hadn’t traveled all the way from Cleveland to see me”. Manry’s first words were, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Here are two links to You Tube films of that Atlantic Ocean meeting. You really get the feeling of just how perilous it was to be in that small boat out in the less-than accepting Atlantic Ocean waters. You also realize what a wonderful person Manry was:

http://youtube.com/watch

http://youtube.com/watch

Manry hadn’t realized that the reports from ships he had passed in the ocean and reports of the sightings had generated world-wide interest in his solo journey.

Jorgensen, by renting a boat at Penzance, and finding Manry in the Atlantic, had a Cleveland journalistic scoop of historic proportions.

Manry, who obviously hadn’t seen a face he recognized for more than two months, poured out his story to his friendly listener.

Manry later wrote that he did think of the fact that Jorgensen was a competitor of the Pee Dee. But, he reasoned, Jorgensen had gone through a lot of effort to find him and deserved to hear him. Manry also thought apparently that the Pee Dee hadn’t paid much attention to his trip. “I felt this way especially when I recalled that the Plain Dealer and national magazines I had queried before my departure had expressed only mild interest in printing stories about the venture,” an indication at least that Manry felt he hadn’t receive as much consideration from the Pee Dee as he felt he might have.

It was a story, one would think, the Pee Dee as employer of the hero would be right on top of. But the Pee Dee fell down on the story, and was humiliated, its tigerish image was ripped to the bone of reality.

Not only did the Pee Dee fail to make arrangements with Manry to tell his story to the newspaper’s readers (after all he was on leave of absence without pay!), but still a Pee Dee employee making a historic voyage.

But the paper, when the story of Manry’s voyage was dropped in its lap, turned it down! Jorgenson had offered film and photographs to the PD.

Here’s what happened and how the Pee Dee was humiliated on a story that became an international tale of personal courage and the beginning of troubles that have kept the paper – at least in my mind – as not the Plain Dealer (“By odds the best newspaper name in the world,” Winston Churchill had said) but always as – the Pee Dee.

First, in the Pee Dee’s defense, the newspaper’s editors didn’t know that Manry was to make the trip solo or in so small a boat.

He had asked the newspaper for a leave and wanted to tell his story, giving it exclusively to the Pee Dee. But at that time the trip was to be a two-person voyage. When a friend backed out, Manry decided without telling the Pee Dee until (after) he left to make the trip that he’d go by himself. Then in a letter to the Pee Dee Manry mailed from Falmouth, MA. he informed the newspaper of his real intention.

The Pee Dee began to take more of an interest in its copy desk editor and began to report the sightings of Manry from ocean liners that spotted the tiny, bobbing Tinkerbelle in mid-ocean.

But long before the entire story of his epic voyage could be told in Manry’s book, or to the now anxious Pee Dee management – sensing an opportunity to piggyback on Manry’s success – the story slipped away from Ohio’s largest right into the hands of its competitor, the Press.

Indeed, the Pee Dee thought it had a lock on the Manry story and finally smelled worldwide publicity for itself. “We owned Mrs. Manry and the kids and that was our advantage,” said a Pee Dee promotion man who admitted, “we spirited her away in the middle of one night” to keep her from the competition.

The story, however, was Manry, not his wife and children awaiting him in England, accompanied by PD handlers.

While the Pee Dee was playing cloak and dagger games with Mrs. Manry, who cooperated as the Pee Dee provided free transportation and accommodations to England to await Manry’s landing in Falmouth, their story was pirated away on the high seas by the salty TV newsman Jorgensen.

Still Jorgensen and WEWS-TV – though related to the Press as part of the Scripps-Howard Corporation at that time – graciously offered the Pee Dee any of the material, a courtesy because Manry was a Pee Dee editor.

Pee Dee editors turned aside the generous offer.

Indeed, the Pee Dee refused to believe that Jorgensen had actually reached Manry. “I was not convinced that Jorgensen had actually found him. So we printed nothing that morning. But the next day when they showed up with pictures on TV, then I was convinced they had found him,” said the late Philip W. Porter, then executive editor of the Pee Dee.

There was more convincing evidence to come.

Jorgensen broke the story on Channel 5 news.

When the Pee Dee refused his offer, he took it around to the Press. The Press editors understood what they were being offered and found no shame in taking a TV newsman’s piece of journalistic initiative.

The afternoon Press decimated the Pee Dee and the morale of the entire staff by taking the Pee Dee’s story away from it with dramatic display of the story everyone was talking about. The concern for the hero Manry could not have been higher in Cleveland,

Press headline: “MANRY FEARS CRASH AT SEA, TELLS OF HALLUCINATIONS,” with a subhead: “Bill Jorgensen visits Tinkerbelle.”

Wow! Talk about eating your competitor’s lunch.

The next day, August 11, was even worse for the Pee Dee. The Manry meeting with Jorgensen was spread across the entire front page, with dramatic photos of the pair sitting and talking in the tiny Tinkerbelle.

Press headline: “MANRY TELLS CLEVELAND A STORY OF FEAR, COURAGE AND HARDSHIP.” The subhead: “Voice of the Tinkerbelle.”

There was Manry – “bearded, shaggy haired” – sitting in his small boat having a hot cup of coffee. Brewed, not instant coffee. And there’s Manry sitting in the boat with Jorgensen.

Spread across the front page. Not in the Pee Dee but in the “inferior” Press. The article started: “The voice of Robert Manry, the amazing lonely sailor of the Atlantic, was heard in Cleveland this afternoon.”

Out poured all the stories of hallucinations, of being tossed out of the tiny boat in the ocean, of the loneliness, of the escapes from near-death. Such dramatic stuff. On the competition’s front page.

Meanwhile, the Pee Dee too ran a story about Manry that first day of Jorgensen’s dramatic coup. On the front-page too. It was about Manry’s pet iguana! Such humuliation.

Pee Dee reporters, so proudly aware of their reputation as “tigers,” were so embarrassed that they didn’t want to go out on regular beat assignments, ashamed to face their counterparts from the Press.

The Pee Dee predicament made the paper appear a joke, ludicrous. When reporters learned that their editors had spurned attempts to share the story, morale sunk lower than the ocean’s depth.

Indeed, it was arrogance and pride that allowed the Pee Dee to turn down the gracious offer of Jorgensen. Those two qualities had infected the Pee Dee of that time, as I remember well. I was there. Hubris, not from deeds, but from the promotion of itself as a superior newspaper.

Time Magazine this time wrote about the amazing scoop by the TV station and the Press. “It all began as sea-breezy fun and good natured rivalry between two newspapers in the same city. For weeks, the biggest story in The Cleveland Plain Dealer concerned one of its own employees. The paper kept its readers posted almost daily on the progress of copy editor Robert Manry, 48, who set out last June 1 from Falmouth, Mass. for Falmouth, England, aboard the frail 13-1/2-foot sloop Tinkerbelle.”

Time said that the Pee Dee printed letters sent to his wife via ships that had encountered him in mid-ocean and hired a plane to fly over Tinkerbelle and the story in the Pee Dee headlined: “Hello, Bob, see you soon!”

Time went on: “the Plain Dealer saw Bob sooner than it expected and in the last place it wanted to see him, in the pages of the Press.”

A third day of front-page material advertised Jorgensen’s scoop, which was labeled the “Atlantic Scoop,” of Jorgensen and his cameraman Walt Glendenning.

In the TV coverage, the film, starting with shots of the small boat making its way in the ocean, then showed Jorgensen handing Manry a copy of a newspaper, the Pee Dee.

The Pee Dee tried valiantly to recoup.

Vail, who had been so eagerly currying national publicity, sent public relations people to Falmouth, England, with Manry’s wife Virginia and their two children, Robin and Douglas. But things didn’t look too good.

Sensing the publicity possibilities earlier, Vail had Manry put back on the payroll. Porter said that they decided, “We ought to put Manry back on the payroll. His family was living off the kids’ college savings (and) … because I thought he was actually making a lot of news for the paper at the time.”

A weak conversion.

So eager was the Pee Dee to share Manry’s success and notoriety when he entered Falmouth’s harbor to 50,000 cheering people and the world’s press that the Pee Dee had RAF flyers, who had been pitching Manry fresh fruit, drop a canister containing a sweatshirt with the words, Plain Dealer, across the chest.

“The theory was that if Manry was at all amenable and would wear the sweatshirt, then we would get the Plain Dealer in a hell of a lot of pictures,” said the Pee Dee’s public relations man.

Manry shrugged off the idea as “silly,” possibly thinking back to the fact that he had to make the journey on his own, at his own expense, with the Pee Dee not wanting to piggyback until it became evident that Manry’s success would be history.

He wasn’t going to die at sea. A fool for trying such a feat!

When he sailed into Falmouth harbor 78 days after he left Falmouth, USA, to the cheers of some 50,000 people, Manry was smiling and tanned. The Pee Dee sweatshirt was not on his chest.

For Manry it was a personal triumph. He never returned to the Pee Dee and died of a heart attack some years later; his wife Virginia tragically was killed in an auto accident in 1969.

Tinkerbelle now sits in the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in University Circle. The Press, we know, was finally snuffed out in 1982.

And the Pee Dee never really recovered its pretended glory days of the mid-1960s when the paper labeled itself Tigerish but never really bared its teeth journalistically.

The Manry debacle was symptomatic of Vail’s leadership for 25 years. It exhibits a desire to capitalize in a promotion manner on what can be achieved only by hard, dangerous or painstaking work. Vail’s concept seemed to want to take the bows of achievement without having gone through the difficult part of the journey.

Consciously or not, the desire for reward without the pain of achievement pervaded the psyche of the Pee Dee. Decline continued. Sloppiness reflected low morale. One frustrated editor noted that some reporters “seemed to regard the city room as an imposition on their lives.” The city editor noted that a reporter wrote that chess champion Bobby Fisher had been taking on all comers on a downtown Cleveland street. “This was great,” said the editor, “The only thing was that Fisher was in Denver at the time.”

Revealing that it had become part of the newspaper’s history, the Manry debacle was to erupt again a few years later, revealing it as a most sensitive area for Pee Dee editors.

The occasion was an article in Evergreen by the Pee Dee’s ace reporter Joe Eszterhas, later a movie scriptwriter (FIST, Jagged Edge, Music Box), about the selling of the photographs of the American massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. The photos had been dropped into the hands of the Pee Dee by the Army’s photographer, Ron Haeberle, who lived here and walked into the newspaper off the street. The Pee Dee was the first newspaper to print the historic, horrible photographs.

While revealing the grisly effort of himself and Haeberle to sell the My Lai photos to a major magazine for big bucks, Eszterhas was brutally truthful about his own motives. But he wrote equally as honestly about his employers. Tom Vail has always thirsted for a Pulitzer Prize, almost as much as getting admiring attention by the newsweeklies. The My Lai death photos raised hopes.

Eszterhas wrote: “The way the executives finally figured it, the story could very well mean the Pulitzer Prize, maybe even the coveted mention in Time’s press section. And ever since Esquire gave the Plain Dealer its journalistic dubious achievement award in 1965, (for the Manry episode) the frustrated upper echelon was looking for Time or the Pulitzer to wash the blood away.”

Eszterhas wasn’t quite that sure. He wrote: “I wasn’t sure, I told our pratfallen executives, most of who had been promoted since the Manry ‘incident,’ that the pictures wouldn’t get us the Pulitzer Prize, but I thought the mention in the Time’s press section was practically assured. They were very pleased and characteristically generous. They offered me, on the spot, a cornucopia of benevolent paternalism.”

Eszterhas recounted the Manry incident in more detail, commenting also on the Pee Dee’s attempt to have Manry wear a sweatshirt as he entered Falmouth’s port. Said Eszterhas: “Manry took the sweatshirt from the water, wrapped his garbage in it, and threw it to the sharks…” Joe was always very colorful in his writing.

The reminder did not endear Eszterhas to his bosses and they fired him. Eszterhas, who at the time went to Rolling Stone, fought the dismissal and a public arbitration saw further Pee Dee linen washed and hung out to dry. The Manry debacle was one ingredient Eszterhas and his lawyers used to portray the bosses at the Pee Dee.

The Pee Dee attacked Eszterhas’ credibility, testifying that their reporter played fast and loose with the facts (though they continued giving him front-page assignments) “He did receive a number of choice assignments,” testified one editor. None could cite any corrections or punishment for the creations of fact they leveled against Eszterhas, who now commands several million dollars for a movie script.

The Pee Dee has always been able to attract good reporters and even some good editors. But the newspaper has had trouble keeping them. Many of the young better reporters who had been among the Pee Dee’s Time of the tiger, left. They should have been nurtured and allowed to mature to become the leaders so sorely needed by the newspaper. But they and subsequent talent had to leave a newspaper that didn’t really want to earn the title it coveted – The New York Times of the Midwest.

The Manry episode may not be remembered by many of the present day reporters at the Pee Dee. But it has along the way infected the corporate culture of the newspaper nonetheless. The Pee Dee has less pretension about being a great newspaper today. Maybe it can achieve an enviable status by covering this community in a manner that reflects the needs of the community.

In other words, by becoming what it needs to be – a plain dealer.

 

 

In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]

 

 

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