Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 11, November 2003
Copyright 2003 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.
A lifetime of chronicling the North End
By CLAYTON PARK
Editor's note: This is the fourth of a series of articles looking back at the career of Stan Stapp, former publisher of the old North Central Outlook and, in more recent years, a columnist with the Seattle Sun among others. Stan finally retired from regular column writing earlier this year at age 85.
A visit to the office of Stan Stapp, which he maintains in the Wedgwood home he shares with his wife Dorothy and their cat Kissy, is like stepping into an amazingly well-preserved time capsule from an older era.
The room is decorated with memorabilia, both from the old North Central Outlook, the community newspaper Stan and his family published for more than five decades until its sale to a citywide chain in 1974, as well as Stan's childhood as a youth growing up in the Wallingford neighborhood.
A newsstand placard on a wall reads: "The Outlook 10 cents: Seattle's Liveliest Newspaper." A pennant on the wall bears the name "Interlake," which was the elementary school on the corner of N. 45th Street and Wallingford Avenue N. that Stan attended in the 1920s, and which in the 1980s became converted into a shopping center called Wallingford Center.
The room is furnished with wooden layout tables and shelves that Stan, a skilled carpenter for much of his adult life, built himself to neatly organize the meticulous notes he took in writing seemingly countless news stories and columns, as well as photos from the Outlook's glory days and archive copies of the many papers he has been associated with through the course of his career.
Stan launched his career as a journalist with The Magnet, the paper he published as a junior high school student at Hamilton, which was located across the street from his home.
As a student at nearby Lincoln High School, Stan became editor of student paper, The Totem, before moving on to become a reporter, columnist, and later editor and publisher of The Outlook.
Stan's career continued, even after "retiring" following the sale of the Outlook when he launched The Skyliner as a one-man operation after he and his wife moved to Anacortes in the late 1970s.
He decided to fold The Skyliner in the early 1980s so that he and his wife could return to Seattle to be closer to some of their grandchildren, but the lure of newspapers proved too much for Stan to resist.
In 1984, he had begun serving as an adviser to a community paper in Fremont and Wallingford called The Forum, and by the following year, he had begun writing a column for it, and stayed on after the paper's sale and subsequent name change in 1986 to the North Seattle Press, which later became known simply as the Seattle Press.
In 1998, he moved his column to a new North Seattle paper called the Jet City Maven, which would change its name to The Seattle Sun in 2002.
Stan admits that there were times after moving back to Seattle in the early 1980s, when he considered starting a paper of his own again, something that his wife Dorothy can attest to.
"Every time we'd see an empty storefront, he'd joke, 'Gee, that would make a great newspaper office...' and I'd have to drag him away. He's had his turn," she said.
And how.
"We put out an estimated 2,600 issues in the 52 years we put out the Outlook," Stan proudly notes. "I think I wrote somewhere between 500 and 1,000 columns, not counting the 360 or so columns I wrote in the 18 years I was a columnist for The Forum, Press, Maven and Sun."
When asked to list the story he was most proud of covering, he says "That's kind of hard to say. There were so many."
But one of the stories that stood out in his mind was the time he covered a cop killing in the middle of the night for the Outlook, which ended up scooping the big daily papers an impressive achievement for a weekly newspaper.
"We'd just put the (week's edition of the) Outlook to bed and I told everyone to go home and that I could take care of the rest," Stan recalls. "I checked the police radio and heard that there was a shooting at Thackery (Avenue).
"I went over and saw a policeman kneeling over his partner who'd been shot by a homeowner who thought he was a prowler. I got the picture of him on the ground with a lady yelling for her husband to get out of there if he didn't want his picture in tomorrow's paper. That's when I knew I had something."
But getting the scoop was one thing. Getting the photo developed and printed in time to be included in the paper, which was scheduled to be printed first thing that morning, was an equally big challenge.
"The problem was, we didn't have our own darkroom," Stan explained.
Stan decided his best bet would be to call Phil Webber, the teen-aged photojournalist phenom who got his start with the Outlook but was now working nights for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"Sure enough he developed them," Stan said of his former protege. "I knew I could depend on Phil to get them for me. He knew what it meant (for the Outlook to get the scoop on such a big story). His mother (whom Webber was still living with at the time) cooperated, too."
Of course, Webber is only one of several former Outlook staffers who eventually "graduated" to work for daily newspapers. Others include longtime Seattle Times columnist Erik Lacitis, Times photo director Cole Porter, Everett Herald photographer Michael O'Leary, recently retired Times associate features editor Karen West, and Times Eastside bureau chief Arlene Bryant.
"I felt very proud that I had hired them to work for us and that they had turned out for us," said Stan. "When they went on to bigger jobs, to a certain extent, I felt they got the job because they got the training working for us."
As a journalist, Stan said the most important standards he set both for himself and for his staff were to always strive for accuracy and fairness even if that meant ruffling the feathers of advertisers, which happened on more than one occasion.
"One of our big advertisers (in the 1960s) was Food Giant (a local supermarket chain that was based in Wallingford)," Stan recalls. "After I'd written something that was controversial, a lot of people tried to pressure them to stop advertising with us. (But) The head of Food Giant recognized that our paper was highly read and that we tried to be fair to everybody."
"I really believed in trying to have a paper that was free to all people," Stan said. On the other hand, he added, he believes it's a mistake for newspapers to mix opinion and news.
"The only place I'd have my opinion was in my column and not in a straight news story. I really tried to be as fair as possible," he says.
As a columnist for the Outlook, Stan earned a well-deserved reputation for being unafraid to tackle controversial topics. In fact, he admits to having embraced them. In the 1960s, he became one of the first columnists in the city to oppose the Vietnam War and also actively supported the Civil Rights Movement as well as empathizing with the Hippie Movement.
"I'd look at possible topics to write and would generally pick the most controversial topic," Stan recalls. "I found I'd get far more response to controversial columns. Sometimes we'd receive as many as 60 letters in a week."
Conversely, when Stan resurrected his career as a columnist in the 1980s, he chose to largely focus on writing about neighborhood history drawing on his experiences as editor and publisher of the old Outlook.
"Writing for a monthly (and later a biweekly with the Press), I didn't feel I could write about political topics and be timely," Stan said. "Also, (by writing about North Seattle history) almost any topic I could think about, I was there. A lot of columnists have to find an old duffer to quote but for me, I was the old duffer."
Stan also credits the popularity of the old Outlook to its nearly single-minded focus (other than the editorial and entertainment sections) to covering neighborhood news.
"In my paper, everything was local to the North End," Stan says. "That's what made it so readable."
When asked why Stan sold the Outlook to the Today chain in 1974, he says at the time it seemed to be the right thing to do, although he would eventually regret that decision.
"Nick Schmidt (the then-publisher of the University Herald, Northgate Journal and Seattle Shopping News) had sold out to the Today chain. They wanted to get rid of me," Stan says. "They offered to buy me out.
"It was getting to the point where pretty soon I thought I was going to have to retire anyway," said Stan who was