Former NEWS editor Marshall L. Stone dies

Marshall L. Stone, a former Bangor Daily News managing editor known for his staunch commitment to editorial independence, and whose barbed Column One often jabbed his own newspaper and other powerful Maine institutions, died Friday at an Ellsworth health care facility at the age of 81.

“Mel’s competence, professionalism and high standards inspired the people he led,” said NEWS Publisher Richard J. Warren, who acknowledged that Stone’s direct and prickly approach as a columnist could be challenging for a publisher, too.

“He had a knack for bringing out the best in his staff as a managing editor,” Warren observed, “and for going straight to the eye of a controversy as a columnist. Mel was a strong idealist and a totally dedicated journalist. That mixture came through powerfully in his writing.”

Stone retired from the NEWS in 1982 after a dozen years with the paper. In December 1969, just three months after accepting the assistant managing editor’s job, Stone, then 49, was appointed the NEWS managing editor, succeeding John W. Moran, who had held the paper’s top editorial post for 15 years.

Born in Bigelow, Ark., Stone was a former sergeant and six-year Marine Corps veteran in World War II. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oklahoma, and held a master of arts degree in literature from Cornell University.

He began his first newspaper job in 1950 for the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock. Three years later, he moved to the Louisville, Ky., Courier Journal, and in 1954 accepted a position with the Detroit News.

Stone joined the staff of the Bangor Daily News on Sept. 14, 1970, as its assistant managing editor, making the move from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he had been employed since 1961. At the Inquirer, Stone initially worked as assistant to the general manager, overseeing that paper’s merger with the Philadelphia Daily News.

“I made the plans for moving the Philadelphia Daily News into the Inquirer building, sort of meshing their editorial, production and library,” Stone said in a 1982 interview. “I did that and got out. I felt so much like a fish out of water, I asked for, and got, a demotion to the editorial department.”

Stone brought a familiarity with Down East Maine to his position at the NEWS. He and his wife, Johnnie, and two college-age sons, Bruce and Mark, had spent summer vacations in Lubec for the previous nine years. The family initially settled in Winterport, and later moved to West Gouldsboro.

As managing editor, Stone was at the helm of the newsroom during a period when dramatic changes occurred in the industry. He supervised the changeover of the newsroom from typewriters to computer keyboards and editing terminals, and the switch in the newspaper’s library from clippings to microfiche.

He made organizational changes in the news operation equally dramatic to the changes in equipment. Those changes were aimed at creating a more balanced and open newspaper, he asserted, since, for many of its readers, it is “their only window on the world.” He was steadfast in his belief that a managing editor had to be the “conscience, the soul of the news,” and felt it was an editor’s responsibility to take stands on many very small issues in order to protect the integrity of the news.

As he told an interviewer at the time of his retirement from the NEWS, “My holier-than-thou approach, I think, has resulted – I hope it has – in a sensitivity on the part of the whole paper to the importance of credibility … a commitment to professionalism.”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward of Winterport, who served as assistant managing editor under Stone, said Stone was an ideal boss who led by example and knew how to get the best out of people. “If you couldn’t work for Mel Stone, chances are you couldn’t work for anyone,” Ward said. “He managed with a light touch on the reins, but left little doubt that he expected his staff to perform.”

Stone arrived on the scene as rapidly changing technology demanded innovative thinking on the part of newsroom managers, and he did not shrink from challenging the status quo in preparing the paper for the approaching 21st century, Ward said. “To me, the Stone era was like a breath of fresh air for the newspaper, its staff and, most important, its readers.”

In 1973, Stone began Column One, which he later described “as a place for the staff to put material to say things that wouldn’t fit in the news columns appropriately and wouldn’t really fit into the editorial page.” To encourage the staff to use the space, he started writing himself, “to show by example that I would hang out there once a week if they would.” He felt it was important to show the staff that he could write, and he also “had some things to say.”

Through his Friday columns, readers became acquainted with Stone, and he often focused on aspects of the news business.

Stone was a Pulitzer Prize juror, serving in 1976 as one of 50 editors named by President William J. McGill of Columbia University. He was named Maine Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press Association in 1982, the year of his early retirement from the NEWS.

Three months after leaving the NEWS, Stone, the longtime daily newspaper journalist, joined what he pointed out was his “first weekly,” the Ellsworth American, as its managing editor, a post he held until August 1984. At the American, “I learned that putting out a weekly is work, too,” said Stone, who was described by James Russell Wiggins, then publisher of the American, as a “fine journalist.”

Leaving the American and the deadline-driven news business for what would be the last time, Stone said he planned to “pay more attention to my hobbies, especially carving, and to my avocation, antiquing.”

Mark Woodward came to work for the NEWS and Stone in 1971. Now the paper’s executive editor, Woodward recalls that for a generation of reporters and editors, Stone was a “powerful role model.”

“He was quiet, thoughtful and a newsroom leader.” Woodward said. “My faith and confidence in him was complete. He was self-effacing, totally unpretentious, and underneath was solid conviction, deep principle and a commitment to maintaining the highest ethical and professional standards. As a boss, he was demanding and expected his staff to share this commitment. On a personal level, he was incredibly understanding. I think Jeff Strout, an assignment editor here, put it best when he said Mel was ‘a Marine with a heart of gold.'”

Stone-the-editor may best be described by Stone-the-commentator. In a 1979 Maine Sunday Telegram interview that was part of a series on those who shaped the news in Maine, he was asked what drove him:

“I’ve had an egalitarian complex all my life. I relate to the staff, to the people below me, better than I relate to the people above. I hope the staff sees me as one of them, as their spokesman when they have proposals to make, and things to bitch about. I hope I’m their representative.

“I’m the boss, but I’m a democratic boss. That makes me a weak managing editor in a lot of ways, but it makes me strong in a lot of ways. I think it gets the best out of the staff.”