Sylvester quintessential hall-of-fame newsman

Ted Sylvester knew Rockland. He knew everybody and their dog, plus where they went to school, whom they were married to and where they worked.

That came in handy when he was bureau chief for the Bangor Daily News through the 1970s and ’80s. Those were the days that the Portland Press Herald and the BDN competed every day, and radio station WRKD and the Courier Gazette covered Rockland like a blanket.

But no one could keep up with Sylvester.

He basically drove the Press Herald out of town and beat the Courier like a rented mule. He had worked there as a linotype operator when he decided he could write those stories as well as the reporters did. He wanted to be a reporter so badly that he took a job in Presque Isle and moved the whole family there.

After a few years, the Rockland job opened and Sylvester jumped at it. He liked Presque Isle. But he knew Rockland.

For the next 20 years, he covered the City Council, shootings and robberies, school boards and festival parades. He was first at the scene of the May 30, 1979, Down East Airlines crash in Owls Head.

It was Sylvester who negotiated the end of a hostage situation at Maine State Prison when a guard was being held with a knife at his throat. One inmate was dead on the cellblock floor, and guards waited around the corner, shotguns locked and loaded. When the inmates aired their grievances, they said they were afraid to let the guard go because they would be beaten. Sylvester agreed to escort the inmates to protective custody, and the situation was resolved without further injury.

He would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Judges were a favorite target. When his old pal, Rockland attorney John Knight, put Sylvester on a panel speaking to a judicial conference, Sylvester criticized Chief Justice Vincent McCusick for accepting free trips from lobbyists.

He wasn’t invited again.

When Justice Bruce Chandler announced plans to add a bathroom suite to his Rockland chambers, Sylvester wrote in his popular Fish n’ Chips column that this was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The suite wasn’t built until after Sylvester retired.

The column was in every Saturday. You didn’t want to be in the office if the editors left it out, for one reason or another. You could tell by the phone calls how important Fish n’ Chips was to Rockland-area readers.

My personal favorite was the time he planted rosebushes and mistakenly used cement instead of fertilizer. At last report, the roses were still blooming.

That popularity of the column drove David Himmelstein crazy. Himmelstein graduated from the Rockland office of the Press Herald and ended up writing movies, of all things. When he was a lowly reporter, he once ended up on a White House tour with a friend and managed to “attain” some official stationery. He wrote a letter from President Jimmy Carter saying that Fish n’ Chips was a routine part of the presidential news reading, then mailed it from Washington, D.C.

Sylvester fell for it, hook, line and sinker. In his defense, it looked genuine. When he started waving “the president’s” letter around the coffee shop, even Himmelstein had to fess up. I think Sylvester is still mad that he fell for it.

When CBS newsman Charles Kuralt wrote a book, I bought a copy and mailed it to CBS to be autographed for Ted. Kuralt mentioned Fish n’ Chips in his message to Ted. When I gave the autographed book to our bureau chief, he thought that was a fake. I bet he still does, even though I showed him the envelope from CBS. Himmelstein he believed, but not me.

Sylvester could be irritating as hell. He never bounced a check. He never got a speeding ticket. He has never paid a nickel of interest on a credit card. It’s hard to work with someone like that. But I managed, somehow, for 20 years.

God, he was dedicated. He covered a motel fire hours after being released from the hospital after an operation.

For his stellar career in news reporting (he hated the term “journalism”) the Maine Press Association has named Ted Sylvester to its hall of fame.

It’s about time.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.