A Life Lived In Newsrooms   

Gil Spencer pecked out his copy on manual typewriters, wore Brooks Brothers suits dusted with cigarette ashes and had a love for the racetrack second only to his devotion to the newsroom. That's how colleagues describe Spencer, 67, who retired last month from the Denver Post after four years at the paper and a career that spanned 46 years.

Spencer has also been the editor of the New York Daily News , the Philadelphia Daily News and the Trentonian in New Jersey, where he won a Pulitzer in 1974 for 10 editorials on government corruption.

The Post's executive editor, Neil Westergaard , succeeds Spencer. Spencer's wife, Post Sunday Editor Isabel Spencer , assumes Westergaard's duties and the title of managing editor.

Westergaard says Spencer was immediately plugged into the Denver market. "He had an uncanny ability to figure out what people would be interested in," he says. Adds Richard Aregood , editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, "There aren't many editors that you really love. The staff would have climbed mountains for him."

Spencer, who punctuates his speech with profanity and enjoys comparing politicians to ferrets, says getting into the business was "pure horseshit luck." Once he was there, he says, "It saved my life... My family, particularly my mother, thought I was a lost cause."

After being kicked out of the house by his mother and told to find a job, a girlfriend suggested Spencer take an aptitude test. The results: He should be a newspaperman. He began to look for work but says editors "laughed me out of New England." The Philadephia Inquirer , however, hired him as a copy boy in 1947.

Spencer says he plans to write daily for at least three hours "to keep from going crazy." He also begins a Sunday Post column in December. "I'm going to miss newsrooms," he says. "I lived in them."