The Philadelphia Story   

I was looking all over for The Judge, but he was nowhere in sight.

This was at a gathering commemorating the 15th anniversary of the death of the Philadelphia Bulletin, and it looked like virtually everyone else was there. But no sign of The Judge.

The Judge is known more formally as Harmon Y. Gordon. He was covering the courts for the Bulletin when I was assigned to the same beat at the Inquirer as a 12-year-old (OK, 22-year-old) reporter back in 1966. But anyone who was anybody, and a lot of people who weren't, called him The Judge.

The Judge was the old-school reporter at its best. He had been on the beat for 15 years, and he was totally wired. He couldn't walk down a corridor in City Hall without some tipstaff or bailiff or lawyer or trial junkie emerging from the woodwork to give him a story. The Judge even looked like a judge, trim and dignified with terrific silver hair.

It turned out he didn't show up because his wife wasn't feeling well. But there were enough luminaries around to ease the disappointment. Like:

* Peter Binzen, my boss when I was the Bulletin's deputy metro editor. Peter, who now writes a business column for the Inquirer, is a man of great intelligence, dignity, fairness--a class act all the way.

* Suzy Gordon (no relation to The Judge), my first hire and a pantheon human being. Suzy has never been a superstar, and never wanted to be. She's like the basketball player who doesn't care about scoring points, but instead does all of the dirty work that wins games. Suzy, who also joined the Inquirer after the Bulletin folded, always does what needs to be done, and always does it well. The world would be a better place with more Suzy Gordons.

* Gene Herman, like The Judge, a great old-school beat reporter (in this case labor). Gene harkens back to the days when reporters worked their way up from copy boy, when reporters worked in the cities where they grew up (and for that matter when papers had labor beats). He knew the fabric of the city because he was the fabric of the city.

* Ron Goldwyn, now with the Philadelphia Daily News, a very talented writer who overcame the often crippling handicap of not being from Philly by totally immersing himself in the city's mores.

The Bulletin bash got me to thinking about the collapse and death of the once-dominant Bulletin and the rise and triumph of the Inquirer. And I was struck by the fact that the Philadelphia story puts an interesting and sometimes surprising spin on the debates over who should own newspapers and what should go in them.

Take the question of independent vs. chain. When I started with the Inquirer in 1964 (as a summer police reporter; they hadn't invented internships yet) it was as independent as they get, owned by the fabulously wealthy Walter S. Annenberg.

It wasn't exactly a paper like they design in the ethics courses.

Walter didn't much care for the University of Pennsylvania's president, Gaylord Harnwell. So his name didn't appear in the Inquirer.

He didn't much like the ownership of the Philadelphia 76ers. So the local professional basketball team was lucky to get three graphs in the sports section.

He really didn't like Milton Shapp. When Shapp ran for governor of Pennsylvania in 1966, he was pilloried mercilessly in the paper's news columns.

The Inquirer's glory days began when Knight Newspapers (now Knight-Ridder) bought it in 1970. (With my finely honed instinct for the great career move, I had left to go to the Bulletin's Washington bureau months before. Who knew?) First John McMullan cleaned out the ample supply of deadwood, then Gene Roberts cranked up the greatness machine. Score one for the chains.

Of course today's Inquirer is a different paper than it was at its peak, and there were ample reminders of that the day of the Bulletin reunion. Those who made the pilgrimage from the Bulletin soirée to the Pen and Pencil Club encountered the aftermath of the farewell party for Steve Lopez, the Inquirer's terrific local columnist. Earlier in the day came the news that Barlett and Steele, the celebrated investigative duo, were leaving, like Lopez heading for Time Warner (see Bylines, page 8). But the evolving Inky is another story (see "The Inquirer's Midlife Crisis," January/February 1995), or another column.

So how did the Bulletin, a family-owned, independent paper, respond to the Inquirer onslaught way back when? By retreating. By dumbing down before dumbing down was cool.

One unforgettable vignette: When the nuclear accident occurred at Three Mile Island, the Bulletin was all over it from the get-go (the Inky, for all its wonderfulness, was never that fast off the mark). Then, after a couple of days, came the orders from top management I'll never forget: Bring those reporters back. (After all, we had dispatched them all the way to central Pennsylvania. What were we thinking?) Meanwhile the Inquirer was sending a battalion of reporters to cover the story.

Of course the Bulletin, like so many big-city afternoon papers, was probably doomed. But it could have gone down being true to the tradition that had made it the city's finest paper for years.

As for the ownership question, maybe the lesson is this: Judge papers not by what they are, but what they do.