December 8, 1962: The New York Typographical Union goes on strike. This means the newspapers of New York City have to stop publication.
This includes the broadsheets: The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Journal American, and the New York World-Telegram & Sun. It also includes the tabloids: The Daily News, the New York Post and the New York Mirror. And it included 2 papers on Long Island, both broadsheets: The Long Island Star Journal and the Long Island Daily Press. Newsday, a Long Island-based tabloid, was not affected.
New York had been a newspaper city for over 100 years. Even the growth of radio hadn't stopped that. Nor had the 1924 merger of the Herald, once the paper of James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr., with the Tribune, once the paper of Horace Greeley and the leading voice of the drive to abolish slavery in America prior to the Civil War.
Nor had the merger of the morning American and the afternoon Journal, both owned by William Randolph Heart's company, in 1937. Nor had the merger of the World, once the paper of Joseph Pulitzer and the publisher of The World Almanac, with the Telegram in 1931, or the 1950 merger of the combined "World-Telly" with The Sun, the paper that declared in 1897, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."
Nor had radio really hurt newspaper sales. Quite the contrary: Many of the early radio stations were founded by newspapers. Indeed, Chicago's best-known radio station, WGN, was founded by The Chicago Tribune, which named it for the nickname it had chosen for itself: "The World's Greatest Newspaper."
But what radio didn't do, or even try to do, television, however inadvertently, did: Killed the institutions of the afternoon newspaper and the evening newspaper. It was bad enough for papers that there was a 6:00 news broadcast on local TV stations every night. But with the addition of an 11:00 news for when people were going to bed, and the promos throughout prime-time programming of a story they could watch on the news, with the tagline, "Film at 11," the need for an afternoon or an evening paper was gone.
The union knew they had the squeeze on the papers. The papers knew it, too. The strike dragged on through Christmas, New Year's, and the entire winter. On March 4, 1963, the Post negotiated a separate peace. Finally, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. brought the sides to the bargaining table. On March 24, the strike was settled.
New York has had newspaper strikes since, but no strike in the history of the American labor movement has hurt an industry more than this one. Several of the papers never recovered. The Mirror published its last edition on October 16, 1963. My grandmother, who grew up in Queens, said it was no great loss: It was a conservative paper of low quality.
The remaining papers did whatever they could to survive, from cutting costs by laying off famous columnists to appealing to the rising Baby Boom generation. The Journal American, in particular, had gambled on gaining younger readers with heavy coverage of the Beatles' visits in 1964 and 1965, something you wouldn't expect a conservative broadsheet to do.
They even hired the famed "pop psychologist," Dr. Joyce Brothers, to analyze the Beatles from a distance. And they had the top entertainment columnist in New York, Dorothy Kilgallen, "The Voice of Broadway" and one of the panelists on CBS'What's My Line?, write about rock and roll for the first time.
But they lost their biggest asset on November 8, 1965, when Kilgallen died. The next year, a long-running power struggle between Hearst company CEO Richard Berlin and the Hearst family did the paper in. The paper's last edition was published on April 24, 1966.
The E.W. Scripps Company gave up on the World-Telegram & Sun the day before, April 23, 1966. The Daily News bought the rights to The World Almanac, and its parent company still publishes it today, although it's really a waste of money, given how easy it is to look things up on the Internet.
The Herald Tribune, long the beacon of America's "liberal Republicans," with one of the finest sports sections in the country, hung on a little longer, until August 15, 1966. It was the most direct competitor to The New York Times, which eulogized:
The death of The New York Herald Tribune stills a voice that for a century and a quarter exerted a powerful influence in the affairs of nation, state and city. It was a competitor of ours, but a competitor that sought survival on the basis of quality, originality and integrity, rather than sensationalism or doctrinaire partisanship.
For a while, the 3 papers that failed that year tried to band together: The World Journal Tribune began publishing on September 12, 1966. But instead of combining the best aspects of all 3 papers, it seemed to combine the worst, and the money problems of all 3. The WJT, or "Widget," never caught on, and Scripps (W-T&S) and Hearst (J-A) pulled the plug on May 5, 1967.
And so, New York City, which had 10 daily newspapers as recently as 1924, and 7 as recently as the Summer of 1963, was down to 3: The Times, the Daily News and the Post. Both the Daily News and the Post have survived 2 existential crises since then, as well as their ideological flip-flop of 1976: Rupert Murdoch bought the Post, turning it from a paper for liberal intellectuals, especially Jewish ones, to a populist conservative paper, as the Daily News had been; and the News then became a liberal paper, though still taking conservative positions on crime in New York (helping Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani get elected Mayor), the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Cuba.
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December 8, 1962 was a Saturday. Baseball was out of season. The college football regular season had ended the day before. But each of the 2 pro football leagues of the time played 1 game. In the NFL, the Baltimore Colts beat the Washington Redskins, 34-21 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. And in the American Football League, the New York Titans, forerunners of the Jets, lost to the Buffalo Bills, 20-3 at the Polo Grounds.
There were 4 games in the NBA that day:
* The New York Knicks beat the Detroit Pistons, 87-78 at the old Madison Square Garden.
* The Syracuse Nationals beat the Boston Celtics, 102-97 at the Onondaga War Memorial Arena in Syracuse. This was the last season for the Nats, who moved the next season, becoming the Philadelphia 76ers. Their arena still stands, as the Upstate Medical University Arena.
* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Cincinnati Royals, 131-128 at the Cincinnati Gardens. For the Lakers, Elgin Baylor scored 33, and Jerry West and Rudy LaRusso each scored 28. Oscar Robertson of the Royals led all scorers on the day with 42, but it wasn't enough.
* And the St. Louis Hawks beat the San Francisco Warriors, 145-129 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. Wilt Chamberlain scored 39 for the Warriors, but the Hawks got 26 from Bob Pettit, 24 from Cliff Hagan, and 21 from John Barnhill.
There were 3 games played in the NHL:
* The New York Rangers played the Boston Bruins to a tie, 3-3 at the Boston Garden.
* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Detroit Red Wings, 2-1 at the Montreal Forum.
* And the Chicago Black Hawks played the Toronto Maple Leafs to a tie, 1-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.