(HOST) The Vermont Legislature opened this month with a score of reporters covering it. Tom Slayton remembers the editor who first assigned him to cover the legislature, almost forty years ago.
(SLAYTON) Not all history is made by famous people. Quite often, history is made by people most of us never see and do not know.
That’s the case with a former managing editor of the Rutland Herald. His name is S. Kendall Wild, and he didn’t make the dramatic kind of history that involves winning battles or elections.
But it was important, nonetheless. It affected the life of journalism in Vermont – and therefore just about anyone who reads a paper or pays attention to the news.
At this point, a bit of full disclosure: Kendall Wild was my boss at the Rutland Herald for more than ten years. In fact, he trained and shaped a whole generation of Vermont journalists.
Reporting in Vermont was a lot lower-key before Wild took over the Rutland Herald in 1962. So was Vermont, for that matter: quiet, Republican, and economically depressed.
But change was in the air. Phil Hoff, a young Democrat from Burlington, had won the governorship, and the Republican Party’s long dominance of Vermont politics seemed to be ending.
Kendall Wild wanted the Rutland Herald’s coverage to match the urgency of the times. Over the next few years, he began to make some substantive changes in the way The Herald covered the news. He hired a phalanx of young, aggressive reporters and started non-stop campaign coverage. I was one of those reporters. Kendall sent us out with every major political candidate. We covered every stump speech and rubber-chicken dinner.
Later, after the Herald bought the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus, Wild decided that those papers needed their own bureau in Montpelier. He split away from the Burlington Free Press and established the Vermont Press Bureau, just to serve the Barre and Rutland papers.
By this time, he was spending a lot of money on reporters and overtime. Fortunately, the publisher of the Herald and Times-Argus, Robert Mitchell, believed strongly in the value of good news coverage.
The result was that journalism in Vermont got more competitive – and better. The Free Press established its own capital bureau. The Associated Press added a second reporter and later more staff. Broadcast news staffs were also expanded.
What difference did it all make? Vermonters may not realize it, but the lively news coverage they get today is a direct result of the higher standards that Kendall Wild established forty years ago at the Rutland Herald.
There are not only more reporters at the Vermont State House than there used to be – there are more reporters there than in just about any State House in the country. One of the best things about public life in Vermont is that there are several good newspapers, plus good television and radio news staffs.
Admittedly, no one person is responsible for all that. But it’s fair to say that Kendall Wild started and inspired the drive for more aggressive news coverage in Vermont back in the 60s and 70s – and Vermont is a better place today because of his work.
Tom Slayton is the editor of Vermont Life magazine.