Jay Spry author page

Jay Spry was a longtime journalist with the Baltimore Sun who mentored generations of reporters. Spry's mentees included Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and David Simon, creator of the HBO series "The Wire." Simon included Spry as a character in the final season of "The Wire," which centered on a fictionalized version of the Sun newsroom.

Spry passed away in 1989. David Ettlin, another of Spry's proteges, wrote Spry's obituary for the Sun:

Jay Spry, a cigar-puffing newspaper rewrite man who rarely allowed a deadline to get in the way of a good story — whether he was writing it or telling it —died of cancer yesterday…. He was 72.

He instilled the basics of good reporting — chiefly, double-checking every fact — in younger colleagues during two stints with The Sun that were sandwiched around a 16-year career as a press relations officer for what is now Exxon.

Finding the right word was no problem for Mr. Spry, since he was a noted constructor of crossword puzzles.

He was also a skilled tournament bridge player — an avocation only slightly removed from his legendary prowess at the poker table.

Among reporters pumped for facts and lectured on accuracy by Mr. Spry was Russell Baker, who joined his mentor on this newspaper's rewrite desk before moving along to the New York Times to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist.

In [Baker's autobiography], Mr. Baker remembers Mr. Spry as a "one man school of journalism" who preached "the vacuum-cleaner philosophy of reporting then practiced by the New York Times, though not with the demanding exactitude Jay brought to it."

Recalling the challenge faced by young reporters in the field who had to phone in their facts to the rewrite desk, Mr. Baker wrote:

"On rewrite, Jay was the man for eight-alarm fires, and you had better come to the phone with the correct identification of every fire company on the scene; the name of every fire chief, including middle initial; the identity, address, and job of the person who turned in the first alarm, what he was doing when he first noticed the fire, [and] how many people he was doing it with.…"

Born in Lakesville, [Maryland]…, Jay Franklin Spry was the son Nellie Majors Spry and the late Rev. Charles W. Spry, a methodist minister whose frequent moves were responsible for the boy attending five grammar schools.

Mr. Spry attended Washington College, becoming editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, the Washington Elm, and picking up extra cash at rummy and poker.

"His idea of heaven," said a college roommate, retired Maryland Court of Appeals Judge Marvin H. Smith, "was where you could sleep all day and play cards all night."

But somehow, Mr. Spry managed to graduate magna cum laude in 1937 and move along that July to a $20-a-week reporting job at The Sun, working the police beat and general assignments by streetcar.

He was "moved inside" little more than a year later to fill in on the rewrite desk, a job one step below an editing position.

Mr. Spry later attributed the move largely to the need for another player in the nightly newsroom poker game. He seldom lost. In fact, he recently recalled, "I often won more than I earned."

Newspaper work was only partially interrupted by World War II, in which Staff Sergeant Spry served as editor of the Fort Meade Post — a time, he noted, when Fort Meade was "the second largest city in Maryland."

He later joined a special team that translated Japanese air force codes.

Mr. Spry returned to The Sun after the war but was lured away in 1952 to greener pastures of what was then Esso Standard Oil Co….Mr. Spry took early retirement from Exxon in 1968, and for a year mostly played bridge and constructed crossword puzzles, an interest brought on by the ability of his wife, Carolyn Crane Spry, to solve them.

Both created puzzles that were printed and reprinted in dozens of the popular collections edited by Margaret Farrar, and Mr. Spry's more challenging works appeared regularly, with a byline in publications including the New York Times and the National Observer.

After his wife's death in 1973, he moved back to Maryland. And in the summer of 1976, Mr. Spry's former partner on The Sun's rewrite desk . . . lured him back to the newsroom for six more years with a lament on the need for a good-old-days type of rewrite man.

What the obituary doesn't reveal is how it came to be written. Jay himself, bedridden in his last days from colon cancer at an Annapolis area nursing home, called [the] then-news editor…, asking him to send me to see him and write his obituary.

I sat with Jay for about two hours taking detailed notes, including about his relationship with the younger journalist Russell Baker (who he had mentored, and considered as much a son as friend and colleague). I returned to the office and wrote an obit that basically ran two full columns in length, and the next day returned to read it to Jay.

His reaction: The Sun would never run such a long obit. And he hated the lede. I told him he didn't get to write' the lede of his own obit, and that everyone in the newsroom loved it. The lede stayed, although the obit was trimmed….