Frederick James Flagler Jr.

FLAGLER WINSTON-SALEM - Frederick James Flagler, Jr., retired managing editor of both the Winston-Salem Journal & Twin City Sentinel, died early Tuesday morning, August 25, at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. He was 83 and a resident of Winston-Salem for more than 50 years. Because of his lifetime contribution to journalism, Mr. Flagler was named to the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame April 3, 2005. He was famously known for adoring the love of his life, Mary Hill Gaston Flagler, and the newspaper business. Mr. Flagler is survived by six children: Frederick J. Flagler III of Atlanta; Margaret MacLaren of Wilmington; Eleanor Flagler Hardy of Louisville, KY; David W. Flagler of Wilmington; Elizabeth Ann Flagler of Davidson; and Kathryn Flagler Fleer of Maryville, TN. He also is survived by his six "in-law children," as the Flaglers called them: Linda Flagler, James MacLaren, Owen Hardy, Madeline Flagler, Mark Washburn and John Fleer. He was also proud of his grandchildren and their spouses: Brian Flagler (Amy Flagler,) Emily Flagler (Andre Strumer), Molly MacLaren (Patrick Lynch) Jeffrey MacLaren, Kathryn and Rachel Hardy, Mary & Julia Flagler, Matthew Washburn and Jackson, Daniel & Justin Fleer, and his great-grandchildren, Patrick, Sam & Grady Flagler, Krystall Strumer and Anna Kathleen Lynch. Mr. Flagler served the Winston-Salem newspapers for 36 years. He was Winston-Salem Journal assistant city editor, city editor, managing editor and associate managing editor. He also served as managing editor of the Twin-City Sentinel until its demise in 1985. He retired from the Journal in 1991. In 1971, during Mr. Flagler' s time as Managing Editor, the Journal won journalism' s most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize, in the most highly coveted category: Public Service. The series of articles was credited with preventing Northwest North Carolina from being strip-mined, keeping the mountains a treasure for generations. During his time at the Sentinel, he and his team turned around the circulation decline of the paper, won three prestigious Meeman Awards from the Scripps Howard Foundation in three years and became the first two-time winner of the Thomas Stokes Award of the Washington Journalism Center for the best environmental reporting in the U.S. and Canada. When the Sentinel was about to close, he felt it keenly: "The death of the Sentinel is something we feared because of the national trend toward the demise of the afternoon newspaper...Thank you for reading us, and thanks too for those calls and letters consoling us about the death in the family." Before joining the Journal, he worked for the Statesville Record, High Point Enterprise and Furniture South. Mr. Flagler was the beloved husband of Mary Hill Gaston Flagler for 59 years before her death in 2006. They fell in love at the University of North Carolina when she was the star reporter for the Daily Tar Heel and he was head of the Yackety Yack yearbook, among other publications. They married on February 8, 1947 in her family home in Gastonia. The Flaglers moved to Winston-Salem in 1958, when Mr. Flagler was appointed city editor of the Journal. For 12 years, they lived at 2016 Gaston St. in Ardmore. For 35 years, they lived at "1250," their beloved home on Yorkshire Road. Both Flaglers had an "open door" policy to welcome any child or friend just about any time of day or night. Mrs. Flagler kept the kitchen hopping with great Southern cooking and her calm despite the chaos of six children, while Mr. Flagler kept the downstairs rocking with drum sets and a music system that would blast out everything from Marcia Ball to Duke Ellington, the Big Band music he loved from his teenaged years in High Point, N.C. It was a haven for all 12 grandchildren. In recent years, Mr. Flagler lived in an apartment at Salemtowne, the Moravian retirement community. He kept things rocking there, too, with his music and his computer - which he used for receiving and sending jokes to friends and family spread across the country - and to make personal greeting cards still treasured by those who received them. He was famous for his ice cream recipe, caramel corn and pancakes. Even after moving to Salemtowne, he would distribute them to anybody lucky enough to get one. He was known for his storytelling and for keeping his visitors and the dining room at Salemtowne jolly. "It' s not the same without Fred," said one of his tablemates. "He kept us laughing all the time." At the N. C. Journalism Hall of Fame ceremony at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, he brought the house down with his brevity and wit. The honoree who came after begged: "Never put me on the program behind Fred Flagler again!" He was ever the keen-eyed editor. He praised his wife' s 2006 obituary in his usual understated manner. "It was good," he told the daughter who wrote it, but there was an error. About his favorite photo of his wife in Egypt: "Actually it was not a camel cart in Cairo. It was a donkey cart in Luxor." Mr. Flagler recently told one of his daughters that his career started when he was 9 in High Point, N.C., when he and his friend Earl Graham set type for hours after school in Graham' s attic, producing a little neighborhood newspaper. His mother had no idea where he was. He was smitten. He never considered another career. "I never knew how to do anything else," he said. When he retired from the Journal, Journal columnist Tom Sieg interviewed Mr. Flagler. "The thing that' s been fascinating is, you' re not turning out the same box of cookies every day," Mr. Flagler said. "You' re turning out something that is changing. I think I would have had a difficult time trying to turn out boxes of cookies every day. He had a sense of commitment and correctness about every aspect of the newspaper " no matter what the power elite might believe or argue," wrote Mr. Sieg. "There was talk of the time when the report of the first study on tobacco and health, a study of smoking' s effect on dogs - was released," Sieg continued. "A telephone call came that evening from a worried Bowman Gray, the head of RJ Reynolds Tobacco and brother of Gordon Gray, the publisher of the Journal at the time. Bowman Gray said something like: ' I was just wondering if you folks were planning to do anything with that item about the cancer study. It doesn' t really seem to me that there' s all that much to it. What do you think?' "There was no mistaking the intent of the call - or Fred' s feelings on it. He gave the story on the report major display on Page One, where it belonged." In the 1960s, the "city fathers" wanted the newspaper to downplay what they called "minor disturbances." Other media were going along, "Fred saw to it that the Journal broke the real story: Race riots had broken out, and residents of our city were in peril." At the University of North Carolina, Mr. Flagler was editor of the yearbook, The Yackety Yack, editor of the Daily Tar Heel, and head of the Publications Board. He was winner of the Abernethy Award for Excellence in Student Publications at UNC. He was a member of the highest honorary societies, Golden Fleece and Order of the Grail, and he was president of Kappa Alpha fraternity. The 1946 Yackety Yack called him "Carolina's No. 1 Publications Man." It called Mary Hill Gaston: "DTH star reporter, associate editor of the Yackety Yack, leading coed on Publication Never tiring and always with a smile." Their first date was a N.C. editors' dinner at Duke University. Mr. Flagler lived in North Carolina all his life since his birth in Hickory, NC on August 5, 1926. He was the son of Lucy Sledge Flagler and Frederick James Flagler Sr., a railroad shipping clerk, of Hickory and later High Point. As a toddler in Hickory, he started carrying tools, following his grandfather, W. T. Sledge, owner of a general store, around his rental properties that needed fixing. It was a habit he never gave up. At the Journal, he fixed typewriters, balky telegraph machines and was seen plenty of times on the floor repairing the wire machines. After retirement, he volunteered doing home repairs for the elderly and poor. One day, he worked almost all day fixing a lady's plumbing and electricity. She insisted on paying. He declined. She insisted. He declined. As he walked out the door, she slipped him payment anyway -- $2 for a job well done. In a column he wrote in August, 1984, he acknowledged that being the child of a newspaperman could be tough. Although he tried to be home for supper every night, he could be late. He missed plenty of school plays and ball games. He was so concerned about his young staff being with their families out of town for Christmas, he always worked Christmas himself. The Flagler family, as a result, always celebrated with a big brunch and packages first thing in the morning, but no Christmas dinner later that day, because Dad would be cranking out the paper. "We were family under him, for sure," said Arlene Edwards Thompson, who worked for him as an intern, education and state reporter, and who has been a close family friend for 48 years. When she was a 21-year-old intern ­ with a brand-new driver¹s license. Flagler, her boss, loaned her his car so she could do an assignment. On the way, she wrecked it. When he came to assist, he loaned her his second car, so she could be sure to get the story. 'He taught me more that night than I learned from all of the journalism professors...If anybody that night had told me I would live, much less be a family friend 48 years later, I would never have believed it." In lieu of flowers, the family requests gifts be sent to the Palliative Care Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Expressions of condolence to the family can be sent c/o Eleanor Flagler Hardy, 1929 Lowell Ave., Louisville, KY 40205. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Sat. September 12 at Knollwood Baptist Church, where he was a member for almost 40 years.