Former Sun-Times Editor James Hoge helped usher in a golden age of Chicago journalism by hiring young talent and signing off on audacious investigative projects, including the Mirage Tavern undercover sting. The newspaper would win six Pulitzer Prizes under his watch.
This all happened by the time he was 45 years old.
Mr. Hoge started at the Sun-Times in 1959 as a $68.50-a-week night police reporter while still a graduate student at the University of Chicago. He sprinted from assistant city editor in 1965 to managing editor in 1967 to editor-in-chief in 1968 to publisher by the time he was 44.
Mr. Hoge died Tuesday in New York City. He was 87.
“He loved Chicago and was enormously proud of the work he did there,” said his son, James Patrick Hoge. “It was really important that the Sun-Times carved out a place that became known as THE place for investigative journalism, and he nurtured and protected and supported the journalists who were going after stuff.”
From his first day on the city desk, Mr. Hoge had one assignment: Draw young readers. The top editors, as he recalled in 1998 for a Sun-Times special project on the newspaper’s history, “had a feeling the paper had plateaued” and expected him to figure out what to do next.
A remarkable judge of new talent, he recruited a new generation of commentators, some right out of college, including future columnists Roger Ebert, Bob Greene, Roger Simon, Ellis Cose and Ron Powers. In 1973, Powers became the first TV critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, and in 1975 Ebert became the first movie critic to receive the honor.
Mr. Hoge doted on reporters, and they loved him for it. He believed the Sun-Times should be a “writer’s paper” and was known to stand over a reporter’s shoulder as he or she banged out some gem on deadline and say, “Keep going, keep going.”
In 1969, after the Chicago Tribune ran a photo of the home where Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton was killed by police that was provided by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan’s office and purported to show bullet holes in a door frame that were caused by Panthers shooting at police — Mr. Hoge received a call from a tipster saying the raid was a setup, the bullet holes were fabricated and to “go look for yourself.”
So Mr. Hoge did. He and reporter Joe Reilly inspected the apartment where Hampton was killed that day. They inspected the door frame and saw no holes, just unplastered nail heads.
The Sun-Times the next morning ran a front page headline: “Those ‘bullet holes’ aren’t.” Follow-up stories would ultimately lead to public condemnation of the police raid and the booting of Hanrahan from office.
Also in 1969, during a rampage in the streets by a radical group of young people who called themselves “Weathermen,” Mr. Hoge suggested reporter Tom Fitzpatrick write a piece that would explain what it was like to be in the middle of the riot.
“Take all the space you need,“ Mr. Hoge told Fitzpatrick, who would win a Pulitzer for his work. It was the first in an amazing string of Sun-Times Pulitzer awards.
The Sun-Times won a Pulitzer Prize in five of the first six years of the 1970s, including one for the photography of Jack William Dykinga in 1971 and two for general reporting. Only the New York Times and the Washington Post won as many Pulitzers in those years.
“I remember feeling, “My God, I think we’ve done it,’” Mr. Hoge said in that same 1998 interview. “Overall, there was a generalized feeling we were on to something.”
Mr. Hoge was born in Manhattan on Dec. 25, 1935, one of four children of successful New York City attorney James Hoge Sr. and Virginia Hoge. He was schooled at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. He received a master’s degree from the University of Chicago.
Mr. Hoge may not have seemed the most likely candidate to run a blue-collar tabloid paper, but he was a natural newsman who was as comfortable as any of his reporters drinking beer at the Billy Goat.
“He was as at home in a grimy, cigarette- and cigar smoke-filled Chicago newsroom as he was at a Hamptons lawn party, and as interested in mob-inspired Northwest Side hits as he was in post-Cold War relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union,” said former Sun-Times reporter James Warren.
Under Mr. Hoge, the Sun-Times tried new, even audacious approaches to getting the story.
Reporter Pamela Warrick worked undercover as a substitute teacher in Chicago’s public schools to learn firsthand the dangers they faced. She was, she reported, “cursed, slapped, insulted and harassed.”
Working with investigative reporter Pam Zekman, Warrick also went undercover as an employee in an abortion clinic. They revealed that some doctors performed abortions without anesthetic and sold abortions to women who weren’t even pregnant.
But of all the blockbuster investigations served up by the Sun-Times under Mr. Hoge’s leadership in the 1970s, one topped them all.
In 1977, the paper bought a beat-up neighborhood bar, dubbed it the “Mirage” and stood back and watched as city inspectors seeking payoffs came around.
In a lofted space in a back room of the bar, photographers cut a hole in the wall, covered it with a vent and documented it all with their cameras.
The Mirage was Zekman’s idea, and much to her amazement, Mr. Hoge bought it the first time she pitched it — while the two walked across the Michigan Avenue Bridge.
“He began figuring out what problems we’d encounter, and he was so enthusiastic and supportive,” recalled Zekman. “It was incredible.”
They drafted a dazzling new young writer, Zay Smith, to tend the bar and write the series, with the Better Government Association helping keep tabs on the scams. The investigation resulted in the firings of city workers, dozens of indictments and the reform of several government agencies. The series cost the paper several hundred thousand dollars and generated even more controversy when it didn’t win a Pulitzer because it used undercover reporting methods.
In the newsroom, Mr. Hoge’s nickname was The Golden Jet.
“If Hollywood called Central Casting back in that era, looking for someone to play a newspaper editor — or airline pilot — they’d send a guy who looked just like Jim Hoge. Tall, handsome, blond — with that steely gaze. He just oozed respect and decisiveness,” said Sun-Times breaking news editor Scott Fornek, who was a clerk in the newsroom at the time.
“But with Hoge, appearances weren’t deceiving. He was the real deal, a visionary leader who the men and women in the newsroom wanted to follow. You ask folks to pick the top five editors of the Sun-Times, and I’d bet you a beer Hoge makes everyone’s list — likely at or near the top,” said Fornek.
Young writers at the Sun-Times stumbled over each other to be the best and brightest, to break new ground and please Mr. Hoge, who became revered in Chicago’s journalism circles for having an excellent eye for gifted, up-and-coming reporters and writers.
Mr. Hoge hired Mary Dedinsky as a 25-year-old cub reporter to work the paper’s education beat.
“He was out there early helping to bring women and people of color into the newsroom,” said Dedinsky, who later worked as an editor and associate dean at Northwestern’s journalism school.
In 1978, Mr. Hoge oversaw the closing of Sun-Times’ sister paper, the Chicago Daily News, and the merging of the two newsroom staffs.
His time with the paper concluded in 1984 when the Marshall Field family sold the Sun-Times to Rupert Murdoch. Mr. Hoge, then publisher of the paper, organized a group that tried to buy the Sun-Times, but they were outbid by the Australian media mogul. He resigned his post as a result.
How’d he rise so quickly at the Sun-Times?
“He was masterful at managing up and down,” said Warren, noting that the Ivy League connection for then publisher Marshall Field V, a Harvard grad, was also important.
“And the Field family really liked him. He was dashing and brought some of the east coast allure that Chicagoans on one hand thumbed their noses at and, at the same time, arguably out of insecurity, craved. But, at heart, he was really, really good.”
Mr. Hoge later worked as publisher of the New York Daily News and Foreign Affairs journal. He also served as chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board and chaired boards for Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Journalists.
Mr. Hoge is survived by his wife, Kathleen Lacey; sons James Patrick Hoge, Robert Warren Hoge and Spencer Hoge; his daughter, Alicia Hoge Adams; stepdaughter Kienan Lacey; stepson Devin Lacey; nine grandchildren and two stepgrandchildren.
Services are pending.
