‘Would-be doctor’ has prescription for ‘Local Life’
From Pundit to Punster
 Local Life editor Len Lear
by LAWRENCE H. GELLER
The story of Len Lear begins with all the makings of the stereotypical American success. Hard-working parents who never finished high school, thrilled that their youngest of five sons, a Central High School graduate, was going to be a professional man.
"Not just any professional man, but a doctor," said the 65-year-old Lear, Local Life editor of the Chestnut Hill Local, in a recent interview. "And not just any doctor, but a doctor of psychiatry.”
Although he had been at the top of his pre-med class at Muhlenberg College, he dropped out of Hahnemann Medical School after just one year. “I hated it,” he said. “It was so dry. I couldn’t take it.”
His parents' reaction?
“Don’t ask,” Lear said, rolling his eyes. “Very disappointed.”
Still, the disappointment in their failed psychiatrist would turn to pride one day as their son would become one of Philadelphia’s best known and most versatile journalists, rising to prominence with muckraking pieces on consumer fraud and life in the ghetto. Personality profiles, interviews with show-business performers and mouth-watering restaurant reviews would follow.
But for Lear, the road to success was riddled with potholes.
“I loved literature,” he said. “After the debacle of medical school, I went to graduate school at Temple University for English literature.”
A product of his times, Lear entitled his master's thesis "A Marxist Analysis of Six Great American Novels." He received an A, but the praise was fleeting.
Amid the backdrop of Vietnam, the civil rights struggle and the women’s movement, the anti-establishment Lear was serving in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He also worked for the City of Philadelphia at the time as an investigator of communicable diseases in the Health Department.
His involvement with the anti-war movement — including an arrest — attracted the attention of bureaucrats in the administration of Mayor James Tate and he was promptly fired. Temple followed suit, rescinding his graduate assistantship.
A broke Lear had little choice but to drop out of the school's Ph.D. program. “It was definitely not the best of times for me,” said Lear, a longtime admirer of literary giant Mark Twain's line, "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
But he didn’t have time to afflict anyone at the time. “I was one of the afflicted myself, and I needed some comforting … in the form of a job.”
Now Lear was faced with the age-old dilemma of telling the truth on job applications — that he had been arrested and fired for anti-war activism — and not being hired for a job (particularly in that super-patriotic “Support the Troops” atmosphere of the 1960s) or lying on the job application and possibly getting away with it.
“I was offered a job with an insurance company,” Lear said. Knowing that insurance companies are not prone to take risks like hiring an anti-war activist, Lear kept his background to himself.
But as Lear was to experience the hard way, insurance companies are also known for checking things out … “like my background. I was eventually fired. I was not even there long enough to collect on a policy I had written to insure myself in case I was fired,” he said in jest.
He eventually took a job — a minimum wage job — assembling eyeglasses. “They didn’t care about my background — I told them the truth — they desperately needed workers because they paid so little.”
So far, so good. However, the working conditions were so bad that he tried to organize the workers into a union. Remember, Lear’s the guy who tries to comfort the afflicted.
Right on? Right out the door. He was fired.
And then life took one of those inexplicable twists. “I saw an ad in the Temple University News for a summer factory job.”
But in his haste to call for the factory job, he dialed a wrong number by one digit. So instead of calling the factory, Lear inadvertently called the Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest continuously published black newspaper in the United States. Although there were no openings, Lear was asked about his writing experience.
“Term papers, an essay on Lord Byron, a Marxist Analysis on …” replied Lear before he was interrupted. “I don’t think we need that kind of writing,” was the editor’s response.
Desperate, Lear quickly responded, “You might be missing out on the next Faulkner or Steinbeck.” Fortunately for Lear, the editor, Mark Bricklin (who later became the editor of Prevention Magazine), had a good sense of humor, and he told him to “come on down.” “They liked me, but there were still no openings.”
Finally, on May 16, 1967, he got the call. And neither Lear nor the Tribune has been the same since. One of his first assignments “was one I’ll never forget as long as I live: July 4, 1967. It was the first demonstration, I think, in Philadelphia for homosexual rights. Now we take it for granted. But back then?”
Organized by the Lambda Society (Greek letter L for lesbian), Lear scooped every other paper in town because he was the only reporter to show up. “Everyone else turned me down,” said Barbara Giddings, the organizer. Twenty demonstrators showed up, and Lear interviewed many of them. And the Tribune had its scoop. Not bad for a rookie reporter.
So what was it like to be a white reporter on a black newspaper?
“Well, to be accurate,” replied Lear, “I wasn’t the only white. The city editor, Bricklin, and another reporter made us a minority of three out of 50 or so employees there.
“I became more sensitive to my whiteness and could begin to see how blacks viewed the white world, as I heard them talk the way they do when whites are not around. I became one of the family.”
How about outside “the family” — out on the street?
“With skepticism at first,” replied Lear. “But when blacks saw that they were treated professionally and quoted accurately, the skepticism evaporated.”
Notwithstanding his 11 years of reporting for the Tribune — in and out of high-crime areas — he had only two instances of mugging, “one of which is as vivid in my mind as if it happened yesterday.
“I had just parked my car at 25th and Ridge when I saw three black teenagers coming down the street ... At first, I hesitated getting out of the car. But then I thought to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? What are the chances of them doing anything to me? I’m thinking like a racist.’”
So Lear got out of his car, was immediately attacked and knocked down, while one of the teens ran off with his camera bag. “I was so angry, I ran right after him and tackled him. I was jogging a few miles every day, so I was in great shape. I think he was so shocked that I did that, he just let go of the camera bag and took off.”
However, irony struck three weeks later when Lear’s indispensable camera was again stolen — this time permanently — at a street fair in Powelton Village. After the initial skepticism he encountered in his early days on the street, Lear says there was only one time in his Tribune career when his “whiteness” was resented.
“Friction between black and white gangs resulted in a non-gang black youth being beaten up by some whites,” he said, “with the result that the boy died, and I was sent to the family’s house to get their reaction. As you can imagine, this was a big story in the black community.”
The tension in the house crowded with family and neighbors was already high before Lear arrived. “And when I walked in, I could feel the tension increase appreciably. It was difficult, to say the least. Upon returning to the Tribune offices, I told my editor never to send me on an assignment like that again.” And he never did, in the hundreds of assignments Lear accumulated in his final years at the paper.
Leaving the Tribune in 1977, Lear worked for several other papers — including the old Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, until they closed down, and the now-defunct Philadelphia Journal. He has written numerous freelance articles for Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Prevention Magazine, Main Line Times and South Jersey Courier-Post, among others. Just prior to coming to the Chestnut Hill Local in 1995, Lear’s previous job involved some controversy. He was the editor of the Mainliner News in Ardmore.
“I was fired,” said Lear, ever one to march to the tune of his own drummer. “My boss there wanted me to do a hatchet job on the first Democratic female politician ever to hold office in that area (U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky) because of a personal grievance he had with her family.” When Lear said “no,” his editor said, “go.” That paper’s loss was the Local’s gain.
When Lear wants to unwind, he visits area restaurants (he writes restaurant features for several area papers, including the Local), or he can be found playing with his two dogs and one cat, puzzling over crossword puzzles, working out at L.A. Fitness or tending to a pet cemetery in his West Mt. Airy back yard, where he lives with his wife of 40 years, Jeanette.
Cemetery?
“Headstones and all,” said Lear, “for 12 cats and dogs who died over the years.”
Lear, who admits he even made an abortive attempt at standup comedy (he now prefers sit-down comedy), would have liked teaching social philosophy on a college level. “But I have truly liked — and continue to like — my years in journalism.”
Looks like that wrong number turned out to be right for him. |
Len Lear: A different beat at the Distant Drummer
On the issues that shaped Philadelphia’s alternative press in the late 1960s.
by JAMES STURDIVANT
One of the lasting legacies of the tumultuous 1960s was the flourishing of a vibrant alternative media in cities across the country. The most influential of these “underground” newspapers in Philadelphia was the Distant Drummer, launched in November 1967. The paper took off quickly and excelled as a forum for commentary on local and national politics, reporting on Philadelphia’s radical/hippie community and its frequent clashes with police, critique of the mainstream media (ridicule of the Inquirer and Evening Bulletin was common), information on the city’s exploding music and arts scene and essays by some of the period’s best-known underground writers.
The anti-establishment ethos ran deep — staffer July Mathe was the “(Barely) Managing Editor,” long-time editor Don DeMaio’s job title in the inaugural issue was “Believer,” and the same edition featured an interview with him, “In which our Head offers an excuse for our existence.” Still, the paper had to pay the bills, and despite healthy readership, could not attract enough advertising revenue to escape debt. Beset by official harassment, including charges of obscenity (unlike the more radical Philadelphia Free Press, the Distant Drummer never advocated violence), the paper hung on into the 1970s, becoming the Thursday Drummer and, eventually, The Drummer.
A frequent contributor during the newspaper’s heyday was Len Lear, who in his career has managed to straddle the line between the conventional and underground journalism.
How did you get involved with the Distant Drummer?
I was writing for the Philadelphia Tribune at the time … and the people who ran the paper were so old and conservative, they didn’t see Vietnam as a “black” issue, although the younger people, who were the staff writers, certainly did. I was very involved in the Vietnam issue at the time [and] didn’t have an outlet, so the only opportunity was as a freelancer. The daily papers of that era — which meant the Inquirer, the Bulletin and the Daily News — were all so right wing that it was pointless to approach them.
So, the Drummer was considered a ‘breath of fresh air’ in this environment?
The alternate, underground press came about as a result of this, in my opinion, because there was no way to get views into the mainstream media — television included — of this type. I probably saw a copy of this paper and thought, “What is this!” I called Don DeMaio, and he said I could submit a piece, unsolicited, and I thought, “Hallelujah!” I remember writing about Vietnam, I remember writing about political prisoners in other countries … and the United States government supporting dictators. I wrote things like, “Hey, didn’t we go to war against this type of oppression in World War II?”
Were you writing mostly opinion, or going out and reporting on demonstrations?
If I did any reporting, believe me, it wasn’t objective reporting. The reporting was just a fake pretense, a veneer of reporting. I was not about to play games. I thought, if these people in the major media can distort everything to support one side, why should I play this silly game: “He said, she said” ... I was a propagandist, I guess you could say — bringing a different view than you could find in the mainstream media in those days.
Did you ever write about local politics?
Yes, I wrote about [Frank] Rizzo … He loved animals, and I usually like anyone who loves animals — except Mr. Rizzo.
How well did you know Don DeMaio?
Well, I got to know him pretty well. Nice guy, laid back, very unassuming. Not a political firebrand type. He seemed like the most innocuous, bland guy — but nice guy. He was the first male I knew personally who had long hair, and I kind of liked him for that.
Did you ever hang out in the office?
Not really frequently. Maybe once a month. I was afraid of having a conflict with my job if I was in there too much. There were people at the Tribune who were looking to get rid of me because I was too political.
If you wrote for the alternative press back then, you felt you had to watch your back.
Yes. That’s not the same today, and these papers, like the City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly — they’re OK, I’m not knocking them — but it’s not the same thing; it’s not even close. These papers are lifestyle papers. It’s page after page of cultural stuff, rock music and stuff like that. Well, I’ve got nothing against that, but that’s different … 75 percent of the paper is ads, much of it for pornography and prostitution. They didn’t have that [with the old underground papers]. They were 24 pages, almost no advertising, and the advertising they had was from people who were sympathetic to our anti-Vietnam, pro-civil rights, pro-feminist and gay rights views.
What did you get paid?
I think it was $10 an article. And I was glad to be paid anything, just to get to express these views. |
