https://www.jacksonville.com/story/opinion/editorials/2020/08/21/a-1/5598641002/
That TU building looks much better than the courthouse parking garage that's there today. As for TU coverage of Ax Handle Saturday...it didn't really cover black history in town period then and decades before. For local black history research, I use the archives of papers around the country like the Pittsburgh Courier, which did.
Quote from: thelakelander on August 21, 2020, 10:50:22 AM
That TU building looks much better than the courthouse parking garage that's there today. As for TU coverage of Ax Handle Saturday...it didn't really cover black history in town period then and decades before. For local black history research, I use the archives of papers around the country like the Pittsburgh Courier, which did.
Is there access to the Florida Star archives?
UF has some of their papers: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028362/00254
That's one of the best T-U editorials I have ever read. Appreciation to them for this gesture.
The T-U "overlooking" Ax Handle Saturday wasn't the only news story they buried. Being owned by the ACL railroad, which in those days was still in the passenger railroad business, the T-U "overlooked" major railroad accidents, particularly on ACL lines, and played up airline accidents. They also carried the passenger railroad schedule in the paper as "news." Once, the T-U was the feature story of the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review for blacking out the ACL logo on a photo of a train wreck that was too newsworthy to ignore.
It took the CSX merger for the Company's management to do the "right" thing and say it wasn't appropriate to own the newspaper in a city where they were a major player leading to a sale of the paper to the Morris family.
When I was a child, by Dad took me into the building downtown in the picture. I recall it was straight out of an old movie set of a newspaper newsroom. Lots of bustling activity and energy along with a good dose of cigarette smoke!
a) Times-Union wasn't just owned by the Atlantic Coast Line
b) It was common for companies in that day to own all sorts of businesses that weren't in line with the core business focus. Hell, they didn't have that concept back then. One company - Wilson & Co. - had sporting goods ( as in the Wilson brand; still out there IIRC ), meat and pharma. And no, they weren't creating some synergy where they'd use the cowhide scraps to manufacture strings for the tennis rackets and drugs that made people feel like playing tennis.
Companies like 3M owned a company that made board games. What we'd today think of a computer company, Control Data, owned a toilet paper company and a big ass bank.
Heck, up until not so long ago Florida East Coast Railway was owned a paper company.
When CSX T was formed business + markets learned what we already knew - jack of all trades, master of none. They shed non-core business to raise cash and focus on what they did best.
Quote from: bl8jaxnative on August 24, 2020, 04:10:55 PM
a) Times-Union wasn't just owned by the Atlantic Coast Line
Heck, up until not so long ago Florida East Coast Railway was owned a paper company.
From Wikipedia:
QuoteFor most of the 20th century, The Florida Times-Union was owned by the Florida Publishing Company, which was in turn jointly owned by the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, the Florida East Coast Railway, and the Seaboard Air Line Railway, the three main railroads serving Jacksonville, having been acquired in equal shares by them or their corporate predecessors about 1896.[6] The Coast Line and the Seaboard merged in 1967 and were predecessors of CSX Transportation; the Florida East Coast has maintained its corporate identity into the 21st century. Both railroads have their headquarters in Jacksonville, the railroad hub of the state.
Looks like SCL became the majority shareholder of Florida Publishing Co. after the merger of Seaboard and ACL so it would have controlled the shots, thereafter, if Seaboard and ACL didn't already have some prior agreement putting ACL in the driver's seat (since ACL HQ's were here and it became the surviving HQ's. And, with the thought that Ed Ball and FEC might have been "odd man out"given Ball's combative "competitive" streak and the subsequent merger demonstrating a closer relationship between Seaboard and ACL). I certainly didn't recall a significant display of the ownership share by FEC and wonder if they weren't more of a silent partner (though hard to believe with Ed Ball at the helm).
St. Joe Paper and FEC (and other companies such as Talisman Sugar) were effectively controlled and managed by the iron hand of Ed Ball via the Alfred I. DuPont Foundation even if there was cross ownership, i.e. St. Joe would have acted more like a holding company for any interest in FEC.
From Wikipedia:
QuoteIn the early 1960s, Edward Ball, who controlled the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust, bought a majority ownership of FEC, buying its bonds on the open market, allowing the FEC to emerge from bankruptcy following protracted litigation with a group of the company's other bondholders, led by S.A. Lynch and associated with the Atlantic Coast Line which had proposed an alternate plan of reorganization. That same year, a labor contract negotiation turned sour. Ball was determined to save the railroad from the bankruptcy that had continued for more than a decade. Ball was certain that if the company didn't become profitable, the equipment and track would deteriorate to the point where some lines would become unsafe or unusable and require partial abandonment. Later, in 1962, the expanded Cuban embargo added to the woes.
Ball fought ferociously for the company's right to engage in its own contract negotiations with the railroad unions rather than accept an industry-wide settlement that would traditionally contain featherbedding and wasteful work rules. This led to a prolonged work stoppage by non-operating unions beginning January 23, 1963, and whose picket lines were honored by the operating unions (the train crews). From this point forward, the long-distance named passenger trains rerouted over the Seaboard Air Line route through the central interior of the peninsula south of Jacksonville, marking the end of long-distance coastal service between Jacksonville and West Palm Beach. Any resumed service later in the 1960s was strictly intrastate trains operated by the FEC.
Because the strike was by the non-operating unions, a federal judge ordered the railroad to continue observing their work rules, while the railroad was free to change the work rules for the operating unions, who were technically not on strike and thus had no standing in the federal court regarding the strike.
Ball's use of replacement workers to keep the railroad running during the strike led to violence by strikers that included shootings and bombings.[1] Eventually, federal intervention helped quell the violence, and the railroad's right to operate during the strike with replacement workers was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court. As the strike continued, the FEC took numerous steps to improve its physical plant, installed various forms of automation, and drastically cut labor costs. Most of the nation's other railroads did not match these achievements for several years; some still had not as of 2010.[9]
Passenger service became an issue in Florida during the early years of the labor strike, which essentially lasted 14 years, from 1963 to 1977. At the insistence of the City of Miami—which had long fought to get rid of the tracks in the downtown section just north of the county courthouse—Miami's wooden-constructed downtown passenger terminal was demolished by November 1963.[10] Although a new station was planned at NE 36th Street and NE 2nd Avenue,[11] it was never built.
Further, while freight trains were operated with non-union and supervisory crews, passenger runs were not reinstated until August 2, 1965, after the City of Miami sued and the Florida courts ruled that the FEC corporate charter required both coach and first class passenger services to be offered. In response, FEC sold "parlour car seating" for first class accommodations in the rear lounge section of a tavern-lounge-observation car. This new state-mandated passenger service consisted of a single diesel locomotive and two streamlined passenger cars, which, in addition to the operating crew, were staffed by a passenger service agent and a coach attendant, who were "non-operating". The mini-streamliner operated all of the way across three previously observed crew districts (Jacksonville to New Smyrna Beach to Fort Pierce to Miami). Following the letter of the law, the passenger service was bare bones. The trains carried no baggage, remains, mail or express and honoured no inter-line tickets or passes. The only food service was a box lunch (at Cocoa-Rockledge in 1966). On-board beverage service was limited to soft drinks and coffee. Without a station in Miami, the 1950s-era station in North Miami became the southern terminus. This stripped-down service operated six days a week until it was finally discontinued on July 31, 1968.
In 1979, the FEC's mainline was cut back to its current terminus in downtown Miami when a 9.5 mile segment of the mainline between there and Kendall was sold to Miami-Dade Transit, which then built the southern half of Miami's elevated Metrorail system on the former right-of-way.[12] The rest of the former mainline from Kendall south to Homestead and Florida City would remain until 1989, which could still be accessed via the freight bypass through Hialeah (Little River Branch). That segment of the former mainline has since become the South Miami-Dade Busway and the South Dade Rail Trail.
After 23 years under Ball, Raymond Wyckoff took the helm of the company on May 30, 1984.