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The man from Flint Lake

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By STEVE OTTO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 24, 2009

Leland Hawes celebrated his 80th birthday last weekend. You'd never know it. He never changes. They roped off a section of The Colonnade Restaurant on Bayshore Boulevard for the event.

Leland knows more people in town than anyone I can think of, but the crowd was pretty much his family, his friends from the Tampa Bay History Center and a gaggle of newspaper colleagues who had worked with him through his 50 years at The Tampa Tribune.

When he retired almost five years ago, he was our "History and Heritage" editor and the guy you went to if you had a question about anything that ever happened around here. He has been chronicling our lives since he started his own paper as a boy living by Lake Thonotosassa. He called it the "Flint Lake Diver," after the Indian name for the lake.

But what made Leland special in our business, other than that he may have been the last true "gentleman" to grace our paper, is that he was - and is - a stickler for detail and getting it right. What galled him more than anything was reading something inaccurate in our paper.

I thought about Leland again last night at home, where I was reading a copy of William Shirer's "Berlin Diary." Shirer is the author of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," still the most comprehensive study of Germany leading up to and into World War II.

War diary

"Berlin Diary" was the late journalist's daily account of his life as a correspondent for CBS Radio while stationed in Berlin in 1939-40 as Hitler led that nation into war.

What was so striking about it was the detail and insight Shirer was able to put not just into his diary but his daily radio broadcasts. You go through his diary and there is page after page of his insight into the Nazi stranglehold on the German people and how they were twisting the truth as a rationale for what would become the Holocaust. He pointed out not just the savagery happening in Germany but the acquiescence of so much of the rest of the world as it happened.

Shirer had been on the European continent for years as a newspaper correspondent before joining the network. He spoke the language, mingled with the people and thoroughly understood not just the politics but the psyche of the various cultures coming out of World War I.

News lite

In my mind I compared Shirer's reporting with the cacophony of "news" we get today, a heady mix of cable talking heads and the newer social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Everyone seems to be armed with cell phone cameras, resulting in a stream of images and opinions on a 24-hour cycle.

I wonder whether we are getting the news with any more clarity or understanding today that we did from Shirer's nightly radio broadcasts 70 years ago or through Leland's insistence on telling the whole story locally in our newspaper.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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