For many years the Anchorage Daily News marked Christmas Day with an editorial quoting the Gospel of Luke, introducing the text with a paragraph about how this came to pass.

“On Christmas Eve 1969 we were struggling for words to express the joys and spirit of Christmas in an editorial. We finally went into the boss's office for help. Larry Fanning thought for a moment and said, ‘The best Christmas message I ever read was in St. Luke. If it's still there, let's reprint it.’”

I found it reassuring to read that corny line every December 25th, “If it’s still there, let’s reprint it,” always conjuring up an image of Larry Fanning’s storied past in the big-city newspaper game.

In the middle of the last century, he was a premier editor in San Francisco and Chicago. After he moved to Alaska in 1966, newly married to Kay, his third wife, the only thing he didn’t have much left of was time.

Here he is pictured in August 1950 as managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He looked a good deal older than his 36 years.

Note the collection of butts in the ashtray, the suspenders, stacks of papers, letters, editing pencil, bow tie, cluttered desk, rolled-up sleeves. The picture all but screams, “If it’s still there, let’s reprint it.”

A fellow scribe said that when Fanning edited the Chicago Daily News, his desk “was always piled high with papers, documents, memos, books, magazines—read and unread, lost and found. Somewhere in that assortment, it was assumed, he knew where everything was.”

C . Robert Zelnick, who went on to have a long career at ABC News, fell under the Fanning spell in Anchorage, where the editor “wielded his thick lead pencils with the aplomb of an editorial Picasso.”

“Larry worked 12 or 14 hours a day, sometimes more, often seven days a week. He was advised not to work so hard or care so much,” Zelnick wrote, “but it was like advising a cow to spend her time producing something other than milk.”

Fanning was born April 14, 1914 in Minneapolis and became a copyboy on the Chronicle, while attending the University of San Francisco in 1933. Once he had seen the inside of a newspaper office, he found his calling.

“In a few months he was in charge of the copy desk and then every few months he would get another promotion,” reporter Franc Shor told the Washington Post in 1971 after Fanning’s death. “At 24, he was assistant managing editor, and I think the youngest man in the country that held a position that high on a major paper.”

The city had four competing daily newspapers. Fanning was the “kid managing editor of The Chronicle,” columnist Herb Caen once remembered, “lean, mean, talented and giving the paper the kind of devotion money can’t buy.”

“We were all like that, living and breathing the newspaper business,” said Caen. They called themselves a “clan” and they were closer than most families. “We felt on top of the world, with the glow of youth and good Scotch.”

When a competitor from the San Francisco Examiner mouthed off in an all-night bar that the Chronicle staff featured “a bunch of young punks,” it was Fanning who “smashed him to the floor, where his head lolled between the cuspidors,” according to Caen.

Fanning was either fired by the Chronicle in 1954 or he resigned over layoffs the publisher ordered. He left a staff meeting, posted news of his departure on the bulletin board, “and retired to the local pub for a bracer,” as one account put it.

One of his reporters, Pierre Salinger, future press secretary to JFK, was among those prepared to walk out in protest of how Fanning had been misused.

Fanning told him he had a better idea. While still managing editor, he sent Salinger to Guatemala to cover a coup, with instructions to return by way of New York, stopping at Collier’s Magazine, where Fanning pulled strings to help set up Salinger as a West Coast contributing editor for the magazine.

“Clearly, Larry Fanning had been his usual effective self behind the scenes,” Salinger wrote in his autobiography, referring to Fanning as one of “nature’s noblemen.”

Fanning left San Francisco for Chicago. In the decade that followed, he led two major newspapers—first the Chicago Sun Times and then the Chicago Daily News. He pushed for coverage of civil rights and race relations, which had been ignored by newspapers.

He once told a reporter on the Chicago Daily News to remember that there aren’t always two sides that deserve equal weight. “Sometimes, in an argument, only one guy is right. When that happens, the people deserve to know the guy is right.”

As in San Francisco, he became a mentor and teacher to a generation and a key figure in establishing the careers of two of the most important columnists in the history of newspapers—Ann Landers (in the person of Eppie Lederer) and Mike Royko. He helped many other great reporters, from Nicholas Von Hoffman and Joseph Kraft to Georgie Anne Geyer.

Lederer, who wrote the syndicated Ann Landers column from 1955 until 2002, applied for a job at the Chicago Sun-Times just as Fanning was looking for a new advice columnist to fill the pseudonym.

He liked the way she answered test questions and said he had never seen someone so naturally aggressive at self-promotion. He went on to edit her column for a decade, teaching her about writing and dispensing a crucial tip of his own to the advice maven to millions.

"Look, baby, these things aren't happening to you," he once told her about readers in tough circumstances. "You've got to separate yourself from your readers."

A Chicago Magazine portrait of Ann Landers in 2003 said Fanning did double duty for the columnist. “During the day he blue-penciled her copy while explaining to her what he was doing and why; at night he escorted her to events, ‘held her coat,’ says Lois Wille, later the paper's editorial page editor.”

Fanning didn’t hold Royko’s coat, but he gave him his big break, a column in the Chicago Daily News. Royko dedicated his first book to Fanning, “Up Against It.” People who dealt with Royko talked of his undying allegiance to Fanning.

Fanning became executive editor of the Chicago Daily News in October 1962. He set out to change the way the newspaper covered Chicago. “He would create the most influential newspaper columnist of the next 30 years,” Royko biographer F. Richard Ciccone said.

Fanning defended Royko when the circulation department complained about his civil rights columns. And when Royko got upset and went into talk to Fanning, the editor would puff on his pipe “and act very fatherly toward him, protecting and assuring,” Lois Wille said.

In 1965, Marshall Field IV, owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News, died at 49. In the power struggle that followed, Fanning was the first casualty. Royko passed around a petition to protest Fanning’s firing, and while nothing came of it, biographer Ciccone said that Royko never forgot those who refused to sign.

Two years earlier, Kay Field had divorced Field IV. She went to Alaska. She and Larry married in the summer of 1966.

In December that year, syndicated columnist Jack O’Brian said “Lawrence S. (Larry) Fanning, bigtime Chicago news executive and bride Kay, former Mrs. Marshall Field, are in Anchorage, Alaska, looking at a journalistic setup.”

The next year they bought the Anchorage Daily News, against the advice of those who said it would never pay. Under Larry Fanning, the newspaper’s reporting and its editorials reaped many rewards, none of them financial.

He was in the office on February 3, 1971 when he suffered a heart attack. He died that day at Providence Hospital. He was 56 years old.

“Larry went out the way we all do if we stay in this racket, down and out, at the desk and the deadline he had faced that once too often,” Herb Caen wrote in San Francisco.

Kay Fanning, who said Larry was her role model, took over as publisher. For the next three decades, she had triumphs and failures both in Alaska and on the national scene, more influential in many ways than her late husband.

Tom Brown, who did groundbreaking reporting on the oil industry after the Prudhoe Bay strike, put it best in a review of Kay Fanning’s autobiography: “Larry left an indelible mark, but the truly extraordinary chapters of the Daily News story were written by Kay after his death.”

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