Audio By Carbonatix
The face that replaced his on the page looks so young, so nonthreatening. Not like Jack Nease’s face. His face is wrinkled and worn, withered perhaps by having heard too many politicians lie, seen too much corporate greed.
Nease once gazed at readers from the front page of the Sun-Sentinel business section. He wrote a column four, then three days a week, on business issues affecting South Florida.
His picture is gone now. Jack Nease says it’s because he’s old. He turned 64 in August and celebrated by filing a federal age-discrimination suit against the Sun-Sentinel Co. What has long-time news-staffers talking is that Nease alleges a pattern of age discrimination, that the company’s actions toward him are “typical of the way in which it has treated other older workers.” The suit demands the Sun-Sentinel produce personnel documents on former news-staffers Martha Gross, Fred Lowery, Jere Warren and Diego Delvalle.
Delvalle worked as an artist in the graphics department for thirteen years until he left in 1996 at the age of 66. “They made my life so miserable that one day I just walked out of there,” says Delvalle. He says he’d always had favorable personnel evaluations, but a new graphics editor transferred him from one office to another, constantly redid his work, hassled him over getting a cup of coffee. “It was that kind of bullshit on my back,” Delvalle says. “Basically there was no reason to treat me the way they did. I don’t think it was anything personal. It was just that they got rid of the old people first. It’s strictly a bottom-line business. They can get a kid out of the Art Institute [of Fort Lauderdale] for half of what they paid me.”
In court papers Sun-Sentinel Co. denied Nease’s allegations and argued the lawsuit should be dismissed, in part because the paper says Nease waited too long to file a complaint on some of the allegations.
It is perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that the picture that replaced Nease’s in the Sunday Sun-Sentinel is at least 25 years younger. It belongs to Business Editor Kevin Gale, who was Nease’s boss.
In his lawsuit Nease claims he was “constructively discharged,” a legal term meaning in effect that the Sun-Sentinel created working conditions so bad that a reasonable person would be forced to leave. Sun-Sentinel Editor Earl Maucker declined to comment on the lawsuit but said: “Jack was not fired. He resigned. It was regrettable. It was strictly his decision.”
As Nease tells it, his problems began after he wrote an August 1995 column on turning 62. Noting he was now eligible for Social Security, Nease wrote, “The idea of retiring at 62 is repugnant. The way I feel today I want to work until I’m 70 — at least.”
The subject of retirement surfaced at his personnel evaluation in January 1996. It was conducted by business editor Gale and generally praised Nease.
“Jack’s columns are clear and he has a knack for making business topics understandable to our readers …. He follows topics that are likely to be controversial or of personal interest to readers …. He often will raise questions that are worthy of consideration before key decisions are made by business and government leaders …. Jack remains enthusiastic about newspapers and their future.”
During that evaluation, Nease says, Gale asked about his retirement plans, and Nease replied, “I have no plans to retire before age 66 — if then. I am in good health and enjoy my job.”
That enjoyment began to fade.
In the following year, the Sun-Sentinel began a “campaign to herd him into resignation,” the suit charges: moving his column from the front of the business section to an inside page, instituting earlier deadlines giving him less time to develop columns, skipping his 1997 evaluation, and without explanation giving him the lowest raise he had ever received in his nine and a half years at the paper.
Still his work was apparently satisfactory. In the spring of 1997, Gale complimented him on a series of columns — “not a clunker in the bunch” — Nease remembered him saying.
Then on May 21 he was summoned to Gale’s office and told he was being reassigned to a copyeditor job, handling business briefs from the wire services and writing a Sunday column in his spare time, without leaving the office to do any reporting for it.
“Kevin never said why,” Nease recalls. “He said, ‘You’re not going to like it …. This is not up for discussion. This is take it or leave it.'”
“They were trying to give me a job where it was impossible to do a good job,” Nease said one afternoon over a caesar salad at the Floridian. “I was proud of the column. It was widely read.”
A few days after the Gale ultimatum, Nease talked with deputy managing editor Phil Ward, who said, according to Nease, “You’ve been in the business long enough to know the meaning of ‘take it or leave it.'”
To Nease the meaning was clear: “When you tell someone to take it or leave it, you’re telling them to leave.”
Nease contacted a lawyer and quit in June. “I wasn’t going to end my career rewriting wire stories. That’s not me.” He’d shared a Pulitzer Prize at the St. Petersburg Times and worked in Washington for Congressional Quarterly. At the Sun-Sentinel he wrote columns criticizing Wayne Huizenga and the financing for the Panthers’ arena and took on the state’s insurance industry. “Why can’t State Farm get it right?” his last column began.
“I was able to put the political and business angles together,” he says, although perhaps not in the way some South Florida business leaders might have liked.
In Nease’s last personnel evaluation, business editor Gale wrote: “Jack does an excellent job of looking at stories from a consumer perspective; however, some have raised the issue of how his columns are perceived in the business community.”
The “some” may have included Scott C. Smith, the Sun-Sentinel’s publisher at the time. According to Nease, Gale told him Smith ordered his column moved inside. “Scott Smith told Kevin I was a populist. I was rather proud I was writing a column expressing a populist viewpoint.”
After Nease’s departure Gale took over the Sunday business column. Nease says he doesn’t read the paper anymore, that it seems to be written by and for those “mostly in their thirties. They think that is the universe.”
When his departure became known in June, Sun-Sentinel managing editor Ellen Soeteber said Nease’s age was irrelevant, that the paper hadn’t demoted him, just reassigned him to a “leadership role.”
“What bull,” Nease said.
