Whirl

He appeared as a guest on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1989. Seated rigidly on a purple sofa, the lights beating down, a little sweat forming on his forehead, he did not in any way appear to belong in such a place, more often than not reserved for athletes in the NBA or rap stars of high commercial visibility. A careful dresser, he wore a navy-blue worsted suit, a shirt with red candy stripes, a red necktie, and a white pocket-square. Onto his feet he had slipped a pair of two-tone red-and-white spectator shoes. He was seventy-nine years old, small and spry and bandy-legged. He had hair white as an empty page. Upon being introduced—“For over fifty-one years,” Arsenio Hall announced, “our next guest has published the wildest newspaper, I think, in the country”—Ben Thomas parted the curtains and stepped onto the stage as if from another century.

Although the studio audience applauded and whistled and, as they were prone to do on The Arsenio Hall Show, whoop-whooped, it was quite unlikely that many of those present, or watching on television, had ever heard of either Ben Thomas or his Evening Whirl, an eight-page weekly newspaper, a one-man operation, that had covered crime, scandal, and gossip in the black neighborhoods of St. Louis since 1938. Thomas looked a bit dazed, and throughout long portions of his conversation with Hall he maintained a wide, mute smile on his face.

To Thomas’s friends and relatives watching the show in St. Louis or in the studio, this performance by the editor might have been peculiar, if not exactly worrisome. It could simply have been a case of nerves. Or, seen in retrospect, it could have been the first symptoms of senile dementia, for within four years of Thomas’s television appearance, stories in the Evening Whirl would begin repeating themselves verbatim in back-to-back weeks, the names of cops would sometimes get confused with those of the perps, and finally, in 1995, Ben Thomas’s dotage would force his retirement.

But no one foresaw that now. Both on the page and in life, Ben Thomas had a domineering presence—he was a fearful disciplinarian with his sons and a taskmaster with his assistants. He commanded attention; he had the gift of authority. Possibly this characteristic had resulted from a professional five decades spent publishing a newspaper in which his voice alone prevailed. His editorial predilections ran toward such subjects as lovers’ quarrels gone homicidal, preachers who spent their free time pursuing sex on the St. Louis stroll, the 1970s heroin dealers who ruled over the housing projects in this border-state river town—not North, not South, not quite the Midwest—or...