Malcolm “Scoop” Glover, who died March 1 at age 83, was a police reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in the frantic heyday of newspaper journalism in The City.
William Randolph Hearst
During Glover’s glory years, in the 1940s and 1950s, four local newspapers fought it out each day for exclusive stories to splash across page one.
His nickname was hard-won. As point man on the cop beat for William Randolph Hearst's Monarch of the Dailies, as the old man styled the Ex, Glover prevailed for many years in what must have been an insanely competitive environment.
In 1957, one of Scoop’s scoops – an insiders’ account of the arrest of a gun-toting parolee who had shot a policeman – was dramatized on a TV show called "The Big Story." A young Steve McQueen played the desperado. Glover got $500 from Pall Mall cigarettes, the show’s sponsor.
He stayed in the business for more than 40 years after that, outlasting not only all of his rival reporters but the Examiner itself, which Hearst Corp. spun off in 2000 to buy the San Francisco Chronicle. Glover retired from the Chronicle two years after the merger.
People who got to know Glover in the long twilight of his career treasured the association. For one thing, he was a living link to the "Front Page" era of newspapering. For another, he had a personal connection to William Randolph Hearst himself, the hugely wealthy, hard-driving eccentric who founded the Hearst media empire, built Hearst Castle at San Simeon, stocked it with priceless art works, and was the target of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane."
"The Chief" was the whole reason Scoop became a police reporter.
Glover grew up in Dunsmuir, at the foot of Mt. Shasta. His father had worked at Wyntoon, the Hearst estate on the McCloud River. Glover himself sometimes worked as a stable boy there. After he graduated from high school during World War II, old Mr. Hearst – who by then was 80 years old – personally offered the lad a job as a photographer for the Ex.
Glover worked there until he had to go into the Navy. After the war ended and Glover was discharged, he moved back to the city, but he didn’t report back to work. Instead, he hung out in the city, finally taking a job at a shipping company. He hadn’t actually liked being a photographer that much. For one thing, those old Speed Graphic cameras were heavy.
Mr. Hearst inquired about Glover. Then the Chief ordered the Examiner to track him down. As Glover told the story, he was summoned to the newspaper, then put aboard a train to San Luis Obispo. A driver drove him up the mountain to San Simeon, where he was marched before the great man himself.
“Where were you?” demanded the multi-millionaire media tycoon.
Glover said he told the truth: He didn’t want to be a photographer any more.
So, the Chief got on the phone to San Francisco and barked some orders, and after Glover got back home, the paper made him a reporter and put him on the cop beat. According to Glover, that’s just the way things worked, back in the day.
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