Patrick Earl McCauley, 87, of Huntsville, passed away Sunday. Mr. McCauley was editor of The Huntsville Times for 27 eventful years, longer than any other editor in the paper’s history by the time he retired in 1994.
During his tenure, The Times grew in circulation from 40,000 to 65,000 daily and 80,000 Sundays. The news staff tripled in size, won state and national acclaim for the scope and quality of its news coverage, and made the transition to electronic production. It was an era of growth and change in the newspaper industry. The Times plant on South Memorial Parkway was more than doubled in size. High speed communications, electronic preparation of text and type and digital photography were introduced. Full-color, high speed presses were installed.
It was a milieu far different from the small-town daily newspaper that McCauley entered in the old Times Building at Green and Clinton Streets when he first saw Huntsville October 26, 1949. He arrived just a few months before Werhner von Braun and the Space Age. For the next five years he was a reporter under tutelage of Editor Reese T. Amis, covering city and county affairs in Huntsville, Madison County and adjacent areas of Alabama and Tennessee.
Events that he covered included devastation of the mainstay cotton crop by boll weevil; labor strife in the textile mills; economic dislocation that followed the closing of Redstone Arsenal at the end of World War II and its transformation from conventional and chemical weapons to rockets and missile. He covered the rebuilding of the city’s infrastructure to accommodate the anticipated growth and the advent of the University Center that was to grow into the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
The exploits of local political personalities also claimed his attention. Sen. John Sparkman, sponsor of federal public housing legislation and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, ran for vice president with Adlai Stevenson in 1952. Sherriff Oliver McPeters was impeached the year following his election. Speck Searcy ran for mayor of the booming city on the slogan: “Two sets of streets for Huntsville, one to ride on and one to dig in.” The week McCauley left The Times for graduate studies in Nashville, he wrote stories about a new murder case each day from Monday to Friday.
McCauley earned the Master of Arts degree in political science at Vanderbilt University in 1957. With his newspaper experience in Huntsville he was hired as assistant director of Southern Education Reporting Service, a news agency established by a cadre of national newspaper editors and educators and financed by the Ford Foundations’ Fund for the Advancement of Education. It was 1954 and the Supreme Court of the United States, in Brown vs. Topeka (Kansas) Board of Education had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional.
From missiles and municipal affairs, McCauley’s focus quickly shifted to the vast social revolution just beginning, with all its political, legal and economic ramifications that persist to this day. He edited the journal Southern School News, advised journalists and other researchers on current developments in school desegregation, and compiled two books on related subjects. One, “With All Deliberate Speed,” published by Harper and Row, was a collection of essays assessing the three years following Brown. The other, “Southern Schools: Progress and Problems,” was a statistical study of Southern education. Meanwhile, back in Huntsville, there was despair when Sputnik launched, then elation when the Redstone rocket carried Explorer aloft.
In 1960, McCauley returned to daily newspaper work, as editorial writer for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Foreign trade, maritime, affairs, the colorful local history, characters and politics were the focus of his attention. A native Louisianan, born in Alexandria and a graduate of Tulane University, he resumed studies toward the PhD in political science there. He was a director of the New Orleans Jazz Club and edited its journal, The Second Line. With his wife, Imogene Morgan McCauley, whom he’d met and married in Huntsville in 1950, he settled down for good in the Big Easy.
But in 1966, he was offered the editorship of The Huntsville Times. On their return, the McCauleys found the city transformed. The population, 16,000 in the 1950 census, now was 140,000. The city limits (in 1954, four square miles between Oakwood Avenue and Drake-Garth Lane) by 1966 had spread across a quarter of the landscape of the county. Memorial Parkway was a fiery glint in the eye of land use specialist Hannes Leuhrsen in 1954; by 1966, it was a concrete slab through the center of the city and, as its critics had predicted, retail merchants were abandoning downtown and lining up through cotton fields and wetland.
Among the earliest major stories to confront McCauley as editor was the capsule fire than claimed the lives of Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee. The economic lift of Saturn V construction was phasing down. Many contractors whose work was finished were packing up and leaving town, some of them like Boeing destined to return. Then the launches, and in 1969, the lunar landing.
In addition to his duties at the newspaper, McCauley was active in civic and cultural affairs of the community, serving as president of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra Board and the Huntsville Literary Association. He was a member of the Symphony Board of 30 years, and of the governing boards for many years of such organizations as the Arts Council and the Historic Huntsville Foundation.
He served on the Huntsville Hospital’s Ethics Committee, the Liberal Arts Advisory Committee at UAH, and in various ad hoc roles usually dealing with publications. He served terms as a member and as president of the Parish Council of St. Mary of the Visitation Catholic Church.
At the time of his retirement, McCauley was vice president of the Alabama Press Association and was scheduled to be its president for 1994-95. He had served on the APA board for 20 years, as president of its Journalism Foundation that fosters journalism education, and on the Journalism Hall of Fame Committee.
He was a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and had served as a member of its premier Newswriting Awards Committee for three years, as well as its committees on Ethics, Press-Government Relations, Education of Journalism, Membership and Nominations.
He was a man who loved historical and philosophical discussions, and spent many evenings in lively debate with his friends over the meaning of many writings and historical actions. In his later years, he loved to entertain friends for dinner, and learned the art of Cajun cooking.
He is predeceased by his parents, Earl S. and Olivia Oestriecher McCauley, and his beloved wife, Imogene Morgan McCauley. He is survived by many members of the Morgan family, and his cousin Emile P. Oestriecher, III, and his children, Anne and Kurt Oestriecher, all of Alexandria, LA. He leaves behind a legacy of story-telling and entertaining that will be sorely missed.
Visitation will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Laughlin Service Funeral Home, with a recitation of the rosary and prayer vigil at 7:30 p.m. Visitation will also be held from 8:30 to 10 a.m. Friday at Laughlin, with the funeral service taking place at 10:30 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Visitation Catholic Church with Father William Kelly, SDS, officiating. He will be buried next to his beloved wife Imogene Morgan McCauley at 2 p.m. Friday in Eva Cemetery.
n lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the Huntsville Public Library, the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, or The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
