After about a year as Marine Writer at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mike Parks offered me a job at Marple’s Business Newsletter. Elliot Marple, the founder, was over 70 and wanted to retire. The newsletter was a two-man job; if I cam to work for it, Parks said, I could work my way into a 50 percent ownership, just as he had. So I quit the P-I and went to work with Elliot and Mike.
After a while, I found the newsletter too restricting. It demanded a style shorn of all personality. No bylines. After a year, I quit and went back to the P-I.
I always respected Elliot and Mike for what they were able to do — to make business journalism pay — and was thankful for what I had learned from them. Nineteen years later, I was able to express some of that in a review I wrote for the P-I of April 21, 1999.
Elliot Marple, now 91 and still writing, was in his heyday the best business reporter in the Pacific Northwest. He did what almost none of us do: He sold his writing directly to readers. He was reporter, editor, publisher and pencil sharpener at Marple’s Business Newsletter. Some folks are self-publishing today with computers; Marple did it with a typewriter, a telephone and a 1903 Addressograph machine.
I remember the ka-chunk, ka-chunk of that machine. I ka-chunked it myself in 1980 when I was a kind of apprentice under Marple and his successor, Mike Parks. Though I decided that the newsletter life was not for me, I never forgot it.
Marple was the most precise editor I’ve ever known. Never since Marple have I called a corporation a firm. When a piece of mail came in, his rule was, deal with it now. If it’s something you need, file it. If it’s a bill, pay it. Our accountant said we were his only client who accounted to the cent, with no petty cash.
That was Marple’s way, and it made possible the independence he wanted. He has now written a book, Man-at-a-Typewriter Journalism: 50 Years Reporting Pacific Northwest Business (185 pages; $12.95 at bookstores, $15 by mail from Marple’s Business Newsletter, 117 W. Mercer St., Seattle 98119). The book is, of course, self-published.
Marple grew up in Seattle, attended the University of Washington and graduated from Harvard in 1929. He worked in newspapers during most of the Depression, and during World War II was press secretary at the Office of Price Administration under John Kenneth Galbraith. His adventures in price control (the subject of a separate manuscript) convinced him that “the economy is too complicated to regulate.” It also inoculated him against bureaucratic jobs.
After the war, he worked in an ad agency, lost that job, gathered up his family and drove to Seattle. He was never an employee again.
In 1947, Marple set himself up as an independent correspondent for far-away trade papers such as Business Week and Advertising Age. When he had no outlets for the stories he found, he started his own newsletter. It still has 3,500 subscribers, and celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.
Business newsletters typically offer inside news of one industry and charge a high fee. A newsletter about regional business in general was not nearly so promising, but Marple made it work. His rule was, “Anything that had appeared in the daily papers was as dead as a fallen leaf.”
In 1949, newspapers did a shockingly poor job of reporting business. The Post-Intelligencer had only one business reporter, and the Seattle Times had none.
With limited space, Marple had to make every word count. He wrote and rewrote. “Run it through the meat grinder again,” he’d say. He also discarded the bone-headed Associated Press style of trying to cram the whole story into the first paragraph.
He cared nothing for flashy stories. His idea of a coup was being the first reporter to interview Charles Pigott, chief executive of Paccar Inc. Colleagues wondered how he had done it. Paccar was notorious for thinking itself a private company years after its stock was publicly traded. Marple got the interview because he was respectful, because he stuck to business issues and because Pigott was one of his subscribers.*
Newspapers always try to name the person being quoted. Marple usually didn’t. “There wasn’t room,” he says. And he didn’t worry so much about reassuring readers that he wasn’t making things up. “I was responsible for what was in there,” he says.
He also wrote a history of the National Bank of Commerce (later Rainier Bank), which led to an odd incident recalled in his new book. Maxwell Carlson, the retired chief executive, came to Marple’s Spartan office and began unloading his concerns about the bank’s board of directors. The board was taking far too long to find a new CEO. It was letting its international business drift dangerously.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to you as the bank’s historian, not as a reporter,’ ” Marple recalls. “It put me in a terrible bind.” It was unusable information.
Over the years, Marple was offered corporate jobs, including a position at Business Week and an assistant vice presidency at Seattle-First National Bank under economist Miner Baker. Marple’s answer to them was, “No, thanks!” Being independent meant “workdays that stretched into the evenings and a full day Saturday.” But no staff meeting or office chitchat ate up his time. “Just productive work, and the goad that when a self-employed person stops working, he pay stops and the next deadline looms larger.”
Would he do it again? “Yes,” he concludes. “Certainly yes!”
© 1999 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Elliot Marple died on Dec 17, 2001, at age 93. I offered to write the obituary for the Seattle Times, but under union rules I wasn’t allowed to work outside the editorial page. The business editor, Stephen Dunphy, wrote it, but he was able to quote me:
“ ‘Elliot was a master listener, able to see where the conversation was going and keep a few steps ahead,’ said Bruce Ramsey, a Seattle Times editorial writer who worked with Mr. Marple for a year. ‘He kept wonderfully detailed files. Years and years of potato prices. Wheat prices. Unemployment rates.’ …Mr. Marple seemed to maintain some of the flinty nature of his parents. ‘There was always a bit of starch in him,’ Ramsey said. ‘He came from a different generation and showed it.’ ”
*I think I was the first newspaper reporter to get an interview with Pigott, some years later, for the business page of the Bellevue Journal-American. I had to work at it, too.