Re: RIP Boca Raton News
Cindy Thuma is still rockin' the high school coverage down here as a stringer for the Sun-Sentinel and I of course used her as much as I could when I was the SE at the Boca News from '98-99.
Vin Mannix, Hawaiian shirts and all, is still a legend in these parts even though he never got his face on the side of a city bus like he did up in Bradenton.
Unfortunately, when I saw the news yesterday it hit me more like a foregone conclusion than a shock, sort of like the news of Walter Cronkite's passing at the age of 92. I came onboard in the fall of 1996 when it was still a Knight-Ridder paper, so I watched in pain as CNHI took over a year later and then I left for Naples about a year before they moved into those posh digs off of Congress.
I will forever be grateful for the people I worked with there, people of the highest quality like Mannix, former editor-in-chief John Futch, former managing editor Phyllis Gilchrist, all of my fellow sports guys -- Ken Sorensen, Wes Nakama, Marcus Nelson, Jamey Eisenberg, Bob Gosman and Ryan Schuster, copy desk people like Wayne Lockwood and too many others to mention. We had one heck of a talented crew there in the late 1990s.
And being as it was where I was given my first (and thankfully last) management position, and that it was my hometown paper (Vin Mannix wrote about my lone high school sports highlight, scoring the winning goal during penalty kicks in our soccer season opener), the Boca Raton News will always hold a special place in my heart.
So a moment of silence is in order I believe for a newspaper that fought hard to stand its ground in between two much bigger and stronger opponents in The Palm Beach Post and Sun-Sentinel.
On a side note and perhaps a little known fact, the News also was the very first stop for one Ethan Skolnik of S-S, Post and Herald fame as well as AJC writer Ken Sugiera among others.
