Reck, Alfred P.

June 25, 1897 - April 18, 1967

Former Tribune City Editor Alfred Pierce Reck, a man who launched countless newspaper careers —but none as colorful as his own — died today after a long illness. He was 69.

His death at Peralta Hospital came almost five years after his retirement from The Oakland Tribune, where he had worked 26 years, 22 of them as city editor.

Many of the bylines that appear in The Tribune today wouldn't be there if he hadn't possessed a singular ability to see beyond the tinny brashness of the young reporters  given into his keeping over the years.

The men and women who learned their craft from Mr. Reck, a restless soul, recognized him as a professional. He was a product of an era when newspapers expressed the American conscience and journalism was a brawling art. He began his career as a reporter in 1919 in his native Piqua, Ohio, after an Army tour in World War I that read like an adventure novel. Commissioned b e f o r e he was 21, he was wounded, left for dead in the field for three days, captured by the Germa n s, escaped, recaptured and finally released on Christmas morning of 1918.

He returned to Piqua something of a local hero, with a reputation that helped land him his job on the weekly Call. His ability to recognize and write the news soon became apparent, and in less than a year he moved from the 4.000-circulation Call to the 40,000-p e r-d a y Dayton Journal.

It wasnt long before he moved again, this time to Washington as a congressman's secretary, a post he

held long enough to nail down  some of the news sources that  were to serve him well for the

rest of his life. Finally, in 1924, after interrupting  his Washington sojourn long enough to work for

a while as a free-lance foreign correspondent in South Africa,

Mr. Reck, by his own admission, couldn't hold still. It wasn't because he was a drifter. It was just that his urgent sense of history-in-tbe-making demanded action. He pursued the breaking news wherever it seemed to be breaking the fastest, from Lima to the Tampa, Fla., Tribune, to the Washington News, to the old United Press, to the Deseret News in Salt Lake City and finally to the Tribune.

Obituaries of newspapermen are sometimes overenthusiastic, since they are v r i 11 e n by newspapermen. But it is no "overstatement to say that Mr. Reck, who approach d each story with grace and determination, was one of the greats.

The old-timers of United Press r e m e m b e r him for jury-rigging a wireless set out of car batteries during a killer hurricane to become the only voice out of the stricken and isolated city of Miami.

Mr. Reck, who lived in Grinda, is survived by his widow.Pat, to whom he was married 30 years, and a son, Michael, a writer now living in Germany.