Stan Strick, former Herald editor, was a newsman and family man

In the newsroom, Stan Strick was a leader known for his analytical mind and hard questions.

He was as an executive editor with a business acumen, seen as a quiet general who didn’t let emotions cloud news judgment.

Away from The Herald, where he spent 27 years before retiring in 2007, a different image of Strick emerges — a husband who helped his wife make the bed each morning, and a father who took a little girl to the office long before the advent of Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

At home on Camano Island, Strick would often talk with his wife about the newspaper, but Janet Strick said he always made time for family. “He just had kind of a way with his kids,” she said.

Kathryn McGavick, Strick’s eldest daughter, remembers tagging along with her dad in the Minneapolis Star newsroom in the 1970s. He’d show her the printing press, hand her a little notebook and give her an assignment.

Janet Strick remembers the couple’s first date. They’d been introduced by a mutual friend. They ended up at a Chinese restaurant near the Minneapolis Star. Dinner wasn’t great, but the conversation was. Both were raising young daughters.

Married in July 1979, they would have celebrated their 30th anniversary this summer.

Stanley Richard Strick, 68, died Thursday from complications related to cancer treatment. He is survived by his wife; two daughters, Kathryn McGavick and Rebecca Dale; three stepdaughters, Kristen Ophoven, Laura Vargas and Karin Mclain; his mother, Betty Strick; sisters Barbara Korling and Shirley Thierry; brother Bob Strick; and six grandchildren. His father, James Strick, preceded him in death.

Memorial service plans were pending.

Born Nov. 6, 1940, Strick was the youngest of four children. Raised in Spokane, he joined the Air Force at 17, soon after graduation from Gonzaga Preparatory School in 1958. He served in the Air Force police, and was stationed in Nebraska and on Okinawa.

He returned to Spokane for three years at Gonzaga University, then completed his bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Washington. He earned a master’s in journalism from the University of Oregon.

Strick and his wife shared a love of the outdoors, and traveled often to Yellowstone National Park. There, Strick pursued his love of nature, photography and hiking. More recently, they traveled to France, staying in a tiny hotel in Paris and walking the city.

Strick’s younger daughter, Rebecca Dale, cherishes memories of early morning rides with her dad to Mariner High School. They’d listen to National Public Radio and talk about the world.

Whenever she visits a home-improvement store, the scent of lumber reminds the 35-year-old Dale of her dad’s woodworking projects. Back in Minneapolis, when her father was a single parent, a highlight of her day was getting to pour the powder into the macaroni and cheese. Dale also recalled her father trying to nap in an easy chair, nodding off with the newspaper.

McGavick, 40, recalled their father’s keen interest in cutting-edge technology. When home computers were rare, Strick decided he’d buy one, a Kaypro. He told the family they’d have to sell their typewriters. They spent frustrating evenings learning to format her high school papers on the new machine.

An instinct for news

Strick’s career in journalism began in the 1960s.

While at Gonzaga University, where he wrote a student newspaper story taking on the college president, he landed a part-time job with the United Press International wire service.

His boss Roberta Ulrich liked the new night-shift hire, who she felt “had the right instincts, the right basic skills and learned fast.” While still in college, he had to decide what to write, write it and punch the teletype tape to put it on the wire.

In 1963, at 22, he helped cover an execution at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla. For many years, Strick would not talk about it.

In 1993, after capital punishment was reinstated, Strick questioned the intense media attention being given to lurid details of executions. He was appalled at the interest in eyewitness descriptions.

His career with UPI led him to bureaus in Seattle, Olympia and Portland, Ore. He covered politics in Olympia, and in the early 1970s was on the reporting staff of the San Diego Evening Tribune. He moved on to the Minneapolis Star, where he was a reporter, assistant city editor and lifestyle editor.

In the dead of winter, he visited the home of an elderly Minnesota woman whose power was about to be shut off because she could not pay her electric bill. After his story was published, the power company agreed to keep her heat on.

It was not one of Strick’s biggest stories, but it was one of his most satisfying.

A different approach

Strick was at times an innovator in news coverage at The Herald.

In 1987, years before bigger papers embraced narrative-style storytelling, Strick encouraged reporters Jim Haley and Scott North to take that approach in sharing their investigation into the killing of two Island County sheriff’s deputies at the jail in Coupeville. The killer had opened fire with a handgun that had escaped detection before he was brought to the jail. The reporters prepared six stories of varying lengths, each detailing an aspect of what had happened, including how the suspect, a convicted felon, had acquired the weapon.

Strick reviewed the stories and asked for something different.

“Have you ever read ‘In Cold Blood’?” he asked.

He challenged the reporters to take what he said were six excellent articles and retool them into a single story told in the narrative fashion Truman Capote used in his ground-breaking true crime book about the 1959 murders of a Kansas family.

When there were a series of fatalities along railroad tracks in Snoho­mish County, he insisted a reporter get a perspective by riding alongside a train engineer. He found ways to get reporters on Navy ships and to Washington, D.C., to make national stories local.

In the mid-1990s, Strick encouraged the newsroom to cover violence in more thoughtful ways, forming a panel of grief experts in Snohomish County to advise reporters assigned to write about a particularly ugly death penalty trial involving the killing of 7-year-old Roxanne Doll.

Leading The Herald

For many years, Strick was the newsroom’s second in command, reporting to executive editor Joann Byrd.

In 1992, then-publisher Larry Hanson received a call from Washington Post publisher Don Graham, who told Hanson that he was hiring Byrd to be his newspaper’s ombudsman. The Post owns The Herald.

Graham asked Hanson how he was going to replace her.

Hanson told him he planned to offer the job to Strick.

“Good,” Graham told him. “I’m impressed with Stan and what he has done.”

Five years later, Time magazine named The Herald one of the “best papers you’ve never heard of” for what it described as “creative, community-minded local reporting.”

Strick was at the center of a controversial decision in 1990 when The Herald changed the name of its “Wedding Book” page to “Celebrations” and began accepting gay couples’ announcements of commitment ceremonies. The Herald, one of the first newspapers in the country to adopt the policy, made national headlines and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

“Our policy is to allow open access to our pages,” Strick said.

Mark Nesse, former director of the Everett Public Library, got to know Strick about that time, when the library included a “Gay &Lesbian Fiction” book list among its readers’ guides. Nesse said he and Strick discussed how they didn’t act as advocates of a particular point of view, but aimed to represent different points of view.

From that common ground grew a long friendship.

Strick also pioneered new technologies into the newsroom, and was a force in the creation of HeraldNet.com. When the Internet burst on the scene, Strick wanted as much information online as possible, even if it cost the newspaper subscriptions.

Whether it was a Boeing strike or a verdict, he saw an opportunity to get more news out to more people, and have it be instantaneous.

Family at his side

Strick’s pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Everett saw him as a thoughtful and reserved man who asked “hard questions — really hard questions,” but never in an antagonistic way. It was, the Rev. David Parks reasoned, Strick’s way of finding truth.

In the last two weeks of Strick’s life, Parks spent considerable time at his bedside.

“I watched that whole family surround him with such affection and love,” he said.

Last Sunday, in an intensive care unit, he gave Strick holy communion. He was surrounded by a dozen family members. The pastor witnessed Strick struggle to remove his oxygen mask to give his grandchildren kisses and savor the chance to touch each one.

On Thursday morning, Parks was there again.

He put his hand to Strick’s forehead and said: “Marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit forever.”

Strick nodded.

Strick’s daughter Rebecca Dale, an ophthalmologist, spoke Friday morning from Chicago, where she was preparing to take oral board exams in her medical specialty.

One of the last things her father said to her, hours before he died at an Everett hospital, was that he wanted her to get on the plane and take the exam.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.