Obituary / DAVID ETHRIDGE

by Harry Schroeder

“You have long been the public conscience of Key West, and we sorely need your keen judgment. You are also a helluva great editor.” Lou Harris

David Ethridge died on the morning of October 26, 2015, after a long downward progression of Parkinson’s disease. He is survived by Iva Stanley, his wife of 38 years, by four sons, David, jr., Nathanael, Mark, and Seamus, and in the next generation by a widely extended family. He was seventy-six years old.

Before he came to the Keys, David’s life was one of continuous involvement : editing the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, protesting the cause of civil rights in print and on the street, serving in the town as alderman and as mayor pro tem, working with Governor Terry Sanford, and participating in the McGovern Presidential campaign. He also did a hitch in the Navy, aboard the USS Galveston. His contributions here, during four decades of residence, were similarly large and many-sided. Along with his editorship of the late, much lamented Solares Hill, he was for many years the president of the Key West Literary Seminar, which became under his leadership an outstanding event, attracting every year many writers of outstanding reputation. He was also, in 1989, King of Fantasy Fest.

As editor, David Ethridge was one of a small group of distinguished local journalists—William Allen White in Emporia, Harry Ashmore in Little Rock—who had an outsized effect on the communities they served. David came by much of that as an inheritance. His father, Mark Ethridge, who built the Louisville Courier-Journal into a nationally respected newspaper, was uncompromising in his editorial stands against racism, repression, the poll tax, exploitation of tenant farmers, and poverty in the midst of great wealth, at a time when those positions were deeply unpopular, even dangerous. He once described white supremacy as “a complete denial of the democratic process and a complete humiliation of all people who profess any faith in democracy;” at the beginning of the Depression he wrote, “American capitalism has the greatest genius for obtaining production, but it has made a monumental and disgraceful failure of obtaining distribution.” One can hear in this not only the firmness and rightness which came to define David’s own positions, but the uncluttered directness and confidence of his writing style.

David’s treatment of Florida politics was always a joy to follow: he would be smiting the Philistines hip and thigh at one moment, and at the next, like a court jester, beating them vigorously about the head and shoulders with inflated pigs’ bladders. One remembers his solid and graceful defense of the First Amendment rights of Dennis Cooper, the publisher of an aspiring rival weekly, when KWPD Chief Dillon jailed Cooper for printing details about an internal department investigation. His piece on the Terri Schiavo journalistic wrangle was a classic, deploring the exploitation of that sad story by preachers and politicians who “will use any measure, no matter how crass, for the smallest political advantage,” and the local TV news types who seemed to him to have studied up on “how to squeeze every last drop of sanctimony and false sincerity out of their voices.” This is strong satire. But David’s attitude was not limited to anger, even though entirely justified. Of Ms. Schiavo herself, he wrote, “Well after her death, her name will be used for evil purposes, and that is certainly something more to pity.” Not many writers have the perspective to use the words “evil” and “pity” in the same sentence.

That arose naturally out of who he was. One always heard him behind his words, and what one heard was a man of rare depth and breadth, the result of many years of a wide range of experience fully apprehended and put in order. Lou Harris was right about David. In a town where conscience has never been exactly a strong point, we’re going to miss him.

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