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March 7, 2007 12:24am by David Farrar

RIP Frank Haden

NZPA reports that veteran journalist Frank Haden died of cancer on Monday.

Haden worked as a journalist for over 50 years.

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cynic

RIP.

Who is going to campaign against those wishing to abuse the English language now?
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March 7, 2007 6:50am
Adolf Fiinkensein

cunic, you do mean, don’t you ‘Who now is going to campaign against those who abuse the English language’?
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March 7, 2007 7:42am
Helen Bain

Max’s comment is so idiotic it should really be ignored. I’ll just say instead that Frank was a really good person to work with and know and I’m bloody sad that he is dead. His public image was quite unlike the “real” Frank who was surprisingly kind and tolerant. They’re not making journalists like him any more and the industry is the poorer for it.
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March 7, 2007 9:57am
Fred

He dealt to the left….rather effectively it seems…. from the Max comment.
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March 7, 2007 10:15am
Max

He wasn’t anti-Asian, he was pro white.
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March 7, 2007 10:17am
llew

Leave it out Max.
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March 7, 2007 10:38am
Insolent Prick

He was a bloody decent old bugger.
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March 7, 2007 11:12am
llew

“He was a bloody decent old bugger.”

WHo never replied to my email explaining how he misunderstood the new dog control laws.

But I guess that wasn’t a priority for him at the time.
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March 7, 2007 11:40am
Craig Ranapia

Helen:

Indeed – but I often wonder about columnists (and bloggers and their commentators, for that matter) how closely their print ‘persona’ lines up with the human being who creates it. In print, Haden could be vile – especially while visiting cruel and unusual punishment on his many hobby-horses – but he was also an old school hack who loved language used with clarity and precision, knew the importance of getting the story right instead of right now, was refreshingly uncynical about the importance of a Fourth Estate that scrutinised the powerful without fear or favour, and (most importantly) passed it on to others.
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March 7, 2007 12:17pm
Rex Widerstrom

Frank may not wish to be credited with playing a significant part in making me an acceptable journalist and columnist but I owe it to him to acknowledge the role he played in my – and I am sure many other journalists’ – careers.

Usually one would write something (on small strips of newsprint sandwiched between carbons, on an old manual typewriter when I started at the Dom) and off it would go through a chain of subs and comps who’d massage your inept prose into something readable. You’d pick the paper up the next day, read what you almost wrote, shrug and start banging out the next piece.

I started answering to Frank when I was no longer on staff and was writing op ed stuff in the age of PCs, meaning muddle-headed thinking and poor grammar would sometimes flash from writer’s keyboard to readers’ newspring almost unchecked.

But not if you were submitting to Frank. You polished, you checked, you double checked and you fact checked. Then you had a cup of tea and checked it again. If you’d done exceptionally well, you might get a reply telling you it “wasn’t too bad”. And – in my case anyway – it meant more than the cheque that came later.

I like to think I can tell a Haden “cadet” (no matter what grade you were, you felt like you were on your first assignment with Frank as your boss) – I might agree, disagree or be indifferent to their subject. Or I might agree, disagree (as I often did with Frank’s columns) or be indifferent to their opinion. But I’ll always sit back at the end of the read and think “That was a bloody well written piece”.

If I were a religious person, I’d now be imagining Frank up there someplace, sending St Peter withering emails about the poor standard of prose in parts of the Old Testament 🙂
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March 7, 2007 12:30pm
Rex Widerstrom

See, now, Frank would have fired back an email asking me whether “newspring” was something they used to reupholster old couches *sigh*. I’m slipping already.
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March 7, 2007 12:33pm
kiwi in america

Well said Rex. I met Frank at a symposium in the Marlborough Sounds about 4 years ago. He was fascinating – very well read, full of insightful opinions and yes, scathing of the incompetance of others who didn’t meet his exacting standards. He will leave a noticeable hole.
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March 7, 2007 1:05pm
paul Litterick

He was a great journalist. I didn’t agree with his politics but often I found myself agreeing with his sentiments. He was always fair and honest in his opinions.
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March 7, 2007 2:37pm
mara

For me,Frank’s weekly,Sunday newspaper pieces were high on the list of things to read first. When he massaged my own murmurings I purred;when he shot down my rational reasoning,I roared.There aren’t many other journalists around now who have the slightest effect on my blood-pressure.There should be.
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March 7, 2007 2:59pm
Helen Bain

BTW there will be a drink or few upstairs at the Backbencher from 5pm next Thursday for anyone who knew Frank and would like to share a few Frank stories.
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March 7, 2007 3:01pm
baxter

As a reader I invariably enjoyed the content and the style of his writing. I would never have guessed that he was 77 even though he always seemed to have high personal values.The print media is indeed the poorer for his passing.
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March 7, 2007 3:35pm
paul Litterick

He was a great journalist. I didn’t agree with his politics but often I found myself agreeing with his sentiments. He was always fair and honest in his opinions.
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March 7, 2007 3:52pm
Rex Widerstrom

Helen, please pass on my best regards to those who are there, and raise a glass or three to Frank in my absence. Ta 🙂
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March 7, 2007 8:18pm
Deborah

Frank Haden’s columns and opinions (the English usage ones aside) often made me furious. But he had an admirable consistency in his views, and a capacity to accept where his logic took him. So for example, when he argued that young children were best cared for by their mothers, at home, he recognised that this would entail supporting the DPB. I might have disagreed with his premises, but his chain of reasoning couldn’t be faulted.
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March 7, 2007 8:26pm
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April 26, 2007 3:50pm
zajmp unezk

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April 26, 2007 3:51pm
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April 26, 2007 3:52pm
zajmp unezk

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April 26, 2007 3:54pm
John Steed

It is hard to accept Frank Haden, 77, is dead: such men don’t die but live on in our minds.

I heard about his March 5 death only on 30 April.

Frank was extraordinary for so many reasons. He was my friend, someone I admired in what I saw at the time as a giant in a literary world. Frank was my boss: editor of the Dominion Sunday Times, a newspaper that has also died an untimely death.

There were so many sides to Frank. He “mothered” and defended his staff, many of whom also have come to an untimely end. I was a senior

journalist on Frank’s staff for several years.

The Sunday Times office comprised two small rooms: one as Frank’s and another for the rest of us, including a subbing table with

Greame Ingram and Fran Collette at that helm.

The Sunday Times’ journalists seemed to work beneath a Sword of Damocles ready to plunge: Fran Collette died of a severe asthma

attack; Greame drowned, leaving a young wife and children; Rosemary McLeod had an unfortunate incident with Canadian Prime

Minister Pierre Trudeau in New Zealand Government House when her father was acting governor. That is a story for her to tell, no
one else.

I faced a rape charge in the Supreme Court and was acquitted because I did not commit the crime; Warwick Roger, like Frank,

contracted prostate cancer.

The percentages of such mishaps were high considering there were only five or six on the staff.

When subbing copy, Frank frequently stood in the staff office slashing away with a pen seeming as large as an exocet missile, sheets of copy flying about the room. I stood always perplexed and cowed beneath the grandeur of an English language athlete.

He would rant about his “illiterates”, raving towards the wall and muttering severe consequences on anyone near. Then he would

walk into his office, slamming the door with a roar.

Our resident jester, Lesley Walters kept Frank in fits of laughter with stories flowing from his typewriter. Once Frank got the better of Les.

Lesley arrived in the office on the first day of his annual holidays one year, dressed in fishing gear complete with floppy hat, fishing pole, dilly bag and gum boots. He took a look at Frank, saying: “I have come for my pay because I’m off on a fishing holiday.”

Frank looked him up and down, saying: “I don’t recognise you. Go and get some decent clothes.” Lesley left, downfallen.

He mooched out of the office and arrived in a business suit an hour later and collected his pay. Frank thought it hilarious.

I once wrote a story about Charles Rangi Apihai, a notorious and dangerous criminal who escaped from prison, causing an uproar in
Parliament and police headquarters.

Police formed a special squad to hunt him down. Apihai made fools of the police. When spotting them at night near bushland, Apihai would dance a Haka and disappear. He left a trail of stolen cars, smashing into shops at night for food and eluded police for months.

Frank sent me on assignment to the Te Teko area where Apahi had occasionally been seen. I was to write a colour story, that’s all.

I told Frank from the Bay of Plenty region I had a plan to talk with Apihai. Frank insisted it would never happen. The Maoris helping him would not talk in fear of losing Manna. I wrote my colour story and filed it. Then started on my return to Wellington.

Just out of Te Teko a Maori leaped from the side of the road on spotting my car, a Corvette Stingray. An appointment was made for me to talk with Apihai at his hideout. I rang Frank and said I had the interview.

Other journalists at The Dominion subs’ table
getting the Sunday Times ready for publication said Frank came out and was so excited he almost performed cartwheels around room.

During the clandestine meeting, Apihai told how he had walked into the hotel where the special manhunt squad were drinking.

He walked up to them and said: “How’s the search for Apihai going?” One of them turned and replied: “We are hunting a bloody ghost.”

At another time, he told how he was very nearly caught one night. Police had a dog with them and let it lose after him. Running along the roadway with the police dog at his heels, Apihai said: “Heel!” and the dog did, in the middle of the road. Police later confirmed this indeed had happened.

While on the run Apihai kept a diary, which Frank published.

Frank described the story as a major news scoop deserving of a Journalist of the Year award, but it didn’t happen.

Throughout the time I worked for the Sunday Times under Frank’s direction I had many, many death threats. One night, while walking home near the old Paliament House a group of men attacked me warning not to write a particular story I was on dealing with shipboard gambling at the docks.

Frank urged me to write the story. I did. Frank blared the headline on the front page “Write this story and you die”.

The Sunday it was published JudyAnn Steed (the highly recognised and popular children’s page editor) and I returned to Australia on holiday. That night there was an aircraft bomb scare and the journalists at The Dominion believed we had been targeted. It didn’t happen.

When Frank wrote his weekly editorial he would come out into the staff room chuckling and then tell of who or what he had written.

They were great days with Frank mightily at the helm. Sadly, no one has written a book about the paper and its staff. Frank kept a diary of happenings and had intended one day to turn it into a book, again it didn’t happen. There ere so many things that happened it would make an excellent book.

For a time he wrote a special column signed Angus Toft (And Get Stuffed), thinking it hilarious: there was always something of the imp in him.

We lived in each other’s homes, partied every Saturday night at Fran’s flat in Central Wellington, an event in anticipation of the
paper coming off the presses. When it did and was specially delivered to the party, the entire staff, including Frank, went through the paper pulling stories to pieces.

Frank lived and breathed life into the Sunday Times and his crew were his shipmates.

He was a close friend of famous New Zealand poet James K. Baxter whom he frequently supported in the columns of the Dominion Sunday Times, something he also did for other New Zealand writers.

In the end Frank, in the two weeks before he died, returned to Catholicism after a lifetime as an atheist. He died afraid: afraid of the intense pain ruling him (where he occasionally screamed with agony); afraid of living and afraid of dying; wanting Catholicism’s Last Rites.

Such fears in Frank I find hard to imagine: he was such a tall and strong man as an editor, fearing no one or any thing.

I learned he frequently attempted suicide, twice crashing from his bed in hospital to the floor, suffering massive bruising but still alive.

He suffered so much he couldn’t use the telephone his wife, Merle, provided. Instead, he would forget names, fumble the phone and
send it crashing to the floor.

It isn’t a pretty picture, but if Frank could write about it then he would tell it as it happened, pain and all.

Rest in Peace, Frank. You were a great and close friend.
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May 1, 2007 3:49am

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