Lukas felt a budding rivalry with another Harvard graduate and newspaperman, David Halberstam, who would later work with Lukas at the Times. 'He didn't think the paper was nearly aggressive enough in covering local news,' Nordlinger says. Lukas and Nordlinger would rip The Sun's policy of carrying local news on the back page. Over coffee, the tall and imposing Lukas and other journalists would critique the previous day's newspaper. In the 1960s, the apartment - with its funky black walls, skylight and plastic flowers - was the site of RTC daily 'little seminars,' Plunkett says. Plunkett and other newspaper veterans remember Lukas' 'far-out' apartment at Centre and Charles streets, where The Buttery restaurant stands. 'He was just an intense, highly principled person,' remembers John Plunkett, a 43-year Sun veteran who worked with Lukas. In 1961, he wrote about Baltimore's Citizens Planning and Housing Association and its efforts to maintain non-discrimination in housing. Itching and waiting for a foreign assignment, Lukas paid attention to local issues, namely housing.

The reporter drew the wrath of readers, including one who wrote: 'By labeling as 'inhuman' the denial of aid to mothers who have additional children out of wedlock, you show a lack of recognition for the moral code.' 'Sounds rather dated, but at the time it was a very sensitive subject,' Nordlinger says.įor The Sun, Lukas reported in 1961 on a controversial welfare code in Newburgh, N.Y. 'Filipinos Draw Housework Duty' read one headline. He covered racial tensions on the Eastern Shore, he wrote about integration of restaurants along Route 40, and he publicized the Naval Academy's 'caste system of slavery' involving Filipino stewards and their living conditions on base. 'He established the paper's urban renewal beat.' He covered the whole transformation,' says Nordlinger, 61, who retired from The Sun in 1991. Charles Center was just beginning to take root. 'Tony became interested in urban renewal. Lukas wanted so much more than hanging around police precincts. restaurant for a late-night meal of oysters (75 cents a dozen) and an eclair.

He and his new buddy and roommate, Steve Nordlinger, worked their 2 p.m.-11 p.m. He aced the paper's general knowledge test and went to work covering police for $105 a week. It is 1959, and a Harvard graduate (magna cum laude) had finished speech-writing for a Massachusetts governor and wanted a general assignment reporter's job at The Sun. That Lukas reportedly wasn't satisfied with his latest historical book, 'Big Trouble,' and that his method of death was strangulation are painful, curious matters for another time and place.

Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas