Reporters: Maintaining the Public Welfare

Strange to say, the Detroit TV commentator whose question brought on George Romney’s Viet Nam “brainwashing” response spends less than half of his waking hours as a newsman. During daylight, Lou Gordon, 49, is a $50,000-a-year middleman for a women’s-clothing manufacturer. He wears slick suits, a toupee—and sometimes a gun. By moonlight, he is a part-time expose specialist on Detroit radio (WXYZ) and UHF television (WKBD). For more than a decade, he has been collecting ugly facts in Detroit and spilling them out to a mildly fascinated public. Always, he says, in the interest of “public welfare.”

Partly through awe, partly through fear, partly because Gordon will not take no for an answer, a long and covert chain of news sources in and around Detroit’s city government provide him with muck to rake. Working newsmen abhor him, as much for his beats and his seemingly unlimited sources within the bowels of the city as for his cocky personality and flamboyant journalism.

Personal Peccadilloes. Tiring of straight interviews soon after he started a program on WXYZ-TV in 1957, Gordon quickly turned to dirt digging. He ruffled the influential Detroit Athletic Club when he revealed that it was at tempting to have an adjacent city street closed for use as a parking lot. The club, which lists Gordon as a member, was forced to buy the property. Then he disclosed a ticket-scalping ring made up of box-office employees at Tiger Stadium. Detroit Tigers Owner Harvey Hansen demanded the names of the scalpers, but Gordon snapped, “That isn’t my job.” He told Hansen to find the culprits himself.

In 1960, the exposés became too controversial for WXYZ and Gordon was eased off the air. But a change in management brought him back on a five-minute radio show that is still running. Since then, Gordon has found out that Wayne County Sheriff Peter Buback was illegally selling raffle tickets for his own re-election campaign committee. Buback has since been indicted by a grand jury, is now awaiting trial. Topping off Gordon’s electronic exposure of peccadilloes, Basil Brown, chairman of the state-senate judiciary committee, publicly confessed to alcoholism and numerous drunk-driving arrests on Gordon’s TV program after the commentator had raked him over the coals.

Wayward Footsteps. Gordon’s most effective brickbats have been tossed at the mayor’s office. In 1960, he proclaimed that Detroit’s Mayor Louis Miriani was running the city $34 million in the red, despite a city charter specifically outlawing deficit spending. Then Gordon let it be known that Miriani had amassed a too-chic-to-be-mayorly wardrobe, also had been junketing to New York at the expense of lobbyists as well as soliciting city-government appointees to buy $10 tickets to his annual birthday parties. Federal authorities and listeners were equally appalled; Miriani, now a city councilman, is awaiting trial to account for $250,000 in unreported “gift” income.

In 1965, Kaiser Broadcasting signed Gordon up for a 10 p.m.-to-midnight Sunday TV show on Detroit’s WKBD. Detroit Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh, who displaced incumbent Miriani in 1962 thanks partly to Gordon’s exposes, unsuccessfully sought to get his onetime friend and ally fired. His reason: Gordon had turned on Cavanagh, accusing him of borrowing money from appointees, heavy drinking, womanizing and generally following in the wayward footsteps of Miriani. In July, Gordon broke the news that the mayor’s wife Mary had filed suit for separate maintenance. A few weeks ago, Gordon opened wounds again by reporting that Cavanagh had closed his wife’s charge account at Sears, Roebuck—much to her embarrassment when she tried to purchase school shoes for four of her eight children.

Scorned and reviled by many in Detroit for his personal abrasiveness and scandal-oriented journalism, Gordon remains unperturbed. His TV show has recently been expanded to two nights a week in Detroit and syndicated for pickup in Philadelphia and Boston. Moonlight muckraking adds $50,000 a year to Gordon’s income, and as he points out proudly, “I have never been sued and have never had to make a retraction.”