Watchdog in Chicago

On one of his first assignments for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1923, Cub Reporter Milburn Peter Akers followed a sack of potatoes from farmer to housewife to find out why they were so expensive. He handed in a story that had plenty of potatoes but no meat. He had failed to question critically each middleman's excuse for jacking up the price. When the city editor read the piece, he tore it to shreds and bellowed: "You let everybody impose on your credulity!" "On the way back to my desk," recalls Akers, "I looked up credulity in the dictionary. I've been in credulous ever since."

He has, in fact, been relentlessly incredulous. As a crusading managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, he nosed out some of the gamiest scandals Chicago has spawned. In 1951, when a police officer named Michael Moretti was cleared by a grand jury for killing two unarmed youths in a parked car, Akers sent an irate memo to his staff: "The Moretti case stinks to high heaven. I want to go after this as we have never gone after anything before." Despite threats on his life, Akers kept his staff digging until there was enough evidence to put the cop on trial for murder. Moretti was convicted and got a life sentence.

Flower Fund. Last week, at 65, Chicago-born Pete Akers gave up the crusades and retired from the newspaper business. For Chicagoans, it was the end of a tumultuous 45-year career of the man who has been described as having the "mind of a politician, the heart of a social worker and the body [5 ft. 8 1/2 in., 199 lbs.] of a medieval bishop."

Three generations of Akers' forebears were Methodist ministers; he was a preacher only at heart. After his stint on the Post-Dispatch, he became a political reporter in Springfield, later moved up to Chicago for the A. P. during gang-war days. In 1937, Akers took a fling at politics himself and wound up as an assistant to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. But he soon beat a hasty retreat. "Anybody who leaves the newspaper business for a political job," he says now, "is kind of silly."

Akers joined Marshall Field's Chicago Sun in 1941, and when the Sun merged with the Times in 1948, he was named managing editor. "He had a passion for perfection," says a newsman. "He just wanted a great paper in a hurry." The tabloid Sun-Times (circ. 534,000) did not become a great paper under Akers, but it did become a dedicated one; Akers encouraged depth reporting in such areas as education and religion, before most other dailies got around to it. Among his expose triumphs, he uncovered a "flower fund" in the books of a Cook County treasurer who was running for governor. When the Sun-Times showed that the fund was an assessment on county employees for campaign contributions, the treasurer withdrew from the race. In 1952, after the Kefauver crime-investigating committee allowed a candidate for Cook County sheriff to testify in closed session, Akers sent a reporter, posing as a federal employee, to snitch the transcript. The Sun-Times disclosed the details of the candidate's connections with gamblers, and the man lost the election by a landslide.

"Why?" Akers' famous rages still echo around the Sun-Times. Double chins aquiver, he used to storm into the city room regularly and lambast an errant reporter with apoplectic fury. Other times he would resort to the icy memo: "Let's print this newspaper in English."

In recent years, the Sun-Times has combined sporadic crusading with more sober analysis. "We talk about the old interrogatories--who, what, where, when, why," says Akers. "Too many newspapers don't tell why." He found that one way to get the why was to weed the mediocre reporters out of his staff and to keep the pay scales high enough to attract bright newsmen.

As he retires, Pete Akers leaves a legacy of responsible investigative reporting that is still a yardstick in Chicago. "A newspaper has to be a watchdog," said he last week. "If the newspaper doesn't do it, who's going to? God! What would go on in a city like Chicago if the newspapers didn't do it?"

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