http://www.palmbeachpost.com/accent/conten...cbb0d400fc.html

Friends will miss editor - as will Bat Boy

By Thom Smith, Palm Beach Post Staff Columnist - Wednesday, January 28, 2004

I can see the headlines now:

"Aliens Kidnap Editor" -- "Bat Boy Weeps"

Eddie Clontz died early Monday in Salt Springs, near Ocala. Complications from diabetes. Only 56, he was one of the most creative guys in the business, although you won't find his brand of journalism in a daily newspaper. Until three years ago, Eddie edited the Weekly World News.

For two decades under his watch, the black-and-white irreverent stepsister of the National Enquirer kept Elvis alive, then one day announced, "Elvis Dead at 56." It discovered missing World War II bombers on the moon. Its space alien endorsed Bill Clinton for president. After it revealed the existence of baby ghosts, some 1,000 readers wrote in, wanting to adopt.

"It was such a creative atmosphere, and it showed," said Sal Ivone, former managing editor and active participant in many of the conspiracies that made WWN so preposterous and so entertaining. "The brainstorming was incredible. Everybody took such delight in each other's work."

"A guy called from north Florida and claimed Bigfoot had kidnapped his wife," Ivone recalled. "His local newspaper wouldn't give him the time of day."

Clontz's mantra: Let the source tell the story. As for being a reliable source, well, that was for the readers to decide.

On his desk Clontz kept a rubber dog mask and in a drawer his "reporter-waker-upper," a giant squirt gun. But before you envision some frat party gone wild, consider that Clontz, a North Carolinian by birth, moved to WWN, then in Lantana, from the prestigious St. Petersburg Times.

His staff came from London's Fleet Street and from Harvard, Penn, Bryn Mawr, major publishing houses, even The New York Times. They were paid well, often twice the going rate for work at major newspapers.

"We have to pay them a lot," Clontz once said, "because we are, in effect, asking them to end their careers.... We're the French Foreign Legion of journalism."

Some had no experience in journalism. Bob Lind had a hit song in the '60s -- The Elusive Butterfly of Love -- and dabbled in screenplays before joining the News.

"Eddie thought he would add an interesting perspective," Ivone said. "He was a great judge of talent."

Clontz knew his place and that of the News. "Everybody else is trying to demystify everything," he told the Columbia Journalism Review in 1992. "We're trying to do the opposite, to mystify again. We're in a constant struggle against medicine, science and religion. In religion they're telling people more and more, 'Miracles don't really happen.' So I have to keep coming back with BLIND MOM CAN SEE AFTER BABY GIVES HER A HUG."

"We talked last week, and he knew he didn't have long," said Billy Burt of Atlantis, a former rival as editor of The National Examiner. "He asked me if he would be remembered as a tabloid legend.

"I said, 'Eddie, you're bound to be a super legend. You're almost mythological.' "

Yeah, Tug, saw his "final issue" in the news stand near where I work. Just think, if he had been on the Titanic he'd still be alive...

I almost bought that issue today.