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TRIBUTE
December 24, 2002
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By Robert Commanday
Last Friday, William Glackin died where he would have wanted it to happen, at his desk at the Sacramento Bee, at the age of 85, after 54 years of service to the arts and entertainment world, his community and his newspaper. With the possible exception of the San Francisco Examiner's music and dance critic, Alexander Fried, Bill, as everyone called him, had put in more years on the beat than any else in West Coast history.
Unlike the rest of us come-latelies, including the grand Alex, Bill covered the whole
arts and entertainment beat, and that's something, keeping up with late breaking and radical changes in trends and styles, so that even into his eighties he had to keep up with and review the latest rock artists and seriously consider the latest hot Britneys. But he did it, and with a humor, aplomb and grace that gives the lie to everything that spoiled entertainers, divas and artistes have to say about their favorite targets, the critics who help make their careers.
Bill Glackin did more to help, support and encourage artists and groups within his paper's circulation range than most do in their paper's areas. In fact, if he had a failing it was to err on the side of the positive. It took a really terrible show or performance to draw him into coming down on it. Somehow, he always found something good to say. Wayne Thiebaud, the noted Sacramento artist who had been close to Bill for half a century, recalled his advocacy for young artists. "He once told me that he (believed in) encouraging people rather than just criticizing their work," Thiebaud was quoted saying in the Sacramento Bee's obituary. "He said his role was to find what was good . . . rather than what was lacking."
His colleagues in the Bay Area knew him as a kindly, gentle presence in the press rooms, seeing him regularly down in San Francisco, covering an opera, a ballet, one of the more auspicious symphony concerts or recitals. He would hop into his car at 11 or 11:30 p.m., speed the sixty or seventy miles back to his office at the Bee, and before going to bed, turn out his review for the next day's edition, beating most of us San Franciscans by a day. And no complaints. That was what he did, and he loved it.
He was Sacramento-born and bred, in effect growing up in the movie houses that his father managed. Mr. Glackin earned a bachelor's degree in physics from St. Mary's College and did two years of graduate work in English and Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 1941 and his being drafted into the Army in 1943, he worked at various jobs, one as an announcer for radio station KFBK, another teaching drama and speech at C.K. McClatchy High School. After leaving the service in 1946, he had decided on the career of journalism. He never looked back.
A wiry, small man, he regularly played golf and tennis and worked out. Energy, spirit, enthusiasm for his work, he had it all. Bill Glackin was a journalist through and through and a credit to arts criticism.
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