Sports Scribe Recalls 70 Years in Biz

By: Joe Strupp When Sid Dorfman started writing for the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., Franklin Roosevelt was president, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, and Pearl Harbor was still six years away. In 1935, the 15-year-old Dorfman was just glad to a get a job as the Depression swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Knocking on the door of the then-Morning Ledger, the high school student offered his services and got a job covering high school games at 10 cents per inch.

"It was a real break at the time," Dorfman, 85, recalls. "It wasn't difficult for a kid to get a job, because they didn't have to pay you much."

Seventy years later, Dorfman is still writing for the paper, only now as the head of Dorf Feature Services, which provides the Star-Ledger with all of its high school and Division III college sports coverage, as well as obituary and death notices. In addition, the longtime Garden State resident writes a weekly sports column.

But Dorfman's long career did not begin smoothly. The first day he showed up for work, the paper was on strike. "I walked up to the door, a guy put a picket sign in my hand and said 'we're on strike'," Dorfman relates during a phone interview from his suburban New Jersey office. "I had not worked a day in my life and I was on strike." The walkout lasted just two weeks though, ending when S.I. Newhouse bought the struggling paper that his family still owns as part of Advance's Newhouse Newspapers chain.

At the time, the Ledger was one of three Newark dailies, and the last in circulation. The dominant Newark Evening News, which closed in 1972, had most of the scoops and readers, along with The Star-Eagle, which would merge with the Ledger in 1939.

Dorfman's first assignments included covering sports at Newark's Weequahic High School, where he attended classes. After two years, he joined Metropolitan News Service, which provided local news and sports to the Ledger and other papers. "I broke in covering bicycle races [at a local park]," he says. "They also had horse racing." Among the odd sports in nearby Nutley, N.J., at the time was midget car racing, a pursuit which soon ended after one race in which a driver was decapitated after driving under a metal wire. "I saw this head roll around on the track," Dorfman recalls.

In 1938, Metropolitan's owner, H. Stuart Morrison, ran off with his secretary and the company's payroll, Dorfman said. He soon took over the operation, renamed it Dorf Feature Service, and went back into business. He was 18. "I did quite well in the early years, but papers one by one peeled off and died and I needed the Ledger as a base," recalls Dorfman, who now has 50 full-time employees, including two of his three children, working for him.

His first office was in a Newark theater, followed by 10 other locations over the years, including a rat-infested basement near a Newark courthouse. "When I complained to the landlord about the rats, he gave me a BB gun to shoot them," Dorfman says.

One of his early reporters was a young Richard Codey, who now serves as acting governor of New Jersey. "It's mind-boggling," Codey told the Star-Ledger earlier this year about Dorfman's longevity. "He still has enthusiasm." Dorfman recalls the time Codey, as a college student stringer, called in from a town council meeting to report that one councilman had accused another of adultery: "I asked him if he had any pictures."

But Dorfman really made his mark in sports for the paper. As the Star-Ledger's first-ever golf writer, he was handed the assignment even though he had never played or seen the game. Editors also renamed him Pat Ryan, so as to avoid any anti-semitic treatment at area golf clubs. "After half a year or so of playing (in a park), I got into it," says Dorfman, now a lifetime honorary member of the PGA.

Later, he all but created the paper's extensive college and high school sports sections, which often take up more space than coverage of pro sports. He also launched the popular Top 20 listings for campus sports, a well as the All-State teams that remain a fixture at many papers nationwide. One sign of the rankings' impact appeared years ago when students at a high school in Morristown, N.J., organized a brief boycott of the paper after their football team was not ranked No. 1.

In the early 1960s, Dorfman extended his reach to include obituaries and death notices. Sports columnist Jerry Izenberg, whom Dorfman hired in 1951, says no one is more responsible for the paper's existence: "I can't think of anyone who has had the impact on this paper that Sid has had. His fingerprints are all over the success of the Star-Ledger." Editor Jim Willse agrees, noting "Sid was part of the generation that made the Ledger what it is today."

Although he stopped covering games on a regular basis about 15 years ago, Dorfman still edits copy and writes his weekly column, with no plans to stop. The biggest change in newspapers that he's witnessed over the years? "A lot of papers have come to realize that if you're not local, you're nothing," Dorfman responds. "Otherwise, you are not going to survive."