Word: mccraken
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Pavarotti's voice is the "bel canto" voice par excellence: light, thin, with a pleasant floating quality: truly lyric. In contrast to tenors like Jon Vickers or James McCraken, who sing as if they had swallowed cooking knives, Pavarotti's sings effortlessly. Nothing is worse than a singer who strains. But unfortunately, Mr. Pavarotti, like too many other lyric tenors, suffers from the identity crisis of a vocal lightweight. Not satisfied with the lyric repertoire, he wants to conquer the dramatic roles; Manrico, Radames, Canio. He could make no greater mistake. Nothing destroys a lyric tenor more quickly or completely...
Died. Tracy S. McCraken, 66, onetime reporter who converted an ailing Wyoming weekly into the first link of a six-paper chain; of a ruptured abdominal aorta; in Cheyenne. A veteran Democratic national committeeman, McCraken cast the 15 Wyoming votes that gave Kennedy the nomination at the Democratic Convention, two weeks ago declined to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy, caused by the death of Republican Keith Thomson, because "I love newspapering...
Feature Bait. McCraken built his statewide empire on an ingenious newspaper stunt. Twenty-eight years ago, he borrowed $3,000 and bought Cheyenne's sickly weekly, the Wyoming Eagle. He converted it into a daily, made it the area's first tabloid and began giving it away free. But later only paid subscribers got a special section of features (comics, serial fiction, etc.). By starting new features first in the free section of the paper, then moving them to the supplement for paid subscribers, he got more and more paid subscribers, finally stopped giving the paper away altogether...
...newsman himself, McCraken leaves the editorial side to his editors, believes that first of all a newspaper is a business enterprise. Although he is a lifelong Democrat, his Laramie Republican-Boomerang (circ. 2,904) and Cheyenne Wyoming State Tribune (10,413) are pro-Republican because that is what they were when he took them over. Each of McCraken's publishers has come up from the ranks, gets a big stock share in the paper he bosses. McCraken's community-minded dailies (five of them tabloids) rarely crusade, avoid sensational stories...
...Party Press? McCraken got his first newspaper training as a newspaper delivery boy in Evanston, Ill. His father died when he was a child and McCraken worked after school in a wide variety of jobs, such as making handles for caskets and stays for corsets. He started as a part-time reporter in high school in Illinois, worked his way through the University of Wyoming working on the local paper. During World War I, he was an infantry lieutenant, came back and got his first taste of Democratic politics as secretary to the state's Democratic Governor William...