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Steckles’s career began in England in 1960 on the sports desk of the South Shield Gazette in County Durham, wended its way to Manchester, crossed the pond to major Canadian papers in Toronto, Montreal, and other cities, and later led him to create a new tabloid, Caribbean Week, in Barbados and to somehow function simultaneously as a news editor of a paper in Vancouver and as the proprietor of a restaurant on Saint Kitts. In this context, it’s certainly worth mentioning that his biography of Bob Marley will be published in March.
“It’s a very difficult situation for everybody,” Steckles said today. “Trust me, it’s not something I feel particularly good about. One of the great tragedies to me is that the paper’s never looked better. There are some really terrific designers and fine columnists and reporters here. We’re all going through bad times, you know, and the Sun-Times‘s prospects aren’t helped by the fact the coffers were decimated by the previous proprietors [Conrad Black and David Radler]. They were two very experienced, brilliant newspaper proprietors, but there’s no doubt that what they were doing here was not good for the paper.
