When Sports Editor Joe Gross showed up at The Evening Capital in 1973 for a sports job interview, he was wearing a gray cape and a "superfly hat" with his hair grown down to his shoulders. He also had his signature moustache. "I took a look at that clean-shaven, crew-cut newsroom and thought I never had a chance," Joe said.

Ed Casey, the Executive Editor who hired him away from the Bucks County Courier in Pennsylvania, just laughs at the memory.

A graduate of the University of Hawaii and a Navy veteran, Joe hunkered down in an alcove off the newsroom on the second floor at 214 West St. In those days, the department consisted of Al Hopkins, Joe and Hymy Cohen, who covered sports part-time.

A talkable Ester Dimonte headed the nearby library, Joe said. Their desks were next to the miniscule photo lab. At that time, the sports department didn't cover the Orioles or the Colts, "so I started that," Joe said. No one ever traveled with the Navy football team, and Joe started that, too. There were no sport pages, just one sports page. Now on weekends the section can be 12 pages.

Joe wrote the first controversial sports column, criticizing Coach Al Larrimore of Annapolis High School. He hired part-time writers, which brought an increase in high school coverage, more photos of Navy sporting events and more focus on professional teams. Eventually Joe got Ed's approval to include sailing club results, and produced the first boating tabloid.

He also helped newsroom employees learn how to use a new computer system which he had already used in Pennsylvania. The newspaper was updating from old Royal typewriters to IBM Selectrics and then to a scanner system. Joe served in the group that chose the computer system, since a major concern was agate type and box scores, not a typical need covered by most computer software. Joe also was the first one to ever use a portable computer, sent to the newspaper by Tandy so he could test sending results from games direct to the office, he said.

One of Joe's favorite memories is of a part-time writer who was told to put his story "in the hole." The "hole" was the dumb waiter in the middle of the newsroom, which took the copy down stairs for scanning.

The young man dutifully looked for a hole, and found one in the old linoleum tile behind a desk. He stuck in his story. "We had to take out the tiles from the composing room ceiling to get his article," Joe says with a chuckle.

Joe Gross says the best thing that happened at the newspaper was spying a cute reporter, Susan Cloud, in the newsroom. The couple was married in the Paca Gardens in October of 1975 and have two kids: Mara, 21, and Max, 19.

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