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nate our narrative. He encouraged us to read our stories aloud. Doing this, he said, would reveal those needlessly clunky passages in which words would bump against one another.” David Von Drehle, editor at large at Time Magazine, knew Rose well. “Bill would make an article 60 percent better than when you gave it to him,” Von Drehle said. “ And there was no screaming or throwing of chairs.” Clifton said the staff loved Rose’s practical jokes. “He did an excellent imitation of Rep. Claude Pepper,” Clifton said of the legendary Florida congressman. “He would call reporters and pretend to be Pepper. He could lead them on for quite a while.” One year, the famed columnist Dave Barry wrote about an alligator costume in Tropic’s annual Christmas gift guide. Never one to look a gift gator in the mouth, Rose donned the alligator costume and crawled across the floor of the newsroom, right into the office of the executive editor. “He scared me half to death,” Clifton said. Rose’s friends know he loves to play golf. He started playing at age 12 on a 9-hole course in his hometown of Shelby, Mississippi. “I thought golf was a great sport because physical attributes are less significant. I enjoy competing, especially against myself,” Rose said. Shroder, the Tropic editor who went on to be executive editor of the Washington Post Sunday magazine, played golf frequently with Rose in Miami. They particularly liked playing an inexpensive but beautiful par 3 course in Miami Beach. Shroder remembers one round in particular: “Miami Beach in its wisdom had recently granted an easement in the middle of the fourth or fifth hole for a temple congregation to build a mikvah [a ritual bath house for Jewish women] literally in the middle of the fairway of a 160-yard par 3 hole. The course management simply set up a new tee on the pin side of the mikvah, making it an 80-yard hole. But we refused to kneel before the Miami Beach Building and Zoning Commission. So we continued to tee up in the old tee box, hitting a blind shot above the two-story structure directly between tee and green. “I hit first. It felt like a great shot, but who could tell? Then Bill hit with that sweet swing of his. The ball soared high, clearing the little cupola on top of the mikvah and disappearing.”
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Meek School of Journalism and New Media Dean Will Norton, Jr. (left) and Charles Overby (right) award the 2016 Silver Em award to Bill Rose (center) during a recent ceremony at the Overby Center at Ole Miss. This is the highest award given by the Meek School of Journalism and New Media.
Shroder said they found his ball on the green, but there was no sign of Rose’s ball. “Bill kind of shrugged and said, ‘Might as well look in the hole.’ And that’s exactly where it was. We began referring to it as The Miracle of the Mikvah.” When Tropic Magazine folded because of financial constraints, the Herald’s top management worked hard to keep Rose in Miami. “Bill could have had any job,” Clifton said. “We were willing to create a job for Bill. But he was wooed by the Palm Beach Post. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. It broke my heart.” Rose joined the Palm Beach Post as metro editor, worked his way to the top as managing editor and expanded significantly the coverage, both in the quality of writing and the range of topics that the paper covered. “We couldn’t be the biggest newspaper in the state, but we could have the best writers,” he said. He began sending reporters to Mexico, Cuba and Haiti. “We did lots of stuff you
wouldn’t expect,” Rose said. “We were kicking butts and taking names.” When the economy tanked in 2008, Rose had to begin to make cuts in the newsroom. “Because you are in management, you become a numbers man,” Rose said. “Numbers are not my talent – not tamping things down.” So after 10 years at the Palm Beach Post, Rose decided to retire in 2009 at age 62. The big beneficiary of that decision was Ole Miss journalism. Rose went to see Dr. Will Norton, who was chairman of the Department of Journalism. “I knew that Bill had a great reputation in journalism, but I had no idea how good he was,” said Norton. Norton, now dean of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media, said he couldn’t hire Rose fulltime because he didn’t have a master’s degree. Finally, they agreed on a parttime spot with Rose teaching depth reporting. His return to Ole Miss was also a homecoming for his wife of 45 years, Susan Rose, also an Ole Miss graduate.