From the L.A. Times
As the editor of a national weekly publication, Eddie Clontz always knew what he would do if he received a phone call from someone who said he had a Martian living in his bedroom. It wasn’t what other editors would do. "I’d tell the guy, ‘Great, we’ll send a reporter right over,’ " Clontz said in a speech to the Florida Press Club some years ago. As the longtime editor of the Weekly World News, America’s most outlandish supermarket tabloid, Clontz operated in an alternate journalistic universe — one populated by space aliens, talking cats and gardeners who married their vegetables. Clontz, the man who turned an obscure woman’s claim about the late Elvis Presley into a front-page headline — Elvis Is Alive! — that sold over a million copies of the paper and launched a nationwide frenzy of Elvis sightings, has died. He was 56.
Clontz, who left the Boca Raton, Fla.-based tabloid in 2000 after 19 years, died Jan. 26 of liver and kidney disease and complications of diabetes at his home in Salt Springs, Fla., said his son, Bryan. The Charlotte, N.C., native held a special place in the world of tabloid newspapers, one that spurred the mainstream press to dub him the King of Supermarket Tabloids and the Yoda of the industry. For his part, Clontz saw himself as something of a tabloid P.T. Barnum. “We are a throwback,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2000. “We are a sideshow, and we’ve got to get people into the circus tent. So we will put the three-headed woman out there, and we will put the 1,000-pound fat guy out there.” At the Weekly World News, Clontz encouraged his reporters to follow the axiom: “Never question yourself out of a good story.”
From his desk in the middle of the Weekly World News newsroom — in Lantana, Fla., during his heyday — Clontz kept his 18-person staff motivated with his booming baritone, raucous laugh and sense of fun. He’d whip out his SuperSoaker water gun and squirt unsuspecting staff members, or he’d don his rubber dog mask to keep the newsroom energized. “He was very much a jokester and there was comedy club humor all day long, and that would spark what we did and how we worked,” Sal Ivone, who was the tabloid’s managing editor during Clontz’s reign, told The Times.
Clontz set the tone for the staff that turned out such classic Weekly World News stories as Bat Boy, a half-bat, half-human creature with razor-sharp teeth that was supposedly discovered by a research team in West Virginia. Clontz also took pride in writing the famous 1988 “Elvis Is Alive!” headline, whose subhead read: the “King of Rock ‘N’ Roll Faked His Death and Is Living in Kalamazoo, Mich.!” The Elvis edition became the tabloid’s biggest seller, gave birth to the Elvis-is-alive phenomenon and led to dozens of spin-off Elvis-sighting stories.
