DORIS MANSOUR, 68: KEPT TROPIC MAGAZINE WRITERS ON THEIR TOES

Miami Herald, The (FL)
March 28, 2007
by John Dorschner

Doris Mansour -- for two decades office manager, copy editor and mother hen of The Herald's Tropic Magazine -- died Tuesday at Aventura Hospital of congestive heart failure. She was 68.

A graduate of Jackson Senior High, she never feared telling the highly opinionated editors and writers of Tropic, The Miami Herald's award-winning Sunday magazine from 1967 to 1998, exactly what she thought.

''Doris Mansour served with grace and goodwill as the den mother at Tropic during its glory years when she kept a lot of otherwise unmanageable free spirits on a short leash,'' recalls former staff writer Madeleine Blais, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1980.

''Without benefit of formal training or a fancy education, she was a great, great copy editor, ruthless in her pursuit of errant pieces of punctuation and hellbent on cleaning up murky, convoluted or pretentious prose,'' says Blais, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts.

Columnist Dave Barry, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988, says, "When I got to Tropic in the '80s, Doris was my barometer. If she liked a column, it almost always got a good response from the readers. She especially liked it when I wrote about being a dad, or a dog owner. She was less crazy about columns involving exploding toilets. But she always told me what she thought, and no matter what I wrote, supported me.''

Born in New York but a resident of Miami-Dade County virtually all her life, her personal life was often a struggle. For a while, she earned a living delivering newspapers, often taking her three small kids along with her. Two of her children, Barbara and Wayne, preceded her in death.

She started at The Miami Herald in 1972 as a typist and was eventually promoted to Tropic, starting as a receptionist who answered the phones and opened the mail, gradually working her way into the complexities of copy editing, searching for the tiniest mistakes in punctuation, grammar and spelling that other editors missed.

Gene Weingarten, editor of Tropic in the 1980s and now a columnist for The Washington Post, says that while Doris had less education than the rest of the staff, "she also had a knack, which she demonstrated time and again, for being smarter than the rest of us.

"One day we were engaged in an endless, frustrating editing session to come up with a cover headline. It was for a story about how Florida fishermen were in a wild frenzy to catch the world's biggest bass and win a million-dollar prize. We needed something concise and clever, and weren't getting anywhere.

"Doris was patiently listening to all of this, over in the corner at her desk, and finally, when we all fell silent in despair, she called over, 'Bass Hysteria.' One of our best cover headlines ever.''

When necessary, she could be stern with readers. In his early days at Tropic, Dave Barry recalls, 'When people wanted to complain about something I'd written -- which was often -- . . . . Doris bore the brunt. I overheard her end of many conversations that went like this: `Yes, this is where he works.' Pause. 'I see.' Pause. 'Well, sir, he's a humor writer.' Pause. 'Well I think he's funny.' ''

She was also a tiger in defending The Miami Herald's expense accounts. Staff writer Meg Laughlin, now with The St. Petersburg Times, remembers: 'If she caught a new writer exaggerating mileage on an expense account or if she caught a new writer spending what she thought was too much on a plane ticket, a hotel or transportation, she'd say, 'It's not my money, but fair's fair.' ''

Weingarten and Blais mention her "institutional memory.''

''Back before sophisticated computer libraries and instant information retrieval, there was Doris,'' says the former editor. "She was unerring. Later, if we'd set up a John Henry type of competition -- woman vs. machine -- my money would have been on Doris.''

Recalls Blais: "You could always go to her for the backstory on any number of rascals and miscreants.''

She retired at the end of 1998, when The Miami Herald decided to kill the magazine.

''On her last day . . . I walked her out of the building. She had trouble walking because her knees were so bad,'' recalls Laughlin. "She held onto the railings in the hall to get to the elevator. Then, she pushed her palms against the walls to brace herself.

"Struggling down that narrow corridor on the first floor toward the exit, for the last time, she said, 'I feel like I'm going to my execution. Without Tropic, there's not much left for me.' ''

She lived for another nine years, devoting herself to her granddaughters while continuing to copy-edit magazines as a freelancer.

Judi Smith, a close friend and longtime colleague at Tropic: "Doris was never so happy as when she was able to give to someone else. She loved to shop QVC and find the perfect Christmas gift for her daughter and granddaughters. . . . She was a great friend with a big heart.''

When asked to copy-edit a magazine on yachting -- which she knew absolutely nothing about -- she purchased yachting books to bone up. ''She always wanted to be useful,'' Smith said. "She was so proud of her work.''

Talking about her copy-editing, she once told Laughlin: ``Not a bad job for a girl who never went to college.''

A month before her death, she was still editing. In her spare time, she listened to Elvis, Acker Bilk and Patsy Cline while reading mystery novels.

She is survived by her daughter, Donna Sellers; son-in-law John; and granddaughters Jenny and Christina.

There will be no services.

© 2007 Miami Herald Media Company