August 16–23, 2001

media

Another One Bites the Dust

The buyout bonanza over at Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. has sent another veteran reporter scrambling to the payout window and taking off for parts unknown. Dave Racher, as much a fixture in this town as a scrapple sandwich, covered the Philadelphia courts for the Daily News for more than 40 years. Racher is the latest to take the buyout offered by Knight Ridder, and walked out of the PNI building for the last time July 13.

"Dave is the consummate professional — one of the last of the ‘old school’ reporters," says former DN staffer Steph Rosenfeld. "His presence in the courtroom and in the newsroom will be sorely missed. When I first came to the Daily News, I worked a few feet away from him at the City Hall bureau. He was amazing. Lawyers would hold statements until Dave came in. Judges would hold decisions until Dave came in. He had reached a point where he didn’t have to call people for quotes — they would call him."

Racher started at the Daily News in 1955 as a copy boy straight out of high school. He became a reporter a few years later, and was assigned the court beat in 1960. He hasn’t covered anything else since.

"I’ve been around longer than any of the judges on the bench," laughs Racher, reached at his home by telephone earlier this week. "I could walk in the courtroom and immediately know what the case was all about just from looking at the defense attorney, district attorney and judge. Specter, Rendell, Castille — I was there for every one of their major cases. I covered Lynne Abraham when she was a young prosecutor fresh out of law school."

Racher says retirement takes some getting used to.

"I don’t know what to do with myself every morning, but I’m starting to get used to not going to work. I read the papers, and I’m starting to work on a book about my adventures in the Philadelphia court system," he says.

The book, Racher says, will be a humorous look at the follies, foibles and foul-ups that happen in court all the time, but never get printed. Judges so inebriated that they have to be helped on and off the bench, jurors who are admonished for loud snoring, and one particularly amusing anecdote where Racher himself became part of the story he was writing.

"The prosecutor asks this poor 90-year-old lady who was the victim if she sees the guy who broke into her house in the courtroom. She says yes, and when he asked her to point him out, she gets up, walks right past the defense table and pointed at me. I was sitting there taking notes and she puts her finger right in my face and says, ‘This is the man. I’ll never forget that face as long as I live!’ I was placed in handcuffs and hauled down to the holding cell. Eventually, the paper straightened the whole mess out, but as they were taking me away, I heard the defendant in the case just laughing his head off."

—Daryl Gale