by Bailey White
Staff Writer
Come May 29, a Jacksonville native will be attending a luncheon at Columbia University when he’ll hear his name called for the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting.
Kevin Sack will receive the award for The Los Angeles Times article “The Vertical Vision” that he wrote with colleague Alan Miller.
Who’ll be sitting next to him has yet to be confirmed.
“I don’t know who’ll be going with me yet because I’m not sure how many tickets I’ll get,” said Sack, 43, who works at the paper’s Atlanta bureau. “My mom’s been lobbying pretty hard, though.”
Sack was tipped off early about his win; he heard the news Saturday.
“A managing editor leaked it, and I was sworn to secrecy,” he said.
But that didn’t keep Monday’s 3 p.m. announcement from being “a really great moment.”
Sack and his nine-year-old daughter Laura were in Washington, D.C. where they joined Miller and an editor for a newsroom celebration.
“We popped a bottle of champagne and toasted the moment,” he said. “It was a big day for the L.A. Times since they won three prizes. There was an electronic hook-up feeding images of us back to California.”
Another L.A. Times winner joined them via satellite phone from Iraq.
Sack grew up in Jacksonville — his parents are Martin, a prominent local attorney, and Carol, graduating from The Bolles School.
“I was the editor of The Bolles Bugle, my first journalism job,” he said.
He attended Duke University, where he wrote for The Duke Chronicle and majored in history before joining The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, where he worked with present T-U editor Pat Yack. At The New York Times he wrote the lead article for a 15-part series called “How Race is Lived in America,” which was also awarded a Pulitzer.
So this will be his second trip to the podium.
“It’s a really nice ceremony,” he said. “It’s understated and formal, there are no big speeches.”
This time, the winning article is a four-part series published last December that came out of an eight-month investigation Sack and Miller launched into the AV-8 Harrier, a military aircraft with a history of failure that was nicknamed “The Widow Maker” because it has resulted in the death of 45 pilots.
The work took the journalists to nearly a dozen states to talk with family members of pilots who had died in the crashes and to two Marine Corps bases.
“Anything that could go wrong with it did,” said Sack. “There were mechanical problems related to the engine and the wing flaps and a host of outrageous maintenance problems. And it was a complicated plane, mechanically; pilots talked about needing three hands to fly it.”
Surprisingly, the planes have yet to be taken out of service. A Harrier crashed just last week while trying to land on a ship in the Persian Gulf.
Sack will be back in Jacksonville later this summer.
“The city will always be my home,” he said. “We’ll go out to the beach, maybe to Sawgrass.”
In the meantime, Sack and Miller have work to do.
“We came across a number of story ideas while we were working,” said Sack. “We’re off to the next thing.”