Former Shepherd Express editor
and longtime Wisconsin freelance journalist
Scott Kerr died October 5, 1999.
He was 49.
Scott Kerr, former Bayfield resident, newspaperman and Wisconsin freelance journalist whose aggressive reporting on controversial issues and often acerbic political commentary made friends and enemies throughout the state, died October 5, 1999. He was 49.
Kerr launched the weekly Bayfield Sun newspaper in May of 1973, after moving to Bayfield from the Illinois to join his parents. Harold L. Kerr and Jane M. Kerr had been prominent Chicago area artists before establishing Kerr Metal Arts Studio in Bayfield several years earlier. His mother and brother, Brian Kerr, continue to operate the studio.
While generally well received, the Bayfield Sun was controversial and financially hard pressed in the small community with competition from the long-established (1854) Bayfield County Press. In 1975, Kerr began negotiations to buy the Bayfield County Press, Washburn Times and Iron River Pioneer from Earnest Korpella, of Cornucopia, then owner of the county’s three legal newspapers.
In 1976 after negotiations were unsuccessful, Kerr launched the Chequamegon Sun with financial backing from his father and Bayfield businessman and the late Don Duquette. Based in the county seat of Washburn, Chequamegon Sun was Bayfield County’s first county-wide weekly newspaper, focusing on county-wide issues and publishing news and advertising from all communities ranging from Cable in the south to Cornucopia in the north.
The Sun broke numerous stories of local and regional impact, including the mysterious barrel dumping into Lake Superior during the 1950’s by Honeywell. Walter Bresette of Red Cliff, the late prominent Native American rights activist and environmental leader, joined the Sun in 1977 as a columnist and operated Sunshine Graphics out of the newspaper office in Washburn. The Sun also published the Bayfield Apple Cookbook, co-written by Kerr with the late Paul Turner of Bayfield and designed by Bresette. The Sun closed in 1978 having set several precedents, and showing the political and economic viability of a single, Bayfield County-wide weekly, serving both diverse communities and common interests.
Kerr then operated Goldman’s Cafe in Bayfield from 1979 through 1981. The restaurant gained a wide reputation among locals, tourists and sailers. In 1980 Kerr also became a business associate in Richard Orth Construction, a custom residential builder in Bayfield. He joined Orth’s business move to Grand Junction, CO, in 1982, but returned to Bayfield in 1986 to again pursue writing.
As a freelance journalist, Kerr worked with a variety of publications, including St. Paul Pioneer Press as a Wisconsin correspondent and freelance reporter for The Milwaukee Journal, Duluth News-Tribune and others. He also wrote and distributed the satiric Bayfield Chronicle. Kerr continued to write on Northern Wisconsin issues after he moved to Milwaukee in 1989, his work also appearing in a wide variety of publications including: News From Indian Country, Lac Court Oreilles; Milwaukee Sentinel; The Progressive, Madison; Heterodoxy Magazine, Los Angeles; and Shepherd Express, Milwaukee’s weekly alternative newspaper.
In 1992, he was named news editor of Shepherd Express and became its editor in 1995. He also served on the paper’s corporate board of directors and executive committee before resigning in 1996.
Kerr’s expose on oil exploration in Bayfield County, and the inadequacy of state laws governing oil and gas drilling and production at the time, “Wild-catting Wisconsin,” won a 1992 Milwaukee Press Club award for best investigative and interpretive writing. Beyond his abrasive commentary on Milwaukee news and state politics, Kerr broadened the Shepherd Express’s focus to include aggressive reporting on Northern Wisconsin issues, particularly Chippewa treaty rights, mining, timber and other environmental controversies. Much of his writing was distributed nationally through AlterNet, the news service for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Kerr played a key role in the 1994 employee buy-out of Shepherd Express from its previous majority shareholder, a move that made the paper the only employee-owned and -operated alternative newsweekly in the country at the time.
After leaving Shepherd Express, he was communications director for The Affluenza Project, Milwaukee, an educational organization involved in the psychology of wealth and its imbalances. Kerr also was active in Internet web site development, last year co-creating and managing Milwaukee One (mke1.com), a daily Milwaukee entertainment news and events site of which he was editor.
He was born Douglas Scott Kerr on January 1, 1950 in Chicago IL, and had lived in suburban Palatine until moving to Bayfield. Although Kerr had worked on the school newspaper, he graduated in 1968 from William Fremd High School in Palatine, having taken no journalism classes. He did not attend college. His father, Harold Lincoln Kerr, had spent much of his childhood living with his family relatives in the former village of Shaw on Sand Island prior to 1920. The Kerr family maintained strong ties to the area through friends and relatives, including the Palm and Bondi families on father’s mother’s side. Scott Kerr had said he inherited his father’s “almost obsessive fascination with the area, the lake, and its people.”
Kerr died of leukemia at St. Mary’s Hospice, Milwaukee, after being diagnosed with the disease in 1997. He was preceded in death by his father, Harold Lincoln Kerr, in 1981. He is survived by three children: Rachael Lucinda Cuttil, 29, of Palatine, IL; Robert Scott Kerr, 20, of Cornucopia and a student at Carthage College in Kenosha; and by Alicia Anne Kerr, 18, of Cornucopia, and a student at University of Wisconsin—LaCrosse. Also surviving are his mother, Jane M. Kerr, Bayfield, WI, and a brother, Brian Palm Kerr, Ashland, WI. He will also be missed by his beloved partner, Karina Schafer.
