BY PETER SCHEER—The First Amendment has lost a good friend. Raymond Pryke, a free speech provocateur, agitator for open and accountable government, and patron of First Amendment scholarship and advocacy, died February 7 in the southern California high-desert community of Hesperia, where he lived and worked for many years. He was 91.
A British subject, the son of an Anglican minister, Ray discovered America in the early years of World War II, when he was sent to Texas for flight training on fighter planes that he later piloted for the Royal Air Force and Navy in the war against German fascism. After the war, sensing that his future did not lie in a country that vested all power in socialist politicians and a landed aristocracy—the “worst of both worlds,” he once told me—Ray returned to North America.
In Canada he received a first-class (and free!) education, graduating from Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1951. After college, assessing opportunities across the Americas, Ray, like millions of others, was drawn to California: land of freeways, pristine beaches, new university campuses by the dozen, and gleaming suburbs. He moved to southern California and plunged headlong into the real estate business.
In this pursuit he exploited two advantages. One was technology: The former war-time flyer leapfrogged rivals by piloting his own plane—meeting with a client in San Jose in the morning, attending a real estate closing in San Diego in the afternoon. The second was language. Ray became fluent in Spanish in his adopted country. While other real estate agents and brokers shunned Hispanic clients, Ray Pryke sought them out.
He believed strongly in inclusiveness, diversity and social mobility. These values also made Ray a wealthy man.
In the early 1970s Ray became interested in local government. He served as chairman of the civil grand jury of San Bernardino County, in which capacity he bypassed the district attorney and launched an investigation of prisoner abuse in the county jails. At about the same time Ray began to acquire small, local, weekly newspapers as a means of both exerting political influence and promoting his real estate interests.
Once again, Ray would do well by doing good.
Ray created a small chain that eventually would consist of ten weekly papers: In San Bernardino County, The Apple Valley News, Hesperia Resorter, Adelanto Bulletin, Lucerne Valley Post, Barstow Post, Desert Mountain Express, County Legal Reporter and The Victorville Post Express. And in Orange County and Los Angeles, the Dana Point Pilot and Antelope Valley Journal. Ray’s group of papers is known as the ValleyWide Newspapers.
While these publications are heavy on legal notices—their true raison d’etre from a business standpoint—and generic news content, Ray occasionally would fill their pages with hard-hitting investigative news stories about local, political corruption. Among his many targets, Ray took on Hisperia City Manager Robert Rizzo. That’s the same Rizzo who years later, as the infamous city manager of the City of Bell, joined the Bell mayor and other officials in prison on charges of enriching themselves at taxpayers’ expense.
I had the good fortune of meeting Ray in 2011. He called me out of the blue, seeking advice on a legal and business matter. I was intrigued by this savvy octogenarian with a keen sense of humor, an insatiable appetite for information about politics and court decisions, a genuine commitment to hard-working immigrants (like himself) and his own employees, and a deep-seated contempt for Fox News and the Tea Party politicians whom the network championed.
We talked by phone regularly, at least once per month. Ray worried about First Amendment protections, particularly for investigative journalism, and particularly at the hands of what he viewed as an increasingly conservative US Supreme Court. But Ray didn’t just worry. He backed up his concerns with his money.
Ray became a major contributor to the First Amendment Coalition (second only to long-time benefactor, and my other First Amendment hero, Rowland ((“Reb”)) Rebele). Ray also had the good sense to make a significant gift—-over $1.5 million—-to the Law School at UC Irvine to endow a professorship devoted to First Amendment scholarship. That prestigious post is now held by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a preeminent First Amendment advocate, teacher and scholar.
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is the name James Agee gave to his Depression-era book of photographs of ordinary Americans whose dignity and ideals, in the face of adversity, gave their lives a stature more important and lasting than celebrity.
Let us now praise Ray Pryke, a famous American.
Ray is survived by his a brother, Derek Pryke; a nephew, Julian Coleiro; and a niece, Linda Dooley.
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Peter Scheer is FAC’s executive director.