The result was the Thursday, April 4, 1996 A1 — one of the more striking front pages in recent decades.

What was striking about this front page? It had not one banner headline — a style signaling the most important stories and used sparingly — but two, both of them landing "above the fold," prominently visible with a glance at the folded paper on a newsstand or doorstep.

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This bold display has always stayed in my mind, and on this anniversary, I wanted to find out how it came about.

The Post newsroom, it turned out, was better prepared for one of the day's big stories than the other. The national staff not only had been closely following the saga of the Unabomber — a mysterious terrorist who had killed three people and injured 23 in a 17-year package-bombing spree — but had unexpectedly become part of the story.

In June 1995, then-Deputy Managing Editor Michael Getler received in the mail a 56-page, single-space manifesto entitled "Industrial Society and its Future" under a fake name and return address; an identical copy arrived at the New York Times. The writer promised to stop hurting people if the newspapers published his missive in its entirety. After discussing it with each other and the FBI, the papers agreed that The Post would publish it — in hopes that it might help authorities find the killer.

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As the investigation went on, criminal justice reporter Serge Kovaleski was especially well-sourced, recalled Marilyn Thompson, his editor at the time. So when the FBI swooped in to arrest Kaczynski at his remote Montana cabin, the national staff was ready to cover it — with Kovaleski and writer John Schwartz (both now at the New York Times) teaming up to write a masterful portrait of the loner, on a very short deadline. "It was amazing to be able to front a huge news story about the arrest along with a revealing profile of the suspect before anyone else had it," said Thompson, who is now an editor at Politico.

It's still worth reading the profile that Kovaleski and Schwartz wrote — Ted Kaczynski, bookish recluse lived sparse cabin existence — which ran along the news story of his arrest.

But then that same afternoon, sketchy reports of a missing plane in Croatia became more tragically clear. The flight, carrying several U.S. government officials and business executives on a trade mission, had gone down in bad weather just before its scheduled landing in Dubrovnik. Robert McCartney, then an editor overseeing national security and now a senior writer for The Post, recalled the discussions among editors as they realized that this was not just a plane crash story but a political one. Ron Brown was a towering figure in Washington, a man who had broken through racial barriers to become a consummate political operator and a crucial ally who helped Bill Clinton win the presidency. So the front page included not only stories of the plane crash itself and the scene of the search but a comprehensive profile of Brown, written by Dan Balz and Sharon Walsh: Ron Brown, a pioneer at home in black and white America. All three of these stories also written on a similarly tight deadline.

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"That would have been a chaotic night," said Thompson.

Newsroom memories are hazy, though, about the actual construction of that startling front page. Len Downie, who was executive editor at the time, remembers the two stories well but confessed he had forgotten that they broke on the same day. "I oversaw about 8,000 front pages during my 25 years as managing editor and executive editor," he said, "so I don't feel so bad about not remembering this one."

Other former editors noted that while the double-banner headline that day was striking, it was hardly the only time The Post had used the format, so perhaps was not as historic as it seemed to me. Getler, who is now the ombudsman for PBS, credits Wendy Ross, the former assistant managing editor for the news desk — "the best front-page designer ever," he said — for coming up with the format.

Here, you can see a couple other occasions, both in the early 1980s, when The Post stripped two headlines across the width of the page. On June 15, 1982, the front page chronicled the end of the Falkland Island War between Britain and Argentina and a pivotal day in the Lebanon War. On October 10, 1983, A1 gave banner treatment to both the resignation of controversial Interior Secretary James Watt and the Rangoon bombing, an assassination attempt on the president of South Korea that decimated his Cabinet.

When I asked longtime editors for other examples, some suggested I check out two particularly historic and busy dates for Washington: The day that saw both Ronald Reagan's inauguration and the release of the U.S. hostages in Iran; and the day when an Air Florida plane crashed into the Potomac shortly before a Metro derailment killed three passengers.

However, on both days, it turned out The Post used a more traditional format, with one dominant headline. In these cases, the coincidence of the events was part of the story, so it probably seemed unnecessary to break them apart.

Ross, who retired from The Post and now lives in Chicago, said that "double-lede" pages — papers where two main stories were considered equally important and deserving of prominence — posed a variety of challenges. In some cases, the available photos or illustrations helped make the decisions for her.

Other double-lede days were more difficult, she said, "either because the subjects were more nuanced or there was no compelling photography." And that may have led to the format of two banner-headline stories, one stacked on top of the other.

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I remember some colleagues expressing criticism of the April 4, 1996 front page: They were concerned that the Unabomber story placement diminished the significance of Ron Brown's death. Ross did not design that particular page; but when she explained the general philosophy behind a "stacked" format, the design choices on the night of April 3 made sense.

"If the layout was vertical" — with both big stories splitting the top of the page — "the secondary of the two events all too often failed to have the impact it deserved," she said.

With the April 4 paper, the Unabomber story ran on top — but the Ron Brown crash took up much more of the front page. And both were then visible above the fold, which would not have been the case if the larger Ron Brown story had taken the top tier. "The idea to use a horizontal display, with the secondary event at the top, might seem illogical and heretical at first glance," Ross said in an email. "However, to indicate relative importance of the articles, the lower headline was assigned a headline of a larger type size than that at the top. In this way, we could indicate relative importance while simultaneously achieving the display each warranted."

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I checked: The New York Times on that day ran both stories at the top of the page, with a photo in between them. It was not nearly as striking as The Post's A1 that day.

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