Extra! Extra! : Freeway Culture, Mechanization Writing End to L.A.’s Once-Numerous and Colorful Corner News Vendors

“Here’s this morning’s New York Sewer! Here’s this morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York Family Spy! Here’s the New York Private Listener! Here’s the New York Peeper!”

--Cry of a news vendor in Charles Dickens’ “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844)

Chuck Southof, 75, wearing a coat about half his age, was intoning a dirge for Shaky Red, Louie, New York Joe, Blackie, Millionaire, Dummy and “that little guy that worked Hollywood and Vine, I can’t remember his name.”

Fellow news vendors, all gone.

“Not many of us left now,” said Southof, anchored on the northwest side of Sunset Boulevard at La Brea Avenue. “Louie dropped dead right on his corner, five-thirty in the morning. He was strictly an (Herald) Examiner man. Me, I’m a Times man.”

A honking BMW momentarily distracted Southof. He turned around expectantly, squinting into the afternoon sun, but the enraged driver wanted an apology from the car in front, not a newspaper.

After four decades in the business, Southof finds fewer and fewer passers-by beckoning for his wares.

Corner news vendors and their tiny kiosks abound in cities like New York and Chicago, where inhabitants still walk around on all twos. But they are fading away in most parts of Los Angeles, victims of the freeway culture and the preference of newspaper companies for coin-operated stands, which don’t ask for commissions.

“With these mechanical newsboys, you lift the lid with one hand and reach in for the paper with the other and hope the lid doesn’t slam down on your arm, like it always does mine,” grumbled County Supervisor (and retired newsboy) Kenneth Hahn.

Once, live news vendors numbered in the thousands in the city. “There were stands on every corner and there wasn’t a residential section where the residents weren’t awakened every Sunday morning by newsboys shouting, ‘Times! Examiner!’ . . .” Hahn recalled.

Today, there are probably fewer than 100; city officials are not sure of the precise number. (The Times uses about 40 human vendors in Los Angeles, compared to 7,000 or so machines.)

Only in the city’s Latino shopping areas, where newsstands hawk everything from Spanish-language newspapers and comics to hairbrushes and toys, is the trend reversing. But there the problem is too many newsstands.

“Business is not good,” said Sylvia Ortiz, 20, at 6th Street and Broadway downtown. She pointed up the block, which was occupied by eight competitors (nine, counting the bearded man handing out free news about the coming of the Millennium).

“People around here can’t find other jobs so they do this job,” said Ortiz, who works 70 hours a week to support a mother and 12-year-old brother. Asked the last time she took a vacation, she laughed and shook her head.

No, it isn’t like the good old days--World War II, for instance.

Boy Helped Out

“During the war it was ‘Extra! Extra!’ every day, open ‘round the clock,” recalled James Hodge, 76, owner of a stand on 1st and San Pedro streets for 42 years. “I had my boy running the stand part of the time because I was an assistant manager at a hotel nearby. He was 8 years old and one day the teacher calls me and says: ‘How much allowance do you give your son? He’s got $86 and he’s buying ice cream for every kid in the school!’ ”

The newsies’ lives were the stuff of legends back then. One tale concerned the elderly vendor who had secretly painted scenes chronicling the growth of his family on the walls of his downtown hotel room. But, the story went, he had no family--not since his young, pregnant wife had been shot to death by a robber four decades earlier.

The vendor known as Willie the Wizard was said to be unable to read or write but he could instantly solve complex mathematical problems. Then there was Danny the Mole, suspected of living under the Herald building.

Newsboys were such a part of the city that a statue of one was erected in MacArthur Park. The lad is still there and he is brandishing the same edition after 65 years. But most of the other remaining vendors have been forced to vary their offerings in the changing city.

Polyglot Publications

Hodge displays headlines he couldn’t translate, let along shout, on Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Korean publications. He can speak some Japanese, he said, explaining that he once was married to a Japanese woman who was a maid in the Beverly Hills mansion where gangster Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel was murdered in 1947. But that’s another story. . . .

Leon Blow’s kiosk at Temple and Hill streets says, “News and Notary” (he is a registered notary public), “Se Habla Espanol” and “Casting Call (publication).” One wall bears a chart of hand signals used by the hearing-impaired.

“To survive down here, you have to diversify,” Blow said. “It can be rough, like every time the Times or Herald has one of those offers where you can get the paper free for a month.”

Southof knows about survival.

On weekends, he goes to work at 5 a.m. Saturday and doesn’t return home for 28 hours, pausing only for a three-hour break after midnight at a nearby restaurant.

Allowed to Nap

“They don’t mind if I nap a little in one of the booths,” he said.

The faithful customers of machine-age holdouts such as Southof see something noble in the vendors’ quiet perseverance.

“You tell people he (Southof) works two days straight and they don’t believe it,” said Jerry Elster, a frequent visitor. “But he does and sometimes it gets to him. I’ve seen him dozing off next to his papers at 10 on a Sunday morning.”

Plagued with failing eyesight, Arthur Raskin, 69, can’t read any of the 250 or so types of newspapers and magazines he sells from his 27-year-old, converted ticket booth in Westwood. “It’s really no problem,” he said. “I remember their logos or colors.”

Proud of his neighborhood friends, Hodge said: “I can leave my stand for a few minutes and if anyone comes by and takes money out of my box, you’ll see the retired Japanese people around here start talking to themselves. Then they’ll come over. One will put a dime down, then another a dime, and so on. . . .”

Recovers Change Maker

At his Highland Avenue stand in Hollywood, Walter Wigglesworth recalled the time his change maker was stolen, and then recovered by a regular: “He’d found it in the toilet of a bar up the street where the thieves had dropped it. It was nice of him to bring it to me. He didn’t have to do that.”

People, not profits, were what inspired Blow, 36, a college graduate, to quit his job as a claims adjuster five years ago and buy out his predecessor on the corner. (Though vendors need no permit to open, a city ordinance restricts them to certain portions of the sidewalk.)

“My old job was just too depressing,” Blow said. “You’d go into court and take someone’s car or furniture and they’d hate you. Here, I found what I was looking for--contentment.”

Blow, like the other members of his dwindling breed, represents human contact on the mostly impersonal streets.

A Helping Hand

“One woman walked up to me and started crying,” he recalled. “She said she had to talk to somebody. Her daughter had slapped her and cussed at her. She was afraid the girl was on drugs. We went and had some coffee and I calmed her down, told her to pray a little bit. I saw her about a month afterward and she felt better. She said she had prayed and her daughter had gone into a rehabilitation program.”

Blow’s newspaper sales had been low this day--partly, he theorized, due to the unexciting banner headline in the Times (“U.S. Warns Japan on Trade”)--but he was in an upbeat mood anyway.

Why not? It was a sunny day and one passer-by after another smiled at him.

“People kick the (pay-newspaper) machines,” Blow pointed out, “but they never kick me.”