Lively Tales About Long-Gone Paper : Newsmen Recall Old San Diego Sun

Ask an old newspaperman about the defunct San Diego Sun. Sooner or later, he’ll tell you how cheap the place was.

There were 50-cent raises and “Christopher Columbus” paychecks--$14.92 after the deduction under the new Social Security Act.

There was the photographer allowed only two flashbulbs per assignment, who once shot a prize-winning picture by timing his exposure with the Union’s and Tribune’s bulbs.

“That was the kind of penny-ante place it was,” remembered Lionel Van Deerlin, the former congressman whose first job out of college was covering cops for The Sun. He added, with amusement, “It was just awful.”

But on Sunday three dozen alumni of the long-gone daily will hold a reunion over an opulent brunch in a private dining room at the ritzy Little America Westgate Hotel.

There will be croissants, zucchini muffins, bananas and cream; eggs Benedict, eggs opera, poached salmon and sole; bay shrimp omeletes, herb omelets, and hot crepes; 10 types of salad, and 11 types of dessert.

It won’t be just like old times.

The reunion has been organized by Maurice Harris, an 80-year-old retired newspaper publisher who visited San Diego at age 22 and ended up spending 12 years in the advertising department of the Sun.

Among the retired newsmen expected to attend is one from as far away as San Francisco. Many started at the Sun and went on to newspaper jobs across the country --in some cases after the Scripps-Howard chain sold the paper and it folded abruptly in 1940.

“Oddly enough, and this is often true on papers, the worse the conditions are, the more fun people seem to have,” Van Deerlin said Friday. Nelson Fisher, a former sports editor, said: “It wasn’t afraid to tackle anything. As a matter of fact, it stirred up a little hell.”

Ken Bojens remembers starting work as the high-school sports correspondent in 1928 for $5 a week. A year later he went to full time for $15, working for a sports editor called “Galloping” Jo Grossman.

Within months, Bojens said, the San Diego Union tried to hire him for $18.50. He turned it down, so the Union upped the offer to $20. He turned it down again, and the Union raised the offer to $22.50. So Bojens went to see Galloping Jo.

“He says, ‘Take the job, Ken,’ ” Bojens recalled Friday. “ ‘You might work for Scripps-Howard for 35 years and never make that much.’ ”

Sylvia Rye, who operated the Sun’s switchboard, remembers trying unsuccessfully to put a call through to Hitler. She recalls fending off the irate mothers of women led astray by one dissolute reporter, who would hide in the composing room when the mothers came around.

Over time, some people drifted away from the newspaper they called “the Scrubwoman.”

A friend of Van Deerlin’s was laid off after only two weeks on the job--”fired on his day off, as I recall.” He and Van Deerlin wandered east and finally landed in Minneapolis. “We knew there wasn’t anything worse,” Van Deerlin said. “Maybe there was something better.”

Then the unthinkable happened. One Thursday, people noticed that the Sunday comics hadn’t come down from Los Angeles. The next morning, Rye found a guard posted in the newsroom. He was there to stop people from walking off with the typewriters. The paper was dead.

“I think the town was sick. Everybody was very despondent about it,” Harris recalled. But he acknowledged that for him it was the beginning of opportunities. He went on to make “some very fortunate investments” and owned his own newspaper in Long Beach by 1955.

Like the others, he remembered the paper with fond amusement.

“We didn’t get paid too much, but we were gutsy newspapermen,” he said.