Whittier’s Paper Acquires a Real Feel for Local News

Whittier Daily News reporter Charles Elliot had seen the destruction caused by Thursday’s earthquake first-hand and was not taking any chances.

A slightly dented bicycle helmet sat next to the telephone on his desk Monday morning, ready in case of another big aftershock.

“People laughed at me when they saw me wearing this at the shelter. But better safe than sorry,” Elliot said.

For Elliot, 41, this was one story that hit close to home.

He spent Saturday night at a Red Cross shelter at the Whitter Community Center after his apartment building was declared unsafe. His first-person account of the evacuation of the shelter after Sunday morning’s aftershock was the featured story on the front page of Monday’s edition.

It has hardly been business as usual at Whittier’s hometown newspaper since Thursday, when an earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale rocked the city.

During interviews, reporters, who knew many of the victims of the quake, found themselves helping their news subjects repair broken water pipes and helped carry cots for the Red Cross.

Daily News stands throughout Whittier have emptied quickly, said Managing Editor Bill Bell, and hundreds of people have been asking for copies of Thursday’s paper, prompting the publisher to consider printing more of them.

“Many people want to save it as a keepsake,” Bell said. “We’ve been selling out of papers every day since the quake.”

Only two other times in recent memory has there been such a demand for the 87-year-old Daily News, which has a circulation of 18,000: in 1968, when former Whittier resident Richard M. Nixon was elected President, and in 1973, when Nixon resigned.

Some Big Stories

“We’ve had some pretty big stories, like when the town sent one of its native sons to the White House” said Editor Mynatt Smith. “But nothing has had the impact of this earthquake.”

Elliot, who was the first Daily News reporter to arrive at work Thursday morning, said he had no idea that Whittier was the epicenter of the quake until he heard the news reports on the radio that morning.

But judging by the destruction along his six-mile drive to work, Elliot said, he “knew we had one hell of a story.”

Getting the story out, however, proved to be difficult.

Telephone and electrical lines were down for most of Thursday morning, prompting Bell to temporarily move news operations to the paper’s West Covina printing plant.

Bricks from a building across the street were scattered along the sidewalk, but there was only minor damage to the Daily News building.

Despite the relocated office, work on Thursday afternoon’s paper was completed by 10:30 a.m., Bell said, with a large headline in pink across the top of the front page: “6.1 Quake Causes Panic, Major Whittier Damage.”

Bell said the quake story supplanted the lead story that was ready to go to print when he arrived at work shortly before the temblor.

Ironically, the other story was about a ground-breaking ceremony for the Daily News’ future home on Greenleaf Avenue.