Great Truths Come Wrapped in Phrases Apt and Artful

Over the years, newspaper reporters pick up hundreds of quotes from people involved in events they’re covering. A few seem to stick with you, no matter how long ago they were uttered.

Some quotes have obviously been carefully thought out; some are emotional. Some, especially those spoken under stress, are memorable only because of their pungence, and these are generally sprinkled with four-letter words that don’t make the paper.

There was one four-letter one that did get in print, though. It was uttered under stress and, although it is not an offensive word, somehow it had more weight than some rougher words of the same length.

It was not so poetic as the words of Robert M. Allan Jr., former Newport Beach yachtsman and one-time member of the Olympic committee for sailing events. It was on the subject of sailboats that Allan once said: “They are machines that pollute neither the air nor the ocean, the nose nor the ear . . . a machine that is about as close to being the friend of wind and water as anything man has created.”

And maybe it didn’t have the earthy spice of what was said by William T. Reid Jr., who--before moving to central California--farmed a number of acres that today are taken up by developments in San Juan Capistrano. “The thing about farming,” he said in 1971, “it’s creative. You know damn well if you hadn’t have done it--if you hadn’t have planted that seed--it wouldn’t have been done.”

Nor was it comparable to the philosophy of the late Charlie Peddicord, born in 1891 in San Bernardino just after his family had crossed the country from Kentucky in covered wagons.

Before his death in the mid-1970s, he and his wife, Laura, operated what was called Charlie’s Trading Post, which in plain language was a junkyard in Laguna Canyon. “There are three ways to make a fortune in this world,” he said. “Run a bar, a trailer court or a junk business. And junk is the best.”

And it lacked the pathos of a story I remember covering in October of 1969, the return home from Vietnam of about 300 Marines after more than a year of combat. One of them was a tall, skinny, shy 22-year-old who, like many of his buddies, hurried to a bank of pay telephones after landing at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station to call and let his family in Huntington Beach know he was back.

Unfortunately, his family had an unlisted phone number, and he had lost all his personal papers in Vietnam and couldn’t remember the number. His pleas to the operator to “just tell them their son is home” didn’t do any good. It wasn’t until a couple of officers intervened that the phone company arranged to have the family call the base.

When the phone rang at an officer’s desk, the young Marine was told it was for him. Nervous and self-conscious, he picked up the receiver, said a few words, blushed and then hung up.

“That was my Mom,” he said. “She was crying.”

The printable four-letter word was used by another young man as he stood in a cold, rainy dawn in November, 1984, and watched his and several other Mission Viejo condominiums go up in flames.

He had escaped the blaze wearing only a suit coat, trousers and shoes--no shirt, underwear or socks. He said that among other things being consumed by the fire was a gold ring for which he had traded a classic car.

“There’s nothing left,” he said.

Then, when asked what he might do to straighten out his life, he said with a wry grin, “Punt.”