Reporter Who Eclipsed His Rivals in San Diego

It does the soul good on occasion to honor those who have passed this way before. And if there is a degree of rascality involved, so much the better.

Sixty-six years ago this weekend a smooth-talking New Yorker who liked prize fights and three-piece suits sat down at a typewriter at the same spot where I am currently laboring--the southeastern corner of 7th and B streets in downtown San Diego.

Magner White, ace reporter for the San Diego Sun, proceeded to write his way to a Pulitzer Prize with a dramatic tale of a rare total eclipse of the sun:

“The biggest shadow in the world--235,000 miles high, 105 miles wide, and 75 miles thick in its densest part--fell across San Diego today, the shadow of the moon as it crossed the face of the sun.”

White told of the awe and fear inspired by the enveloping noontime darkness.

Five hundred people in Coronado watching through smoked glass and exposed film. Scientists from Point Loma to Ensenada using “costly instruments.”

Strange gusts of cool wind. Animals at the Ringling Brothers circus pacing and roaring.

Friends exchanging “ghastly smiles, pale lilies they are.” Tijuana temporarily scared out of its wickedness.

The story was lean, vivid and timely. Quite timely. The Sun, an afternoon paper, hit the newsstands soon after the eclipse became total.

Much of the “color” in White’s story, as Sun alumni will tell you, was reported before the fact. Thereby proving the journalistic adage that some stories are true whether they happened or not.

The rival San Diego Union, for example, had sent a reporter to the circus and reported the next morning that the animals were unaffected. Picky, picky.

“Magner White was a very polite con man, and a great reporter,” remembered Nelson Fisher, 80, who joined The Sun in 1928 and later became a noted sports writer for The Union.

“Magner used to joke about never having to leave the office to win a Pulitzer,” said J. Boyd Stephens, 84, retired in Rancho Bernardo after 42 years with Scripps-Howard newspapers.

E. Robert Anderson, who retired in 1969 as director of editorial policy for Copley Newspapers, was city editor of The Sun in the 1920s. He assigned White to the story.

“Magner White was a damn fine newspaperman,” said Anderson, 94. “He got cocky after winning the Pulitzer, though.”

White was a columnist and then editor of The Sun before it folded in 1939. The two-story Sun building became a men’s clothing store and a Thrifty drugstore before being demolished in 1980 to make way for the Imperial Bank Building.

After the Sun died, White went to the Los Angeles Examiner where he worked until the 1950s as an editor and reporter.

White had other good stories, but none as fine as that of Sept. 10, 1923. When the California Pacific International Exposition came to Balboa Park in 1935, White wrote a lead meant to simulate the call of a trumpet.

“It was a good idea as music, but it looked pretty bad as prose,” said Lionel Van Deerlin, 75, a retired South Bay congressman who worked at The Sun in the 1930s. “Magner was always trying something different.”

Not a bad epitaph for a reporter: He was always trying something different.

Switching Genders

Look at this.

- The local chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus has backed Bob Trettin against San Diego Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer.

The caucus, which rarely backs a man against a woman candidate, endorsed Wolfsheimer four years ago but this year preferred Trettin’s ideas on public support for family planning and for homeless families.

- Camp Pendleton had its own Soviet arts festival, Marine-style.

Combat troops recently trained with a variety of Soviet assault rifles to get a feel for Red Army firepower. The verdict: Soviet weapons are easy to assemble (better for Third World guerrilla conflict) but not overly accurate.

- A man in Escondido has invented a plastic gizmo called the Chomper to take the seeds out of watermelons. Complete with four-step instructions.