Those Heady Days as a Student Journalist

My wife has returned to school to become a psychotherapist. It’s what she always wanted to do, and when she studies, she loves the mental exercise. When she attends classes every Tuesday, she is almost beside herself with joy.

That is how I felt about the Scholastic Sports Assn. (SSA) of the old Los Angeles Examiner. Two and three decades ago in a grimy, industrial building at 12th and Main in downtown Los Angeles, this program taught thousands of adolescents to be journalists by teaching them to cover high school sports.

Students from Burbank, Compton, East Los Angeles and Beverly Hills and scores of other Southern California locations worked free from 4 p.m. to midnight several times a week at this noisy, heavily trafficked intersection. Why? Because they knew that if they paid attention, a career awaited them in a field they loved.

A lot of them made it. Among hundreds of SSA alumni nationwide in journalism or related fields, the local contingent includes Steve Harvey, Allan Malamud and David Shaw of The Times; Mitch Chortkoff of the Santa Monica Outlook; Henry Alfaro of KABC-TV, and Tom Seeberg, vice president of public relations for the California Angels.

The Los Angeles Examiner merged with the Herald Express to form the Herald Examiner in 1962, and during its terrible strike in 1967 the newspaper ended funding for the SSA. A few years later, wreckers leveled the SSA building and paved a parking lot for company trucks.

Since 1967, private sponsors have maintained a program of seminars, field trips, scholarships and an intensive, annual two-week workshop, but there is no daily meeting place or chance to practice journalism daily. The Her-Ex’s demise last week led many SSA alumni to grieve for an important part of their past.

Looking back, the program seems to have required so much work yet been so carefree.

One evening I realized that time moved so quickly at the newspaper that the night seemed over before it started, and that I ended up feeling almost giddy with exhilaration.

Often when I felt this way at midnight, I bought a large milk and an apple turnover from the catering truck behind the Examiner building at 11th and Broadway, two blocks from our SSA office, and entered a rear door to the composing room.

As the cold milk quenched my thirst, I watched the men set up the lead type for the next day’s paper. I could not help them, but I ached for the day when it would be my responsibility to write major game stories or put out a paper myself.

The newspaper devoted as much as two pages to high school sports on Saturdays and--glory of glories--my byline sometimes appeared several times. This was heady stuff for a 16-year-old, but my attraction to the profession was stronger than bylines. I knew I liked newspaper work more than anything I had ever tried.

I had been an aspiring basketball player, but by the 11th grade it became clear that my future was elsewhere. I enjoyed working on the high school paper, so I struck a deal with the basketball coach. If he allowed me to practice with the team and leave early to go downtown to the SSA, I would get his team the best coverage I could. It was shamelessly unprofessional, but I did not know that then.

So three or four afternoons a week, I raced up the wooden stairs and down the dark hallway to the SSA’s second-floor office, a large, brightly lit room where about 20 typewriters and telephones were dispersed at even intervals along smudged walls. A large copy desk with a slot in the middle stood in one corner.

Shortly after arriving in the office, phones began ringing as other students called in games. We took scoring summaries and highlights and wrote stories, sending our work to sports writers the Examiner assigned to work with us as copy editors.

When the desk completed several stories, one of us gathered them and hurried down the steps, around the corner and across Broadway to the sports department beneath the Examiner’s Moorish dome.

Finished with the afternoon games, we ventured out for dinner. For this we received four dimes to buy a hamburger at Corky’s drug store, the Case Hotel Deli or similar palaces of gastronomy. Originally we received six dimes, but the Hearst Corp. cut the allowance when it confronted hard times.

Returning to work, a lull occurred before callers started reporting night games. We often used the time to imitate Ralph Alexander, the Examiner track and field writer who administered our program.

Alexander’s distinctive speaking characteristics seemed to beg for mimicry. He clasped his hands, rolled a pencil between them, rose on his toes and clenched his teeth, often over a huge wad of gum. On top of that, he called most people “Chief,” as in “See how you do that, Chief?”

Every boy in the program (only one girl joined in this long-ago era) could launch an Alexander imitation faster than a Michael Jordan slam dunk. Sometimes we competed to see who looked and sounded funniest. But behind the contests, we felt affection and appreciation. We knew that Alexander and the program founder, Ira P. Walsh, were giving us an unusual chance to enter an admired profession.

During playoffs, times got even better. The experienced members of the program covered big games, just as if we were professionals. We drove to such far-off places as San Diego, arriving in the press box early to set up typewriters. We scribbled notes as we watched the contests, afterward talking to coaches and players and phoning our stories in under deadline. If we passed anywhere near the Examiner on our way home, no matter how late, we stopped to see how our story looked in print.

If we performed on these outings and maintained our grades, we were eligible for college scholarships. An interview was also part of the evaluation, and during my senior year it was held in the fabled Ambassador Hotel, seemingly the ultimate symbol of rank and privilege.

Before the interviews, a boy from Mt. Carmel High School and I went into a bathroom, nervously adjusting each other’s ties. When the committee called me in, they asked what I felt I had gained from the SSA. I answered, spontaneously, that I thought I had learned something about brotherhood. I was 17, but had had few contacts with other races or cultures. The SSA had given me my first chance.

The scholarships were the final step as Walsh, Alexander and their colleagues tried to force-feed us fundamentals of the trade, and they succeeded remarkably.

But we were still teen-agers. One Friday night, as a joke, I signed a legitimate game story “Hyman O’Brien.” And since all bylines had to be accompanied by the writer’s school, I assigned Hyman to Cathedral High School, a parochial campus in Los Angeles.

Hyman escaped the eye of the copy editors and made his professional debut in the morning paper.

Shortly after I entered the office the following Monday the phone rang. Someone handed me the receiver. A polite voice on the other end identified himself as Leonard Riblett, the assistant managing editor of the Examiner who eventually became assistant managing editor of The Times.

“Is this Hyman O’Brien?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, seeing my journalistic career going up in smoke.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he said.

“No,” I replied.

“How in the hell did you get a name like Hyman O’Brien?”

I explained that I had concocted a nom de plume in a misguided attempt to bring humor to the copy desk late on a Friday night, and Riblett, God rest his soul, relented.

With his blessing, all I got from the SSA was a career, a college scholarship and lifelong friendships.