‘It’s really an impotent feeling, to sit and write letters to the editor.’

Each morning, Edward T. Bagley gets on his bicycle and pedals out of his driveway, down Rancho La Puente Drive and onto Valley Boulevard for his newspaper run.

Then he spends the day reading. Or rather, poring. Devouring. Critiquing.

And sometimes--pretty often, actually--Bagley gets angry. Angry with politicians, angry with bureaucrats, angry with pomposity, angry with the newspapers themselves.

That’s when Bagley, a retired auto-body shop worker whose friends call him Tom, sits down at his computer and writes letters to the editors.

Editors of the Orange County Register, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and The Times all have heard from Bagley. Until a couple of months ago, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner was on the list. In addition, there’s Newsweek, Time, Financial World, Reader’s Digest, American History and Civil War Times magazines.

“I buy stamps $25 at a time,” said Bagley, whose long hair and graying beard make him seem older than his 47 years. “I’m a regular gadfly.”

He estimates he sees about one letter a week in print, somewhere; he has a thick scrapbook bulging with the published evidence of his work.

Week before last was a banner one with The Times: Bagley hit pay dirt on the editorial page, in The Times Magazine and in the San Gabriel Valley section.

What made Bagley angriest that week was a story about a talk humorist Steve Allen gave at Caltech. Allen was expounding on “dumbth,” his term for spreading incompetence, illiteracy and gullibility.

Bagley, however, thought it was rather elitist for Allen to take this message to an audience of college professors and scientists. As his letter put it, “that’s like coaching the extremely rich on how to make a fortune. . . . Why not take his humor to the middle schools, where there is still time enough to make an impression?”

At his kitchen table in La Puente, over a cup of coffee and a smoke one afternoon last week, Bagley said he’s liked Allen ever since he caught Allen’s cerebral jokes on the old “Tonight Show” when his friends didn’t. “He’s pretty smart,” Bagley said of Allen. “That’s what made me mad, for him to pull a stunt like that.”

Sometimes, though, Bagley is sorry about what he writes in his letters. “You fire them off in anger. . . . Then I’ll go through my scrapbook and say, ‘Oh, Tom, how could you say that?’ ”

Why read so many papers? “You don’t get the truth out of one,” Bagley said. “You guys will make (some) guy sound like a hero, and I’ll read somewhere else that he got a $100,000 campaign contribution to be a hero.”

Bagley started reading the Steubenville, Ohio, Herald-Star as a child, but he got his love for the medium from a 1944 publication called “News of the Nation,” a tabloid-size publication that told history lessons, starting with Columbus discovering America, in daily newspaper format.

His family moved to California in 1959; Bagley graduated from Downey High School. He went to take an entrance exam at Cerritos College but left because the waiting line was so long “and then there was a rainstorm and a tree fell on my car and I never got back.”

Bagley, who said he’s been “beating fenders and painting cars” since he started helping his father at age 12, retired after he crushed a nerve in his elbow. He’s studying small-engine repair and does that as a sideline. He is writing a novel about a family of sisters who are incompetent witches, and a short story about future gang warfare, set in 2017 in Rancho Cucamonga.

Meanwhile, he just keeps writing letters, hoping to change things but realizing he probably won’t. “It’s really an impotent feeling, to sit and write letters to the editor,” he said.

He wishes newspapers would take on more social issues rather than political ones. Most of the people who live in the mobile home park where Bagley lives are elderly. One neighbor is a military retiree who can’t afford his $88 gas bill; another has no transportation except Dial-a-Ride.

“I had no idea that older people have so much trouble till I moved here,” he said. “You don’t write enough about the problems of the elderly. I like (newspapers) so much, but it does seem they stay above certain issues that are important to people. . . . If they’d get down and wallow in it a while, they’d get it fixed.”

Newspaper editors debate constantly over how to draw people into the paper, how to present the news so the most readers possible will want to read as much as possible.

Bagley, with his prodigious reading habits, would certainly be one to poll on this question. So how does he tackle his daily stack? “I look at the Page 2 (table of contents),” he said, “and find the one that makes me the angriest, and I turn to it.”