AN APPRECIATION : Enduring Memories of Longtime Colleague Art Seidenbaum

Whatever else they are, newspapers are voices--occasionally discordant soloists surface amid the chorus of collective wisdom, oases of individuality in the great, gray masses of useful text. The bylines promise something: authority, credibility, wit, anger, expertise, perspective, feeling, information, compassion, an understood kinship with the reader, any or all of these qualities. The voice seems to speak directly to you, even though it may reach a million readers.

For nearly 30 years, until he died of cancer late Tuesday at the age of 60, Art Seidenbaum had been one of those voices at this newspaper. For many of those years, before he took over as editor of the Book Review and then of the Sunday Opinion section, Art’s column was a kind of port of entry or a court of last resort for those who had begun to feel that no one else would listen.

His personality--generous, eclectic, concerned--could be detected in his choices as editor, but many of us missed the more active voice, heard mostly in recent times in occasional book reviews.

Art was one of history’s most patient and sympathetic listeners. He was not given to sentimentality and he was as usefully skeptical as reporters are supposed to be. But he was also restlessly curious and never indifferent. In the early days, when his column was called “Spectator,” he looked and listened and wrote about and so reflected the often dazing diversity of Southern California.

He found what was funny and bizarre, but his preferences were for those who were doing things. Probably more often than not what was at issue was a problem that needed the public eye: neighbors confronting a neighborhood problem, men and women with crazy ideas that might just work. His clientele was anybody who had something to say, a complaint or a cheer.

Art wrote about it all in prose that was fresh and arresting. He loved puns and wordplay and his prose frequently had the packed economy of poetry. His idea was nothing like cleverness for its own sake. The style confirmed his impatience with the customary, and his hope that the ideas and their impact would last longer than the paper they were printed on.

He was not least a clearinghouse, putting people in touch with one another, or with other writers and editors, to help their causes along. And out of his openness as well as his unslakable curiosity, Art probably knew and was a friend to more people, representing a wider cross-section of life in Southern California, than anyone else I know--from academics to actors to athletes and architects, librarians and authors, singers and social workers, a list as various as this place itself. The list was weighted toward the activists, people who were addressing problems or trying to figure us out, all hoping to make the place work better.

When I first knew him, 35 years ago, Art was a new researcher at Life magazine, having graduated from mandatory stints as a messenger and reporter on the company house organ. He was working for the military affairs editor, a cheerful eccentric who occasionally brought his pet python (possibly a boa constrictor; I can’t tell snakes apart) to the office and kept it in a desk drawer or under a large mesh wastebasket.

He and I both lived in lower Westchester County, New York, well below the high-rent districts, and we took to commuting together, sharing the tyranny of the New York Central timetable and enduring the dreaded 1:10 a.m. local, the last train north between Saturday night and Sunday morning. The pauses were so long you had the feeling the Sunday papers (if that’s what they were) were being offloaded copy by copy.

One winter weekend night my wife and I gave our first dinner party, for two dozen guests. In late afternoon the phone began to ring. A heavy snow was scaring away the more distant guests; there was flu in a couple of other households. A half-hour before curtain time only the Seidenbaums, who lived nearest, had not disinvited themselves. I called Art and said that in the circumstances they needn’t come. He wouldn’t hear of it. The four of us made serious assaults on the food and drink, saving us from what would have otherwise been a peculiarly depressing evening.

Art broke a plate, and when we remembered the night over the years he always recalled it as the night he broke the plate. But I’ve always remembered it as Art at his most characteristically kind and thoughtful, risking the blizzard to spare us a dismal solitude.

Our paths kept diverging and crossing. Art went to Los Angeles to work for the Saturday Evening Post and see that magazine, in its original guise, through its last, unavailing struggles. I later fled New York for the Time magazine bureau in Los Angeles, and Art and I were neighbors again. He went to The Times and I went to London, then returned to join the paper myself.

In the innocent early days of KCET-TV, Art did a series called “Off-Ramp,” and somehow that led to our six years’ worth of moonlighting on “Citywatchers,” a further extension of his curiosity about the city, its neighborhoods, its large and small institutions and the volunteers without whom the place could hardly function.

Then, as always, Art was as admirable and honorable a human being as I have ever known: wise, generous to the point of self-sacrifice, patient, kind, tolerant, level-tempered even in the face of severe provocations, a man profoundly indifferent to possessions but in love with family, travel, ideas, conversation. He preferred the floor to chairs. For many of us an enduring image will be Art stretched out amid the furniture, propped on one elbow, one leg bent beneath the other, ready and eager to talk and listen all night.

He was a man of deep seriousness but he loved to execute intricate practical jokes. He loved a bit of gossip but he was, in my long acquaintance with him, incapable of malice toward anyone.

When we last had lunch together a few days before his illness struck, he was talking of a book project that was taking shape in his head: a sort of narrative history of a particular interstate highway, exploring the present and past of the country it goes through, the who and what and why of the traffic, the highway seen, in a sense, as a living entity.

It was a terrific but difficult notion. I wish he could have done it, although that is the least of the reasons for mourning the loss of an extraordinary, exemplary man.