Hello, L.A.--Do You Miss Feisty Ol’ Herald Ex?

Dear L.A.,

Everything OK down there? I really missed you at first, in the months after the death of the Herald Examiner where I was a reporter for the better part of eight years.

Now I’m looking at you from a distance again, a Downey boy exiled to San Francisco, where I went to work for the Examiner when the Herald folded.

On Nov. 1, 1989, when it was announced that the next day’s Herald would be its last, I felt sad, but also relieved. Finally, I could get on with my life, no longer tied to the fate of the paper I loved. But I drank myself sick that night at the bar across the street from the Herald--Corky’s, which itself has since perished. No other place will ever match the fury and craziness of working there.

What’s it like being a one-newspaper town? Do you miss that spirit of newspaper competition that makes people get up in the morning and wonder just what is going on out there and who’s finding it out?

OK, the Herald wasn’t the best newspaper in the country. I’m sure we overplayed some stories and took a pass on others we should have gone nuts about. Like Watermelon Bo, a ghetto kid who made millions dealing cocaine for the Cali drug cartel. I think I got a nosebleed the morning I read that story in the Los Angeles Times.

So why didn’t we have it in the Herald? Oh, easy answer. We didn’t have a federal court reporter! We only had about 20 or 25 reporters at that time, covering a city of 3.4 million, so federal court got dropped occasionally, and sometimes we paid for it.

I really loved it when I started working for the Herald. I had Herald in my blood, thanks to my dad, Bud Furillo, who put in 28 years there, the last 10 as sports editor. Even after moving over to The Times, I couldn’t exorcise the Herald demon. Al Albergate, then the spokesman for the L.A. District Attorney’s office, told me on my shift back to the Herald, “Congratulations on your bizarre move.”

What a ride once I got aboard the Herald back in July, 1981. What stories to cover!

Holdout Raider juror talks after reporter’s all-night vigil on doorstep. (That got me off the graveyard shift.) . . . Ex-Marine kills girlfriend, three kids; ex-Marine’s brother-in-law pushes me down stairway. . . . Belushi dies, Herald blames LAPD. . . . Bloomingdale mistress Vicki Morgan slain. . . . Gang murder--gang murder--gang murder--gang murder.

You were one helluva news town, L.A., and in the Herald, you had a paper that delivered the news from an appropriately zany perspective.

There’s one story I’ll always remember that said a lot about the Herald. We still had afternoon home delivery then, in 1981, and our morning headline that day was something to the effect that the Justice Department was declaring martial law to stop a crime wave sweeping the nation.

That morning, on Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City, some punk kids filled up a fire extinguisher with water and hosed down a lady at an RTD bus stop. The bus came by and she got on, dripping wet. She told the driver and other passengers about what happened. Suddenly, the driver spotted the kids filling the extinguisher again in a gas station. He stopped, and everybody got off the bus and surrounded the kids and held them until the police arrived.

Big deal, I thought. But Ron Kaye, our morning city editor, went nuts about the story and made me chase it and find the lady and the bus driver and everybody else, which I did, not knowing exactly why. Our afternoon banner headline: “Bus Riders Turn Crime Fighters.”

I still didn’t get it, until Kaye and another assistant city editor, Barbara Anderson, told me over beers that night just why the story was important. It had something to do with ordinary people doing extraordinary things, something about how to stay free in paranoid times. The Herald looked for those kinds of stories, made banner headlines out of them, while The Times--focused on the weighty matters of the day--turned them into Southland Briefs.

We did our best and kept The Times honest, or at least we thought we did. But in fact, The Times sort of ignored us, unless it couldn’t anymore, like on the Tom Bradley story.

When the Herald died, other papers and wire services called us “feisty.” I hated that. Feisty implies some little guy kicking a big guy in the shins. I like to think we landed a few on the jaw.

But L.A., you let us die anyway, and maybe it was for the best. Just before the end, most of our best people had quit. We were only a shell of the paper that once had great writers and the best sports section.

You might plead innocent and argue that our death was actually suicide by mismanagement. Maybe you would have a case. But it really doesn’t matter if you get off on that technicality, because since the Herald died, a part of you died, and you’re not the same anymore.

Good luck, L.A.

Andy Furillo

Los Angeles Herald Examiner

1981-1989