A Writer of Fanciful Tabloid Tales Comes Full Circle

For those of us in the mainstream press, the prospect of writing for the supermarket tabloids would qualify as one of life’s guilty pleasures. Just crafting the headlines would be a gas.

Reporters in an office where I used to work adorned their desks with tabloid gems. A couple favorites of mine were, “Nixon Was Grooming Elvis to Be President,” and “Top Model Eats Herself to Death.”

So, it was with particular relish that I hooked up with Dan Wooding, now a solid citizen of Garden Grove but who I’m convinced made an excellent scamp when he worked for London’s Sunday People tabloid in the mid-1970s.

At 50, Wooding’s puckish humor comes through immediately and there’s just enough of the cherub about him to know he could cause a wee bit of trouble.

“Basically, it was like being in a lunatic asylum,” he said. One reporter hooked up a taped message about venereal disease to horrify callers. On Wooding’s first day of work, the reporter across the desk from him was wearing a crown of thorns to signify his ongoing dispute with his editor and another reporter was wearing a Batman mask and “answered the phone all day saying, ‘Hi, this is the bat phone. I’m sorry, Robin is tied up at the moment.’ ”

The office was a caldron of mirth and ale. “The place became awash with alcohol,” Wooding said. “The pub we all drank at was the Stab in the Back. All these people had come from local papers and got onto this tabloid and discovered they were in this twilight zone of tabloid journalism, so the only way to survive it was to be drunk all the time. It wasn’t so much the inaccuracy of the stories. The British tabs are not like the American tabs. British tabs are basically very vicious and cruel to other people. They don’t do many UFO stories and Elvis sightings. They’re more into character assassinations.”

Besides his work at the Sunday People, Wooding was also London correspondent for America’s own National Enquirer. “I didn’t know the Enquirer was a controversial paper,” Wooding says. “Compared to my paper, it was the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Wooding has a special fondness for his work on a story headlined, “How the Mormons Lock Out Lust,” your basic tale, he said, of “a Mormon girl who kidnaped and raped a Mormon missionary. She became the sex and chains girl because she tied him to the bed and raped him and then she escaped from the country. . . .”

Then, one day, Wooding had had enough.

Now comes Part II of the Dan Wooding story.

Born a missionary’s son in Africa, Wooding was a longtime Christian whose first job was with a newspaper owned by evangelist Billy Graham. But let’s say he lapsed a bit after going to the Sunday People in 1975, until one night in 1978 an old friend confronted him in the Stab in the Back.

“He said, ‘God gifted you as a writer, and all you do is write junk.’ “The friend challenged Wooding to rededicate his life to God, quit his Fleet Street job and go to Uganda and write about Christians allegedly murdered by the Idi Amin regime. “Then he said something I’ll never forget,” Wooding said. “He said, ‘You won’t get paid and you’ll probably get killed.’ ”

Already struggling with his conscience for working at the tabloid, Wooding accepted the challenge and quit. He wrote “Uganda Holocaust,” which, he said, “became a bestseller around the world except for the United States, where it sold 36 copies.”

But for Wooding, the Ugandan experience reignited his Christian faith. Since then, he has concentrated on what he calls the “amazing Christians” in countries where Christianity is either frowned upon or not the traditional religion.

Aside from writing nearly two dozen Christian books, Wooding founded ASSIST, a program that with the help of Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, has paired U.S. churches with “sister” churches in Central America, Eastern Europe and the Far East. The latest offshoot of that is a pen-pal program in which, he said, 550 Americans have linked with Christians in the Soviet Union.

He deplores that part of the American religious movement that caters to big money. He says he’s more depressed about the Christian church in America than abroad, “where they don’t treat God as a slot machine. . . . North Americans have been taught that God is there for your convenience, and all you have to do is send money to evangelists and in return, he will give you 100-fold back. That’s a total travesty of the Christian faith.”

At midlife, Wooding already has come full circle. Born into the church, then a temporary escapee, he now is a crusader.

But wherever his career goes, Wooding at least regained his father’s favor. The elder Wooding once cautioned his son about becoming a journalist because, in his words: “They are very wicked people.”

Perhaps true, but if not for wicked journalists, where would you get those great headlines?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.