Napkins Will Do When Duty Calls

This was it, that moment of a reporter’s dreams: I was taking notes on a napkin.

I had left home on a weekend without my figurative reporter’s cap and got caught in the grasp of a breaking news story with no note pad in sight.

So there I was, crouched on the rain-soaked rocks of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, talking to a Coast Guard rescue commander, scrawling notes on a napkin.

It could have been worse; at least I was in good company. You see, Dustin Hoffman had done it first in “All the President’s Men,” the journalistic saga that fired the imagination of many a would-be reporter who went on to learn the trade in the post-Watergate era.

If finding a source such as Deep Throat was our holy grail, “All the President’s Men” was our bible.

And for me, one of the movie’s most memorable scenes comes when Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) finally persuades a reluctant Nixon campaign bookkeeper to tell what she knows. Anxious not to lose the scoop, he keeps her talking while scrawling notes on crumpled napkins.

My chance to emulate that particular piece of reporter craft came a few weeks ago when I was taking a college friend, in town for the weekend, on a tour along the ocean in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Matt saw the firetrucks first. Driving past, I tried to ignore them; he had not traveled from the Bay Area just to chase sirens, I thought. But he knew me better than to think we would pass up a possible story, weekend or not.

“Oh, go ahead,” he said. I turned the car around and, still wearing my high-tops and sweaty T-shirt after a game of basketball, set to work.

As it turned out, there was a story all right--a tragic one.

A 57-year-old Los Angeles man had been fishing with five relatives in choppy waters off the rocks in a Palos Verdes cove. He never saw the wave that sent him sprawling into the ocean, his family said.

One son had tried to go in after him, but it was too late. Police divers went in, too, but the body was not found until hours later.

“I looked up and there was my father in the water, caught in the surge, hollering for help,” said Althea Robinson, wrapped in a plastic tarp to keep warm as he watched the rescuers work in vain.

“He was right in front of me and I couldn’t get out there to do anything for him.”

The man cried as he spoke, and I took down his words on the fast-food napkins I had grabbed from my car when I pulled over. I had interviewed many grieving relatives but this man’s words were so obviously painful, the wound so fresh, that I had to stop for a moment to gain my own composure before asking another question.

Many victims’ families do not wish to talk with reporters about what they are going through--those you leave alone, quickly and quietly.

But for Althea Robinson, talking about his grief appeared to offer a catharsis, assuaging the obvious guilt any son would feel just after watching his father die. The interview seemed to give him a way to tell himself--and the world--that “I tried.”

This wasn’t quite the way I had planned to spend my weekend, but after gathering up the various fast-food napkins I had found in the car to write on, I left the scene and phoned in some notes for a short story that went in Sunday’s paper.

It’s a cliche, but there’s some truth to the idea that the news never stops, that reporters never leave the work behind even after the computer is turned off and the presses begin to run.

One photographer in the Times Orange County newsroom is famed for staying tuned to the police scanner seemingly round the clock. Be it an uneventful crash or a front-page crime, he’s often first on the scene--no matter the hour.

Few reporters can claim that kind of dedication or insomnia. But I think most will tell you that even at a party or when schmoozing with friends, they keep an ear out for possible story ideas; or that when they see the police lights flashing, they cannot help cruising by the scene.

And out of the reporter will come this reflexive salutation to the officer: “What’s going on?”

“Aw, nothing--just a fender-bender,” is the usual response.

But there’s always the fear that the one time that you resist the prod to check on a story on your off hours it will turn out to be the next Rodney G. King scandal.