After Nine Years, a Final Column: An End and a Beginning

My first column for The Times was a stinging attack on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

“Free at last,” quipped a longtime colleague who read it.

She was right. At last I was free to express my opinions and liberated from the conventions of straight reporting. I was no longer obliged to get all sides and include every opposing argument, no matter how silly.

I was free to get angry and to express my anger in the paper. Free to roam Los Angeles. Free to pick my own topics, to wake up every working day as if to a new adventure. That was nine years ago, and it’s all behind me now.

On Wednesday, my bosses promoted me. I’m now The Times’ city editor and this is my last Spin column.

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City editor. Ever since I was boy, the title has had a magical sound. My view of the job was shaped by a book I read then, “City Editor,” by Stanley Walker of the New York Herald Tribune, who wrote in wonder of directing that now-vanished newspaper’s staff of fabulous writers and reporters.

The first city editor I ever knew was Al Reck of the Oakland Tribune.

I was a senior in high school, selling musical instruments at the Alameda County Fair one summer, when a man wearing a press pass stopped by my booth. He turned out to be one of my heroes, Ray Haywood, the Tribune’s sports columnist.

I was awed. He was gracious.

“If you ever got tired of selling these things,” he said, “come on up and see me at the paper. Maybe I can get you a job.”

That fall I was fired from the music business--an overreaction, I thought, to my inability to play an instrument or read a note.

I called Ray. He remembered me, invited me up to the paper and introduced me to Al Reck, a slender, brown-haired man whose voice was so soft it was almost inaudible. He hired me as a copy boy and eventually promoted me to reporter. For the next several years, my main goal in life was to win his approval.

Al could not tolerate reporters who were less than totally committed to getting the story he wanted: “Jesus Christ, kid, where the hell you been?” he’d ask if you left the newsroom for a few minutes--say, to go to the bathroom.

One morning before dawn, I was sent to a hotel where a prominent physician had been arrested for drug possession. The police wouldn’t permit me to go upstairs to the doctor’s hotel room. When I returned to the paper and reported this to Al, he was furious. “Kid, go back to that hotel and go up to that room, even if you get arrested.” I returned to the hotel and persuaded the cops to let me upstairs. But if they hadn’t, I’d have gone up anyway. Jail seemed preferable to failing Al.

At the end of 1969, I was hired by another city editor, Bill Thomas of The Times, who later became the paper’s editor.

I met Bill while I was taking part in a strike against my then-employer, the Associated Press. We were introduced by Tom Goff, The Times’ Sacramento bureau chief, who was trying to get me a job on the paper. Bill looked at me, a troublemaker with a picket sign, and asked me to have a drink when my picketing duty was done.

Like Al, Bill had the ability to inspire a reporter without saying much. Both city editors were loyal to their troops. They shared an intangible quality I’d heard a lot about while covering politics: leadership.

Bill roamed the city room and patiently talked to the reporters about their ill-formed story ideas. In his spare way, he guided the conversation so that a vague concept took shape and substance. He did this in such an unobtrusive way that the reporters never felt he was taking over. The idea and the story always seemed to be theirs.

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When my bosses called me in Tuesday afternoon and asked me to be city editor, I was torn because taking the job meant the end of my Spin columns.

In its small way, I think the Spin made a difference in the lives of The Times’ readers. The right kind of city editor, I thought, could do even more for them, especially if he has the chance to lead a staff of talented reporters and editors.

Like all the valuable intangibles, leadership is a thing taught by example. Al and Bill were good teachers, and now I have their examples to live up to, maybe even to pass on.