50 Years at the Keyboard--Many of Them Dog Years

I’m beginning my 50th year in newspapering, and the very idea amazes me. I never thought I’d be able to do any one thing for half a century, but here I am, still pecking away in a field of words like a chicken at chow time, as hungry as ever.

I tell you this even though it violates an unspoken rule in the City of Angles never to even hint at how old you might be. When I told a friend what I intended, he replied in a shocked tone, “You’re coming out of the closet?”

“I’m revealing my age,” I said, “not changing my gender.”

“But do you think that’s wise?”

“I’m not sure that wisdom has anything to do with it,” I said, “but I’m doing it.”

His attitude defines an element of our culture that celebrates the young and dismisses those who manage to crawl past 60. We are endlessly amazed when a grandfather climbs a mountain or a grandmother wins a race, as though the title automatically implies a limited capacity.

That attitude was shaped in Hollywood, where growing old continues to threaten an actor’s status and ego. Those who make their living being young and sexual cling to youth like a kitten to a tree. Face lifts, butt tucks and breast enhancements only temporarily delay the inevitable. Soon, too soon, time overcomes the adornments, and those who once starred drop into the category of those who used to be.

I’ve never really thought much about time, but it’s the nature of our culture that we celebrate milestones. I suppose that 50 years of sitting on a curb and watching the passing parade qualifies. Nothing has changed much.

During that half-century we’ve gone from “Ozzie and Harriet” to “Sex and the City,” but the subtext of the human condition remains pretty much the same. The world is just as screwed up today as it was back then.

We’re still killing one another on fields of combat. Disease and starvation remain the twin evils on a planet with both too much and too little. The gap between haves and have-nots widens. The rich of Enron walk away richer, and the poor struggle in despair.

And I keep writing about the family dog.

That’s a metaphor I use to explain the family columns I write occasionally. I do them to view an often surreal world from the perspective of who we are out here in the ‘burbs. Nothing is more real than a dog.

I began doing this in the 1960s when I first started writing a column. It appeared six days a week on the Op-Ed page of the Oakland Tribune. The ‘60s were a time of turmoil. Anti-Vietnam War protests, freedom marches, bra burnings, draft-card burnings, sit-ins, love-ins, smoke-ins, sing-ins, acid trips and a lot of other “happenings” that I can’t remember. Everyone was bumping into everyone else doing their own things.

I realized at some point that we were all going a little crazy reading about it and writing about it, so I introduced the family dog to relieve the intensity. As a rule, editors don’t like dog columns. I had one editor in Oakland suggest that I ought to kill the dog, write a dead-dog column and get back to exploring issues. In L.A., the highest compliment an editor ever gave me was that he had become accustomed to my dog columns. Then he got canned.

Ike was president when I got my first newspaper job. The Korean War was still going on, but I was out of it after 18 months in combat. The Vietnam War was to come.

The now-defunct Richmond Independent was a small daily north of Oakland. Chick Richards was editor. He drank two double shots of Rocky Mountain rye every day, one in the morning and one in midafternoon. He fired people before his first shot in the morning and hired them back in the afternoon, during his mellow period.

When someone asked my advice about getting into journalism, I said, “Never work for an editor named Chick.”

My first byline was on a story about a guy who’d built a flying saucer out of sheet metal and was trying to figure out a way to power it. He was talking about utilizing “internal human energy” to get it into orbit, but refused to go into detail.

When I asked, “Is this stomach gas you’re talking about?” he went into a rage and threw me out. I’ve been thrown out of a lot of places since then. The Red Cross threw me off a chartered bus once when I questioned their efficiency. A city council committee threw me out of a meeting when they discovered I wasn’t there to serve drinks.

A French writer, Alphonse Karr, observed that the more things change, the more they remain the same. True.

“We will bury you!” Nikita Khrushchev was saying back then. Now, Osama bin Laden is saying pretty much the same thing. In all the years I’ve been writing, annihilation has been just around the corner. It still is. Weapons have changed, but attitudes haven’t. We keep bombing, they keep coming.

Fifty years. The wonder is that after all that time chasing the news and hunting a muse, I can still tie my own shoes and find my way home. Writing continues to invigorate me. So does the family dog. Point me to the computer and watch me hobble to the keyboard. It’s amazing what a grandfather can do when a grandfather sets out to do it.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.