Autumnal melancholy and a friend’s passing

We measure time by different standards, the saddest of which is the death of a friend.

As years pass like drifting clouds, many of those who accompanied us in various pursuits of our lives vanish into distant memories.

That leaves the rest of us, contemporaries of the dead, wondering by what caprice we continue to live while they didn’t. Who chooses and why? What’s the purpose of one life prolonged and the other ended?

These thoughts went through my head as I sat looking out the window at a gray and drizzly morning, a day that by its somber tones confirmed the presence of autumn.

I had learned the evening before that Wil Locke had died of cancer, suddenly releasing a grip on life that had seemed so firm and resolute. Wil was not a weak man, and it had to be a determined God who jerked him from the Earth. Within the confines of his silence, I’m sure he put up a struggle.

He had been a good friend for 40 years, going back to our days at the Oakland Tribune, where he was an assistant managing editor, continuing through his 26-year presence at the L.A. Times, where he was editorial systems editor, and even into his retirement in 1991. We were always in touch.

A chain smoker for years, squinting against the tendrils of smoke that drifted into his eyes as he worked, refusing to remove the cigarette from his mouth, the first messages of death had come to him some months ago when a small malignancy was discovered on one of his lungs.

It was removed and the prognosis was good. Wil was upbeat. They’d gotten it all, they said. The cancer hadn’t spread into the lymph nodes, they said. He’d be OK. Wil intended to continue life as if this “incident” had never occurred, writing letters, debating national politics and involving himself in the turmoil of his community, a small place in Northern California called Middletown.

But despite everyone’s optimism, the cancer returned, metastasizing into his liver and his stomach. “Hold a few good thoughts,” he e-mailed me, “it may be a rough fight.”

He was dead within two weeks at age 71.

Despite his positions in the editorial hierarchy of both the Tribune and The Times, Wil was one of us in the trenches. As news editor up north, he could laugh at the vagaries of reporters he was ordered to discipline. In one incident, a staffer, writing a weather story, utilized the classic mystery-setting lead: “It was a dark and stormy night.” A kid on the copy desk, going along with it, inserted, “Suddenly, a shot rang out!”

It ran for one edition, and when it was caught, Wil was ordered to reprimand the copyreader. Today, that kind of prank would be reason for dismissal. Back then, Wil began dressing him down and ended his reprimand by laughing wildly. The joke was too much for him to take seriously.

Instrumental in computerizing The Times, he added humor by creating a “weirdness file” that contained all of the strangest news stories from across the country, most of them so bizarre no one would even think of reprinting them. His sense of humor was rooted in the offbeat. You didn’t always laugh at his jokes. Sometimes you just gasped and stared.

During dark times in my career at the old Trib, mainly clashes as an op-ed columnist with a right-wing publisher, he was my staunchest supporter and my most persistent fan. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered he had saved all of the memos I had sent him in what he called “The Martinez File.”

Some were written in longhand, some on typewriters, others e-mailed. Some were funny, some outrageous and some disconsolate. He promised in good humor to use them against me someday. The day never came.

“It’s treatable but not curable,” he e-mailed when doctors discovered a lesion on his liver. “Whatever happens,” I wrote back, “I’m with you all the way.” His final note to me was: “You’re a good man, Elmer.”

I stare out the window again. The grayness has dissipated and the skies are blue. The leaves of the oak trees, damped by the morning mist, glisten in the sun. All is the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Nature takes little notice of good friends dying.

So it’s up to those of us who knew Wil Locke, all members of the same vanishing era, to celebrate one who added substance and tone to our lives, who laughed with us and at us, and made us better because of it. Time has collapsed behind us and shortened before us, so it’s more important than ever to recognize a man who owned an era.

Husband, father, grandfather and journalist, he moved through his days with the grace of a distance runner, lived life to the fullest and left it at time’s pleasure. Who could do more?

Requiescat (in pace).

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