He’s finally, finally out the door

Colleagues come, and colleagues go. Many, like me, you never think twice about. Then there’s Ted, the funniest anarchist in the room.

Ted retired from the paper the other day without a lot of fanfare. When we threatened fanfare -- a little party, a speechy lunch -- he cringed as if vaccinated.

“Not for me, guys,” he’d say, then dart off to be sure we got the message.

Not that Ted didn’t appreciate the moment. Ted lusted for the day he could walk out of here and never have to ride the crosstown bus again. He plans to surf in the mornings and spend afternoons hanging out at Bed, Bath & Beyond, giving towel tips to pretty strangers.

“I’ve been looking forward to this day since I was 13,” he said when his early retirement came through.

That was Ted Murray. The son of a famous sportswriter (that last name ring a bell?), Ted chose the beach over the keyboard, the guitar over relentless deadlines and grinding travel.

He spent his workweek keeping the L.A. Times features sections moving -- sorting mail, pulling page proofs, supervising the interns. At 61, he still looks like one of the Beach Boys. Of course, that’s a California 61. (He’d pass for 45 in many states.)

“The papers are running,” he’d say occasionally. “Wanna take a ride?”

So across downtown we’d go in a company Ford, over to the printing plant where the papers were rolling off the presses, a million miles a minute. He’d wrestle the bundles off the conveyor like cords of firewood -- tomorrow’s Calendar section or Food or Home -- then whisk them back to the newsroom for distribution. Along the way, he’d tell stories. Or comment on the strange faces we’d spot on the street.

“See that guy?” he’d say, nodding at some wino. “Used to be our publisher.”

If you’re lucky, your office has a Ted -- a resident comic, Lenny Bruce in running shoes. Ted didn’t need a book or a doctor to tell him about balance in life. Between tasks, Ted would track down obscure chord progressions or rock trivia on the Internet. He knew more about Dylan than Dylan.

And, like Dylan, Ted had a literary sense of others -- from the top editors to his fellow copy clerks -- and could tell the good from the bad almost instantly. He also had a newsman’s nose for gossip, a craving for the ripe little rumor.

“You hear about the bomber on staff?” he whispered recently, as if discovering a $50 bill on the sidewalk.

“Huh?”

“The bomber,” he said, eyes alight.

False alarm. The bomber stuff didn’t pan out, of course. But most of his bulletins did.

To say the least, Ted was never nuts about work. Yet he managed to avoid that beaten-down, pounded look many of us get. Ted was probably the only guy who showed up on Mondays without an acid stomach.

“I don’t fear rejection,” he told me once. “I fear commitment.”

He grew up in the ‘60s, on one of those Malibu bluffs, the other side of paradise. He told stories about meeting Jane Fonda in the grocery store (“Oh, God, she must’ve been 22.”) or the time some actor came out on the deck of the beach house to chase the neighborhood urchins away from a beer blast (“The jerk.”).

Ted was like a bridge to another era, another California. He knew right where Johnny Carson lived and Lee Marvin, too. He knew which celebrities drove drunk, which ones doted on their kids, where all the absentee fathers sort of lived.

He talked of his sun-splashed childhood playing Huck Finn up and down the Malibu coast. He knew just the spot to drop a fishing line. He could describe every cove between town and Little Dume.

Some of his best stories were of his legendary dad and the cronies who used to come by the house.

“Those were guys,” Ted said. “And the stories they could tell. I just sat there for hours, listening.”

He recalls driving his father to cover a game one afternoon, the old man still cranking out five columns a week that verged on poetry.

“You know what I’d like?” his weary father asked him, looking out at the ocean he seldom had time for.

“No, Dad, what would you like?” Ted asked.

“An old sweater with a hole in it. And nothing to do.”

Well, Ted, now you have nothing to do. No hourlong bus rides to work and back, no mountain ranges of mail, no new punks to train. You’ve got the retirement your father never knew.

“I’ve been looking forward to this day since I was 13 . . . . “

Surf’s up, pal. Mazel tov.

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.