The Los Angeles bard was waiting for the elevator when he arrived at his office one day in 2002. Columnist Al Martinez and I greeted each other, and in a mixture of pride and mistrust he shared a milestone.
“This is it,” he said. “50 years in business.”
Martinez said he was in his early 70s and had no intention of slowing down. You would have needed a tranquilizer gun to keep him from chasing after the next story and the next one, and he still told the story until his death in 2015.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won over 12 National Journalism Awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
I was a full generation behind him and had a hard time imagining myself at his age.
But time did it do.
It’s gone.
Now I’m in my early 70s and stealing Martinez’s line.
This is that. 50 years in business.
Nathaniel Ayers and Yo-Yo at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2006.
(Francine Orr/Francine Orr)
Nathaniel Ayers played the trumpet along Fourth Avenue in downtown Los Angeles in April 2008.
(Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times)
At that time, the newspapers surged, sputtering, and rose to hero status to defeat the bent president half a century ago.
In Al Martinez’s heyday, a misthrobbing by La Times on Sunday may have hurt a standard poodle. However, the tsunami of chaos that began with the rise of the internet in the 1990s overwhelmed the news and advertising industry, driving thousands of newspapers and magazines on life support and seriously damaged one of the pillars of democracy.
This is a great moment in history that it’s a scammer, a liar, a gas bag or a double political hack.
But don’t worry, I am not going to mark this anniversary especially about the Spiral of Death, except as a reminder to renew your subscription soon.
How lucky I have been for half a century, what would not change if someone loaded me into a time machine, and why I sat in my seat in Hindenburg, but would like to order a few more cocktails before we crashed.
To be honest, after leaving San Jose State on a Tuesday night in May 1975 and starting work with the Woodland Daily Democrat the following morning, I was left with doubt about my career choices. Woodward and Bernstein had just changed the world with their McRake, but what were they doing with a whole new degree in journalism? I was covering Davis’ Little League baseball. This is an exercise in recycling adjectives, explaining dense, torn, slug, rocket, smoking, and firing.
Boyle will meet Jose Torgiano in October 2022.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
But as they say, I stepped into the door, shamelessly chasing the other newspaper editors and begging for work. I have discovered the essential truth about the job you are supposed to fish for a story, knock on the door, ring the rattle cage, call the poser, meet the winners and losers of life, sit on the keyboard and take a deep breath, and try your best to turn blank pages into postal cards.
It doesn’t really feel like work.
For 50 years I have been enrolled in a continuing education course, and I learn a little more about this every week, and there is no end to the various topics and cavalry of characters, crackpots, dreamers, dropouts.
My LA professors include Barbers (Lawrence Toliver), Patron Saints of Second Chance (Father Gregory Boyle), Social Workers (Molly Lowry and Anthony Ruffin), and homeless musicians who have taught me more about humility, hope and the shame of LA’s unsolved catastrophe (than anyone else).
When I arrived in Los Angeles in 2001, I admit, as a port, I was a bit worried that I was making fun of myself in print or that I was struggling to find a good enough story in a handful of people and places with little knowledge of the political landscape.
But press qualifications are like a passport, which takes you to the front porch and into the living room where people have stories to tell. And I was helped by the daily destructive flow of news. It’s like from a fire hose.
I wasn’t there long before the local Catholic franchise established itself as one of the tougher criminals of the vast sexual abuse scandal. And then the action hero decided to run for governor, and I went to Beverly Hills to see if Arnold Schwarzenegger’s barber could give me the same hairstyle and woody woodpecker dye job (I had hair at the time, but it was pretty ridiculous for a few weeks).
When I began to find my way, Los Angeles became my home, and it was a different place than I had imagined from afar.
Millions of the cities are millions of different, and are organically immune to being fully understood and properly explained. You need to continue exploring, as if each story were the first page of mystery. Your true love with LA begins when you recognize the existence of a unique place in the world.
Anthony Ruffin kneels in January 2017 to talk to a homeless man in Hollywood.
(Los Angeles Times)
In covering LA, I was led by something that a Philadelphia inquiry editor named Ashley Halsey told me on the phone at the end of the first Gulf War, which was reporting from a Kurdish refugee camp in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. I was at a loss to convey the enormous moment of seeing my family bury my loved ones in a muddy cemetery.
Halsey said he didn’t want a panorama. He wanted a snapshot. Count the graves, explain the topography, and talk to the survivors. Put your readers in the cemetery.
Good advice.
Incidentally, when I’m writing about the bursting sidewalks in Los Angeles, it works well. And this reminds me that I want to go back many years ago and thank all the mayors and council members.
I rent a rose garden from my wife to support, mentor, and religiously read the newspaper for years, despite having to put up with the distractions of juggling my story and constantly flipped over the trajectory of the news business.
And in Woodland Daily Democrats, Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch, Concord Transcript, Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Magazine, and LA Times, my columns are known to have been informed of my columns.
Although we are tragically few, missions have become more important than ever.
And finally, thank you:
The best part of the last 50 years is our relationship with our readers.
To be honest, you are not alone. There is a lot of anger from people who think I’m an idiot, or because I wonder why I’m not following up on their ideas.
TV writer David Radcliffe, who has cerebral palsy, crossed a broken sidewalk in a wheelchair in September 2019, seconds before falling.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
However, I tried to make the column a running conversation, and like all the story ideas, I would appreciate the positive and negative feedback. Over the past 24 years, emails, phone calls and direct exchanges have helped us to better understand all the frustration and joys of life in Los Angeles and here. I’m backed up and I don’t respond as much as I should have, but this relationship is not for granted. In fact, I consider it a privilege.
Yes, counting 50 years, and in the spirit of Al Martinez, as follows, and the following:
Send me a hint or two about the story.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
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