I was a shy, kid and didn't find anything that felt like a calling until a newspaper columnist friend of the family took a liking to one of my attempts at writing a short story.
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| 1950MG-Roadster |
He was Gene Sherman - one of the many colorful friends of my family back in 1950s Hollywood, California where I grew up. Gene wrote "Cityside" and gossip and news column that ran on the second page of the mighty Los Angeles Times.
I knew nothing about newspapers except how to throw them from a moving bicycle. But it was Gene's personal style that fascinated me more than his writing. Right out of the movies. He was tall, mustachioed, smoked a pipe, loquatious with a quick, ironic smile and handsome in his 40s. He sported a silk scarf, gatsby cap. He drove a 1950 MG TD roadster in an era when "foreign" cars were considered exotic in America.
Gene was dating a curvy flirty, red-haired chanteuse, a pal of my mother's named Isobel. She sang at "Alba's" Italian diner (named after my opera singer mother). It was so cool, in its cozy converted red Pacific Electric trolley car on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood (no connection with the current bistro of the same name there now, many decades later.) My mother also sang show tunes, opera and Neopolitan songs there with a band on Friday and Saturday nights when the dancing started.
The originial Alba's authentic, old world Italian fare was well reviewed. So was the entertainment. It, soon became a hangout for film autuers, writers, and bit actors.
Isobel was from Paris. She lived as a guest at my mother's Hollywood flat. Naturally, I had a hopeless crush on her as a Hollywood High School teenager.
Gene became a regular a family dinner guest. He would show up in his sporty, gleaming roadsters to take Isobel to parties, plays and openings.
Gene seemed to have it all, to by now this jazz fan, ban-the-bomb radical and reader of beat literature. I took note of how many literary icons - Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Dickens, Jack London had serialized their most famous works in newspapers.
Gene had the name, the wheels and Isobel. He had the dry wit of William Powell in My Man Godfrey, the 1930s classic comedy I saw on late-night television. Gene, in fact, had earned his news chops with an investigative story about the 1940s, Las Vegas air disaster death of Carol Lombard, Powell's brilliant comedic costar and 1930s wife.
(Reporters waved when he strode across the Cityroom to his corner office to file his column for the Bulldog Edition. Those were the last days of police beat, and wiseguy, Walter Burns journalism. That was the life for me.
Gene got me hired as a "copy boy" - i.e. editorial assistant at the Los Angeles Times. It was a low-paying go-fetch job, mostly ignored, but with the slightest chance of being a gateway, for a cub reporter job too unimportant to offer a seasoned news writer or golden-boy ivy leager. The city room was virtually all white male in the mid-fifties.
The sole fulltime woman reporter was asssigned mostly "family angle" sidebars by the desk. Our one African American reporter was parttime. That evolved rapidly (at least on the surface) following the 1965 Watts Uprising, covered in depth by the Times' black reporter - who coined the term, "Burn Baby, burn" and helped the L.A. Times win a Pulitzer Prize that year.
Fresh multiethic faces in at the Times expanded invorgated those pushing against self-censorship and their continuing tug-o-war our estabishmentarian senior editors.
Ever an autodidact, I had barely three years of college when I arrived, freshly married with a baby on the way. I was green as a dill pickle. The 1950s ciger-chomping, whiskey nipping city editor assured me that a degree would be considered at best a handicap in his city room. "We have to train them all over again," he said, blowing smoke across his desk at me.
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Historic LA Times Mirror Building
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I was a nobody amid shirtsleeve writers and edictors whom I awed for their worldliness. We worked downtown in the old Times Mirror buildding, catty-corner from L.A.'s art deco iconic city hall (embossed on L.A. city cop badges.)
The L.A. Times then had long held sawy asw the most profitable, fattest paper in the world published from that historic, fortress-like offices in downtown Los Angeles, across from that city's iconic, art-deco city hall.
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| L.A. City Hall cop badge |
The edidors and reporters for whom I fetched and carried, saw themselves as working stiffs, not wordsmiths. Still I looked up to them, emulated their veneer of cynicism, their seemingly infinite knowledge about who pulled the levers of profit and power downtown. I didn't know that this was the end of an era, and dawn of one on which the jury is still out. None of us did. Now I wish I'd taken notes. These would have been useful, sixty years later, as I wrote The Phantom Eye, the first of my 1950s noir, Frank Ritz L.A. detective novels.
New, personal, enterprising journalism had its costs, most notably, the rise of celebrity "access" journalism exacerbated by high-paid TV news and reality shows that blurred the lines between informing and entertaining their audiences.
The great, Washington Post journalist Ben Bagdikian - of Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers fame (later a professor at UC Berkeley) warned against this..
I had arrived in the final era of print journalism, working in a city room crisscrossed by pneumatic tubes to hot linotypes of a clattering composing work. It was when reporting was a job not a "profession" - a sweaty, risky, smoky, shirtsleeves pursuit. You were expected to stand up and risk offending people. "If you want love, become a firefighter," scoffed my editorial mentors.
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| Feminist Writer Mary Reinholz 2024 |
My contemporaries - a gaggle of intemperate misfit, itentified with existentialist antiheroes. The ones I admired most belonged with those ink-stained story chasers described by Mr. Dooley, the fictional 1880s Chicago columnist who was famously said that the job of journalists was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" - not to rub elbows at country clubs. There was no news celebrity TV other than war correspondent Edward R. Morrow, who actually flew in wartime bombing raids. We never heard of "access journalism" and sneered at overpaid TV news "talking heads" local and national.
The young turks among us stirred up the muck of hypocrisy onto the wingtip shoes of management. Our favorite code word was: "Polish journalism." This referred to the dispatches from brave Warsaw news service reporters who defied Iron Curtain censors with between-the-lines dispatches from then Soviet-dominated Poland.
Meanwhile, in L.A. a defiant, irreverent alternative press sprang from colleges and most voraciously from sex-ad supported, underground newspapers, epitomized by the late Art Kunkin's groundbreaking, literary, outlaw L.A. Free Press.
At 88, few of my 1950s-60s contemporaries survive, much less continue to keep their contrarian faith and practice their bareknuckled trade.. Feminist writer, Mary Reinholz stays constant. She came up through the LA alternatiive press scene, now in New York City, who still plies her trade with the lively independent press there. She crossed over long ago without losing any spice. I med Mary when she wrote wonderfully biting pieces for West, the noted, L.A. Times Sunday magazine where I worked as senior editor during the 1960s and early '70s before I moved on to San Francisco and later here to Chicago.
Mary and I crossed paths back in 2019 when we serialized novellas the late Lionel Rolfe's online literary magazine Boryana Books. Lionel was dear friend to each of us and many long ago collegues doing our damnest to kick fascist asses until the end.
Presently, Mary is circulating her latest work: a delightfully biting satirical novel - "Midnight for Mr. Chuckles" - about a feminist underground writer with a dangerous past. It has my full endorsement.
Recently I asked her if she thought things had changed much from our early days to this time of weaponized propaganda that passes for television journalism. I our era bemoaned Trumpian influence "journalism" but remembered many work-arounds from the "good old days." I conceded that hindsight brightened memories.
Mary spoiled my rant by asserting that despite all I noted, we had it better now than back when. She cited many voices and outlets continuing to their music, some of whom she still writes herself unrestrained. Many it was Mary's way to carry on, but it made my day, and turned that frowny face back upside down and for that I say, thanks. Thanks for carrying on and being with us!
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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus books Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. He went on to become editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.
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