The Bard of Los Angeles was waiting for a lift when I arrived at the office one day in 2002. The columnist Al Martinez greeted each other, and with a mix of pride and disbelief he shared a milestone.
“That’s it,” he said. “Fifty years in the business.”
Martinez was in his early 70s and said he did not intend to delay. You would have needed a sedative rifle to stop him from rushing to the next story, and the next, and he still tells stories until his death in 2015.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a columnist in Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen National Journalism Awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
I was a full generation behind him and had trouble introducing myself at his age, still tailoring.
But the time has done what it does.
It disappeared.
Now I’m in my early 70s, and I’m stealing Martinez’s line.
That’s it. Fifty years in the business.
Nathaniel Ayers and Yo Yo Ma in Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2006.
(Francine Orr/Francine Orr)
Nathaniel Ayers plays the violin next to the 4th St. at the center of Los Angeles in April 2008.
(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)
Newspapers rose and mocked at that time, rising to a hero status half a century ago because he took a crooked president, only to be called the enemy of the people by the current resident of the White House.
In all Martinez’s boom period, a faulty throw from the Sunday La Times could have mutilated a standard poodle. But a tsunami of disruption, which begins with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, has inundated the news and advertising industries, drove thousands of newspapers and magazines under the living support and critically damaged one of the pillars of democracy.
It is an excellent moment in history to be a rogue, a liar, a gas bag or a double-acting political hack, because there are many fewer reporters driving around like drug-sniffing air dog dogs.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to mark this anniversary by going on and on the death spiral, other than reminding you to renew your subscription immediately.
I’m here to tell you how happy I was half a century, why I wouldn’t change something if someone loaded me into a time machine, and why, even though I was in a seat in the Hindenburg, I still want to order a few cocktails before our country.
To be honest, I had a moment of doubt about my career choice after leaving San Jose State University on a Tuesday night in May 1975 and started working at Woodland Daily Democrat the next morning. Woodward and Bernstein have just changed the world with their Mukrake, and what have I done with my brand new degree in journalism? I covered Little League Baseball in Davis, an exercise in recycling adjectives to describe home runs that were slapped, torn, slow, deleted, smoked and launched.
Boyle meets in October 2022 with Jose Trujano.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
But I had a foot in the door, as they say, and the editors of shamelessly chased other newspapers and beg for work. I discovered a real truth about a work in which you are supposed to go fishing for stories, on the doors, rattling cages, calling out the posers, meeting the winners and losers of life, and then sitting at a keyboard, taking a deep breath and doing the best to turn an empty page into a postcard, the next day an accusation:
It never really feels like a job.
I have been enrolled for a continuing training course for 50 years, and learn a little more about this every week and that, without the end of the variety of topics or the cavalcade of characters and crack pots, dreamers and dropouts.
My La professors included hooders (Lawrence Tolliver), patron saints of second chances (Father Gregory Boyle, social workers (Mollie Lowery and Anthony Ruffin), and a homeless musician who taught me more about humility, hope and the shame of La’s unleavened disasters of homelessness. Thank you).
I would admit that when I arrived in Los Angeles in 2001, I was a little worried about whether I would, as a transplant, make a fool of myself in print, or have trouble finding enough good stories in a place where I only knew a handful of people and little of the political landscape.
But a press voucher is like a passport, and it gets you on front porches and in living rooms where people have stories to tell, some who lift you up and others who break your heart. And I was helped by the daily flow of news, which does not fall – it haunts. As if of a fire hose.
I was not here long before the local franchise of the Catholic Church established itself as one of the more ominous offenders in an expansive scandal for sexual abuse. And then an action hero decided to run for governor, and I went to Beverly Hills to see if the hairdresser of Arnold Schwarzenegger could give me the same haircut and woody specht dye (I had hair at the time, but looked very ridiculous for a few weeks).
When I started finding my way, Los Angeles became my home, and it was a different place than the one I suggested from afar.
This city of millions is millions of different things, which are organic immune to be completely understood or neat. You must continue to explore, as if each story is the first page of a mystery. The right love affair with LA begins when you acknowledge the existence of a place, unique in the world, which lies above all the lazy clichies and pompous proclamations.
(Los Angeles Times)
At the cover of LA, I am led by something that an editor of Philadelphia Inquirer named Ashley Halsey at the end of the First Gulf War told me by phone when I reported from a Kurdish refugee camp in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. I saw families buried loved ones in a muddy cemetery and conveyed the greatness of the moment, sitting against the panorama of geopolitics.
Halsey told me he didn’t want a panorama. He wanted a momentum. Count the graves, describe the site, talk to survivors. Put readers in the cemetery.
Good advice.
By the way, it works well if you write about broken sidewalks in Los Angeles. And it reminds me that I want to resign every mayor and councilor, who goes back many years, which contributed to the current embarrassment of spectacular decline, in which the waiting time for the city fixes a sidewalk is ten years (Spoiler Alert, I work on another chapter of the story while reading it).
I owe a garden of roses to my wife, for years of support, guidance and the reading of the newspaper, despite the fact that I had to get my deductions for the Juggarren inferences and constantly on the trajectory of the news business.
And to the hundreds of reporters, photographers and editors from which I learned and inspired by the Woodland Daily Democrat, the Pittsburg Post-Dispatch, Concord Transcript, Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Magazine and The La Times, where, Informed by the ACE report on my colleagues.
We are tragically less in number, but the mission has never been more important.
And a last thank you:
The best part of the past 50 years was my relationship with readers.
Not every one of you to be honest. There is a lot of anger out there, from people who disagree, I think is an idiot or wonder why I did not follow their ideas.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
But I tried to make the column a running conversation, and I thank you for the feedback – positive and negative – as well as all the story ideas. Thousands of exchanges over the past 24 years, by email, by phone and in person, have helped me to better understand Los Angeles and all the frustrations and joys to live here. I am backed up and am not as responding as I should be, but I do not take this relationship for granted. In fact, I consider it a privilege.
So yes, 50 years and count, and in the spirit of all Martinez, to the next, and the next.
Send me a story tip or two, will you?