LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS---
(photo courtesy UCLA special collections)
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7 NEWSIES GO HOME AGAIN
| Sweat shop then, now EX-NEWS REPORTER WEEKS TOURS OLD NEWSROOM by Paul Weeks (Daily News Staff Writer) It was a sweat shop at Pico and Los Angeles - even more than the one we left last on December 18, 1954. We were there at the gracious consent of the current owners or lessees. So let's not ask Lu Haas to get up on the old city desk again and extol the benefits of the union shop. Maybe they already have one. We didn't ask. Endless rows of sewing machines droned, each with a rod rising up from it like bayonets of marching soldiers, where once old Underwoods clattered raucously and someone was hollering, "Copy, boy. Copy!" A handful of us - and don't for a minute think of us as the walking dead - had just come from Genio's in Burbank where the Old Farts Society had hosted a reunion of Daily News survivors. Rip Rense, son of the sports department's Art Rense, needed people, color and art for his assignment to write a memoir for the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine. Don's Bar and Grill was gone from the corner of Pico and Main - the place where Lee Goodman once said to me one too-early morning over Maud-the-cook's fried eggs, toast and coffee, "Paul, we just don't know what we want to do when we grow up." The hot dog stand across the street was no more. There was no steak cooking on a hot plate back in the morgue off the city room, no phone call from Pat O'Hara on the DA's beat with a new lead on the Beulah Overell yacht bombing case. "Hello, dahling," he would always say - never gender specific. The sweat was as pervasive as ever. The cloud of cigarette smoke wasn't, nor were the desks scorched by unfinished cigs. No one had gotten around to installing air conditioning. Walls had been torn out. The third floor, where Leslie sat in the slot of the copy desk to the other end where Ned Cronin ground out those sparkling sports columns, was humming, humming, humming, turning out garments galore. (CONTINUED on Page 2, Col. 2) |
WHAT'S INSIDE
The
Daily News Story---
by Ralph Story, that is. . .
Q&A'S WITH THE NEWSIES:
PAUL WEEKS
JACK JONES
ROY AND VIVIAN RINGER
HELEN BRUSH JENKINS
LU HAAS
NEW! MARY KITANO AND
DOUG DILTZ!
plus.
. .
NEWSIES TOUR OLD DIGS! and. .
CONVERSATIONS
WITH:
ROB WAGNER, AUTHOR OF
"RED INK, WHITE LIES"---DEFINITIVE DAILY NEWS/L.A. NEWSPAPER HISTORY
JOE SALTZMAN,
PROF
OF JOURNALISM, USC.
THIS JUST IN:
"THE CAMELLIA FOREST"
---TIM
MCGARRY'S LOVELY ESSAY ABOUT BODDY AND DESCANSO
GARDENS.
HAVE A DAILY NEWS MEMORY?
E-MAIL us at rip@riprense.com
LU HAAS: BADGES? I DON'T NEED NO STINKIN'
BADGES!
by Will O' the Wisp
(Daily News Staff Writer)
|
Survivors of the original Los Angeles Daily News, for decades
"The Only Democratic Newspaper West of the Rockies,"
reunited at the old building at Pico and Los Angeles Streets for an L.A. Times article. Paul Weeks, Jack Jones, Lu and Jan Haas, Roy and Vivian Ringer, and Helen Brush Jenkins trekked downtown and back into the largely forgotten building---now a garment district "sweatshop"---for an article by freelance writer Rip Rense (son of Daily News sportswriter Art Rense.) "Well," laughed Jones, who joined The News in 1949, "it was a sweatshop then!" It was easy to picture the old city room, as so little had physically changed since the paper went out of business Dec. 18, 1954. (FULL STORY on Page 3, Col. 1) |
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