RIPOSTE
by RIP RENSE |
|
EL
DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
(Oct. 31, 2007)
In keeping with the spirit of
El Dia de los
Muertos (Day of the Dead), the Mexican holiday in which deceased
friends, relatives and ancestors are celebrated (Nov. 1, 2), I hereby pay
tribute to a few people I have been fortunate to know.
Geoff Kelly---Geoff
and I worked together briefly at the old Valley News when it was
still headquartered in Van Nuys, long before it moved to its windowless
corporate coffin in Woodland Hills. He was an assistant city editor, as I
recall, with longish hair and trimmed beard about the color of the Sherman
cigarettes he smoked. It was a novelty having a youngish city editor, and
the mostly young reporters took to him—for his enthusiasm, his smarts, and
his desire to dig behind the official story-lines. His ready smile and great
sense of humor didn’t hurt anything. I last saw Geoff a couple years ago at
the funeral of our old mutual friend and Valley News colleague,
Carter Barber, at a church in Pasadena. Geoff had been at the Times for
decades, and his hair was silvery, short, distinguished. He looked good.
Geoff and Carter, it turned out, had worked together at the Pasadena
Star-News, and though he hadn’t seen Barber in years, Geoff was one of a
few old mates who turned up. He and I hashed over old Carter stories, Geoff
particularly relishing the memory of Carter’s habit of waiting for women at
parties to break out a cigarette, then rushing across a room like a
broken-field halfback with lighter at the ready. Well, Geoff wound up taking
a job at the Hong Kong branch of the International Herald-Tribune
shortly thereafter, probably for the joy and adventure of it. He collapsed
after a workout, and didn’t get up. He was in his early 60’s, and with any
kind of luck, he and Carter are yucking it up over a couple of beers right
about now.
Bob Babbitt---People
are too often surprising for the wrong reasons. They seem okay, then you get
to know them, and before long they are talking about the dwarf living in
their closet. And the media place ever-so-slight an emphasis on image, as
opposed to what (if anything) might be behind it, the result being adoration
of the likes of Paris Hilton and Rudy Giuliani. People truly deserving of
attention, admiration, affection, for the most part seem to go about their
days with all the obtrusiveness of hummingbirds. Such a guy was Bob Babbitt.
I barely knew Bob, as he was a colleague of my spousal assistant, Annie, but
I used to hear about him a good deal. Enough to figure out that this was a
person of accomplishment, judgment, and smarts of an ilk that would be nice
to encounter in a so-called community leader. Bob would likely quibble with
that, but I think it’s true. Red-headed, red-bearded and burly, he was
vastly knowledgeable and curious, and could hold forth with great authority
and joy about the history of trains, California, and how to rebuild car
engines. As with Arthur Conan Doyle, he loved to collect paintings of
fairies (unlike Doyle, he didn’t actually believe in them), and he was apt
to, on a whim, grab a camera, hop on a bike, ride the length of the L.A.
River and document it with a website. He loved the old buildings of downtown
L.A., Laurel and Hardy, good conversation, and a million other things. Bob
grew up in the Valley, loved the Valley, and died there while riding his
bike in the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area one beautiful afternoon last
May. He was barely in his 50's.
Stella Zadeh---I
only knew Stella for a couple of years when she was one of the city editors
at the L.A. Herald-Examiner, but she made an indelible impression on
me, and, I suspect, on all who knew her. Ripsky, she called me. I’m not fond of editors as a rule,
because most I’ve known were editing with their egos and not a lot of skill,
but Stella was an exception. She was A-1. It was all about getting the story
with Stella, and getting it quickly and accurately---and getting it
in the paper as soon as possible. Frankly, I loved working with her, and for
her, even if she sent me out on a story at the end of my shift, at midnight,
keeping me out covering a plane crash till 4 or 5 a.m.. She had her
priorities straight. Lots and lots of fuss is made over women in powerful
editorial positions, and not a few have tried to ride their promotions to
fame. Few outside the paper or the news biz heard of Stella when she was on
the city desk at the Her-Ex, but she was one of the things making the paper
solid, back in the early 80’s. Oh, her eccentricities were legend, how she
often said everything twice, and was on a strange, restricted diet that
found her wolfing down cottage cheese and ketchup (I think) as she updated
some reporter’s deadline copy. Just larger than petite, with a dark brown
1950-ish (sometimes sprayed) hairdo, she had a sort of antic voice that
reminded me of Margaret Hamilton’s. Some reporters steered clear of her, but
she was always my preferred choice---especially over her male colleagues at
the time. She went on to a career as some sort of TV agent, and I didn’t see
her much after that. She was cheated out of this rigged game at the age of
58 earlier this year.
Mrs. Miyata---Now,
I didn’t know her first name, and I’m not going to look it up here, because
I knew her only as Mrs. Miyata. She was the mother of my friend, Laraine,
who I met during Obon, the Japanese summer festival of dance and remembrance
and celebration of the here and now. Actually, Laraine is largely the reason
that Annie and I came to take part in Obon, as she made us feel at home and
helped us (especially me) to learn the Obon dances when we came for lessons
almost ten years ago. Laraine took wonderful care of her mom, who was
pushing 90, bringing her to the practices and to the various Obon festivals
at local Southern California Buddhist temples. Mrs. Miyata was a tiny lady,
always friendly, and always joking about how lousy her memory had become.
“What did you do over the weekend” was likely to elicit a laugh and
something like, “I don’t remember, but it was good!” She turns out to have
been the real bulwark of a large family and with her husband, a mainstay of
the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple for decades. We always stashed our
stuff under Mrs. Miyata’s chair at the various Obons, and she always greeted
us heartily. This counted for a lot with me. One of the last things she said
to me was “You should join the temple!” So in her memory, I did.
Aunt Virginia---This
fine lady was my mother’s sister, one Virginia Shearer (later Rogalle), and
to jot just a few words down about her here is probably rude of me. But
then, she would understand. She was a woman of spirit, modesty, and humor.
And did I mention humor? Oh, and humor, too. When I was a tyke, going to my
Aunt Virginia’s house was always a happy thing, probably because I knew she
would be smiling and laughing and cracking jokes. Her wit was mordant,
ironic, biting, something that I seem to have picked up in ever so slight
quantity. Once, when I ran away from school in the second grade, I ran to
her house---the house where I first heard Elvis, not incidentally, back
around 1960. I even lived with her for a while, when my divorced mom was
overloaded with work, and am glad of it. I’m also glad that she lived a very
long life, and got to see her daughter, Katie, raise three superb grandkids
almost to their teens. Aunt Va. and her husband, Francois, stuck it out
for---oh, could it be almost 50 years?---winding up on a much loved little
ranch in the desert outside of Phoenix, with horses and dogs and owls and
cats and coyotes. . .Although I didn’t see her for decades, I got to visit
her several times in the recent years before she went to take a nap one
afternoon, and didn’t wake up, and I was overjoyed to find her wit and
insights as dry and acerbic as ever. Hardly a time goes by that I look at
the moon and do not remember her holding me in her front yard, singing, “I
see the moon, the moon sees me/ God bless the moon, and God bless me.” And
God, whose existence she and I both figured as likely as mosquitoes turning
out to be secretly controlling world events, bless Aunt Virginia.
Dave Barton---Dave
was a copy editor at the Herald-Examiner who started out there as a
copyboy, back in the days when you could still do that. He was a merry,
impish, fast-talking, thoroughly engaging human being who left one
(certainly me) smiling after every conversation, chat, howdy-do. Too many
clichés are rushing in here, and colliding. Nice guy. . .big-hearted. .
.loved by many. . .dedicated professional. . .Dave
was one of the people who just make life easier to bear. Devoid of guile, he
always---always---smiled when he saw you, his eyes crinkling up and almost
closing as inevitable puns and quips came. Not incidentally, he was a
terrific---and extremely clever---headline writer, and very fine copy editor
who went on to win awards and affection for many years at the L.A. Times.
I didn’t see him after the Her-Ex days, except for the occasional Grateful
Dead concert, but I used to hear from him in e-mail once in a while, and the
smile was there, too. He was a great dad and great husband, and he checked
out at only 53. Goin' home, goin' home/ By the waterside I will rest my
bones/ Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul. . .
Mike Qualls---Qualls
was a political columnist, and political editor, at the old Her-Ex in the
‘70’s and 80’s. He sat in the row in front of me for a couple of years in
the newsroom, but I’ll bet we didn’t exchange more than a few hundred words.
He was very, very quiet, and very, very dedicated to his job. Not
surprisingly, he was also very, very well respected. I see him now, elbows
on the old metal desks we had, one hand holding a phone to his ear, and the
other a cigarette, carrying on quietly with this or that contact. There was
a mystique about Mike, and the word was that he rode the tail end of a
helicopter over a cliff while serving in Vietnam. I always thought we had a
quiet mutual respect, but probably I’m kidding myself as Qualls was just too
busy doing his job to think much about that sort of thing. He went on to run
City News Service for many years, and moved his last piece of copy at age
63. Rough racket, journalism.
Shirley Maxwell---Mrs.
Maxwell, as I always knew her, was the mom of my best childhood pal, Jim. I
suppose it trivializes her to say that she wasn’t far off from Mrs. Ward
Cleaver, or any other nice, dependable TV mom of the ‘50’s. But her son,
Jim, called her a traditional American mom, so I guess it’s all right. She
was a sweetheart, really, and always had a welcoming smile for me. Southern
hospitality (South Carolina) colored her voice, her manner, and she was
gracious enough to look the other way when Jim and I fired up some Tiparillo
cigars in his bedroom at age 12, while playing poker. A mother of three, she
spent most of her adult life in Thousand Oaks, keeping a splendid home and
doing all those sorts of suburban things that moms used to do: bridge clubs,
backyard tiki torch parties, assorted local social activities. She was also
a longtime member of the Sweet Adelines singing group, and I always remember
her in the kitchen, in late afternoons, crooning some old 40’s classic as
she made dinner. She made it well into her 70’s, but it still seemed too
soon.
Paul Weeks---Paul
deserves much more from me than this paragraph, and maybe one day I’ll
manage that. (Stay tuned to this site, as a video interview with him is
forthcoming, if I ever get the technical stuff mastered.) Weeks was one of
the great L.A. journalists, or newspapermen, as he probably would have
preferred. He went from the old Daily News to the Mirror-News
to the Times, and all along the way he comported himself with
principle, humor, love, and a conscience. At the Daily News and
Mirror, he pushed for covering L.A.’s minorities---something that was
done very little in the 40’s and 50’s---and at the Times, he wound up as the
paper’s civil rights reporter in the early 60’s. While there,
he clashed with an editor for defending a black reporter at the Los
Angeles Sentinel, and was removed from the beat. He warned that the city
would “blow up one of these days, and the Times won’t know what hit it.” The
Watts Riots happened a year later. Paul went on to work for the Rand
Corporation, but I don’t want to make this an obit rerun. He was a great
raconteur with equally great memory, who wrote a column right up to the end
of his 86 years a couple months ago. He had a real joie de vivre about
a great many things, from flying to music to dogs and cats, but what struck
me was his enormous affection for the papers where he had worked, and for his
colleagues. There are those among us ex-newspapermen who remember our old
comrades and places of employment vividly, and with real love, and Weeks was
at the top of that list. When he spoke of the days at the L.A. Daily News,
I could almost feel them come to life---especially when he and I visited the
old newsroom at Pico and Los Angeles Streets, along with a few of the other
old “Newsies.” I’m sure he would have argued this contention, but he never
seemed old.
Captain Kangaroo---I
didn’t know the Captain (Bob
Keeshan) any better than millions of other kids, which is to say, I knew
him very well. He started every morning with me for years in the 50’s and
early 60’s, along with Mr. Moose, Bunny Rabbit, Dancing Bear, Mr. Green
Jeans, Tom Terrific, et al. Such a program would be laughed and sneered at
today, when kids’ shows are hyper-manic ADHD fests, but I’m grateful for
Keeshan’s dedication and gentle, reassuring persona. How much of an impact
did his show have on me? Here’s how much. Very often, when I wake up very
early and get up suddenly, I still hear the Captain’s theme music,
“The Puffin’ Billy,” by Edward H. White, playing in my head. Why, it
happened just this morning. That music helped me start my days when I was a
tyke, and thanks to my subconscious, it still does. In this increasingly
incomprehensible world, the Captain is still around, in a way, still telling
me to have a happy morning.
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