Warren ‘Scoop’ Wynkoop

By John Murphy

My seventh-grade basketball coach, Hank McLaughlin, used to say Thursday was his favorite day … because he’d get home from school, grab some chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and read the San Bruno Herald. He wasn’t alone.

The shining star of the weekly San Bruno Herald as far as I was concerned was a dark-haired, energetic, hipster man with the too-good-to-be-true name of Warren “Scoop” Wynkoop.

As sports editor and staff photographer for the Herald, Scoop was everywhere – writing his upbeat pieces about local-boys-made-good like Capuchino High grads Wally Bunker of the Baltimore Orioles and Jim Kauffman of the Stanford Indians, as well as area preps right on down to Midget and Pee Wee League baseball players.

Scoop was not only the local sports editor, but also a family friend. His oldest son, Bob, was a classmate and close bud of my older brother Jim. Same for his second-oldest son Bruce and me. Sometimes Scoop would take us to San Francisco Warriors basketball games or Stanford football games he was covering and bring us hot dogs from the press box. Seemed like a good gig.   

Dude knew some far-out cats, too. One was a San Francisco native named Robert Bootzin who was known simply as “Gypsy Boots.” Bootzin owned this place called the Health Hut in Hollywood which catered to the stars. But he was also this athletic freak of nature who would breeze through San Bruno to visit Scoop and distribute his Gypsy Boots Energy Bars and wow people at San Bruno Park with his ability to throw and kick a football incredible distances. It is said that at age 80 he could still throw a football 40 yards.  

But I digress. Scoop Wynkoop in his heyday from the 1950s to the late 1960s was a journalistic force of nature and an inspiration to me. He took photos all over San Bruno and did a radio show for KCSM and described sporting events by using the hip vernacular of the day like this headline I still remember from 1968: “Serra Out of Sight for San Mateo – Padres Simply Too Much.”

Nothing gold can stay, as Frost wrote. By 1968 profits at the Herald sagged and longtime publisher A.I. Cloud sold the newspaper to the Amphlett Printing Company which cut staff, including Scoop. San Bruno sports coverage was never the same.  

Scoop hung around, doing some public relations work for the city of South San Francisco and writing a sports column for the Millbrae Sun. But, sadly, he became ill and died in 1976 at age 46.

Warren “Scoop” Wynkoop – gone too soon, but never forgotten.   

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