By John Murphy
Late December 1978 I climbed into my father’s Oldsmobile and drove south. Destination: Santa Cruz.
I interviewed for a sports reporter job at the Santa Cruz Sentinel at like 8 a.m. Three hours later, I tried for Watsonville’s sports editor job.
Luck and youth were with me, as I got both jobs. I chose Watsonville since it made me the boss. The boss of one guy that is, Greg Lathrop. Lathrop is a story for another day as I — ahem — can’t fit all his antics into this piece.
Never had so much fun as those early days at the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for community service in 1956 (the year I was born). Three of its main players then — photographer Sam Vestal, editor Frank Orr and managing editor Ward Bushee — were still there.
The place was classic. We were housed in an old supermarket building on the north end of town. An old guy, Bill Akers, sat across from me, banging out columns on an Underwood and smoking. Bill did crossword puzzles too and learned obscure words like reprobate and ne-er-do-well. Lathrop and I filched those gems and used them to insult each other. Mature stuff.
There were no computers yet. Instead, high school girls rolled tapes from the United Press International wire that were fed into a machine that spit out copy. Wire photos came out of a machine too. We judged their size with a measuring wheel. And we used pica polls to gauge copy — I won’t even explain those.
Me and Lathrop? We cracked wise all morning and wrote too many headlines with rock ‘n’ roll references. Our antics occasionally irked Bushee who would tell us to “knock off the jollity.” We’d clam up and grab a dictionary to look up jollity.
We wrote a lot of local copy, but also ran New York Times sports columns by Red Smith and Dave Anderson. Those were typeset in back by a chronically hung-over guy who set pristine copy. But if we told him the wrong column measure it screwed up the works. Then there’d be Hell to pay.
Bill Brazil, a burly Portuguese guy would burst out of the back and accost us. It was scary. But Bill mellowed over the years and became only sort of terrifying.
One day former Watsonville sports editor Glenn Dickey came to town to give a speech. Glenn was big-time now, writing a sports column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He infamously ripped Willie Mays back when nobody did that. His fame grew.
I wrote a column about Dickey’s return and somebody sent it to him. It was nothing special — just a local guy makes good piece. But a few days later a letter post-marked San Francisco got dropped on my desk. It was from Glenn, praising my work and offering words of encouragement. Classy move.
I learned from that and have tried to do the same with younger writers … which for me these days is everyone.
Watsonville. I remember it fondly.
Main Street Dog 