Sunday, November 6, 1994
Home Edition
Section: Metro
Page: B-1
The Herald Is 5 Years Gone, yet the Stories Live On;
By: GORDON DILLOW
TIMES STAFF WRITER
of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, as he looked around at the 150-plus
old Herald hands who were gathered to remember the newspaper that had
been so much a part of their lives, and the life of Los Angeles.
It was the same sort of comment you heard five years ago last week, on
the night the Herald closed down, about how the Herald really wasn't
dead, that its spirit would live on.
The death of the Herald cost L.A. a piece of itself, the last of its
old-style, screaming-headline, kick-out-the-jams newspapers. Ever since
1903, when press baron William Randolph Hearst blew into town and created
what he called "an American paper for the American home," the Herald
Examiner and its precursors had chronicled--no, Heralded!--the tumultuous
history of the city, story by story.
At its height, the Herald was the biggest afternoon paper in the
country, cranking out a million copies a day in 12 frantic editions. At
its ebb, after a brutal 10-year strike that began in the late 1960s, it
was a financially ailing but editorially feisty morning daily known for
its "second-coming" headlines: "WOW!" for the 1984 Olympics opening
ceremonies, "LAKERS!" when Magic and Co. won the '87 NBA championship,
"GUILTY!" for the 1989 conviction of Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night
Stalker--a nickname invented, incidentally, by Herald City Editor Larry
Burrough.
It was relentlessly local. Given a choice between a parliamentary
shake-up in England and an escaped hippopotamus named Bubbles from a
Southland wild animal park, the Herald went with Bubbles every time.
It was a newspaper feared beyond its circulation numbers by a
generation of L.A. politicians and officials, one of whom, then-Police
Chief Daryl F. Gates, paid the Herald perhaps the ultimate compliment
when he said its closing meant "one less pain in the posterior."
When all that ended five years ago, it was nonetheless said by the
newly unemployed Herald hands, as they gathered in the paper's watering
hole, Corky's bar, that the Herald could never really be dead. Because
the Herald was not just a printing press, a building and a fleet of
circulation trucks. The Herald was people, newspaper people--Herald
people --and as long as those people were around, it would live on.
It was the sort of brave talk you might hear at a funeral, when people
try to persuade themselves there really is a place in heaven for dear
departed Uncle Harry.
Yet for a few hours Saturday afternoon it seemed true as the former
Herald staffers gathered at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to mark the
fifth anniversary of the newspaper's death.
"It's been five years already?" said Ramon Munoz, who spent 20 years
at the Herald Examiner, working in the production department. "I loved it
there. I still miss it."
"People have such great memories of the paper," said McCrohon, who
flew here from Washington to attend the reunion. "There was just such a
great spirit there."
"It was a place you went to kick up your heels and to shake people
up," said Jim Bellows, Herald editor from 1978 to 1981. "We had a great
time."
Hundreds of stories flew back and forth. There was the time in the
early '80s when a Herald reporter was kidnaped while covering a story in
South-Central Los Angeles and was later ransomed for $18 and a peanut
butter and jelly sandwich. There was the time word came in that a window
washer was dangling by one foot 18 stories above a Downtown sidewalk and
an assistant city editor sent a cub reporter out to "try to get an
interview with the guy before they reel him in."
There was talk about the legendary figures in Herald history: The
Chief himself, William Randolph Hearst, who fired editors almost nightly
over the phone. And Aggie Underwood, the crusty, cigar-smoking woman who
ramrodded the newsroom as city editor.
In the end, however, that was really all there were . . . just
memories. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was no longer alive.
But it didn't die.
PHOTO: COLOR, Herald Examiner's final edition rolled off the
presses Nov. 2, 1989.
PHOTO: Former Herald City Editor Larry Burrough signs a poster
version of the paper's farewell edition during Saturday's five-year
reunion.
PHOTOGRAPHER: LUIS SINCO / For The Times
Type of Material:
Descriptors: LOS ANGELES HERALD EXAMINER; ANNIVERSARIES; BUSINESS
CLOSINGS;
