Belated thanks to an editor

THE STOCKTON (ca) RECORD
Vintage Section

Paul Weeks
Published Tuesday, Dec 6, 2005

He was a great spokesman for freedom of the press. He not only spoke about it, but he also spent a career in newspapers practicing what he preached. It is always disheartening to withhold your appreciation for such a person until he has left us.

But J. Edward Murray, my managing editor when I worked at the old Los Angeles Mirror, said thanks but no thanks when I called him at his home in Boulder, Colo., a few months ago, asking him for an interview that I proposed to submit to Editor & Publisher, a highly respected monthly in our business.

Murray, 90, slipped quietly away Nov. 2, and his obituary has echoed through the nation's press. But I want my say about a couple of incidents of our crossing paths.

In the early 1960s, I was writing an exposé of Los Angeles' Skid Row, an assignment directly from Murray. One large property owner in the slums gave us some leads. But when we decided to interview him for publication, he suddenly refused.

So interested was he in our not writing about him that he sent his press agent up to the city room one day to seal our lips -- with cash. He offered $500 each to me and my partner covering the story.

No greater insult can be heaped on a reporter than that. I roared so loudly that the room probably shook. I ran into Murray's office immediately. He tried to quiet me down, grinning as he did it. The press agent had left.

He was back the next day. I watched. He walked into Murray's office. Moments later, Murray's usually quiet, steady voice had turned into a bellow.

He threw the man out physically. I think applause broke out in the city room. I'm sure I enjoyed a warm chuckle to myself.

Born in the little town of Buffalo, S.D., near the beautiful Black Hills, he knew the questionable reputation of a man named William H. Parker, also from South Dakota, who later became chief of police in Los Angeles.

Parker often offended minorities. The Mirror carried quotes from Parker that made him prickle, while other press seemed to give him more leeway.

He was the chief quoted as saying just a few hours after the Watts riot broke out in 1965, "We're on top. They're on the bottom." It took four days and a call-in of the National Guard before the ashes cooled and about 30 people had died.

"Paul, I want you to do an in-depth profile of Parker and the department," Murray told me. Parker was supposed to be a reformer. It was not long after I had been involved in an exposé of the previous leadership of the department, working for another L.A. newspaper, which had not endeared me to law enforcers.

Parker called the newspaper when my report started to run. That didn't soften Ed Murray. He backed me up all the way.

Murray also gave me the first assignment to write about the plight of the increasing Black population in Los Angeles, housing discrimination, lack of jobs and education opportunities.

He opened feature story opportunities for me to cover visiting delegations from the Soviet Union and to cover social issues that were seldom explored in L.A. newspapers.

And after I left newspapering to work for the RAND think tank in Santa Monica, Murray, who was president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, published a piece from me that he requested, emphasizing the importance of newspapers covering scientific information -- and the researchers understanding the importance of press coverage.

You were important to all of us, Ed. Peace be with you.

Contact Paul Weeks at features@recordnet.com

The Watson brothers -- actors/ photogs

The Stockton (CA) Record
Vintage Section

Paul Weeks
Published Tuesday, Jan 3, 2006

One evening in 1937, Shirley Temple was standing on the Union Station platform, where the Santa Fe Super Chief was westbound from Albuquerque. The crowd blocked my way to getting near to her for a brief interview. As a 16-year-old cub reporter, I wasn't much older than the 9-year-old who had just achieved fame in "Heidi."

The other day - 68 years later - I learned that a friend, who used to chase breaking news with me for the old Los Angeles Mirror, had a featured role in the same movie. His name: Delmar Watson.

"Are you up to reminiscing a little?" I asked Delmar, now 79, who was in a hospital just a few days after back surgery. "I want to write my next column about the Watson brothers."

The six Watson brothers - Coy, Bobs, Billy, Delmar, Harry and Garry - appeared in more than 1,000 movies, starting in the days of silents up through the midcentury. Coy, the eldest, now in his 90s, earned the name "The Keystone Kid" when he played in Mack Sennett's "Keystone Cop" comedies from the time he was a 9 months old until he was 22.

Those of us in our vintage years fondly remember stars such as Temple, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jackie Coogan, Fred Astaire, Lionel Barrymore, Kath

Looking ahead at age 85

Paul Weeks
Published Tuesday, Feb 7, 2006
THE STOCKTON (Ca) RECORD

When do people quit being shy about their age and start bragging about it?

In their vintage years, it seems to me. Particularly if they want to celebrate life rather than mourn the passing years.

I was surprised on my 85th birthday to find my spouse, Barbara, not only had invited family and neighbors to the party, but also colleagues from my early years in journalism. She even hired caterers who rented a tent and hired a mariachi band. I found myself dancing the Mexican Hat Dance despite an aching back.

One interesting way of looking at your birthday is to count your age now in comparison with the same number of years before you were born. I was born on a day a blizzard swept North Dakota. The doctor took a horse and sleigh 14 miles through the storm to our house.

(I've never forgiven my mother for telling me that I instructed the stork to land at our house. It was no weather for a stork to be flying. I thought the truth was far more interesting than the fable.)

Suppose I had lived my life backward in time.

Eighty-five years before I was born would have been the winter of 1835. George Washington had died only 36 years before. James Madison, the fourth president, was still alive - but not for long. Abraham Lincoln was assas

Clark Gable, Doris Day. . .and me!

The caller said she and her husband were writing a movie script, “Teacher’s Pet,” about a New York City newspaper city editor and a college journalism teacher – Clark Gable and Doris Day. Would I like to help?

Things like that fall out of the sky when you’re a newspaper reporter struggling to make a living for a wife and two children. It was 1957.

Fay Kanin and her husband, Michael, legends as writers for the screen and stage in Hollywood and on New York’s Broadway, had read a series I had just written in the old Los Angeles Mirror. It was about African-Americans in our city: their problems getting housing, education, employment and justice in L.A.

The working script arrived at my desk shortly – one of the memoirs I have socked away in my files to this day. It was an effort to get away from the traditional way newspaper reporters had been depicted on the screen. I liked that.

The facts ought to be up front. But in the then-required way of reporting the who, what, why, where, when and how in a story, the why is often terribly neglected.

“What can you tell us about that?” the Kanins wanted to know. “See how we could weave it into the script.”

I had a field day describing how a city room ought to look, how the reporters shout, “Copy boy!” when they are up against deadline and summon the copy boy – or girl – to deliver a “take” of their story a piece at a time to go to the city desk for quick editing and then on to the composing room to be set in type.

But then we got to the meat of the plot: Clark Gable was depicted as sort of a hit-and-run guy, getting shallow coverage of a crime, while he had a copy boy played by Nick Adams, whose mother wanted Clark to fire him so she could get him a broad education first.

Gable frowned on that, but then got assigned by his publisher to go to a class in journalism, taught by Day, playing the role of the daughter of a country newspaper editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for an editorial he had written.

Eventually Gable sees the light, falls in love with Doris. (I didn’t even try to dabble with that part of the plot.)

The Kanins won a nomination for the Oscar that year for the best original plot written for the screen. And Gig Young, who played the role of a noted psychology professor – and the boyfriend Doris eventually kissed off for Clark – won an Oscar for the best actor in a supporting role.

I kept in touch with the Kanins and once asked if they could help me get my talented son a role as an actor. And when I was working later for RAND, the think tank, they asked me if I could get their son a job there. Neither of us was successful.

When I decided to write this piece, I got out my old copy of the film where I was identified on American Movie Classics as a technical consultant, and compared it with the script.

I don’t know how much the Kanins or Gable and Day got from the highly successful film – but, by golly, the $500 I got didn’t compare with the fun I got from playing my role.

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