John_Schwada's Blog

The Herald-Examiner was to me what the Great Depression and WWII were to my parents (sorry, Mom and Dad, that’s probably a stretch, maybe even sacreligious). In other words, working for that newspaper produced great horrors, adventures and joys…

A lot of these memories bubbled to the surface this week when the survivors of the Herald-Examiner gathered for an “almost 20th reunion” in Hollywood. The paper’s last edition appeared on Nov. 1, 1989; a few days later I had a job at the Los Angeles Times. Now, almost 20 years later…..

As I start writing this and thinking what memories to share I’m ambivalent. I don’t want to leave any of my old comrades-in-arms out because so many of those Herald-Examiner folks played a big role in my work-life. It would be a shame not to give them all credit. But that, my friends (to quote John McCain), would bore you to tears.

So, I’m not going there. I’ll stick to more reflection, less gossip.

But the Herald-Examiner was different. It was an extension of people like Editor Jim Bellows (who used various grunts and body English to express himself, as translated by managing editor/editor Mary Ann Dolan), and City Editor Larry “Mountain Man/Izzy Top” Burroughs. As such the paper was scrappy, feisty and schizophrenic.

Imagine a paper with distinguished columnists book-ending wildly worded, and sometimes erratically edited, exposes…a paper that had a blue-collar Sports Page (replete with sex ads and horse racing touts) and a style section written by fashionistas, gossips and culture mavens. At various times, the reporters consisted of youthful lushes, Harvard University graduates, the scions of various blue-blood families as well as kids from the boondocks – all trying to make it in the big-city news business.

Herald-Examiner reporters/editors/copykids, etc. cursed each other, threw typewriters, burned memos, threatened to dangle editors out the windows by their heels and generally behaved in ways that were then – and still are – considered tacky, dangerous, incorrect and demonic. If you wanted to find an editor, there were days when they could be found just as frequently at the bar across the street as in the newsroom. If the Herald-Examiner had had a Human Resources and legal department, like the baleful ones that dominate newsrooms today, its minions of correctness and legality would have had their hands full putting out fires, keeping stories out of the paper.

All of these volatile ingredients produced journalism that was often inspired, sometimes wondrous and frequently uneven. And while its colleague-papers turned grayer and richer, the Herald-Examiner kept its exuberance and lost its shirt.

It was a hugely sad day when the Herald-Examiner folded – for its sons and daughters, its graduates, its lovers, its readers and for the city of Los Angeles. An institution that was unafraid to challenge our conventional wisdom, to push the envelope, graced our city for too little time. It was like a teenager with promise, killed in a drive-by shooting. The city has been poorer because of its absence. More, not less, voices are needed to keep a city both together and fun, to clear out the cobwebs, smash the china. People tell me that all the time. Unfortunately, they didn’t buy the paper.

True we have blogs now, and websites and Wikipedia. More voices. The number of news outlets is expanding I keep telling myself....

So maybe the spirit of places like the Herald-Examiner didn’t die, it just hibernated for a while. I hope for all of our sakes that’s true.