Toast to David Perlman:
Chronicle’s science editor retires at age 98.
As David Perlman prepares to leave daily journalism — an option the 98year-old would brush aside with jokes even a year ago — there’s deserved attention to his legacy as a science reporter.
His early coverage of AIDS. His plainspoken mastery of topics from earthquakes to evolution and space exploration. A procession of honors so lengthy that such organizations as the American Geophysical Union have named awards after him.
But, for those of us who know him as a co-worker, the true measure of Perlman is this: He embodies everything that a journalist should be.
Eager and inquisitive. Skeptical of prepackaged “news.” Nailing down every possible fact, all the while knowing that the result must be a story people want to read.
“David has the rare ability to explain really complicated things to ordinary people in a way that makes it clear why science matters to their lives,” said Dennis Bartels, executive director of the Exploratorium from 2006 to 2015. “He always keeps the reader first in mind — why is this topic interesting or relevant to them?”
Some journalists develop an inflated sense of self-importance, but Perlman has never been part of that crowd. From his corner in the newsroom, behind cubicle walls and a comically disheveled desk, he’s more comfortable working sources on the phone. Turning academic research into must-read journalism. Shooting the breeze with co-workers, young and old, some of whom fondly address him as “Dr. Dave.”
Best of all, finding ways to escape the office and learn something new.
“I like to get out and explore, but these old bones are getting pretty fragile,” I heard him tell someone over the phone a few years ago. “Doctors want to put their hands all over me. … I guess it beats being embalmed.”
If he was feeling restless, no wonder. Born in Baltimore, he grew up in Manhattan and studied government and journalism at Columbia University before nabbing a job as a copy boy at The Chronicle in 1940. By March of the next year, he was writing for the financial page — “Ship Shortage Threatens Severe Price Spiraling” was the headline above his first byline — and in October, he wed Anne Salz, a marriage that lasted until her death in 2002.
Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. That night, Dave was on the paper’s roof, dispatched to look for incoming planes. He thought he saw one, but it turned out to be a planet. Two months later, he joined the Army Air Corps. It was 1951 before he returned to The Chronicle and San Francisco — he and Anne wanted to raise their children here.
Even then, there was no settling down for the reporter. As The Chronicle’s science writer, Perlman spent two months in the Galapagos Islands in 1964 and two weeks in Antarctica in 1972. There were bylines from Cape Canaveral and Mount St. Helens, Israel and oceanic research vessels. He even joined evolutionary biologists on a fossil dig in Ethiopia — in 2006, at age 87.
All this testifies to his enduring curiosity, a trait the best journalists never lose.
The fact he’s a science reporter bears witness as well.
Prod him, and Perlman is happy to tell how he discovered the beat that defines his legacy. He was laid up after a skiing accident in 1957, and a friend gave him a copy of Fred Hoyle’s “The Nature of the Universe.” The heavens sparked his imagination. Back at work, he started finding ways to capture the realms of science in words.
“When I started covering the first few stories, it was so much fun,” Perlman said last month. “One thing led to another, I started latching onto stuff, and then I was doing science all the time.”
An early scoop came with his 1958 exclusive that “a strikingly beautiful stretch of California coast ... has been recommended by the National Park Service as a new public recreation area.”
The “unspoiled paradise” described by Perlman was none other than Point Reyes. After President John F. Kennedy signed the legislation making the designation official in 1962, then-Sen. Clair Engle gave the pen to Perlman as a gesture of appreciation for spreading the word when it counted the most.
The beat in the following decades expanded profoundly — from the race to the moon to the horrors of AIDS to warnings of climate change.
“People ask me, ‘Do you ever get tired of it?’ ” Perlman said with a laugh. “No, because it’s always new.”
Now consider: The focus on science began when Perlman was 39, already mid-career.
He was “just” a good reporter who discovered a never-ending vein of stories to be mined. The details might be more complicated, but the basics were the same: Write with clarity, and keep readers hooked.
Basics he already had mastered, as a look at his earlier articles reveals.
“Block by block, door by door, a weary, plodding search went on throughout the city,” is how Perlman began a 1955 story on the hunt for a kidnapped baby. “Never before has the city’s police force been called upon for such a staggering job. … Mile after mile they walked yesterday, without the trace of a solid clue.”
Skim through the stories that Perlman wrote that year, and the range is impressive — from state water policy to City Hall politics and an unpaid bill of $336.59 for a banquet at the Fairmont Hotel (big money back then!). From the opening of a Ford manufacturing plant in Milpitas to a visit to an oil rig off the Louisiana bayou, “a strange half-world of boggy land and water.”
A roundup review of three books on New York, which allowed a chance to reflect on the city of his youth: “It is a world apart, with its own mores, its own variety of ulcers, and its own language. It isn’t even called New York. Noo Yawk is the name.”
When the United Nations met here in 1955, Perlman filed 14 stories. Followed by his account of a Grace Kelly news conference to plug her latest film.
“She drank a gin and tonic without giggling and without pretending it was lemonade,” Perlman noted approvingly. “Miss Kelly, in short, is a cool and selfpossessed young woman whose job is acting and not showing off.”
All this might seem remote from the decades of science reporting for which Perlman is known. But being a quick study and a deft writer allowed him to craft a body of work that has served as an ongoing education for Chronicle readers ever since he returned from that skiing accident.
Along the way, Perlman’s also been a remarkable example to everyone in the newsroom. He’s shown that you can age in this profession with grace, getting better each step of the way. And while major reporting projects are vital, there’s also joy in turning out a taut news story on deadline.
Journalism has changed irrevocably since the days when Perlman’s duties as a copy boy included slipping out between editions to place bets for copy editors with Tenderloin bookies. The prevalence of cynical spin can mock the virtues of getting to the bottom of a story and treating your readers with respect.
But the accolades that David Perlman has gathered through his career remind us that, yes, news matters. We’re lucky that he has stayed in the game so long.