Chronicle ghosts, we remember you
New hires making introductory laps around the office are welcomed with smiles, chitchat and hearty hellos. But every day, 45 years after making my own such circuit, I glance around the office and see the gang that’s gone.
With Christmas approaching — and memorial tributes to Lloyd Watson and Judy Stone on my desk — I’m going the
Ebenezer Scrooge route, greeting the everyday Chronicle ghosts, colleagues and pals who weren’t famous enough to be immortalized with civic tributes. A caveat: It’s inappropriate when memorial speakers talk about themselves, but memory, uncensored, doesn’t care if it’s self-centered. Blustery transportation writer Harry
Demoro stood when he was on the phone and told interview subjects how many books he had written. When he said one day that he was having heart surgery, and who knew how that would turn out, we thought he was overdramatizing. The next day he was gone, and now, nearly 25 years later, it’s still a surprise. Bookloving Jean Collins, who oversaw literary listings, shuffled into work a few days a week, schlepping shopping bags. She offered to introduce me to Isaac Bashevis Singer if I drove her to an interview with him at the faculty club in Berkeley, where he was staying (with a bottle of prune juice on his nightstand). She lit up when he told her she looked like Queen Victoria.
Hot-tempered Dale Champion scolded me for talking while he was writing, and Birney Jarvis threatened to duke it out with him in the alley — the only time anyone’s ever threatened a fight over me. “If I’ve ever done or said anything that would offend you, forgive me,” said
M.Z., when I visited him a few days before his life was over. He hadn’t, I told him as I fed him a piece of pie. He’d been known for wild parties.
A rotund editor said he wished he looked like a certain swashbuckling reporter, and I thought, “Why would you not want to look like you?” and then tried to apply that wisdom to myself. Weakened by chemotherapy, S.Y. leaned against the ladies room sink washing her scraped feet after she’d fallen on the Mission Street sidewalk. We were asked to wear Hawaiian shirts for reporter Torri Minton’s memorial, where a basket of nail polish bottles she’d collected was passed around so we could take remembrances.
Boxing writer Jack Fiske seemed always angry that I had been given a desk amid the sports writers; office manager Chester Howard accused me of stealing a coat from the cloakroom (I hadn’t!), and Carolyn Anspacher stared at my pregnant belly, put her hand on her hip and asked, “When you gonna pop that kid out?”
J.A. was dying of AIDS but telling most co-workers he’d fallen and was home nursing a broken arm. We watched the Miss America pageant on TV together. And after he died, I lamented to D.B. that J.A.’s keeping his illness a secret meant that no one had the chance to tell him he’d be missed. Six months later, D.B. was gone, too.
Business writer Watson was cultured and gallant, and asked, “Why are you still doing that?” when he saw me heading out to the back stairway to have a smoke. I never told him that it was the way he posed that question — not judgmental, just curious — that made me stop.
I recall tough, irascible Stone suggesting that she, Art Hoppe (my boss at the time) and I, all of whom shared a birthday week, share a potluck picnic at his desk. When he agreed, she was as excited as a high school girl who’d just snagged a prom date. I don’t think she’d mind that I remember her as a flirt.
And it was said that Valentine, well into his 80s, was a cousin of the de Young/Thieriot family that owned the newspaper. An alcoholic after he returned from fighting in World War I, legend had it that the publisher had promised him a job if he never drank again. Fifty years later, he was still a mail boy.
Jim Hicks, Clyde Wyatt, Cathy Shen, Carole Vernier, Barney Peterson, Bea Mettasick, Gordon Pates, Bob Bartlett, Michael Grieg, Gina Warren, Jane Benet, Joan ChatfieldTaylor, Ruth Miller, so many more, you’re still here. I see you.
And I’ll be back in January. Happy New Year.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “We never have guests. And when we do, they’re not guests we care about.” Woman to man, overheard on Chestnut Street by Deborah Sullivan