This column marks the big 4-0-0
This is my 400th Daily Pilot column.
That blows me away. I’ve been filling this space weekly (watch your spelling there!) for eight years.
When the Pilot solicited me for the column in March 2009, a year after I’d retired from a deeply rewarding, 37-year career as Orange Coast College’s director of community relations, I was interested but hesitant.
From the age of 10, I’d always wanted to be a columnist. My hero was Los Angeles Times essayist extraordinaire Jim Murray. Murray was amazing.
I issued a typed-written neighborhood gazette when I was 11, was sports editor of the Costa Mesa High School Hitching Post my sophomore and junior years, wrote for the Daily Pilot (then the Globe-Herald) sports section as a high-schooler, was op-ed page editor of my college newspaper and was sports editor of a weekly U.S. Army newspaper.
I loved being a columnist in high school and the Army. My passion for writing blossomed
While in college, I worked as a late night “copy boy” in the newsroom of the then-Santa Ana Register. A newsroom bottom-feeder, I was responsible for ripping stories from the news wires and organizing them by topic for the night editor.
I also had to remember to replace paper in the machines or we’d lose stories. I messed up a time or 10.
I remember a reporter who held what I viewed as the ideal job in the business. He was a San Clemente reporter and worked from a one-man shop up the hill from the San Clemente Pier. We almost never saw his face in the crowded, overwrought, sultry, smoke-filled Santa Ana newsroom.
But, every evening — like clockwork — he’d send, via teleprinter (a sort of early fax machine), several San Clemente-slugged stories for the day. What a gig: freedom to run your own news bureau in one of the fairest beach towns on earth!
I edited numerous publications during my time at OCC. It wasn’t journalism, per se, but the next best thing: public relations! I quickly realized that my job at Coast was the best anywhere.
When the Pilot contacted me about writing this column a year after my retirement, I remember thinking: “What will I write about? I’ll be out of material in three months, or less!”
Don’t get me wrong, the job very much appealed to me and — after giving it considerable thought — I decided to take it. It’s just, well, I’d heard that writing a weekly column is like “feeding the beast.” The beast is insatiable; you never have enough provisions in your larder to satisfy. Relentlessly, it pursues you, week after week.
I’ve since discovered that that’s not true, not if you love to write. But, at times, the pressure is on.
We’ve all grown familiar with Hollywood stereotypes of columnists. They’re portrayed as high-octane types who smoke cigarettes by the carton, boast hard-boiled personalities, occasionally sucker-punch rivals, drink to excess and chase about for headlines.
Remember that 1934 Frank Capra romantic comedy, “It Happened One Night?” Newspaper reporter Peter Warne is scrambling to find a story. He’s just been fired by his cranky editor and is desperate for a story that will win him back his job.
In the meantime, Warne, played by Clark Gable, is drowning his sorrows with fellow reporters when, quite by accident, he comes across spoiled newlywed heiress Ellie Andrews (played coquettishly by Claudette Colbert).
Clark and Colbert wind up on a night bus from Miami to New York. She’s running away from her rich father and playboy husband. Gable sees potential here for rescuing his career.
All goes awry, however, when they fall in love. They can’t see it coming, though every sentient being in the movie house can.
By the way, you never see Clark sweat bullets over the right lede for his story or seek to bolster broad statements with facts and data, or struggle with clumsy syntax, or proofread his material.
That’s Journalism 101 stuff!
Pro that Gable was, his words flow like honey.
Unlike mine, which too often ooze like sludge from a storm drain.
But I’m not complaining.
JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.