ShareThisIt was the day after Labor Day in 1960 -- exactly a half-century ago -- when a 16-year-old kid climbed very steep, rickety stairs into the newsroom of the Humboldt Times in Eureka, Calif. to begin a $50-a-week job as a copyboy.
That takes some explanation. Copyboys were go-fers whose job was to do whatever the boss wanted done. Sometimes that meant carrying copy -- typewritten pages of newspaper stories -- to the composing room, but it could also mean fetching coffee or cigarettes.
In that era, but soon to change, newspapering was more a blue-collar trade than a quasi-profession and few reporters went to college, much less journalism school. So being a copyboy was a way to get one's foot in the door -- an apprenticeship of sorts.
I was that kid, a month shy of my 17th birthday, what's now called an "emancipated minor," attending high school by day and working at night. I sat, watched and jumped when Hodge, the boss, yelled, "Boy!" I loved everything about it.
By and by, I was given a few minor stories that the raffish, hard-drinking regular reporters shunned. I apparently did all right, because a year later I became a police reporter. That was even more fun in a hard-edged town with a big red light district -- going to crime scenes, kibitzing with cops, wandering through the jail talking to prisoners.
The job, the all-night, penny-ante poker games and girlfriends were such diversions that high school became just a grind. In theory I could have graduated, but I lacked one required class (civics, ironically). Sitting in a classroom was boring, so I just stopped going.
After a few years in Eureka, I longed for greener pastures and became a bit of a vagabond, moving every few years from one small paper to the next, first as a reporter and then as an editor, becoming a boss myself, editor of the Hanford Sentinel, at the ripe old age of 22.
However, after a falling-out with a publisher over principle, I needed a job to support my family and landed at the now-defunct Sacramento Union, going into its Capitol bureau in 1975, just as Jerry Brown became governor.
I started writing a daily political column in 1981, shifted to The Bee in 1984 and nearly three decades, about 7,500 columns and a couple of books later, I'm still doing business at the same lemonade stand.
Newspapering has undergone radical technological, economic and professional change, but mostly for the better -- more ethical, more comprehensive, more confrontational -- and I'm proud to still be part of it, or as Paul Simon sang, "still crazy after all these years."
When asked about retirement, I usually reply that geezers have hobbies and this is mine - both a joke and the truth. I get paid to scratch my itch of curiosity about what makes California tick and to critique its politicians.
What's not to like?
(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service
ColumnMust credit Sacramento Bee
