Memorable Scenes of Dad

One of my favorite scenes at home in Duarte was hanging out with my dad while he stood at the bar/kitchen counter that separated those two rooms, reading the LA Times or  LA's Herald Examiner.   He'd read the paper either standing inside the kitchen at the counter with the paper draped across the pink tile counter top or he'd sit at one of the two stools at the bar with his paper open wide atop the bar.  Regardless, he'd always have his radio playing, either classical music at 105.1FM with Tom Dixon hosting or on KFI an AM station far to the left of the dial that would play big band era music of his day.  My dad rarely talked at length of any of the articles that he read.  But he obviously had his favorites.  In Sports, it was Jim Murray.  I wonder what he thought following the reading of some piece on the front page.  He loved sports, so we generally knew his opinion on things.  Details like Steve Garvey working as a bat boy and taking the bus to his baseball assignment found affection in my dad.  It would seal for him the reasons behind loving the Garv!  No such stories existed for Ron Cey or Dusty Baker or Reggie Smith or even Davey Lopes, but the story played out well for Steve Garvey whose voice I still hear from time to time in Dodger commentary on some baseball or sports controversy. 

My dad was obsessed with reading the newspapers.  On any road trip to San Diego to San Francisco to Monterey to Morro Bay to Solvang to the Kern River or to downtown Los Angeles, he'd pick up a copy of the local paper [The Denver Post, The San Diego Union Tribune, a San Diego edition of The LA Times], and spend an hour or two delighting in and weighing in an author's turn of phrase.  To find a new twist of an old idea was rejuvenating gold.  Here is an example from Bill Dwyre, printed in the golf magazine, FORE.  

Fortunately, we got Murray in the prime of print media. Most fortunate were those of us who were golfers. He wrote about every sport. He romanced golf. He turned its terminology into life descriptions. Of Jack Nicklaus, after his late-in-life Masters victory in 1986, he wrote: “He is not going gently into that good night. He is going to eagle it.” Of the venerable Sam Snead, after another victory when he should have been much too old to achieve such a thing, Murray wrote: “Sam Snead’s career is now running neck and neck with the Ice Age as an historical era.”

I became sports editor of The Los Angeles Times in 1981, which meant I was Jim Murray’s boss. To even type that is a joke. Murray needed a boss like a headache needs a noisy neighbor. He knew what to write, when to write it and, how to write it better and more creatively than any other sports writer on the planet.

I came from The Milwaukee Journal. Murray was a legend in Wisconsin, too. His syndication took him to most states and more than 150 newspapers, including the morning Milwaukee Sentinel. You read Murray before you went to work. If the paperboy was late, so were you. He would eventually win every sports-writing honor offered and also, about 15 years after he should have, a Pulitzer Prize.

So, it was against this background that, when I called my mother, an avid Murray reader back in Wisconsin, to tell her I had been promoted to sports editor of The Los Angeles Times, I had the following exchange:

Me: “Mom, they just announced I will be the new sports editor.”

Mom: “How wonderful, dear. (long pause). Ah, does that mean you are Jim Murray’s boss now?”

Me: “Well, kind of, I guess.”

Mom: (another long pause) “Oh, good Lord. Are you sure they haven’t made a mistake?”