Getting Started
Forty two years ago today, Sept. 1, 1981, for those of you counting, I began my first job in journalism. I was a reporter at the Fontana Herald News, a then 4,000-circulation, six-day-a-week newspaper in Southern California, two towns west of San Bernardino.
A man died that day.
I’d barely been learning the computers (they were so old-school the screen was about six inches square) when the call came in about the dead body at the Kaiser Steel plant. Kaiser, the only start-to-finish steel plant west of the Mississippi River, was the lifeblood of Fontana and the surrounding unincorporated parts. At its height, the plant employed some 8,000 people. The city’s population at the time was 40,000. I was hired to be the Kaiser reporter. In addition to being police reporter, education reporter and many others. At a small paper, you wore many hats. A few months in, we had layoffs—the newsroom shrunk from three to two reporters.
Anyway, the man who died had fallen some 60 feet from a platform. The plant was in the unincorporated area, so the Sheriff’s Office would be investigating the death. I remember walking into the detectives’ room—all bright and young and eager and full of nervous energy and with the think-a-mile-a-minute analytical nature I carried with me at the time (and probably still do; no wait, definitely still do)—and asking the veteran sergeant in charge if the victim died from the fall.
Now, that was a legitimate question, I thought; somewhere, I’d heard about people having heart attacks, that kind of thing. And to my surprise, the sergeant agreed with my thinking.
“No,” he said, so completely deadpan that it drew the attention of the five detective deputies in the room. “It was the sudden stop.”
Welcome to journalism, Les.
Today, the Herald News is a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 14,000. Fontana has a population of 210,000. And the old steel plant, which closed not long after I left the Herald News for a job at the Bridgeport Post and Telegram in Connecticut, has been transformed into Auto Club Speedway, a NASCAR track.
As for me, well, I still get to write, even with my full-time job being clinical mental health counselor.
Oh yeah, and that poor steel plant worker who lost his life that day? Well, the autopsy came in three months later. It turns out he’d been improvising a makeshift tool with another worker on the platform when everything went wrong. The torque from a steel rod that got loose struck the worker and sent him right off the platform. The autopsy said the blow killed him instantly.