There were a bunch of “Wayne-isms” in our first newsroom out of college. The newspaper was in a cop-firefighter sleepy suburb, Simi Valley, later to become notorious as the California town with a jury that gave the Rodney King cops a walk.
The newspaper was lofty: The Enterprise, Sun & News, a shotgun marriage of old chamber of commerce shoppers blended into a fledgling almost-daily paper distributed to newly incorporated suburbanites in the mid-1970s.
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Richard Nixon had recently left the White House, and for one, brief shining moment, a couple of reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the equivalent of rock stars in campus newsrooms across the nation.
The Enterprise editor was Wayne Lee, and his signature remarks replay themselves in our inner ears over generations.
One was, “If you hear your mother loves you, check it out.”
One time, when Wayne was out of town, we all raced around the newsroom putting out a four-page “Extra!” edition (the only one I have ever done).
The “Extra!” was about a levee that looked like it was going to break up during heavy seasonal rains. It could have flooded some homes.
The levee held. We raced back to our desks, adrenaline pumping from putting out an “Extra,” photos, stories, description about what a levee is, and so on.
Wayne returned from his outing and commented, ‘”Extra!” Huh. … What’re ya gonna do when a levee does break?”
We groaned. And roared about our overblown news call over beers at Elmer’s, a cop and postal worker bar straight out of “Cheers.”
Wayne was a former roughneck out of the Texas oil fields, a Golden Gloves boxer and a TV ad salesman who broke into newspapers without any training in his late twenties. That’s the way it used to work.
You do not need licensure or degree to commit journalism.
Wayne’s flagship paper, The Hutchinson News of Hutchinson, Kansas, won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in the early 1970s on as bland a topic as reapportionment. But the series, which Wayne had a hand in as managing editor, showed that farm voters outweighed town voters, and that wasn’t fair. It brought in changes in the Legislature.
That’s the way it used to work, too. Newspapers found out about something, and somehow, through a variety of processes, a “wrong” got righted. It was right makes right, not might makes right.
Another “Wayneism:” He told us about how he had found out about payoffs with some giant health care provider and members of the Legislature, and he called his crusty old editor (all of them were crusty and old in those days), and said, “For $500, I can get the goods on these guys!”
Instead of looking for the cash drawer, the editor told him, “Use your charm.”
So, when Hal DeKeyser and I, the “Woodstein” reporter pups of the Enterprise went rushing to Wayne for some booze money to loosen up a source, what do you think we were told?
Use our charm.
He showed us about getting the interviews, and getting the goods without ever resorting to opening up our wallets.
He also showed up about the newspaper cardinal sin of assuming. Assumption can kill you. Or, somebody.
We were an afternoon paper, of which there used to be many, and so the pages got pasted down early in the a.m., and Hal, the reporter several months senior to me, was in charge of finishing the paper that a.m.
He called for “one more story” and “one more headline.”
I squeezed together a couple of inches off a cops-and-fire report about a guy who had a propane tank blow up in his face.
The headline was “Propane blast kills man” and the paper shipped off to the out-of-town printer for the early run. Our neighbor paper had the press, then.
A few hours later, the editor was reading the edition, that was Wayne. He looked over to my senior partner, “Hal, is this guy dead?”
Hal looked a little quizzical, then looked at me. I had shouted the headline across the newsroom to the production room. In other words, I owned it.
One of us shrugged, and one of us, me, I think, said, “Propane tanks blew up in his face. It sounds fatal?!”
Then Wayne laconically related to us that he thought he just got a phone call from the dead man.
He looked at Hal and Texan-drawled, “Hal, now ‘yer gonna learn about something called … public relations.”
My lead to the next day’s edition cited Mark Twain and his obituary remark that rumors of his demise were greatly … you know the rest.
Wayne was fun, and funny. He was also wise, and could be hard. Indisputably fair. He looked like a mash-up of Genghis Khan (moustache) with Moe’s haircut from the Three Stooges. But he was no stooge. He was all savvy.
And he did the best thing an editor, as mentor, to any young journalists could ever do. He backed their play. If it was true, and it needed to come out, we could do it.
We went after a story on some housing fraud that he had tipped us too. And we went after a police chief who was running a Vegas travel agency from his office desk at city hall.
Wayne was folksy. The guy even commissioned a folk song from a local singer about “the sun, and the fun, and the blues in the Enterprise, Sun and News.”
To Wayne, news was a song, and a poem. He taught us to love and respect what we did, and to be accountable when we got it wrong, and to be proud when we got it right.
I remembered Wayne the other night when I saw a re-run episode of “The Lou Grant Show,” the best TV show ever done about newspapers and news rooms. It turned up on Hulu, a digital retrieval mini-miracle that would have delighted Wayne as much as he would have been puzzled about the slide of big newspapers.
“Lou Grant” was about a curmudgeon editor sent back to newspapers from exile as a TV manager. His newspaper was about righting wrongs.
In this episode, a wily former colleague cons Lou and a couple of reporters into an all-paid expense account trip to go to the Caribbean and find a fugitive billionaire of Howard Hughes type.
The colleague, a known rogue, gets the boys to buy new white suits, liquors them up, and they all wake up on the floor of an expensive hotel room with the publisher, Mrs. Pynchon, a Katherine Graham lookalike, inquiring testily by long distance if the editor and his reporters are awake.
Lou wiped the crust out of his eyes, heavily hung over and spoke into the phone, “I’m awake, m’aam. In fact, I’m dressed.”
He was still in last night’s con-artist rumpled suit.
Wayne laughed out loud at that one. And said, “Yeah, I did that. Got a call from the editor, and I said, ‘Yes, I’m up. I’m dressed!”
That was a younger Wayne, on the hunt, hung over, interested, investigating.
Wayne’s news room exits were legend, too, but that really is another bunch of stories.
We were lucky, then. A couple of years after Woodward and Bernstein courted the impeachment of a president who had done high crimes and misdemeanors, we had an editor, an authentically wise man, who would show us the difference between a high crime or misdemeanor, whether in journalism, or law.
Such birds were rare then. They are rarer now.
-Dennis Anderson, Editor, Antelope Valley Press
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