With Smokers’ Last Bastion Besieged, Old Ally Defecting

It’s always a little dangerous to write about an issue where you know a good portion of your audience won’t be happy about your sentiments. But I’m starting to change my mind about smoking.

I’ve never been a smoker, but I’d always been a big defender of smokers’ rights. Years ago when a group in our newsroom wanted a no-smoking section, I thought they were being silly. Then, when the whole newsroom went no-smoke, I thought it simply unfair to those who couldn’t write without a cigarette dangling from their mouths.

But after the smoke was gone, I discovered I really liked having the cleaner air. (Surprise: It didn’t keep anybody from writing.) Gradually, I find my smokers’ defense slipping away. I absolutely love having restaurants smoke-free--and airplanes and public buildings.

Now at issue is the smokers’ last great stand: bars and taverns. How can you relax in a bar without a cigarette? Or a good cigar? To smokers, it would be like saying a bar can’t serve alcohol. If you don’t like smoke in bars, you can bet that side is saying, then don’t go in them.

The Laguna Hills City Council tonight will consider whether to run ahead of a new state law--now on hold--that will prohibit smoking in bars. If this goes through, the county would see its first smoke-free taverns. (The council is also going after patio smoking at restaurants.)

I’ve got a suggestion for smokers: Give it a chance; it’s the wave of the future. And if this passes and you head to a bar in Laguna Hills, take a lot of gum with you.

Quick Look Back: Last week I wrote about an old photograph on the wall of Pop’s Cafe in downtown Santa Ana. Taken in 1939, it depicted seven motorcycle police officers. Santa Ana Police Lt. Felix Osuna was so taken with the photograph, he got some of his colleagues together to duplicate it in the exact location at the Bowers Museum.

Evelyn Hershey of Tustin didn’t know the picture existed. But after reading about it, she hurried down for a look. One of those 1939 officers depicted was her late husband, B.A. Hershey, who later became Santa Ana’s police chief. He died in 1954.

Evelyn Hershey then went to the police station to meet the young lieutenant who took the time to honor her husband and his fellow officers. To her delight, Osuna gave her a copy of the 1939 picture he’d had made. He asked if she could get him a picture of her husband in uniform. “I told him I’d get him a copy of the one I have on my night stand,” she said.

Old photographs don’t lose their magic, do they?

Quick Look II: When I recently described Masters victor Tiger Woods--raised and educated in Orange County--as a fine young man, I was prepared for some dissent. The young golfer had been quoted recently in GQ magazine saying a few off-color things not likely to make his mother proud of him. As expected, several readers brought that up.

It’s true that at age 21 you often say things you’d rather not see in print. But in response, I’d like to share with you something Tiger Woods wrote when he was 19. After completing his first Masters in Augusta, Ga., as an amateur, he sent the membership of the golf club this letter:

“Please accept my sincere thanks for providing me the opportunity to experience the most wonderful week of my life. I was treated like a gentleman throughout my stay, and I trust I responded in kind. It was here that I left my youth behind and became a man. For that, I will be eternally in your debt.”

Not a lot of teenagers would remember to write a thank you letter, or express such sincere sentiments. To me, that is a fine young man.

Wrap-Up: The best friend I ever had in the newspaper business, Bill Billiter of Huntington Beach, died on Saturday. Bill raised grace and selflessness to new levels in the newsroom. I’ve never known anyone so beloved by his colleagues.

I first knew him by reputation when I was a reporter for the afternoon Louisville (Ky.) Times. Bill was the political writer for the companion morning paper, the Courier-Journal. It was the state’s largest newspaper; he was its most powerful journalist. Yet, he was so unassuming. He carried the most requisite quality for a newspaper writer: He listened, because he really did care what people had to say.

In the mid-1970s Bill became city editor of the afternoon Louisville paper. The first direct assignment he gave me was to send me to raging flood waters of southeastern Kentucky. It was a dramatic event that required working through the night and filing my story by telephone just after full daylight. I was terribly beat and told the morning editor I couldn’t wait to hit a motel pillow.

“Guess again,” the editor said. “Billiter’s got you a seat on the governor’s helicopter tour of the flood damage this morning.”

As a reporter, Bill never knew how to cover any story except all-out; as an editor, he assumed his reporters would do the same. The friendship that developed from that inauspicious introduction became so endearing that my wife and I eventually followed Bill and his wife to California. Bill had joined the Los Angeles Times in 1978.

As much as he loved his native Kentucky, Bill took to California as if he were born for it. He embraced all it had to offer--the sea, the desert, its great weather for outdoor activities, and especially its history. New and lasting friendships would spring up everywhere he turned. (People from all walks of life called throughout the day Monday to share their warm remembrances of him.) Yet, Bill’s greatest joy, as it was in Louisville, was his family.

Bill was just 62 when he died. No sentence that I’m capable of putting together on my own can describe what a loss the entire Orange County Edition of The Times feels this week. I can barely retain a coherent thought when I pass his empty desk. So forgive me for resorting to the words of another, the great playwright Moss Hart, upon a dear friend’s death:

Part of our loss is that we will never again know his wonderful uniqueness; nature doesn’t toss his kind up too often. But part of our solace is that we were lucky enough to have known him--that he lived in our time.

As my colleague Rene Lynch and I shared our stunned and shaky states of mind in the newsroom the night of Bill’s death, she said something that likely summed up how all his friends felt: “Bill’s life was a great success.”