A Chapter Ends, but the People and Their Stories Will Be Remembered

I just cleaned out my desk.

I’m not sure how to feel.

My fingertips are black from sorting through thousands of clippings of stories I wrote for The Times.

My hair is full of dust, and my head aches dully; the job-ending ritual made me realize there’s a lot more to sort out than clippings.

After 17 years in newspapers and more than seven at the Ventura County edition of The Times, I am leaving them both.

Next month, I start a new job as a news editor/producer in Orange County, where I will be helping to launch an Internet news service.

The fresh challenge in a fledgling medium excites me. But the act of leaving behind a place that has been so rich in news, so flush with raw memory, has left me at odds with my emotions.

How do I describe what my time in Ventura County meant? I try cataloging:

I interviewed gangbangers, pawnbrokers, movie model makers, psychotic killers and politicians both honest and crooked.

I saw dolphins playing, Alzheimer’s patients struggling, houses collapsing.

I smelled jet fuel at Point Mugu, chicken guano at Egg City, salt air and hydrazine at Seacliff, blooming orange trees and burning manzanita in Santa Paula.

I heard the roar of engine tests at Rocketdyne and the sobs of a Simi Valley mother left childless by her suicidal husband’s murderous rage.

I listened to the songs of kids celebrating the groundbreaking for a new school, the Martian thunder of amped-up teenagers playing laser tag, the skirl of bagpipes bidding too many slain cops farewell.

The county lived, and I watched.

Dutifully, I took notes.

Miles of red and black and blue ink jutted and curled through hundreds of my tattered spiral notebooks--bearing witness to murder trials, catastrophic floods, artistic epiphanies.

But these lists I make, the notes I kept, the clippings I am filing away don’t help. What Ventura County gave me is still too slippery to define, too bulky to be alphabetized or categorized.

So I try to dig for deeper revelations.

California taught a lot to this Rust Belt boy, who grew up in small-town Connecticut and cut his journalistic teeth on the grit and bustle of big-city newspapers in Hartford and Philadelphia.

For one thing, the true nature of natural disasters sprang into vivid focus.

I knew nothing of brush fires. Until one almost killed me and Times photographer Bob Carey as it roared through Santa Barbara and devoured more than 500 houses right before our smoke-stung eyes.

I had never seen a mudslide. Until tons of rain-sodden cliff collapsed onto La Conchita, flattened people’s houses and left me slogging through ankle-deep mud for a week to record the damage.

I had never felt a major earthquake. Until the ground tossed me out of bed, dumped my cupboards onto the kitchen floor and sent me bleary and unshaven across the shattered world to cover the devastation in Simi Valley, Fillmore and Piru.

When I came to The Times in March 1990 to help fire up the new Ventura County edition, my boss, Bill Overend, offered a caveat:

Ventura County is fascinating, Bill told me. There’s a lot of oil-prospecting history here, plenty of social issues in the poorer and richer neighborhoods, a bustling agricultural market and loads of intriguing cases in the courts. But you’re a city boy, you might go out of your mind with boredom up here.

The city boy--like the rest of his new colleagues--had only begun to discover just how rich and busy this sun-blessed place could be. It was an honor helping shape the way this new edition covered it all.

At times, the work was fascinating.

Rogues and innocents trudged through sensational criminal trials in Ventura County’s courts:

Gregory Scott Smith went to death row for kidnapping and murdering little Paul Bailly. Kevin Jon Kolodziej went to a mental institution for stabbing elderly Ventura resident Velasta Johnson.

Father David Dean Piroli was acquitted of charges that he had stolen more than $60,000 in collection money from his own Simi Valley parish. And now Diana Haun faces life in prison for murdering Ventura mother Sherri Dally.

I covered a speech by King Hussein of Jordan, met the Beach Boys and Nancy Reagan, shook hands with George McGovern and Tony Duquette.

For what now seems like a brief period, I enjoyed the supreme privilege--known only to newspaper reporters--of fully plugging into the main power cables of a big, colorful, dizzyingly diverse community.

Now I have to unplug and move on. And I still haven’t figured it all out.

Maybe only when the current’s off, when time begins to haze over the friendship of cops and judges, shopkeepers and teenagers, and of the most decent, hard-working colleagues I have ever known. Maybe only then will I be able to understand what Ventura County gave me.

For now, I’m just trying to find a way not to wash the ink off my fingers.

*

Staff writer Mack Reed left The Times on Oct. 24.