THE FRED COLUMN

Fred Martin

I was probably more surprised than you when I read Bill Lobdell’s

Editor’s Notebook column last week.

Wow! What a shock. No, not Bill moving onward and upward with the Times

organization; that’s long overdue. But that he and Greer are expecting

their o7 fourthf7 little Lobdell!

Of course, having done a little moving of my own last year, I can’t

expect to be in on all the gossip. Bill and I greeted each other when I

dropped into the newsroom during a couple of brief visits to Newport over

the past 14 months, but we didn’t have time to chat in any depth.

Last spring, when I saw the extent of the growth at the Pilot, I thought

of Bugsy Seigel coming back to Las Vegas after all these years since he

was whacked in the living room of his moll’s house in Beverly Hills. He

wouldn’t believe his eyeballs.

Used to be, there was so much empty space in the Pilot newsroom, you

could hunt ducks without hitting anybody. Last visit, the place was

jammed. Bill’s column said there were 22 papers in the family now,

employing some 300 people. Now that is a big-time operation and it takes

a big-time person to run it properly.

Bill Lobdell is a big-time guy.

I remember reading the article about him when he joined the Pilot, 10

years ago come January. Good grief, this kid’s going to run my favorite

newspaper and I have daughters his age!

Four months later, he was my boss. One of Bill’s first acts as editor was

to launch a contest to discover the Pilot’s new, “Page 3 columnist.”

Every day for weeks there was a blurb in the paper hyping the

competition.

At the time, I had a small advertising agency with a few excellent

clients. I did well enough that we could keep a nice sailboat in a

Newport Beach slip and pay eight consecutive years of college tuition.

What more is there?

But things had become sweaty. Within two months, I’d lost my two biggest

clients through corporate mergers. So, hey, why not? I wrote an overlong

blurb about myself and entered the columnist bake-off. Eventually, I won.

My mother was ecstatic because she could finally understand what it was I

did for a living.

I was hired to write four columns a week. Though I’d lived in Newport for

25 years, I was not what you’d call well-connected around town and

finding good column fodder was tough.

Bill shortly afterward also hired Jerry Kobrin, which got him into a spot

of trouble. Jim Wood had been writing a column before Bill came on board.

Then I came, then Jerry. Male, male, male.

After about four months, Bill called me in one day, told me what a great

job I was doing -- and would I mind cutting back from four columns to

three?

“I’m getting heat because we don’t have a woman columnist,” Bill said.

I leaped at the opportunity. The amount of time I had to put in to come

up with four weekly columns made my hourly something like $1.37. Of

course, what didn’t occur to me until later was that I was voluntarily

cutting 25% out of my rice bowl.

While Bill and I don’t always agree on issues, the only real argument we

ever had came when the paper decided to restrict its coverage to Costa

Mesa and Newport. No more Huntington Beach, no Fountain Valley, no

Laguna, no Irvine.

I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek column bemoaning these new

limitations. I wondered, for example, what might happen if someone on the

Newport side of Von Karman got into a shootout with someone across the

street in Irvine? Would we report both sides of the story? Would we

identify only the Newporter and not the Irviner?

Spiking is the newspaper term for an editor yanking a story, for space,

libel or other reasons. In this case, Bill flat didn’t like what I had

written. “I’ve had nothing but heat on this all week,” he told me, “and I

don’t need any more!”

The column ran anyway. Seems one of the nightside editors came to work

and saw my column wasn’t in its accustomed place in the page layout. So

the editor found the column in the computer and put it where it was

supposed to be.

I guess Bill had a closed-door session with the transgressing makeup

editor, but when he and I talked, he was laughing about the snafu. “It

was actually a pretty good column,” he said.

High praise from a newspaperman, and friend, I respect very much.

* FRED MARTIN is a former Newport Beach resident who now writes from his

home in Fort Collins, Colo. His column appears Wednesdays.