LOOKING BACK

Young Chang

Joan Crum visited the Daily Pilot last week and asked, shyly, whether

we’d be interested in the picture she held in her hand.

It was a mustard-colored clipping of a photo that ran in our paper on

Dec. 2, 1971. It had darkened with time and perhaps even become fuzzier.

In the foreground was a side view of the Statue of Liberty. Behind that,

to the right, stood the World Trade Center towers.

Those of us from the newsroom who met Crum downstairs stared, at the

clippings in awe. It was strange, in a good but eerie way, to witness the

two buildings as they once stood. Stranger even still was the fact that

this photo had run in the Pilot a good three decades ago and had been

saved, for some reason, by a sweet little lady who wondered if we might

want it back.

This week’s history column will be the story of Crum and why she saved

a reprint of what has now become two of the tallest losses ever.

“I wanted to share it with other people,” the longtime Costa Mesan

said. “I didn’t want to just leave it here and stick it in a book or

something.”

Crum, a retired employee of Waterloo Galleries (they make miniatures),

was in the business of reconstructing little figurines in the early ‘70s.

Her boss at the time wanted Crum to redo the Statue of Liberty -- her job

was to cast the figure in lead and restructure it in wax. So the Pilot

reader clipped every photo of the Statue she could find, including the

one in our paper because it offered a side view of the famous lady.

“I needed to find out how the drapes fell,” Crum, 76, said.

Though the Pilot now covers only Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and UC

Irvine, we used to run stories and photos by the Associated Press and

United Press International to cover national and international events in

addition to local happenings.

Crum’s photo was a reprint of a UPI Telephoto. The Pilot had run it,

the caption tells us, because the towers were still two years away from

being completed at the time.

Reams of wire stories and pictures would spit through a spider-armed

apparatus called the Linotype machine that went “clackety clack” back in

the ‘70s and ‘80s, said the Pilot’s Sports Editor Roger Carlson, who

started working here in 1968.

The paper’s focus changed in 1991, concentrating coverage on

Newport-Mesa, Carlson added.

When asked why she saved the photo after using it, Crum answered

simply:

“I’m a collector.”

She’s the type who can’t just throw things away, who keeps everything

from her daughter’s baby toys to photographs from magazines and

newspapers to use in her artwork, which she still does as a hobby.

She stored the clipping in a Waterloo Galleries box and placed it in

the garage 30 years ago. Last week, Crum and her daughter were sorting

through old boxes when they came across the Pilot photo.

“And no other pictures showed the Trade Centers,” Crum said. “They

were mainly the heads of the Statue of Liberty.”

The collector suddenly giggled.

“And my daughter used to kid me about saving everything . . .” she

mused.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at young.chang@latimes.com; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.