PILOT MEMORIES

The Daily Pilot asked former reporters and editors to share their favorite memories of covering Newport-Mesa.

“Dick [Nall, my city editor] taught me how to write a straight-ahead news story. He’d invite me to his house at night or on weekends and give me tutorials. He was my first real mentor, and I loved him dearly for it. Even if, once every week or so, my biggest assignment of the day was to run down to City Hall, pay his parking tickets, and on the way back stop at the liquor store and buy some more cigars. It was my pleasure.”

Staff writer from 1968 to 1969, former editor for the Los Angeles Times and now editor for the Las Vegas Sun

“The Daily Pilot was the perfect training ground for young reporters. We had Tom Murphine, Chuck Loos and Dick Nall editing all our copy, occasionally ripping it out of our manual typewriters as we typed, tossing copy back on our desk and shouting, ‘Your lead is in the last graph. Fix it!’ ... Working successfully with three editors became an art form. If Chuck Loos tossed a story back on your desk and said, ‘Break this lead into two paragraphs,’ you’d do it. But then Dick Nall might get the next version and throw it at you, growling, ‘Make that lead one graph, not two.’ That’s when you’d take both versions, toss them in the copy bucket and say, “Here, you guys figure it out.”

— Steve Mitchell

“When Nixon left office and Ford was named president, the L.A. Times ran a story one morning about his mother and stepfather. It mentioned in the story that he had a stepmother and stepsister on Balboa Island. So I was in the Newport Beach bureau, and my editor called me and said, ‘Read the Times this morning. See if you can find these people and do a story.’ They were listed in the phone book, so I called them up, gave them my sweet little Southern voice. They graciously agreed. I drove over there, and probably for the only time in the history of the world, I found a parking space on Balboa Island in front of their house. I raced over to the Daily Pilot, wrote the story, turned it in, and it was in the paper that afternoon.”

Reporter and editor from 1973 to 1980

“We had a tradition that we did an April Fools’ story each April 1, and the first one we did was a story on the fact that they had made a wave machine off the coast and it was going to pump in these perfect pipeline waves to boost tourism. So many people bought that story. We’d get calls for six months after that from people trying to track down where the wave machine was. We did the April Fools story about four years, and we stopped when the Times bought us. They didn’t think it was that funny.”

editor from 1990 to 2000