Remembering the old barn

RICHARD DUNN

Thursday was the final day in this old building. Walked in for the

last time. Tried to keep normalcy and routine. It wasn’t easy.

Today we start working in our new building at the LA Times plant

on Sunflower Avenue in Costa Mesa. Well, it’s not a new building, per

say, but it would be new for you, too, if you spent the major portion

of 23 years coming through the doors here at 330 W. Bay Street in

Costa Mesa and seeing the myriad changes from the time I started as a

sports stringer, i.e. part-timer, covering high school football and

basketball games under former Sports Editor Craig Sheff in the fall

of 1981.

In those autumn days, with my mind occupied with my sophomore year

at Orange Coast College and playing baseball under Coach Mike Mayne,

there were no computers in this newsroom. Only typewriters.

The next year, around Labor Day during the inaugural Op Pro

Surfing Classic at the Huntington Beach Pier, I was asked to cover

the event. I’ll never forget talking on the phone to Curt Seedan, a

former Pilot sportswriter, who informed me about the “new computers,”

aka video display terminals.

Every other newspaper around already had VDTs. Stringers at other

papers, some of those with whom I was attending college, would talk

about their sports department’s VDTs and, well, I was embarrassed to

admit that where yours truly was a stringer, there were only big,

old, smelly Smith Coronas. I mean, the early 1980s were a little

different with KROQ and skinny ties. But typewriters?

Anyhow, it was fun and easy to learn the new VDTs and start my

second season as a stringer here at the old Bay Street building. At

the time, I was a junior at the University of La Verne and decided to

major in journalism, while pursuing a baseball career.

Throughout the 1980s, I continued as a stringer. I was here and

there. Depending on the season. Mostly here. Even while playing in

the minor leagues, Sheff insisted I spin a weekly column on my

“trials and tribulations” in the Pioneer League for the Idaho Falls

Eagles and, the following season, for the Salt Lake City Trappers,

before getting sold to the Minnesota Twins.

My minor league career came to an end after spring training 1987

(the year the Twins won the World Series, and I tell people that’s

because they got rid of me). For the next three years, I was an

ardent full-time stringer, if you will, covering everything from the

Angels and Dodgers to USC and UCLA football. I was a Daily Pilot

stringer when I covered Kirk Gibson’s home run to win Game 1 of the

1988 World Series for the Dodgers.

Since the first weeks of 1990 when I was hired a full-time

sportswriter, I’ve perpetually taken the Newport and Harbor

boulevards to reach this beautiful old barn in a distinctive corner

of the world on Bay Street.

For years, I traversed back to these old digs. The stories are

endless. There are the late nights (i.e. early mornings, at about

1:30 a.m.) in the old newsroom (pre 1994) of hearing the newspaper

presses operating and softly rumbling the newsroom. We’d pop in the

press room and grab a freshly inked copy, then return to our desks

and admire our section (our puke over mistakes that were too late to

change).

Oh, sure, I’ll miss coming here after 23 years, but embracing

change is part of life and producing a newspaper we can admire is the

goal each day, no matter where our computers, or typewriters, are

placed.

As the memories here fade, the pressure-packed deadlines on a

nightly basis will remain on new turf.

The Daily Pilot is, and will continue to be, an institution in

Costa Mesa and Newport Beach, even as we usher in a new facility to

call home.