Lord Jim

He was easy to spot, strolling along at that ambling gait, somewhere between the rolling walk of a sailor and the swagger of an Irish lord.

There he would be, his hands stuffed into the pockets of the disreputable, rumpled corduroy jacket, the end of one leg of his wrinkled gabardine slacks half-stuffed into the top of one of his scuffed Justin cowboy boots.

His hair, always about two weeks overdue for a trim would hang down over his collar, framing the face strangers would tell him reminded them of Marlon Brando.

I got my first look at him in the waning days of the 1950s in Brawley. I was moving on to greener and hopefully cooler fields after a year or so as the city editor-then managing editor of the Brawley News, a struggling 4,000-copy daily that was being sapped of its income and spirit by the owner of a string of desert dailies.

In those days the Brawley News was published in the plant of at a sister paper in El Centro.
I had a week or so to show Jim around and train him in the intricacies of editing the paper, a chore that had to be done by 10:30 each morning. If that deadline was ever missed, it would not only mean the Brawley News papers would not be ready for its circulation manager to load into the Army surplus Jeep trailer for transport to its readers, but the sister paper in El Centro would be put into a bind.

For several days I had Jim shadow me as I went through the process of ripping the wire stories from the teletype machines, hastily reading them, the sports stories and copy for the society page, laying out pages, writing headlines and sending it all out for the early pages. That was followed by somewhat the same process for the front and jump pages, last the go to the printer.

Most of the time, Jim was engaging me in pleasant conversation, but it seemed he had no clue as to what he was to be doing. I feared that my departure from the paper would trigger the first incident in Brawley News history when the readers not only received their papers late, but mght get no paper at all.

Two days before I was to leave, I decided to give Jim a test run. I went through a hurried review of his duties early that morning and sent him on down to El Centro, where he would do the editor’s job. I stuck around the newsroom in Brawley for a few hours, worrying about the problems that would be created by this guy who didn’t seem to be paying attention to me.

Finally, about 9:30 a.m. or so I couldn’t stand it and drove down to El Centro. When I walked in the newsroom at a little after 10, I was shocked to see the Brawley News editor’s desk was unmanned. I was stewing over ways I could salvage the day’s edition in less than half an hour, when the door to the newsroom opened and in walked Jim.

I was about ready to rake him over the coals when one of the El Centro editors walked over and complimented Jim for his work. He had finished everything almost half an hour early, apparently with no problems at all.

That was the way he was, a calm, cool, efficient newsman.
Although we had only worked together a week or so in Brawley, I stayed in touch with Jim, who married a Brawley widow who was the Brawley News’ office manager.

***



Up the hill in Victorville


A few years later, when I was editing a twice-weekly in Victorville and found myself in need of a No. 2 newsie to help with the job, I thought of Jim.

I tried to call him in Brawley, but his wife told me he had just taken a job at a grubby little weekly in Compton, one of the 15 or so papers within the McGiffin chain, which published most of the community papers on the south side of the Los Angeles area. It didn’t take much arm twisting on the phone to get him to agree to join me at Victorville, particularly when he found out the pay was much better.

It was in Victorville I discovered another side of Jim; his sparkling wit even when things would be going poorly. Putting out a twice weekly with two newsies, a part-time photographer and a handful of correspondents was hard work.

It was always a challenge to produce enough stories and photos for the growing paper. Toward the deadline period, it was my habit to tell Jim it was time to ``get out the copy crank’‘ and start cranking.

One morning I came back to my desk and found that Jim had fashioned a crank from cardboard and hooked it on the lever end of my Underwood typewriter, adding a similar one to his mill. Another time, when he was handling the darkroom chores, he tossed a pile of pictures on my desk for editing. I was about halfway through the stack when I was frozen by one: Jim Jeffress in triplicate in the ``hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil’‘ pose. Sometime during his work when I was not in, he had managed to put the camera on a tripod and shoot a triple exposure to produce it.

He was such a wag, that when he suffered a back seizure on deadline day and was bent over his desk in pain, saying he couldn’t move, I thought he was putting me on – something we took turns doing quite frequently.

Finally, when he convinced me of his plight, we had to get help several people from the shop and office to help pick up his chair, with him in it, and carrying him half a block to a chiropractor’s office.

A few months later, when my relations with the general manager soured and I left, Jim stayed as my replacement. We stayed in touch.

My path led back to Ontario and the sister paper from which I had been lured to Victorville. From there, I made my way to the San Diego Union, north to Alaska and the Fairbanks News-Miner and then to the Wrangell Sentinel and Petersburg Press.

Economic bad times forced another move, this one to a press secretary’s job for U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C. Carrying the distinction of being the only press secretary ever fired by a senator, I found myself jobless in Ramona.

After several months of fruitless job search, I found myself with several job offers – as a reporter for a startup paper in Beverly Hills, a future editor of a twice-weekly in Auburn, a city editor for a three-times-a-week in the Puget Sound area and a reporter-desk combo job in Bakersfield.. It was at that point that I heard from Jim Jeffress again.

He was a copy editor at the San Jose Mercury and told me they were looking for someone on the desk there.

I landed the job and Jim and I become best buddies for the next six years.


Next: Adventures in the city at the end of the Bay