Remembering the Her-Ex

 This entry on Rip Post is so accurate it's scary. I worked there in the late 80s right up until the last day. (that's me in the back row holding a cigarette)

Let us now turn to the departed L.A. Herald-Examiner, in late ‘70’s and early 80’s, where the only stability was instability. This was newsroom as chaos theory. When I was first offered a job there, I looked around the place and turned it down. Picture: rows of ancient metal desks with reporters shouting into phones, shouting at editors, banging on old Royal and Olympia mechanical typewriters, waiting in line to use the dozen-or-so computers available (waiting in line to make deadlines!), smoking (cigarettes, cigars, pipes), cursing, running to move cars so they didn’t get parking tickets. Bus diesel blew in through opened windows, past Venetian blinds not changed since the ‘40’s or ‘50’s. I later came to my senses and took the job.
          The Her-Ex at that time was a Mardis Gras of union disputes, threatened strikes, city editor reshuffling, section redesign, occasional physical confrontation, and extremely hard work. Duly legendary editor-in-chief Jim Bellows stocked the place with free-spirits, top-to-bottom. As I’m fond of saying, even the assholes were talented. There were no weak personalities there. They would not have lasted long. Top reporters’ salary: about five bills a week. Most made four or less. Imported big-gun (highly paid) columnists worked right in the newsroom with the mostly kid reporters.
          I recall an editorial clash being resolved, more or less, by a reporter shot-putting a typewriter into a wall. Then there were the occasional sleepover parties, when cots were rolled in during periods when strikes were feared, so management could live on the premises if necessary. One city editor regularly returned from lunch very hyped up and sniffling a lot. A columnist came to work a few times in drag (he was writing a lot about transvestites at the time.)
          One horrid day in 1980, we all arrived to find that our friend and colleague, Sarai Ribicoff, had been murdered in a robbery. A couple of months later, the newsroom drafted me to write a letter to Rolling Stone criticizing an article about the murder for RS freelanced by a Her-Ex columnist. Being idealistic and stupid (often the same thing), I wrote the letter, and was later attacked in the newsroom by the columnist, who first tried to choke me to death over a dictionary (poetic!), then pummeled me in the face, head, and neck until a copyboy and city editor Larry Burrough pulled him off. 30! (Yes, I threw one punch in retaliation, but, sad to say, it did no harm.) When the supervising editor refused to come to my aid, I called the cops. They came to the newsroom, did their interviews, and were given milk and cookies.
          Then I went back to work.
          There was a rumor that a reporter fired a pistol in the office, but that was before my time. (The late City Hall reporter Mike Qualls was said to have one strapped to his calf.) There were very few neckties at the Her-Ex, and decidedly not-couture apparel among the ladies (fashion editors excepted.) Half the staff was in and out of Corky’s Bar across the street all day and night, some of them puking in the gutter before going back to meet a deadline. Irreverence, irony, sarcasm, and Pepto-Bismol were exalted.
          Small wonder that the paper poked fun at The Times, calling it “The Whale” in its “Page Two” column. Small wonder, also, that the Her-Ex beat the Times in several L.A. Press Club competitions in those years, in total number of awards.
          Point being: that place felt like a newspaper. A roiling, percolating den of ideas and disputes, with news-beats kind of spilling over into each other. We did a great job in spite of---or because of---“instability.” Once again, John Carroll:
          The more worried everyone got, the better the work seemed to get.