PHOTO ESSAY "Christmas Time Around The World:" Recent Images from The Atlantic

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11. I had the GREAT honor of working with him when I was at the AP in L.A.

Last edited Thu Dec 27, 2012, 07:08 PM - Edit history (1)

It just dropped my jaw when I realized that the short, quiet, self-effacing, jocular, gray-haired Asian guy over at the photo end of the newsroom was THAT guy. THE Guy. I was actually working with a piece of history on two legs. I couldn't believe it! I'd interviewed rock stars and even movie legends before. Even threw a question at then-President reagan and actually got the I-never-say-squat-to-the-press Johnny Carson to answer a question (very briefly, but he actually did speak to me!) but lemme tellya - being in the presence of this particular man made me shaky in the knees. Made me want to stand up straight and clean up my language and tuck my shirttail in.

He was so nice, so approachable, so friendly. He still responds occasionally on Facebook. He's my hero! It just always blew my mind that he'd covered these earth-shaking events, capturing these shatteringly momentous split-seconds in history, having the impact he did with his work, and yet - there he'd be, lo these many years later, in some loony group of entertainment reporters and camera crews, shouting for - well, nowadays it'd be Justin Bieber and/or Kim Kardashian. In L.A., that's basically most of what you covered, because Los Angeles = Hollywood and as such is a company town. Unless we had mudslides or brush fires or Manson/Night Stalker murders or something. SOMETIMES political idiocy, but showbiz is still pretty much the main course.

I also had the privilege of working with a second Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer at the L.A. bureau. Reed Saxon. He took the photo of then-candidate Bill Clinton in a suit and sunglasses (a la Blues Brothers), playing a saxophone during an appearance on "The Arsenio Hall Show." And you could see Arsenio a couple of feet away from him, grinning a huge grin. That photo went into a compilation of 1992 campaign photos that won the AP another Pulitzer.

That was a total trip - working for the ol' "A&P"! What a ride!

Shortly after I started there, the L.A. Times did a front-page feature story about the Associated Press. It was really cool, and the whole newsroom was all aflutter about it. It made me feel really proud and kind of dumb-founded to be part of it. And I loved the first anecdote in the long, detailed report. It recounted Mahatma Gandhi - on a train ride through some lonely, isolated area in India. It was the wee hours of the morning and I think I recall in the story that it was also raining. Gandhi disembarked at this little out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere train depot, expecting to sorta disappear, unnoticed, into the countryside. But sure enough, there in the empty train station was an A.P. reporter, waiting in the rain to interview him. Gandhi recalled being really impressed by that. And he commented that - when he finally passed from this life, he fully expected that the first thing he'd see on the other side would not be angels or Whatever his idea of God was, but rather - an Associated Press correspondent, waiting to interview him. STILL makes me smile to think about that.

NOBODY at the AP had any pizazz. That's not what it was about. What struck me immediately when I first got there was that I was surrounded by a whole bunch of "mild-mannered Clark Kents." Even Lois Lane was too flashy for the women who worked there. Nobody ever turned into Superman. Nobody bragged. Nobody was that impressed. They were just day-to-day journalists, toiling in the back of the vineyard to generate the stories that made all the fancy TV people with the hair and makeup look smart on the local evening news. There was a fellow there named Bob Thomas who was basically the dean of the local (Hollywood) industry press. His reporting was regarded as every bit as essential reading as was Army Archerd's column in the trades every morning. And yet, Bob Thomas was THE guy who alerted the world to the shooting of Bobby Kennedy in the madness at the Ambassador Hotel that night in June after he'd just won the 1968 California primary. HE was there on the scene and it was HE who called it in. It was REALLY cool! And it was like being in the Army. You got "three square a day" (you didn't live large on an AP salary but you were always paid enough to eat regularly and they couldn't fire you on whims or bad ratings).

The AP gave out Mark Twain trophies as its top awards for regional news coverage, and each trophy featured a bust of him, and a quote engraved on the front: "The only source of illumination in the universe is the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here." Proud to say I have three of those for various crazy things I did.

Good times. (For the most part, that is.)