El Paso Herald-Post reunion website


Recollections

The Old Herald-Post building, by Leon Lynn
Cops, Parties and Dresses, by Michael Quintanilla
Worst Day at the Herald-Post, by Nancy Miller Hamilton
Top of "The Rocky" Back in Business, about Dean Lindoerfer
The Old Herald-Post building

(webservant's note: Leon Lynn wrote to me after inspiration from a picture on this website--Billy Calzada)

The picture below has filled me with an afternoon's worth of reverie:

I swear I can smell the gritty little lobby just inside those doors.

Never will I forget the nights we'd park in the roped-off drive-thru lanes of the MBank ­ the official night shift parking lot ­ and just lean against the sheet metal and talk about the world in that warm, dark, steady breeze, one ear on the scanner always.

I'd give $1,000 to sit at my old desk again for a day or two, next to the coffee pot, listening to Terry Poppa's mysterious phone calls and Joe Old's rants.

I knew the ring of my phone from all the others, even when I was in the conference room with the door closed. I lost that when we moved to the new building, where they all chirped the same from their mass-produced computer chips. I knew what was coming even then, I think. It had already begun.

I am never far removed from those terrible green screens with the bars running across them in the old building, dropped right in the middle of desks that had no business being around still, the cables running along the aisles in taped-together bundles. Some of the best work of my life was done in that place and I miss it every day.

See you in October, my brother.

Leon Lynn
llynn@asq.org
Cops, pot parties and dresses

Michael Quintanilla worked at the Post from 1981 to 1985. While there, he reinvented the long-standing "Little Girls Dress Fund" that was started decades earlier by a former publisher's wife who believed that little girls should get dresses on Christmas Day and their brothers, well, should get nada. So when Michael was told to take over the fund, he began Operation Noel and that included boys and girls, which irritated the publisher's wife to no end. Record-breaking funds were raised through stories he wrote about needy kids, and then he went shopping (a favorite pastime!) for clothes at the local Levi's manufacturing plant.

But Michael's claim to fame at the H-P was his award-winning drug series "Drugs in our schools" that had him go undercover as a full-time high school student for two months at two different schools to learn about teen attitudes toward drugs, how drugs were being pushed, used and sold. (On his first day, he was invited to an afternoon pot party in the backyard of nearby home) ...

Michael's claim to fame at the Herald-Post was his award-winning drug series "Drugs in our schools" that had him go undercover as a full-time high school student for two months at two different schools to learn about teen attitudes toward drugs, how drugs were being pushed and used and sold. (On his first day, he was invited to an afternoon pot party in the backyard of nearby home.) The series received statewide recognition, and Michael was asked to appear before a governor's panel on drugs. But the best moment happened when El Paso's police chief visited then-editor Harry Moskos and demanded that Michael and Harry give the chief names of pushers so cops could bust them. Harry promptly threw the chief out of his office, shouting that that would never happen. He then called Michael into his office, and the two destroyed Michael's notes.

After the Herald-Post, Michael landed at the Los Angeles Times where he covered (ta-da) Hollywood. He remained there for almost 13 years on the L.A. scene as a party beat reporter, human-interest writer and a fashion writer. The latter took him around the world: New York, London, Milan and Paris twice a year for several years. Today, he's back in his hometown working as a features writer at the San Antonio Express-News (the paper where he began his career). He writes about fashion and pop culture and anything he can get away with. He also is a regular on the local NBC affiliate's San Antonio Living Show, a morning lifestyle program where he is known as the "fashion guru." And he is a contributing editor for Latina magazine, handling celebrity cover stories such as Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, Eva Mendes and Mia Maestro, among others.

Worst Day at the Herald-Post

From Nancy Miller Hamilton (EP Times, 1950-59; H-P, 1972-76):

My nomination for "Worst Day at the Herald-Post" is January 1, 1974. (Excluding the last day, of course.) Not only was it the New Year's holiday, but the Sun Carnival Parade had not yet switched to Thanksgiving and it was parade time. This meant a skeleton staff in the office to answer phones and handle odds and ends. Most of the staff was along the parade route gathering tidbits for the main story.

Our first problem surfaced early on. The switchboard operator, leaving work the day before and not due back until after the holiday, had plugged the Times newsroom phones into the H-P newsroom and vice versa. Fortunately, the Times, due to parade coverage, had someone aboard earlier than usual and he kept coming to our door to summon us to our phone calls in his bailiwick.

About a half hour into the parade's movement along Montana avenue, I raced over to the Times to take a call whose import I had to conceal from the Times guy. A stunt motorcycle rider in a contingent of Juarez police had lost control, his vehicle slamming into the crowd of spectators. Two were dead and many were injured. Our on-site people started gathering what information they could. Someone went to Thomason Hospital, where some of the injured were taken. Ray Chavez, part of the skeleton staff, offered to go to Providence, the other emergency room, because he had formerly worked there. But when he arrived, the emergency cases were not only parade accident victims; a family reunion had come down with food poisoning, and the identities of the two groups had not been sorted out. Ray was enlisted to help his former co-workers in processing the large influx of people. From time to time he would call us (at the Times, of course) and let us know they still didn't know how many parade injuries there were.

Then came a blessing in disguise.

Luis Perez, a former H-P staffer then teaching at UTEP, advised us he had been watching the parade at the very spot where the accident occurred and had taken pix. But when his film arrived, it was color for which the H-P did not yet have processing ability, and we had to go without pictures. Luis did, however, provide us the only eye-witness account for the story.

The PI story for that afternoon was headlined: Runaway Cycle Crashes in Crowd; Two Killed in Sun Carnival Parade, 15 Persons Injured On Procession Route.

The accompanying photo was of a float, but not an award winner. Jane Pemberton every year tried to learn the names of award winners before the parade started, but the judges invariably favored the Times and kept the list from her until past her deadline.

The cryptic lead on the story was a paragraph that was supposed to have been inserted farther down but ended up on top: AProvidence reported seven others injured in the accident.@ Several lines later came the real lead: AAn elderly woman and one eight-year-old boy were killed and 18 others were injured today when a Juarez police motorcycle went out of control and crashed into the crowd viewing the Sun Carnival Parade at Williams street and Montana avenue.@

During the ongoing drama in the newsroom, a strange man had wandered into the building (this being before guards at the door) and settled in the men=s restroom on the third floor, singing hymns at the top of his voice.

Naturally, in the January 2 paper featuring 21 photos of parade coverage, some cutlines were switched.

Meanwhile in the rest of the world people complained that gasoline was going up to 60 cents a gallon and Watergate was still a curiosity.

Some other memories:

A trend in the 1950s was to hire newspaper editors' sons as reporters. Among them were:

John McKelway, son of Benjamin McKelway of the Washington Star; Frank Ahlgren, whose father headed the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and who stayed on until retirement; and Chester Selzer, son of Louis Selzer of the Cleveland Press. Chester wrote fiction under the pen name Amado Muro and his short stories are now often found in high school English textbooks. His son, Robert, was an H-P reporter in the 1970s.

Two reporters from the 1950s are listed as witnesses in the Warren Commission Report. Thayer Waldo, then working at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was the first newsman to reach the Dallas police station after Kennedy was shot. Bill Stuckey was working for a New Orleans radio station when he interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald about his Cuban activism.

Several staffers from the fifties besides Seltzer were book authors. Earl Shorris' list, available on Internet, may be the longest. Vance Trimble wrote biographies of Sam Walton and other prominent business and political figures. Edward Anderson's "Thieves Like Us" became a film in 1949 titled "They Live by Night" and again in 1974 under its original title starring Keith Carradine. Eddie was also the subject of a biography. Welborn Hope, dubbed "Oklahoma's tramp poet," was a contributor to Saturday Review of Literature and other publications.

The history of the El Paso Times was written by a former H-P staffer, John Judy Middagh, who left the paper in 1948 to teach journalism at the College of Mines (which became Texas Western the following year and UTEP in 1967). Frontier Newspaper: The El Paso Times was published by Texas Western Press in 1958 and was designed by Carl Hertzog, whose books are very collectible. He wanted to do a history of the Herald-Post but funds were not available for the project. Middagh headed the Journalism (later Communication) department for many years until his death in 1973.

One of the most famous H-P alumni was Rubén Salazar, whose death in 1970 at age 42 made him a popular folk hero among Mexican Americans, according to Mario T. García, editor of a collection of his writings, Ruben Salazar, Border Correspondent (University of California Press, 1995). Rubén and I started as freshmen in journalism at Mines in 1946 and graduated together in 1954, him with a bachelor=s degree after an interim of military service and I with a master=s in English (no graduate work in journalism in those days). He did some daring work at the H-P thereafter, writing about La Nacha and other border notables, then joined the LA Times staff in 1959. García describes him as Athe first significant foreign correspondent of Mexican American descent, becoming in 1969 the first Mexican American columnist for a major newspaper. He was covering the Chicano Anti-Vietnam War Moratorium in Los Angeles when he was killed by a tear gas projectile fired into the café where he and his crew from KMEX-TV had gone at the end of the rally. His collected works include three H-P stories from 1955 and 1956, coverage of the Mexico City Olympics, and numerous stories about the border and Chicano issues, spanning the years 1961-1970. In 2003 UTEP's Department of Communication introduced the Rubén Salazar Spanish-Language Media Program, offering students bilingual classes in print and electronic media to prepare them for the growing field of Spanish-language media.

A later reporter, Terrence E. Poppa, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1987 for his investigative reporting on drug trafficking which led to "Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin," published in 1990 by Pharos Books (a Scripps-Howard company). Poppa's life was threatened during his probing of the activities of the drug lord, Pablo Acosta, who was said to be smuggling 60 tons of cocaine into the U.S. annually.

Barbara Funkhouser, who later became editor of the Times, was the H-P Las Cruces correspondent in 1958-59, assigned to produce at least one story per day that was carried on the front page of the early edition. Las Cruces had 10,000 subscribers at that time and had just been the subject of a series of derogatory investigative stories by Cliff Sherrill, so Barbara was not popular among the civic leaders he had maligned.

********* Before Times publisher Dorrance D. Roderick killed our union in 1959, H-P and Times reporters had a chapter of the American Newspaper Guild. We met irregularly on the third floor of the Blumenthal Building (across the street from the Del Norte). Two annual activities were one we looked forward to a picnic in the pavilion at McKelligon Canyon and one we didn't, the sessions to negotiate a new contract. Mary Smith Thurber discovered early in the 1950s that it helped to have a woman on the committee to keep Ed Pooley's language from being totally offensive, so she and I took turns at it. We met with Mr. Roderick or his son, Buddy, and the two editors, Pooley and W.J. Hooten. We were most happy when the AFL merged with the CIO in 1955, as that put us closer to the ITU, which used to invite us to their annual picnics. But we were always the weakest union in the building; they could fill the paper with wire copy and never miss us. So Mr. Roderick finally did us in by waving money packages around, and a bunch of us left as a result.

A very old story comes from the 1930s and I think I heard it from Paul Lance, who was the first president of the Press Club when we organized in the fifties. He said when he was a reporter, the old police station on Campbell Street had a press room. The reporters hung out there and the papers sent copy boys to pick up their stories. They never had to report to the newspaper offices. So Paul and his competitor worked out an arrangement, naturally. One of them would cover for both papers on, say, Monday, and the other on Tuesday. Then they filled out the rest of the week that way, and their bosses didn=t find out for quite a while.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS: TOP OF "THE ROCKY" BACK IN BUSINESS

From Dean Lindoerfer, former assistant managing editor at the Herald-Post from late 1985 through spring of 1988, when the first redesign in years took place:

Below is article from the editor at the Rocky Mountain News when I returned from a serious illness nearly two years ago. Thought you would be interested in it. (i.e. staph infection). I have been at the Rocky, another Scripps-Howard newspaper since 1988. I was former design director and photo director. Now, I am a designer on the news side, primarily designing Page 1 and other news pages.

Bronco Dean is back

By John Temple, Rocky Mountain News

One of the Rocky's great characters rolled into the newsroom this week, bringing joy to the hearts of his colleagues.

I'm not kidding.

You've probably seen those old black and white movies about newspapers, where the journalists are always tough and jaded. Well, I don't know about those days, but the truth now is that they're also funny and caring, at least about most of the people they share the newsroom with. Dean Lindoerfer, a page designer whose love of Denver's football team is matched only by his quirky sense of humor, almost died this summer. We hadn't seen him at his desk since June. He was whacked so hard by a combination of things that he couldn't walk anymore, and walking never had been easy after he was stricken with polio as a kid. But on Thursday I got him to get on his scooter and come on over to a table near the center of our newsroom, where we hold what we call a "caking," an event usually reserved to welcome newcomers.

In this case, Dean was feeling so chipper that before I could even say anything he was off on a riff about the Sports Department and how he was going to whip them back into shape about the Broncos, how columnists Dave Krieger and Bernie Lincicome were on the Broncos' bandwagon - any and everything he could think of. Had we noticed the scooter's blue color matched his No. 7 Jersey bearing the name BRONCODEAN?

The crowd pressed in around him, loving it.

It was Dean, back to his old self. And with him was another much-loved page designer, Karen King, who'd returned the same week from an even longer struggle with a series of afflictions .

The return of these two very different veterans seemed to charge us all up.

They are leaders in their own ways. Karen, who started here as an editorial assistant almost 26 years ago, is willing to do anything to help the Rocky. Everybody knows she'll do whatever she can the best she can. And she always seems to do it with a smile. Karen is what's known as a positive influence.

Dean, on the other hand, is a wild card. He's the joker of the newsroom. Some people's influence comes from position or title. Dean's comes from his ideas, his willingness to express them and his ability to carry them out. He's not afraid of trying things, and he'll tell everybody right up to the boss that they're wrong if he thinks he's right. And quite often he is. Dean acts like he runs the place. He loves to shout official-sounding terms. "Confusion on 109!" might burst from his lips (109 is his work station). Or, as on his first night back, "Shared Work Alert!" meaning he's sent a photograph to the department that prepares them for publication.

Having him at his old desk means I can walk by every night and tell a bad Broncos story. Had he heard that a player has been injured or that we're going to have a story the next day that's going to turn the team on its head? A few times I've actually had him believing me.

You see, if you can't have fun in this high-stress field you shouldn't be in it. Both Karen and Dean appreciate what a great place a newsroom is. They enjoy their work and help make others feel the same way. They missed the Rocky. And we missed them.