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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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Editor Has Interviewed the Great, Near Great and the Ignominious in 40-Year Career of Journalism

Years ago, as a sophomore in college, I interviewed Ronald Reagan. Yes, that Ronald Reagan.

I was covering a UC Regents meeting in Riverside for my student newspaper, and Reagan was the newly installed governor of the great state of California.

Having vowed to clean up the mess at Berkeley, he wanted to make his views known as a regent.

When I approached, he looked up from his pile of paperwork and flashed that famous smile before I was able to introduce myself.

I asked my two questions, he answered , directly, but courteously, and I thanked him before I walked back to the press seating in the meeting room.

My encounter with the future president flooded back the other day when I caught the gray outline of the USS Ronald Reagan while driving along North Harbor Drive.

I find it amazing that the man I interviewed in 1967 later became what many pundits now regard as one of the greatest presidents of the modern era.

And even more amazing that one of the crown jewels of our 21st century Navy has been named after him, and it’s tied up right out there in San Diego Bay.

Journalism, as one of my college professors used to say, is history in a hurry. And, my gosh, has the history whizzed by!

I celebrate my 40th year in the word trade this fall, a career that has given me firsthand glimpses into the cavalcade of news.

Journalism, though not the most financially rewarding of professions, is certainly one of the more fascinating. With notebook and pen in hand (and the occasional tape recorder), I have talked to the great, the near great and many of the ignominious.

Reagan was one of the true giants I interviewed. Another was Joe Rosenthal, the modest photojournalist who captured on film the five U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima toward the end of World War II. The image ranks as one of the most famous , if not the most famous , photographs, snapped in the 20th century.

I only mention Rosenthal because he died this month, and his name is again in the news. I remember well my encounter with him in early 1973 , an unusual one in that he was a fellow journalist, not a source.

The newspaper I worked for at the time had assigned a reporter and photographer to cover the return of a prisoner of war from the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War at a military hospital in San Francisco.

The photographer, Gordon Clark, was no slouch in his own right when it came to capturing history in a hurry , a photo he took of renegade newspaper heiress Patty Hearst made the cover of Newsweek. He and Rosenthal bumped into each other and the two started talking shop.

One discussion led to the other, and Rosenthal started telling us the story about how he came to snap that famous photograph on Mount Suribachi.

Rosenthal, who sported a French beret, wore thick eyeglasses (he had poor eyesight all his life) and smoked cigarettes through a filter, described matter-of-factly how he took the photograph that reflects the very essence of our patriotic valor in a time of war.

Basically, he was at the right place at the right time with the right f-stop setting on his camera lens.

The exposed film was thrown into a bag, which was taken to the rear where it was developed. Rosenthal didn’t find out what he had accomplished until a couple of weeks later.

It was like shooting a football game, he later said.

One slightly less important character I encountered early on in my fledgling career was Farnum Fish.

Orville Wright of the Wright brothers taught Mr. Fish to fly in the earliest days of aviation, and fly he did during those first two decades of the 20th century. Primarily as a barnstormer.

But what caught my interest during our interview was the fact that this quiet, introverted man (another inveterate smoker) had flown reconnaissance missions for the notorious Mexican insurrectionist Poncho Villa.

Mr. Fish never really explained how he ended up working for a South-of-the-Border revolutionary , the interview was like pulling teeth without benefit of anesthesia.

The story I wrote first ran in the newspaper I was working for at the time, and then the Associated Press picked it up and distributed it worldwide.

I was famous, for a few days or so. But what was fame worth, about $15 in the form of a check that arrived a few weeks later.

Which brings me to “Jerry” Brown, Gov. Moonbeam himself.

Brown (always Edmund G. Brown Jr. in first reference), whom I interviewed on numerous occasions during the course of his eight-year stint as governor, once said that one should work for psychic rewards as much as monetary compensation.

Well, I suppose I can say the psychic rewards have been in abundance. Why else would I be doing this?


Thomas York is editor of the

San Diego Business Journal.

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