(Version 2.0: Updates/corrects bio info thanks to her son, Bob Wilmuth.) Katie Castator surprised us. Again and again. She was Somebody’s Mom, three times over. Yet she had a full-time job. She apparently hadn’t graduated from college, and certainly didn’t have a journalism degree. But there she was in the newsroom, a 40-year-old rookie. She […]

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Jim Matthews is an important journalist, brothers and sisters. He occupies a niche, granted, but a niche most of us in journalism tend to overlook or trivialize. Distancing ourselves from a substantial subset of our potential readership. That niche: Hunting and fishing. Jim Matthews is the Boswell of the Great (SoCal) Outdoors. A guy who […]

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Jim Long may be the toughest, most resourceful and most relentlessly enthusiastic journalist I’ve ever met. Particularly when we take into account the hand nature dealt him. My history with Jim Long began when a woman named Joyce Miller, adviser for the Eisenhower High School paper, said she had a wonderful candidate for a part-time […]

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I was operating from memory when I did a lengthy post on former San Bernardino Sun colleague Claude Anderson. The mass of information was correct, thank goodness, but a few facts were off a bit, and a few others I didn’t bring up at all because I didn’t know. Like how old he was when […]

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Austin Powers was a Johnny-come-lately. Jim Schulte was an International Man of Mystery a good 30 years before Michael Myers’ toothy British secret agent. Schulte may be the most memorable character out of The Sun sports department during my 31-plus years there. And character he was. Often, it was difficult to determine where the actor’s […]

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At the time, most of us held Gordon Coy in contempt. The smiling little old-timer was the Maynard G. Krebs of the San Bernardino Sun sports department. He knew the path of least resistance on any assignment. He was a master of mailing it in. He didn’t just half-ass his job, he no-assed it. And […]

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If I ever had a mentor, Paul Hagen was it … for all of the seven or eight months we worked together in San Bernardino. Hagen was still young when I joined the Sun-Telegram in August of 1976. He had been there three years or so, as I recall, coming out of Ohio University, as […]

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Claude Anderson was almost 54 years old on Aug. 16, 1976, my first day on the job at the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, as the newspaper was known back then. I was just another college kid, all of 22, who thought he was pretty smart … and that Claude Anderson was some antediluvian relic who was […]

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I’ve decided to do a series of mini-bios on people with whom I worked during my 31-plus years at the San Bernardino Sun. Me and that newspaper … it’s about the past, not the present or future, and we had some fun (or at least memorable) times, and I worked with some interesting, even bizarre […]

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