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 he died, which had been driving me nuts.

My memory was all I had to go on for a couple of reasons:

1. The Sun no longer has its biographical clip files available for perusal by staffers. When the newspaper moved to the new building, in 2005, either the bio clips didn’t make the move … or they’re in some closet somewhere, under lock and key. Great. So if you want to read up on anyone who got in the paper before, say, 2000 (about when they stopped clipping stuff) … you can’t. A century of info, chucked aside. Nice move.

Thus, I was unable to ask a former colleague to “go to the library and pull the Claude Anderson file and read a couple of things to me.”

2. The Sun also no longer has a working microfilm machine, and hasn’t for years now. So even that backup method of finding some Anderson info, from his Sun obit, was unavailable. In short: The Sun’s record-keeping is a joke, a travesty.

(I remember a news-side reporter, name of Emily Sachs, asking editor Steve Lambert at a newsroom meeting about The Sun’s non-existent library (and librarian), and he sarcastically said, and I paraphrase, “You volunteering to be the librarian?” The offensive second-guessing non-team-oriented reporter was laid off within a few months. Steve fixed HER wagon.)

But, I had one last resource … and with the help of a friend and former colleague, Nate Ryan, I was able to get my hands on the Claude Anderson obit, and here I will flesh out and correct (where necessary) the record of the man who was “the dean of Southern California sports writers” when he retired.

Nate, now the NASCAR reporter for USA Today, was putting out the sports section in San Bernardino the day after Claude died. Nate told me it was “1995 or 1996,” or about 3-4 years later than I thought.

Turns out, I have this garage-inhaling collection of EVERY Sun sports section from my first day on the job (Aug. 16, 1976, the day that Dave Stockton won the PGA) … until I was fired. Yeah, it’s a little twisted, but that’s what I did.

So, as I was moving these 25 (!) boxes of newspapers into storage … I cracked open one that had a year or so of sections from 1995 through June 1996. I was determined to find Claude’s obit, and I was counting on Nate’s memory to guide me. Yeah, I’d go through two years of newspapers, if necessary, looking for that obit in the lower-right corner of C1.

I had gone only a week into the box when I found a letter to the editor mentioning Claude, and then there it was. Andy’s obit, written by Steve Dilbeck, from an interview he had done months (years, even) earlier.

So …

Claude was 73 when he died, on June 15, 1996. So our guy got 12 years of retirement with his well-to-do wife, Melitta (who died in 2006, by the way). Good for him.

He worked at The Sun from 1947-1984, and when the stroke he suffered forced him into retirement … no one in Southern California journalism had been on the job at the same paper for a longer time, a fact he was proud of. He liked the “senior man in terms of consecutive service” concept.

He told Dilbeck that sports events he covered included the 1963 World Series, when the Dodgers swept the Yankees; the Muhammad Ali-Archie Moore heavyweight title fight; and Silky Sullivan’s astonishing 40-length comeback to win the Santa Anita Derby.

Dilbeck recalls that Andy often wore plaid sports coats … and in the photo on C1 Andy is wearing, yes, a plaid sports coat.

He was the fifth of eight children, and the other seven apparently survived him. He graduated from Redlands High School in 1940. He played basketball and was captain of the tennis team (and I never took him for a tennis guy, at all).

He joined the Marines in 1943, while attending the University of Redlands, and was assigned to the 4th Marine Division. He told Dilbeck the division was being shipped across the Pacific for the planned invasion of Japan when Truman ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Japan … and the war ended. “They turned the ship right around,” Anderson said. “I’ve been lucky all my life.”

He completed his degree in English at the U of Redlands and joined The Sun one day after his graduation. He didn’t miss a single day due to illness until his stroke, 37 years later. (And his near-fatal heart attack, in Holland, was in 1995, the summer before his death.)

Tim Mead, Angels vice-president and an alumnus of San Bernardino’s San Gorgonio High School, said he grew up reading Anderson in The Sun. “He was my Jim Murray,” Mead said. “For a kid growing up wanting to be a writer, he was bigger than big to me.”

Andy was a member of the CIF Hall of Fame, the University of Redlands Hall of Fame, was a charter member of the Ken Hubbs Award committee and a long-time member of the Redlands Elks Club.

Dilbeck has Anderson saying he “never got rich but never stopped loving his job.”

Said Anderson: “It was more fun than working. I looked forward to it. There was always a lot of excitement.”

I feel better now. Andy deserves to have the facts as complete as we can make them.