I was about to suggest that it’s interesting, what moments you remember in a three-decade career.

Then I considered that we’re talking about a middle-of-the-lineup Angels hitter being shot dead on the streets of Gary, Indiana, and, yes, that probably ought to make for a memorable moment. Doesn’t happen every day.

Anyway, that quote came from former colleague Gil Hulse, and I believe it is verbatim, with this addition: “My God! Lyman Bostock has been shot!”

We were putting out the Sunday sports section, on a Saturday night in 1978, Sept. 24. It was getting late. Not quite deadline late, but getting there.

I was on the rim that night. I was the Rams beat writer for the San Bernardino Sun at the time, so I can only assume the Rams had a home game the next day, and I was pitching in on the big Sunday section.

Gil was laying out the section, I’m thinking, which would have been quite a responsibility for him, given that he wasn’t quite 24 and probably hadn’t been a full-timer very long. If he even was.

Anyway, around 8 p.m., I’m thinking, maybe 9, Hulse was going through the wires and came across an Associated Press bulletin.

Lyman Bostock, Angels outfielder and key offseason signing, had been shot while sitting in a car in Gary, a few hours after the Angels’ game in Chicago against the White Sox.

My recollection is that we got word that Bostock was, in fact, dead … within an hour. Or that first bulletin might even have had it.

That set off one of those mad scrambles that makes desk work so fun — and so stressful. Tearing up the front page with deadline looming, ditching this or that story, getting Bostock at the top of the page.

We didn’t travel with the Angels back then. Actually, I’m having trouble remembering who our beat writer for home games was. Might have been Jim Schulte. Anyway, we had no way to get at the story aside from the wires, but we did what we could. In a hurry.

Anyone who has worked any significant time on the production side of print journalism has no affection for that big, late-breaking story. It’s a tough-enough job under good conditions, but to have a new lead story late in the evening … it’s an adrenaline rush that gets old fairly quickly. The really veteran production-side people are the ones who hope news breaks at least 12 hours before deadline. (Though that has changed, in the internet era, where deadlines are continuous.)

Gil used to go through the wire, just before we left the office, “to make sure Willie Mays hasn’t died,” as he put it.

Lyman Bostock wasn’t Willie Mays, but he was a serious player.

I recall Hulse shouting like that only one other time in his career. It was maybe 10 years later. Sometime in the late 1980s.

A part-timer had taken a box score from Twentynine Palms High School basketball. One of 29’s best players was a kid named Tucker.

Our clerk typed it in with an “F” instead of a “T.”

For some reason, I was looking at the string of basketball box scores (probably just curiosity, though I did often look at them to make sure “style” was correct), and I got to Twentynine Palms and probably did something that would look like a classic double-take. Like, what did I just read?

I told Hulse, who was putting out the section that night. He blurted some obscenity, I’m thinking, and took off at a run. He went downstairs, ran past the makeup boards and back to the press room where, for the first (and only) time in his career he shouted, “Stop the presses!”

The press had just started turning and the pressmen did, in fact, stop the presses. They were annoyed — until Gil pointed out the “Fucker” in agate type.

We rushed through a corrected plate, the “Fucker” papers were set aside as spoilage (though I may have one in my collection somewhere) … and Gil had his “stop the presses moment.”

What prompted this trip down memory lane? A guy who works for espn.com has done a big story on Bostock’s death; the 30th anniversary is coming up next week.

Maybe it’s shallow of me to remember the event in terms of what it meant to the desk operation inside the offices of The Sun … but that’s how it’s framed, in my mind.