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 hanging around long past his expiration date.

The sports editor was a guy named Ed Willhide. The prominent reporters, in my mind, were “old-timers” Paul Hagen and Bob Padecky, who were straddling age 30. The younger guys I could relate to were Mike Davis and a couple of part-timers (at the time), Jim Schulte and Gil Hulse.

But the guy who really mattered to readers of what in a few years became, simply, The Sun … was Claude J. Anderson. He was The Face of San Bernardino sports and had been for most of the previous 30 years; my first day, my first year, I wasn’t smart enough to pick up on that.

The other guys on the staff almost immediately began telling me Claude Anderson stories. They all did impressions of his semi-bombastic speaking style, too. The undertone was that he was barely competent, inflexible, behind the times — and prone to spending lots of time in local taverns such as the Pirate’s Den.

Some of that was accurate. But I also have to think Claude Anderson did as much as any single person to help the newspaper go from maybe 30,000 circulation, when he started, to the 80,000 or so it had when he retired.

Claude J. Anderson … “Andy” or “Claude J.” we often called him … had been with the paper nearly nonstop since 1946, when he said he was mustered out of the Marines. The only work time he missed was when he was called to active duty during the Korean War. (I saw the photo the newspaper ran, in the clip file. He didn’t look particularly happy, but I don’t think he ever actually went to Korea.)

Other than that, he was as dependable as smog in the San Bernardino summer. He was proud of telling people he had never taken a sick day — even when he had pneumonia. He got a shot of penicillin on his lunch break, the story went, and came back to work.

His background was local-local. He went to nearby Redlands High School, had delivered The Sun as a newspaper boy, went on to the University of Redlands and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marines when he graduated. He rarely talked to kids like me about his past but I distinctly remember him once saying how glad he was that President Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan because his unit was going to be part of the invasion of the Japanese home islands — what would have been a horrendously bloody campaign. He credited the A-bomb with shortening the war.

Professionally, I had trouble relating to him. Age was an issue, of course; he was eight years older than my own father. But also because he represented the tail end of the age of a certain type of sports journalist I didn’t want to be. Guys who equated jargon with creativity, used quotes sparingly and badly and weren’t worried about getting too close to the people they reported on.

I thought he was a hack. In some ways, he was. You didn’t win a pennant. You pursued the “gonfalon.” Left-handers were southpaws or port-siders. You didn’t start a game, as a pitcher, you “toed the slab.” Free throws were taken from the “charity stripe.” Guys didn’t carry the football, they “packed the porkhide.” You didn’t run track and field, you were a “thin clad.” Basketball players were “cagers.” Et cetera. That was how sports guys had written, in his life, and he was still doing it just as we were going into New Journalism — with an emphasis on featurized leads, color and lots of quotations from athletes and coaches. He could write straight news stories, and he could handle his weekly notes column, no problem … but he really couldn’t write personality features, and he wanted nothing to do with enterprise or investigative reporting. That was muckraking, and it made him uncomfortable.

His idea of an interesting quote was something like this: “Brown has carried 144 times for 640 yards and 10 touchdowns.” Yes, he would put stats from coaches inside quote marks. Because someone had told him to “get some quotes” into his stories. He really never did get it.

He had many of the habits of journalists of his era. The drinking, as noted. He smoked. His language was salty. He was something of a womanizer, and he liked them buxom.

Even as he was approaching 60, stories of Andy and his women continued to circulate, gleefully passed on by other newsroom old-timers. One story had some woman he had wronged barging into the Sun building in hot pursuit of Claude. I believe her name was Gert. Anyway, the story went that Andy heard Gert shouting and ran to the perceived safety of the men’s restroom. Gert must have seen him go inside, because she charged right in, looking for him. He had locked himself inside one of the toilet stalls, but she bent over and shouted, “I know you’re here, Claude Anderson! I can see your feet!” Eventually, Gert was led away and Andy escaped.

He never made much money, coming out of an era when reporters were ridiculously underpaid; he was making maybe $450 a week when he retired. By 1976, he was divorced, with kids he never talked about. Not in my earshot, anyway.

He had some prejudices of an earlier age. Not so much race-oriented, because anyone who was a standout athlete in his core market was a guy Claude J. would talk up incessantly, like Ronnie Lott and Sheldon Diggs and Greg Bunch. Most of the top athletes in his part of the Inland Empire had been African Americans for a couple of decades, and when it came time to elect all-star teams he battled ferociously for “his” guys, no matter their ethnicity. That they were “local” trumped all else.

But he had trouble taking girls’/women’s sports seriously and resisted covering them, even when it was part of his job as the main prep reporter. He thought it below his dignity to cover a girls game, and he rarely (if ever) did. He was a bit of an anti-Semite, as well, if his description of former colleagues who were Jews was any indication.

What I didn’t realize, when I first got there, was how his professional standing had taken a battering.

He was a veteran who knew the area and all its main actors. He was pounding a typewriter and covering sports professionally before the rest of us were born. He once had held a “day sports editor” title. But Claude J. was also a guy who had been sized up as yesterday’s news and increasingly marginalized by editors and sports staffers, almost all of them out-of-towners who rotated through the newsroom during the 1970s. HIS newsroom. Using it as a stepping stone rather than a stopping point. By the time I got there, he was a standing joke.

Looking back, I’m surprised he wasn’t more openly bitter.

What he did complain about, incessantly, and maybe it was safety-valve-venting for him, was something almost silly: Answering the phone. We had about five lines into sports, and he and another fiftysomething, Gordon Coy, were the only sports guys who worked business hours. Everyone else was oriented to a 4 p.m.-to-midnight existence.

But Coy was infamous, in Andy’s telling, for shirking his phone duties. Wandering off for long stretches of time, feigning deafness or just ignoring the phone — which Andy always eventually picked up. “Goddam Coy!” he would blurt as soon as Gordo walked out or the night-side guys walked in.

Oh, a couple of his idiosyncracies. He typed with only two fingers — the index finger on each hand. I can still see him with his hands up in the air, as he stared at the keyboard, index fingers poised to strike. Also, when he smoked … he perched the cigarette directly in the middle of his mouth. Never to one side.

He had a very retro “spike” on his desk — about four inches of thin metal on a stand upon which he would skewer old copy, press releases he no longer needed, etc. (A tool that gave name to the journalism expression “to spike” a story. Kill it, that is.) And he had a glue pot he rarely used anymore, since he wasn’t allowed to work on the production side — where glue was used to attach wire copy to print-order sheets.

He wore his graying hair fairly long and slicked back. His nose was a fairly bright red, perhaps from the alcohol. He always wore slacks, a buttoned shirt and hard shoes to work. Never a tie, though. He wasn’t trim but he didn’t carry much extra weight, either.

He hated TV broadcaster/personality Howard Cosell. And Muhammad Ali, whom he always referred to by his original name, “Cassius Clay.” He loved boxing, though, and horse racing and football. He loved covering live events. He was old-school in that sense.

I realize that I may be painting a picture of a guy who time had passed by, but Claude Anderson had several specific and useful skills:

1. He never got his facts wrong. Never. His copy might be drab, but it was error-free. He never misspelled a name, botched a stat or had the wrong final score. It just did not happen, and anyone who has worked in journalism can tell you how rare a talent this is.

I had Andy’s accuracy reinforced to me the hard way. He and I both covered the 1978 CIF football championship game involving Colton and La Sierra high schools. Each of us had mentioned the yards gained by a particular Colton running back, name of Aldama. Andy had him for 102 yards. I had him for 89. Our stories needed to agree, but Andy had already filed his story and left. It was deadline. So I changed the number in Andy’s story to 89 yards, my stat. When I came into the office Monday night, I found my own set of stats on my typewriter; Andy had gone through them and found the 13-yard gain I had marked down but somehow overlooked when toting up the yards. He was right and I was wrong, and I should have known it would be so.

2. He knew where he worked, and he knew the history of the paper and the region. While so many people around him were making one- or two-year appearances, never quite figuring out the difference between Yucaipa and Yucca Valley, he knew his market intimately. He understood what was of interest to his readers, and he was unfailingly polite (if as brief as possible) when they got him on the phone. And he was a walking reference book for local sports history. He inevitably was asked the “when was the last time this happened” questions, and he always knew the answers.

3. He was loyal to the newspaper. Even when the newspaper didn’t do all that much for him — underpaying him throughout his career, shuffling him into the background, rarely allowing him to cover anything in Los Angeles, refusing to let him go to the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley because management couldn’t be bothered to find someone else to put out the section in his absence. I know this because it was one of the few regrets about his career that he ever voiced.

I became sports editor in 1980, and the then-57-year-old Claude Anderson must have shuddered at some other young punk taking over “his” section.

Doing performance evaluations on him was tricky. Old dog, new tricks and all. (To my “another carpetbagger” status.) But we got along because by then I had come to realize that he was a local institution to be treated with respect. I had come to realize what he meant to the readership, and it boggled the mind to think about how many San Bernardino County kids had gotten their names in the newspaper because of him.

Even after I had been there four, five, six years, and had become sports editor, it was not unusual for local coaches and fans at a prep event to ask me, “Where’s Claude?” Clearly disappointed the “main man” hadn’t shown up.

He was working in the office one day in 1984, I believe it was, when he had a stroke. He felt nauseous, ran to the restroom and threw up, came back to his desk … and began typing gibberish. The stroke had left him unable to control one of his hands — which I deduced when I came in, a few hours later, by looking at the last copy he wrote; all the letters typed by one of his index fingers were correct; the ones typed by the other were random and wrong.

He retired soon after, after some 38 years on the job. By then, he was married to a German immigrant named Melitta, a woman of Wagnerian dimensions who Andy would tell us, proudly, was “very affectionate.” She had money, and he spent the rest of his life in comparative ease, which seemed only fair. They traveled to Europe almost every year, and Andy loved it. He even survived a near-fatal heart attack on a street in Holland; a passerby resuscitated him, he told me. He had several more years yet to chill out.

After his near-fatal heart attack, I assigned a staffer to interview him for his obituary. The only time I ever did that. The while-you’re-still-alive interview is common in some places, but I always found it a bit creepy. At the end, I decided he was too important to the history of the place to leave us guessing at his early life and career, and I sent Steve Dilbeck out to chat with him.

Andy died in his sleep in 1992, I believe it was, of heart failure. He would have been right around 70.

We ran his obit on the lower-right corner of the sports cover, with a color photo he’d posed for a few years earlier, sitting behind one of those new-fangled word-processors he never really liked.

His funeral was something of a sad affair in this sense: Little was said about what he meant to the community and how hard he had worked to chronicle a couple of generations of local sports achievements. I believe I was the only person from the newspaper at his funeral.

It was nice, though, that the guy who did the service, who clearly didn’t know him, read from the obit we had run. It was nice that The Sun came through for him in that small way.

Claude Anderson wasn’t as talented as many of his colleagues, and perhaps more close-minded than most. We never were friends, and if we ever had any heart-to-heart conversations … I don’t recall them.

But I came to respect him. He gave his life to his work, and some stadium or park in San Bernardino or Redlands ought to be named in his honor. He loved his community, and he loved his profession. It just didn’t love him back in quite the same way.