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 did the man who hired him, Phil Fuhrer.

Hagen was maybe 26. Probably 25. But to me he was a crusty old veteran, wise in our craft. And what made him someone I never forgot was how he went out of his way to help me in those first tough six months as a professional. He was like the “old” sergeant to my green recruit. Surviving would have been much harder without him.

Hagen covered the Dodgers and Rams for the paper, which was quite a pair of beats to own, considering they were probably Nos. 1 and 2 in the market at the time.

Yet he often was in the office and went out of his way to be helpful, which is just the kind of guy he was, and is.

I distinctly remember my first trip to Dodger Stadium as a professional sports writer, in late August of 1976. Hagen was covering the game, and I was shadowing him. He showed me the fast way into the ballpark, where to park, where to enter the stadium, where our paper’s seat was. How to get down to the field, where and when players and coaches were available.

And he went over the logistics of it all with me, which was no small matter.

In 1976, we still were using typewriters. But instead of dictating back to the office, a “new” technology had come into use, the “telecopier.” It was a suitcase-sized device with a revolving drum and an electronic eye that slowly scanned a printed page … and via phone line reproduced the page on a receiving machine back in the office.

It was tricky to use. You had to feed the page in just right … and if you set it for the “slow” setting of six minutes per page, you would need a full 18 minutes just to file a three-page double-spaced game story, which was the norm.

Then, Hagen instructed me on how to write a game story and still make deadline.

First, you went downstairs and gathered notes material. Lineup changes, injuries, a quote from the previous night’s game, the usual stuff that I understood fairly well. Then you would come upstairs and eat in the press box cafeteria. Then sit down and bat out a page of notes.

About the sixth inning, if the game were moving along at a decent clip, you would begin writing “running,” known in some places as “B matter.” It was a description of events up to that point in the game, early scoring, early big plays, without committing to “Dodgers win” or “Dodgers lose” — because the game wasn’t over, see? Generally, you did a page of this. I remember Hagen quoting somebody as saying, “Hemingway couldn’t write good ‘running’.” Or was it Shakespeare? The idea being, nobody could, so don’t bleed over “running.”

If the game ended early enough, you would run downstairs to the clubhouse for some postgame quotes (otherwise, you wouldn’t leave your seat and hope you could get a quote or two from a reporter buddy) … and run back up to produce your “featurized” game lead. Usually one more page.

And this was key, while doing your “first” page, you would begin sending your completed pages to the office, where time was short. The notes page would go, and you’d call to make sure it had arrived. Then, depending on the deadline, you would send your first page and your second “running” page. If you had time, you would trash the “running” and write straight through from postgame. Two new pages with the notes picked up at the end.

The point being, you were sitting there pounding away on the typewriter while this big clunky machine was spinning next to you, making a lot of noise.

Paul Hagen is the guy who showed me how to handle all that. Within a year or so we had moved on to the first primitive “portable” (more or less) word-processors, and telecopiers went the way of the dinosaur.

Not long after shadowing Paul Hagen, I was sent down to cover a Dodgers game on my own. A Sunday late in the season. Maybe the second-to-last weekend. There had been rumors that long-time manager Walter Alston would step down and be replaced by dynamic/obnoxious third-base coach Tommy Lasorda.

Allan Malamud of the Herald-Examiner had reported that morning that Lasorda was going to replace Alston, which came as news to Alston, who didn’t like Lasorda and was seriously ticked — both at the story and that someone was leaking that sort of information on what was a sort of palace coup.

Alston could be an intimidating guy, even if his nickname was “The Quiet Man of Darrtown,” and before the game Alston sought out Malamud and went crazy, by his standards. He called him “an overstuffed pig” (Mud was a little chunky, yeah) and also challenged him to a fistfight “even though I’m 30 years older than you.”

The Dodgers weren’t in contention, but they had a game with the Pirates, and when it was over I wondered if I should write (as the lead) the game … or the pre-game eruption.

(Hey, I was a kid; it didn’t seem so obvious, at the time.)

I tried to think what Paul Hagen would do, and considered calling him … but I was still undecided until another baseball veteran, Gordie Verrell of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, said aloud, to no one in particular, “Is overstuffed hyphenated?” Then I knew that was what the beat guys were writing, and I should too.

The Sun SE complimented me, the next day, on having the correct angle.

But back to Paul Hagen. He also was the guy responsible for the name I was known by for most of my career — PaulO.

The Sun already had a Paul. Him. So we had to differentiate. In high school, I was known as The Obe. At Long Beach State, I was sometimes called “Obie,” which is what my father had been known by, in high school.

But The Sun guys went with the initial. And I became PaulO, and remained so for 31 years, even when Paul Hagen left along about February or March of 1977.

PaulH (only I called him that) seemed old and mature to me, but he was at home with the younger guys. Mike Davis, Jim Schulte, Gil Hulse, me. And he routinely went to have a beer with us at the end of the production shift. It was at those informal outings that I heard Claude Anderson stories, began to learn about the internal politics of the paper and the chain (Gannett) and the personal histories of my contemporaries. Paul Hagen was the key figure in these late-night events, and I am grateful he let The New Guy join in.

He was a blond guy with a ruddy face that eased quickly into smiles. He rarely was down; many of us took our emotional cues from him and it almost always was “man, are we having fun now!”

I remember him as a solid writer, if not quite free of some bad habits he probably brought with him from college. (I remember he rarely ended a quote with “he said.” The person speaking often could “bark” or “laugh” or even “chirp.” Such as, “I’ve never felt better,” Lasorda chirped.”

Paul was a very good reporter though, and surprisingly tuned in to the local-local scene, a competent desk guy and just a plain ol’ nice guy. I have a memory of him interacting with an attractive but dim young woman. A barmaid, perhaps? Someone in production? He could have taken advantage of her, but he didn’t. He became a sort of confessor for her. She once asked him, to give you a sense of her naivete, “Where do all the words come from?” Referring to the written word.

Hard to answer that one.

Paul also was a capable production guy, back when “well-rounded” was a requisite for a suburban newspaper. He had good news judgment and could work fast. And if it were a Sunday, and he was laying out the section, you could count on a mass dinner break at the Mexican restaurant on North D Street that he loved.

Perhaps the most meaningful compliment I ever received was given to me by PaulH. We were sitting in the Depot, a dive bar around the corner, and it may have been right before he left the paper. I don’t know how it came up,but he said to me, “I think you will go farther than any of us.”

I don’t know if I proved him right. But for him to say that, considering the esteem I held him in … I was very pleased and proud.

Paul was hired away in the spring of 1977 by the (since-closed) Dallas Times-Herald to cover the Texas Rangers. We were glad for him, and proud of the paper that it could send someone to cover ball at a “major metro.”

Since then, he’s worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He covered the Phillies for years, and I would see him when the team traveled to Los Angeles. I believe he now is the Inquirer’s national baseball writer. He knows his stuff, and is very committed to his job and to covering ball.

We still exchange Christmas cards.