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 the rest of us were disgusted by how little he cared.

Thirty years later, I’m beginning to think “Gordo” was a sort of genius, and maybe the only one of us who actually had his priorities in order. Maybe.

In a department riven by personal rivalries and generational conflict, populated by Type A personalities convinced that what they were doing was important, Gordo was the one concept we could all agree on.

He was a dog.

His inadequacies ranged from annoying to borderline criminal, as far as we were concerned.

–He never answered the phone. Gordo worked “normal” business hours along with fellow veteran Claude Anderson. But to hear Claude tell it, Coy made an art form out of avoiding phone-driven interaction with a demanding public. From what I could see, “Andy” was telling the truth.

During his shift, Gordo would go for long walks. He would take leisurely lunch breaks. And when he actually was sitting at his desk, which couldn’t have been more than a few hours a day, he would allege to be hard of hearing. Though how he could miss the shrill BRRING! of our phone system yet converse in a normal tone of voice with the rest of us was a mystery we never solved.

Thus, the one guy who ought to have been Gordo’s generational ally, Claude Anderson (Coy turned 57 in 1978, Andy turned 56) … instead may have loathed him more than anyone on the planet. By the time someone else came into the office, Andy was usually about to erupt from frustration and would spew expletives about the shiftlessness of “that goddam Coy.”

–He was the most indolent layout man in department history. Gordo was the backup backup layout guy, usually doing the Tuesday morning section, which was small and didn’t have a lot of local copy in it. And then he didn’t exactly add value to it.

He had three or four front-page layout templates in his desk. And depending on the shape of his main photo, he would haul out the appropriate pre-dummied page and fill in the blanks for tomorrow’s “new” section. Honest. Anyone who worked with him knew this. Gordo couldn’t be bothered to come up with something different. That would require extra effort and he didn’t give extra effort.

–He was the laziest writer in the department. If he was sent to cover a high school event, he inevitably would turn in a story pegged to the team’s mascots. To wit: “The Eisenhower Eagles soared past the Redlands Terriers 14-10 …” I mean, time after time after time. Claude wrote plenty of wretched leads (no holiday could go by without Claude working it into a story), but Claude was Grantland Rice compared to Coy.

–He didn’t care about how a section turned out. During a marathon staff meeting at the home of sports editor Ed Willhide, I voiced my concern about mistakes being edited into my copy. It was killing me. Gordo’s response astonished me. “Don’t worry about it, Cuz,” he said (and he referred to everyone as “Cuz”). “There’s always going to be mistakes in the paper.”

–He often couldn’t be bothered to come up with “new” cliche leads. If he was assigned to do a preview on an event he had covered the previous year … he would find the story he did 365 days before and plagiarize from himself — turning in a story that was appallingly similar to one he had done before. Not that anyone noticed, 95 percent of the time.

By any standard, Gordon Coy was an anomaly in a department of Guys Who Were Going to Make a Difference. He was a man who was going to take a paycheck in return for the absolute minimum work.

I can’t say I really knew him, though I can still see him in my mind’s eye. He was of slight build, maybe 5-6, 150. Balding, with gray hair around his temples. He wore glasses. He was wiry and played tennis, and covered it, too. His favorite beat, mostly because he knew it well and because he got to watch the women play, something he freely admitted. He also covered golf. Those were his two primary beats, local-local golf and tennis, though he sometimes was sent out to cover a big tournament like the Bob Hope Desert Classic, which was nuts, because he was going to turn in half-baked copy, same as usual.

I must concede that the people he covered seemed to like him. Well, he wasn’t unlikable. He usually seemed happy and upbeat. Which didn’t seem to jibe with how we felt about him.

Gordo never hung around with the rest of us. He didn’t sit and talk shop. Which only proved to us that he didn’t give a hoot about the section.

About 1979, a woman in the features department named Katie Castator expressed interest in moving to sports. Gordo was OK with the idea of moving to features — probably because no one over there worked late or had to answer the phone to explain why the wrong radio time for the Dodgers game had gotten into the paper.

So the departments made a swap, and it was a great trade for sports, we all thought — because we got rid of a slacker and gained an ambitious reporter and writer in Katie Castator.

Gordo hung on for a while in features; I remember one of their editors telling me, several years later, how she was shocked (shocked!) to find that Gordo would recycle stories from year to year.

By the mid-1980s, he was out of the newsroom. Maybe he quit. I think he was forced out. He did some teaching at a local parochial school, English, mostly, and coached a little tennis … and then we never heard of him again. An internet search I did for this item indicated he died in 1993, at age 72. I didn’t hear about it when he died, and we didn’t run a special obit on him.

For 20, 25 years, I considered Gordon Coy to be one of the worst journalists I ever worked with. But as I got older and slogged through year after year of “massively important!” stories and sections … I slowly began to believe that Gordo may have been on to something.

I am fairly certain that when he was NOT agonizing over his job … he was leading something resembling a real life. He was married. I believe he had kids. And I’m fairly sure he went home and spent time with his family … rather than get all amped up and overanxious and hump like a maniac until midnight and then self-medicate with too many beers into the wee hours of the morning. Like the rest of us.

Maybe there had been a time when Gordo cared. Maybe he once had been a rising talent in journalism. Maybe. If so, he had gotten over it by 1978, when he was tuning 56 and clearly had no future in the business. He had Figured It Out.

His attitude wasn’t professional, no. But it probably was healthier than the rest of us could manage. He wasn’t going to die for newspapering. He wasn’t going to die for the section. And now, when I am almost as old as he was then … I finally realize he may have had the right idea all along. (Well, maybe not to the extent HE took it …)

Do just enough to make your supervisor happy. Don’t act like a star because more is expected from stars. Don’t show creativity on the production side because you might have to work more nights. Be Zen about it all. Take a walk around the block and stop and smell the roses before you got back.

We could make a case he was a sort of savant, then. A guy who had weighed the priorities and decided that “life” was more important than the morning sports section of a suburban daily. I no longer judge him. Instead, I remember that he seemed as content as the rest of us strivers … and that he never said a mean thing in his life.