Austin Powers was a Johnny-come-lately. Jim Schulte was an International Man of Mystery a good 30 years before Michael Myers’ toothy British secret agent.

Schulte may be the most memorable character out of The Sun sports department during my 31-plus years there. And character he was.

Often, it was difficult to determine where the actor’s role ended and the man began. But it was always an entertaining exercise to try to tease out that line of demarcation.

Even when his performance — as the tall, dark and handsome raconteur with a certain undeniable je ne sais quoi — was so convincing as to obliterate the person beneath … the entertainment value made the newsroom’s Prince of Darkness a compelling, magnetic personality.

Schulte’s origins were murky, and he clearly preferred to leave them that way. Even after long hours spent sitting with him in bars, discos and coffee shops … his co-workers/friends/wing men were never quite sure where he had come from and knew few details concerning his personal life.

This is what I gleaned: His father was an Air Force man, perhaps an officer and perhaps not the man whose surname he carried; his mother was Filipino. He grew up in and around Manila/Clark Air Force Base. The three of them landed in San Bernardino sometime around 1970, at Norton AFB, and the young Schulte spent some time at San Bernardino Valley College. He narrowly escaped being drafted into the Marines during the Vietnam War, perhaps because of a tropical rash. He had been married twice, to the same woman, a smart classy local girl he cared for but couldn’t quite keep happy; and he perhaps had a son from some long-ago liaison.

But that stuff rarely came up. And may not be true. I always suspected he adjusted his life story as needed, always erring on the side of opaque and obtuse.

Years later, he suggested to a young colleague, after he had moved to USA Today as part of that paper’s start-up staff, in 1982, that his private life was extraordinarily dull. “I go home and iron,” he said.

But back in the late 1970s … most of us assumed his home life was an extension of his public persona. The elegantly dressed hipster who lured women into his orbit with cool detachment, droll asides and well-rehearsed world-weariness. Surely his evenings ended rather like James Bond’s did, in the company of a fetching (and smitten) member of the opposite sex.

Here was a typical night with Schulte. Or at least the parts we saw.

It began in the newspaper office, on the production side of things. Schulte, often wearing sunglasses all night, would lay out the sports section and/or ramrod copy and agate in the final hours up to the 11 p.m. deadline. And then dive back in on the page updates/corrections until after midnight. It was a nerve-racking yet exhilarating group enterprise.

Schulte, and we almost always referred to him by his last name (pronounced SHUL-tee), could seem sleepy and disengaged during the day, but he came to life — rather like a vampire — as night settled over San Bernardino. He was particularly active in the hours on either side of midnight, which made him perfect for the production cycle of a morning newspaper. He wasn’t sports editor; he had no title at all; but he might as well have, because he clearly was in charge when the paper was coming together.

He was a master of the logistics of that final hour before deadline, knowing when to wait and when to jump, when he could fudge a few minutes on the clock because allies were working in photocomp. He was expert with a knife — an Exacto, that is, pasting up his own agate page.

Bashing together a section on deadline was a rush for him, as well as everyone else engaged in it. As it has been throughout the histories of daily newspapers.

After the adrenaline high of that experience, the idea of going home and sitting around seemed ridiculous to a group of 20-somethings. Not only would it be self-defeating to think you could sleep before 3, it was more than a little anti-social. If someone tentatively suggested an early departure, Schulte would announce, “The night, she is young!”

And if that open-ended promise of intrigue wasn’t enough to prompt a posse to form around him on his way out the door, he would cut to the chase. “If you go home now, you haven’t got a hair on your ass.”

Thus, we would repair to a local dive bar known as The Depot, or to the local Bobby McGee’s, epicenter for the late-70s scourge of disco. At McGee’s, three or four of us would settle at a table of Schulte’s choosing on the edge of the dance floor. Schulte then would skewer the dancers in tart asides. Particularly the guys.

We rarely, if ever, danced. Schulte clearly thought it was uncool, especially when drudges such as “One Suit” were out there clomping around. “Uno Suito,” as Schulte eventually dubbed him, was a dorky guy who looked vaguely like Larry Bird and wore the same cream-colored leisure suit night after night. He always seemed to leave alone, even after the 1:50 a.m. “dance of the desperate,” as Schulte called the last-minute, close-the-bar hookups.

Because we arrived so late (often not before 1 a.m., ) we could manage only a couple of beers at McGee’s before last call, which comes at about 1:45 in California. So Schulte then would lead a parade, in his antique two-seater Triumph, across the street to an all-night coffee shop named Jojo’s … and it was there that he was really in his element.

He cut a dashing figure, with his dark slacks, dark shoes, long black hair and flowing black coat/cape that he typically wore over his shoulders, Euro-style (think Adam Sandler as “Opera Man”). But the key to his late-night performances was conversation — and you couldn’t talk inside a thumping disco.

At Jojo’s, Schulte held court. It was his personal salon, his Algonquin Round Table. He regaled the younger guys (almost all of us, that is) with stories of debauches past, the peccadilloes of co-workers and the suitability of women we knew as possible sexual partners.

The hours would pass, and the night, she would no longer be quite as young. Other Bobby McGee’s refugees slowly sobered up under the glare of Jojo’s interior lighting, but Schulte kept a perpetual buzz on by having his coffee cup steadily refilled with wine by pliable waitresses.

Waitresses were putty in Schulte’s hands, and in his later years at The Sun they constituted most of his romantic partners. One was a crazy woman named Carli; another was a mother in a bad marriage, name of Steffi, who was “cute as a button,” Schulte conceded. He later confided to us that the woman’s young son told him, “My father says you’re a bad man.” I believe the cuckolded husband may have climbed over a fence at Schulte’s condo and killed his rabbit. I am not making this up.

So, we sat there, hour after hour into the night, Schulte the Fonzie to our Richie, Potsie and Ralph Malph. Impossibly cool yet generous enough to allow us to hang with him. Eventually, we would trickle out into the night and hope our wives/girlfriends didn’t notice us sneaking in at 4 a.m., and he generally would remain behind, presumably to escort out the graveyard-shift Jojo’s employee who caught his fancy.

Some other random stories:

At Cindy Robinson’s epic wedding, in 1981, Schulte took advantage of the open bar outside the synagogue to get an early start on the alcohol. I distinctly remember him taking a run across the expansive dance floor, dropping to his knees and sliding up to where Cindy was sitting. He was just getting warmed up. He woke up the next morning on the beach at Newport, roused by a Vietnamese fisherman. Neither of them had any idea how he got there.

At my bachelor’s party, in 1979, Schulte matched me shot for shot. I ended up hugging a commode till dawn. Schulte wound up in the parking lot at Bobby McGee’s throwing up blood, driving himself to the hospital when he was sober enough. As he noted in a comment elsewhere on this blog, I wasn’t the only one to swear off Benedictine and brandy that night.

He had a girlfriend we remember only as “Electric Lady;” he led numerous raucous overnighters to Las Vegas; he was such a steady patron of a certain jewelry store (generally with his twice-over ex-wife in mind) that all the employees there knew him by first name.

Schulte made his mark on the production side, but eventually he moved over to reporting. He was the Angels beat man for a year or three. He covered motor racing.

He might have moved into management right there in San Bernardino, but I’m almost sure he never got a college degree, and his reputation as a party animal was known throughout the newsroom and certainly retarded his advancement.

Just before the USA Today launch he went over to the news desk … and then in early August, 1982, Schulte, David Leon Moore and I flew to Washington D.C. as part of the Sun’s seven-person loaner contingent for the start-up of “the nation’s newspaper.” I bolted for home after two weeks because, as a writer, it became clear to me this was going to be an editor’s paper of six-inch game stories, and because I preferred running my own suburban section to being one of a mob of reporters at USA Today.

Schulte stayed, and eventually became a USAT legend, as well. As far as I can tell. He even got into management. He may have been No. 2 on the production side. He later was executive editor of usatoday.com, making him the biggest success among the 1970s Sun crew. He now runs the website for a governmental agency.

Everyone who worked with Schulte, at least into the mid-80s, has Schulte stories. Late-night shenanigans, heavy drinking and a warm sense of bonhomie are the common denominators.

Eventually, the International Man of Mystery shtick wore thin, and I think Schulte would agree. He needed new audiences who hadn’t heard his stories a half-dozen times. He needed new blood who would smile at his familiar assertion that, “The night, she is young.” He needed people who were OK with the idea that he would be the center of attention, that he really wasn’t willing to be a social-group second banana.

He has tended, the past 20 years, to lose touch with colleagues, some of whom considered him a good friend. My belief is he wearied of maintaining the facade he created and perfected. He tired of remaining in character; heck, the toll on his liver had to be enormous — though his youthful look, well into his 40s, prompted all manner of “Dorian Gray” comparisons.

Most of those who knew him, especially Back Then, certainly will accept him for who he is. We know a guy can’t party/crash/work forever, that something resembling real life intervenes. We know, yes, he probably does go home and iron.

His clothes always looked sharp. Did I mention that? Anyway, he was a great guy to work with — and stagger through the wee hours of a San Bernardino morning with.