Jim Long may be the toughest, most resourceful and most relentlessly enthusiastic journalist I’ve ever met.

Particularly when we take into account the hand nature dealt him.

My history with Jim Long began when a woman named Joyce Miller, adviser for the Eisenhower High School paper, said she had a wonderful candidate for a part-time position we had open in my first months as San Bernardino Sun sports editor, in the summer of 1980.

After talking up Jim Long’s competence, his grammar and his energy, she ended the conversation by saying, “I should tell you … he may not look like much, when you see him.”

And a day or so later, into the office came a little blond kid, 17 years old, walking with a limp. That was Jim Long. We talked, and his willingness to do whatever it took to get into the newsroom, his enthusiasm for newspapering (Jim Murray was his hero), his love of the whole concept of covering sports events … well, I was won over on the spot, and Jim became the first person I ever hired.

Nearly three decades later, the little kid who was born with diabetes and cerebral palsy, who later beat lung cancer and suffered a stroke … is still fighting to get into press boxes and get the news out.

OK, I admit it: I gave the moniker “crabby little wordsmith” to Jim Long. But I meant it in the nicest way.

Even though he stands about 5-foot-5, nobody ever has pushed around Jim Long, Journalist. He has been threatened, sources have attempted to intimidate him, but it only makes Jimbo more determined to cover a story the way he believes it should be covered. Even in high school, he was second-guessing the boys basketball coach, who tried unsuccessfully to muzzle the little pipsqueak.

Pressure from sources ticks off Jimbo. Which is as it should be. He also is fiercely protective of his writing, and won’t hold back from questioning why this or that bit of prose has been changed.

Hence, “crabby little wordsmith.”

In his early days, he was an agate clerk. Taking prep calls, handling box scores, answering the phone. But within a few years he demonstrated he could handle larger topics, and eventually he gained the “local colleges” beat, and he covered the University of Redlands, the local JCs and the emerging Cal State San Bernardino sports program.

I recall one athletic director leaning on Jimbo to give his school more “positive” coverage. Just walked up to Jimbo and demanded it. But Jimbo never budged from what he thought was fair and balanced reporting. Chronicling victories but also never failing to point out the inevitable warts in a JC athletic department. That didn’t stop the AD from relentlessly criticizing Jimbo — who let it all roll right off him.

Among the many characteristics that make Jimbo lovable is his sense of self-deprecation. He concedes his voice, especially when he was young, might “squeak.” He would talk about “squeakin’ on down the road” when he left the office. He referred to the converted one-car garage he moved into as The Mailbox. As in, “not much bigger than.” I once got a look inside The Mailbox, and it was one room with a hot plate, a bed, a fridge and a tiny bathroom. Fittingly, it had a fractional address. Something like 222 1/2 18th Street, San Bernardino. But the rent was about $125 a month, and since he was making maybe $250 a week as a 30-hour part-timer, the rent was low enough for him to also make his pickup truck payments, and he was happy with the arrangement.

He also liked his little cell, because he thought it made him more of a character, and he liked being a character.

Entering the office, he invariably would chirp, “Hi there!” And when he left, headed for The Mailbox, he would announce, “I’m now leaving to get reacquainted with my pillow!”

Some Jimbo stories:

–A Monday night in the fall. Jimbo was in the office working on his weekly local colleges column. A guy named Dan Hawkins was laying out the section. I was working the rim, and a kid named Lisa Wrobel was handling agate.

Monday Night Football was on our one TV, and things were bumping along … when I noticed Jimbo had plopped himself down on a chair over by my office. He wasn’t moving much, or talking much … and eventually he wasn’t speaking at all.

I tried to engage him. Was he OK? Was he dizzy? Could he hear me? The answers were no, no, no and getting worse. Could he walk? No, not really. Certainly he couldn’t drive.

So, what to do? Should we call the paramedics? We decided, no, Jimbo hadn’t passed out and it would disrupt the entire newsroom to have medical people barging in. So finally, Dan Hawkins and I decided we would drive Jimbo (by now completely unresponsive) to St. Bernardine hospital. We carried him out of the newsroom and down the back stairs to the parking lot. At some point here, we did, in fact, call 911 … and asked that rescue workers meet us in the Court Street parking lot.

A few minutes later, the paramedics were on the scene. One crouched over Jimbo, whom we had laid on the pavement, and he focused a flashlight into Jimbo’s eyes, tested his reflexes, checked his pulse. And within a minute or two he said, “Are you diabetic?” And Jimbo nodded.

That was the answer. He was going into diabetic shock. And none of us knew he was diabetic.

For five, six years since joining the paper, he had kept quiet a serious medical condition. We knew he brought a paper lunch bag to work with him every day, and we knew he had an interesting (for a young guy) diet, with lots of carrots and such … but we never knew he was carrying insulin and a syringe inside the paper bag. We never knew he was one insulin miscalculation from having an episode.

I believe he was afraid I wouldn’t hire him if I knew he was a diabetic. But I’m also convinced he didn’t want his condition to be a factor in how he was treated or what assignments he received. Unfortunately, it led to this potentially dangerous situation. Luckily, Jimbo was OK after a visit to the emergency room. I don’t think he missed a day of work.

The next day, I talked to Jimbo’s mom … and she told me she had contracted German measles in the first trimester of her pregnancy with her first child. That explained the juvenile diabetes and palsy. It was better for all of us to know all the facts.

–One day in the ’80s, Jimbo walked in the door, sat down and announced, “Well, found my dad.” His parents had divorced when he was young, and his father moved away. It was hard on a little guy with some physical issues, and not helped when his mother (he told us) would tell him how much he reminded her of his father. (And that wasn’t a good thing.) But Jimbo had tracked down his father at a garage in the High Desert, if I recall correctly. And I believe they remained in touch thereafter.

–Jimbo sometimes had issues with maps, and with directions. Part of it was his eyesight, which was far less than 20-20, especially at night. We once assigned him to cover a CIF football playoffs game at Ontario Christian, which sits right on the 60 freeway. We told him he would see it on his right, while driving west. Football field right up against the freeway, “ONTARIO CHRISTIAN” written in yard-high letters on the gym … he couldn’t miss it.

About an hour later, Jimbo called from, like Pomona. Had he missed Ontario Christian? Well, yeah. He had driven right past it — and 20 miles beyond. Eventually, he got to the game and filed, but he may have missed the first quarter or half.

–Another diabetes-related story, but a few years later. It was the CIF playoffs, and we sent Jimbo to cover a game involving a local team. Somewhere in the Walnut/Mt. San Antonio College area.

I related this incident elsewhere on the blog, but I will repeat it here.

Jimbo called, after the game, and begin dictating, on deadline. I was in the office, taking the information. The score, the box score, the gamer he had typed out on his Trash 80 mini-laptop. (He couldn’t send it over the phone lines because the “couplers” on those machines wouldn’t allow a successful transmission into the main frame.)

He was nearing the end of his gamer … and I noticed he was having trouble focusing. He was stopping and starting. He seemed confused. I sensed we were losing him. He finished dictating … and I asked him if he were OK. He must not have answered satisfactorily, because I asked him where he was. He said, “a donut shop next to the freeway.” That was it. The line went dead. I envisioned him slumping to the ground.

Within minutes, we dispatched another part-timer, David Bristow, to find our fallen scribe. Somewhat miraculously, with so little information to go on, Bristow found “a donut shop near the freeway” in Walnut, some 45 miles away, and arrived just in time to see Jimbo being wheeled into an ambulance. The paramedics suspected diabetic shock but expected him to recover, and Bristow called with the news.

And in the sports department, where a Light Brigade “do and die” culture was pervasive, Jimbo’s stock climbed even higher, in our eyes — because he had filed BEFORE going into shock. He was more concerned about his story than his health. We were all proud of him.

–Jump forward to the mid-1990s. Jimbo grasped that part-timers in journalism rarely become full-timers at the same newspaper, and he took a full-time job with the Daily Press, in Victorville. His primary assignment was covering the new California League baseball team, the High Desert Mavericks. And he loved, loved, loved that beat.

Then he got married, to Judith, and went on a honeymoon. When he came back, he learned that the sports editor had decided, in Jimbo’s absence, to put another reporter on the Mavericks. The crabby little wordsmith went postal.

On his way out the door, he grabbed a coffee pot. The sports editor told him he was fired if he didn’t put it down. Jimbo didn’t. He attempted to throw the pot, or maybe empty it. Instead, the coffee sloshed around and some of it apparently landed on a co-worker. Jimbo was, in fact, fired. He called me a few hours later, asking for advice. I suggested he crawl back on his hands and knees and apologize and ask for his job (if not his Mavs beat) back … and he tried it, but the firing stood.

Jimbo then became a regular freelancer for The Sun, mostly in the High Desert, and he took delight in beating the Daily Mess (as he called it) on Victorville/Apple Valley/Hesperia stories. But stringing for us at $50 a story wasn’t a real living, and somewhere along in here he got a job in the school district in the computer lab. He was good with computers, and he liked working with the kids.

It was in the later ’90s, I believe, that he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Even though he had never smoked or lived with smokers. He had part of one lung removed, and within a month was back out there, covering events for us. Apparently none the worse for wear, though we noticed he sometimes got winded easily.

He was a regular stringer right up till last fall, when he suffered a fairly serious stroke. It damaged one hemisphere of his brain, and he has trouble walking. Typing is an effort, though he’s getting better at it. In one of the occasional mass e-mails he sends out to friends and co-workers, he admitted to frustration and depression over his inability to come back as quickly as he would like.

He did, however, manage to get to the High Desert Mavericks home opener recently — keeping alive his streak of having seen every home opener in the franchise’s 18-season history. I’m pleased for him, because getting to that game was one of his goals.

The mail he sent out had a couple of classic Jimbo touches. He told us the weather (climatic conditions being a regular feature, in Jimbo gamers) at the opener. “Windy and damn cold.” He also sent along his spreadsheet-style accounting of Mavericks history, season by season, with a note that the club is 359-649 since 2000, a nearly unwatchable stretch of teams that Jimbo somehow has managed to watch. He also noted that all-time Mavs attendance is 2,566,248. Jimbo loves his stats.

He isn’t a young man anymore; I believe he is 45. I know his birthday is March 15 — he always has been proud that his birthday is “the Ides of March.” To me, he’s always going to be that plucky kid thrilled to discover someone will give him money to cover sports events.

Something else I love about James P. Long Jr. … he embraces life. Until his stroke (and this concerns me), I never, ever heard him complain about his physical issues. Never. His mind is a treasury of fond memories of events covered. Road trips and bad weather and tough deadlines and bad logistics, and he will happily share those warm memories if given the chance.

His high school newspaper adviser warned me he “doesn’t look like much.” But he is the ultimate proof that appearances can be deceiving. Since 1980, Jim Long has accomplished as much as any reporter in the Inland Empire. Seen as many games, written as many stories, filed as many column inches. And, in the process, become the unofficial sports historian for the growing High Desert area of San Bernardino County.

And knowing him and his mental toughness, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he’s out there covering High Desert prep football, come fall.