Dan Hawkins was as bright as anyone I ever worked with. As witty and amusing, too. A guy ready to laugh, someone who was conversant in a myriad of subjects and expert in more than a few.

He was the resident NASA expert, even when he was working in sports, and when the space shuttle Challenger blew up, in January of 1986, he rushed into the office and headed up the crew that published an “extra” edition. This barely a few hours after he had put the sports section to bed.

I can see him now, a fairly short and thin guy in his late 20s, omnipresent cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, bearded, his hair parted in the middle and thinning … sitting in the midst of the computers that took over newsrooms a few decades ago, and talking (only semi-ironically) about how he was “the Power Editor of the Eighties.”

Hawkins saw himself as an avatar of the cyber future. A guy who had complete mastery of all the systems around him, the front-end system, the arcane and intimidating page-layout terminal, and the various and sundry little machines, from the fax machine to the copier to the laptops starting to infiltrate the newsroom. See, he didn’t know just one or two. He knew them all, jumped from one to another to another on deadline, swiveling in his chair and making first this, then that machine jump.

That’s what made him a “power editor.”

He did many things well. He was as good a copy editor as we ever had. His work rate was prodigious. He handled pressure well. (In the office, at least.)

He was as talented as anybody who worked with/for me, during my 31-plus years in San Bernardino.

But then there was that not-so-little issue of … the massive betrayal.

Another aspect of Dan Hawkins: His deep religious convictions (perhaps reinforced by a youthful battle with cancer) … and an abiding sense of class consciousness.

You don’t always see that in guys from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Unless maybe they come from a UAW assembly-line or coal-mining background. But Hawkins attended Calvin College, in Michigan, and he didn’t seem to have the bona fides or life experience to be quietly radical. At least by California working standards.

Perhaps I should have noticed this when he would talk to me about teaching a journalism class at the University of Redlands. He was appalled, disgusted, by what he perceived to be the students’ indifference to his class, its subject matter. To college, in general.

I remember him telling me he considered the U of Redlands, in the 1980s, to be overrun by underachieving rich kids, shiftless middle children of wealthy Easterners … trust-fund babies who had never worked or felt any impetus to begin, or ever really would.

He had me over to his class, once, to talk about sports writing. (It was a copy-editing class, as I recall.) And he could barely hide his disdain for kids he thought had so much going for them … and got so little out of it.

But what happened in 1986 … made me think often about his seeming preoccupation with class. With right and wrong and evil, and civic responsibility.

Dan Hawkins secretly became the point man in the Newspaper Guild’s attempt to organize The Sun newsroom.

Let me backtrack for a minute. At this point in history, 1986, Dan Hawkins was someone I considered a friend as well as a co-worker.

We had established the Sun Baseball League some years earlier, but Hawkins wasn’t that interested in ball. Not like he was in hockey. So the two of us created the Sun Hockey League and induced a handful of half-interested co-workers to join in. It really was a rather arcane concept — a hockey fantasy league in pre-Gretzky SoCal.

We held an annual draft, and kept statistics for goals, assists, penalty minutes, goalie saves and save percentage.

Once a week, Hawkins would come over to my house, after the two of us worked a Monday night desk shift, and we would compile a week of stats for the entire six-team league. I would call out the name of a guy, Dan would look in the NHL box scores to see if he had played, tell me what the guy had done, and so on. That would go on till 3, 4 a.m.

We would kill a sixer of Molson beer in the process. Well, Dan would, and I’d help him a little.

(An aside. Somewhere around this time, he asked me if I thought he might have a problem if he couldn’t sleep until he had drunk a six-pack of beer. I told him, well, yeah, you do. I think he then cut back, even though he seemed as over-revved at work as ever.)

Before or since, probably no staffer ever spent as much time in my house as did Dan Hawkins for 2-3 years there, after he came over to us from the news desk — and before the fateful union effort.

The Guild effort was an enormous issue at The Sun. Huge. Careers hinged on it. Political views came into play.

It divided the newsroom into warring camps, both secretive, plotting and paranoid. There was no middle ground. You either had signed a card calling for a vote … or you had not. You were with the company or you were against it.
I was strongly against the Guild push. For several reasons.

–I grew up in a family in which my father ran his own business, a gas station. Like most small businessmen, he thought unions were ridiculous. He knew his workers, and he gave them a fair shake. That was the milieu I was raised in. You didn’t go to a shop steward to ask my dad for a raise. You did it yourself, man to man.

–I was a manager. I didn’t want to run my department with an eye toward what I was sure would be silly and restrictive Guild rules. I was there to put out the best section possible, and I was convinced Guild rules would impede that effort. I was astounded that anyone could believe differently. Newsrooms should be purely meritocratic places, I believed. The talented, eager and productive had no need for a union. Auto workers? Maybe. Reporters and copy editors? No. We were professionals, not huddled masses.

–As part of corporate Gannett, which owned The Sun at the time, we lived in an anti-union culture. The Guild just meant costs and problems, and unions tended to coddle underachievers and slackers. We believed this. Southern California, in general, had a long history of anti-union sentiment as well.

(Though I should add, I have no problem with current attempts to organize MediaNews newsrooms in the Bay Area. The traditional newspaper “compact” … competence and loyalty are rewarded in non-Guild newsrooms … clearly is broken.)

Dan Hawkins was a union champion. It fit perfectly, I later realized, with his self-perceived status as a Little Guy in a Big Guy’s world. A place where Big Guys didn’t play fair and one of the few ways of evening the fight was for Little Guys to organize. And as a university graduate (even from an austere, religion-based school) he was the natural leader of the proles.

Not that I knew that up front. In all our long discussions about world events (in addition to Wayne Gretzky and Pelle Lindbergh), we had never talked about labor law. Probably because Dan already had figured out where I stood.

Then came the Guild push. They wanted to organize wall-to-wall — from the newsroom to the pressroom. And it soon became clear that Hawkins was, if not leading the push, certainly its key figure. He was the guy who hung around till 4 or 5 in the morning to recruit press men and people in the production department. He was the one who was most convincing in those one-on-one sessions with newsroom employees, promulgating the benefits of unionization. (And he stood in stark relief to the other organizers, who were as sluggish and inept in their organizing work as they were in their newspaper work.)

He was a true believer. He was into it 100 percent — which was how he worked, too.

Did I mention I felt betrayed? The guy who sat on my couch for hours at a stretch was secretly trying to undermine the foundation my entire world view rested on?

Let’s just say it destroyed a friendship almost instantly … and a working relationship soon after.

I still remember when the Guild vote came up. By then, Gannett had mobilized its anti-Guild resources and brought in lawyers who held meetings explaining all the evils of a newsroom union. (While at the same time making efforts to increase employee perks, with more aloof managers even making attempts to be nice.)

I can remember sitting in the editor’s office, in the days leading up to the vote, looking out into the newsroom, as the editor and I tried to predict which way the voting would go. Was he with us or against it? Was she? How about him? It was ugly.

The day of the vote came. It was an incredibly tense situation. I vividly recall the publisher of the time, a guy named Jerry Bean, watching the votes come in. He was sweating like Nixon during the 1960 presidential debates. He knew his Gannett career would be over if the shop went Guild on his watch.

The vote was close, but the Guild failed. It went something like 164-135.

Most everyone was relieved it was over. I believe Dan Hawkins was deeply disappointed, though I can only guess; we were barely talking, by then. I think he also was unhappy with his sports co-workers. I like to think I had persuaded most of them to vote against the union effort, and some of them had signed the green cards calling for a vote.

I didn’t have to work out any significant rapprochement with Hawkins, our best word guy and our backup layout man. He left soon after, of his own volition. To the Philadelphia Daily News, I believe. A union shop, I’m pretty sure. And he went back as a news copy editor; he had done sports almost as a lark, and was good at it, but it’s the Toy Department, after all.

I have had no contact with him since. I hear snippets about what happened to him from Vic West, a co-worker of ours in the 1980s whose wife became friendly with Dan Hawkins’ wife.

If my google search has found the right guy, he’s now a copy editor at the Grand Rapids Press, in Michigan. I’m sure he has the talent and ability to be a manager, but don’t True Believer union guys prefer to remain among the rank and file?

Dan Hawkins was (probably still is) an enormous talent. Clever, well-read, impossibly energetic, driven. Great to work with. When he’s not staying up all night trying to overturn the system you know and believe in.

I’m grateful to him for the hard work he put in, the good work he did. But I hold him responsible for a rift I forever after felt in the department. A Me vs. Them vibe I never before had felt. From 1986 forward, I was never really one of The Guys anymore. I was management, someone you kept a respectful distance from. I could try to pretend it wasn’t so … but it was.

I’m sure Dan Hawkins meant well. All revolutionaries do.