I’ve decided to do a series of mini-bios on people with whom I worked during my 31-plus years at the San Bernardino Sun. Me and that newspaper … it’s about the past, not the present or future, and we had some fun (or at least memorable) times, and I worked with some interesting, even bizarre people. Many of whom I hired.

The plan is to do one person for each calendar year I was with the paper, beginning in 1976 and ending in 2008 … which means 33 entries (on 33 people) generally pegged to each year. In addition to this more general intro.

Here, today, I’m going to resurrect some of the particularly scandalous/goofy/crazy/unprofessional behavior that went on inside the sports department while I was there, and I will leave names out of it.

Here’s why: In one or two of the following episodes, the person involved later denied having done what he/she freely admitted to, back in the day. In several others, the people are married and have kids old enough to do google searches, or have respectable jobs and certainly wouldn’t endorse (let alone make known) the actions they took a decade or three ago.

Let the sordid tales begin!

La Dolce Vita

Ah, yes. The evocative name of the call-girl service — it might have been an out-and-out brothel — that a sports staffer paid for on his company credit card while on assignment in San Francisco.

He came back and regaled co-workers with specifics of the story (but years later violently denied anything like that happened).According to his original tale, he arranged for the prostitutes with “La Dolce Vita,” and my vague recollection is that the cost was $250 each. One for him, one for his buddy.

As the original story went, he was drunk as well as randy, and the night destroyed him to the point that he nearly missed the entirety of the event he was to cover the next day, filing a story only thanks to the kindness of fellow beat writers.

He escaped punishment for the “company credit card” side of things by coming up with an inspired tale: He and a batch of writers had gone to a restaurant Saturday night — an Italian restaurant, of course, named “La Dolce Vita,” and they had been drinking, he told the sports editor, ordering lots of expensive wine, and in an alcohol haze he had offered to pay for everyone’s meal, and it came to $500. But, of course, he would pay back the company for his unauthorized generosity — and apparently did.

The question we were interested in, back then, was “Was it worth the $250?” And he said, with emphasis, “Nothing is worth $250.”

Even if it didn’t happen … making up that sort of story tells you something about the guy who told it.

Plagiarism gone wild

It was the late 1970s, and a colleague was on a road trip. And he didn’t pick up any hookers. But he did take advantage of company travel money to interview with at least one newspaper (and maybe two) while on the trip.

He had a Saturday morning interview that apparently ran long, and by the time he got to the early afternoon game that he was assigned to cover … it was far along. Maybe the later half of the game. Heck, it might even have been over, considering what he did next.

This was in the pre-laptop, typewriter days, and one of his competitors on the beat was filing stories using paper with multiple carbon copies. Our guy managed to get his hands on those copies … and proceeded to lift long passages of prose practically without change. And file it under his own byline.

Plagiarism on an epic scale, that is.

The next morning, I read his game story in The Sun, and then the game story of the guy from the competing paper. As I was reading the second story I had a sense of deja vu … like I’d read this story before. I sat and puzzled over this for a moment … and then I got both papers and compared the stories. After the first few paragraphs, the stories were nearly identical. A word or two had been changed here or there, but the duplication was probably something like 70 percent. There was no doubt; somebody was ripping off someone else.

I thought about what to do about this for a day or two … and then I went to the sports editor of the time. For all I knew, it was the other guy who did the plagiarism. I just thought it was extremely tacky and ought to be exposed. I laid the two sections in front of the sports editor and asked him to read the two games stories.

From across the room, I watched the SE, and after about five minutes he lifted his head and stared at me. He had noticed the massive, word-for-word duplication.

Within an hour, our guy confessed to what he had done. The plagiarism part, anyway. I don’t think he got around to the “I was late because I was interviewing for another job” part of things. I recollect that he suggested traffic, maybe illness, kept him from seeing most of the game, and that he decided that “the only way to write it was the way [his competitor] wrote it.”

What happened? Nothing, basically. My memory is that the SE didn’t even take the matter up the chain of command.

I should note that, 20-plus years ago, plagiarism wasn’t treated like the career-ending crime it is now. It was cheesy but not a mortal sin. Thus, the sports editor had a “good talking to” with the offender, warned him never to do it again, and asked me not to talk about it. But the offender and I and the former SE … all know what happened.

Sex in the newsroom

Sports people, news desk people, production people, all work very late. And in an environment with men and women working under pressure, often at close quarters … well stuff happens. I didn’t actually stumble across this stuff, but I know people who claimed to have done it … and I’m sure it was doable in a newsroom with sporadic overnight security and few (if any) security cameras.

Trysts took place … in the newsroom library … the second-floor conference room … the graphics department … the roof … in an empty office in the Fox wing of the building … and this is just on-site. (And involves people outside the sports department, too, I should note.) I’m fairly sure this is an abridged list.

Stoned on the job

I didn’t know about this until most of the guilty parties had left the paper, but there was a stretch there when 4-5 party-minded staffers would take advantage of nights I wasn’t in the office to go up to the roof and smoke dope. They would leave behind a part-timer to answer the phones and cover for them, disappear for 20-30 minutes and come back feeling no pain for the rest of the shift.

Drunk on the job

Yeah, journalists and booze. Shocking. Not. In my early years at the paper, employees frequented a bar across the street, sometimes going over during their dinner breaks. One particular guy was in charge of putting out the paper, drawing pages, writing headlines, editing copy. A serious job, that is. But when he came back from the tavern across the street, he often was barely fit to walk, let alone put out a section. It’s a miracle some huge mistake didn’t get into print, but I can’t say I remember any.

Coked up on the job

Actually, I can’t swear this happened. But I believe it did. This happened early in the history of cocaine as a recreational drug (late 70s, early 80s), during the time when it was considered an almost magical “non-addictive” high. One of our best employees routinely carried a brief case that he kept under lock and key, and he more than once hinted that it had “pharmaceuticals” in it … and he also had at least one of the accouterments associated with the usage of cocaine. Something I was so naive about, at the time, as to not notice. I needed years to figure out what almost certainly was going on, but it certainly explained this guy’s extraordinary energy, late at night.

The Streakers

During one over-the-top party more than two decades ago, three guys still in journalism stripped off their clothes and ran through the house of the guy hosting the event. Luckily, I wasn’t there. But those who were are still talking about it.

The Thinker

During another gone-too-far celebration, this one to note the imminent departure of a veteran, one veteran party-goer disappeared into the bathroom … and promptly passed out. After a suitable interval, his absence was noted, someone went searching for him and found him, pants around his ankles, still sitting on the toilet. One of the people there decided it would be amusing to get photographic proof of the moment. He took a snap of a co-worker pointing at their half-naked friend, then the witness and photographer switched places and took another photo. This might be one of those things I would say, “Naw, didn’t happen” … because I wasn’t there (again) … but the photos exist and were passed down to me … and I still have them somewhere among my junk.

On a lighter note

I’m going to use names here … I sent one of my favorite employees, a kid named Jim Long, to cover a high school basketball playoffs game in Walnut, about 45 miles from the office. Jimbo, as I’ve always known him, is a diabetic (something we had discovered only a few months before, when he nearly slipped into a coma while in the office). So, he went to the game, and this is the 1980s, and it was very difficult to file via remote. So he found a donut shop and began dictating. I was in the office, on the other end of the phone with him.

Jimbo was trucking along nicely, dictating like a pro, but as he began to reach the end of his story I could sense him becoming confused. By the time he finished, he was nearly incoherent. I asked him if he were having blood-sugar problems. I asked where, exactly, he was. By then, he couldn’t answer, and I had images of him slumping to the floor.

I then turned to another trusted part-timer, named David Bristow, and not knowing what else to do asked him to drive out the 60 freeway to Walnut and look for a donut shop near the freeway. “What donut shop? What offramp?” David asked. And I didn’t know. Yes, it was just this side of a wild goose chase.

Not even an hour later, Bristow was on the phone. Incredibly, he had noticed a donut shop near the 60, driven to it … and found our plucky little reporter, Jim Long, being attended to by paramedics. They were just wheeling him out. They said he would be all right, and we all heaved a sigh of relief. He was back at work a few days later.

But he went into Sun sports lore as the guy who finished dictating on deadline … finishing before he went into insulin shock … and David Bristow burnished his reputation by somehow finding him in the middle of the night and making sure he was OK.

The torrid hookup

For several years, a seedy little downtown bar named “The Depot” was a late-night haunt for Sun sports people and the occasional adventurous news deskie. We inevitably closed the place. (Well, actually, there were occasions when the help would shoo everyone else out, lock the doors and drink with the Sun guys until whenever. I can’t say I actually was there for any of those nights. By then, as a manager, I had a dampening effect on hijinks.)

Management hired a handsome young woman as a bartender, and she soon developed an interest in one of my dashing colleagues, and the thing smoldered for a bit before erupting in a flash of passion. My recollection is that our guy spent two smoking-hot weeks with the barkeep (and was nearly impossible to find, during the day) before disenchantment (or perhaps exhaustion) intervened.

The Invitation

Same bar, different year, different cast of characters. We went into the Depot one night and some random but attractive woman appeared from nowhere. She gravitated to the table where four or five of us were sitting. She was overtly flirtatious, traveling the country and clearly unattached. Eventually, she all but promised sex for a place to sleep/eat … and the four or five of us collectively froze up at the audacity of the offer. One or two of us were married, and so nothing was going to happen, and the other three … just couldn’t pull the trigger. I remember one of the married guys lamely offering, “I could kill an hour or two …” Eventually, the brassy young woman insulted the group of us for “not being men enough” to take her up, got up and left.

My bachelor party

We convened at the Berdoo Bobby McGee’s, nearly the whole staff, and as an only occasional drinker I had no idea what sort of damage Benedictine & Brandy could do to the human body. But that’s what my “friends” began ordering for me. And, hey, I liked it. Sweet and syrupy …

An hour or two in, I was nearly insensate, but I knew I needed to stop drinking this B&B stuff, which was coming at me in double shots. At that point, various of my co-workers offered to dance together on the disco floor — if I would chug a double B&B. So I did at least a couple of those, and several of my co-workers dutifully made spectacles of themselves, boogey-ing down with each other.

The disco closed, and we stumbled over to JoJo’s, the coffee shop next door, and that’s when acute alcohol poisoning caught up to me. I made it to the restroom and was violently sick for the next hour — if not two. Eventually, my colleagues noticed I had been gone an awfully long time and found me passed out, hugging a toilet. This amused everyone. I eventually was led to someone else’s car (I hope a guy who was sober, basically) and driven to my home … where I lay near death for the next 24 hours. I was told it was a great party. Maybe, but I haven’t touched a drop of B&B since. And I was lucky nobody had a camera.

I suppose that’s enough of this to give you an idea of things.

Much of what we did was a product of our times. Journalists still drank seriously and without apology, when I broke into the profession, even on company time, and consequence-free (we thought) sex was common throughout the country until AIDS and other STDs entered the scene in the 1980s.

We tell these stories to the young people, and some seem almost wistful because most newsrooms have turned into relentlessly puritanical, uptight places — traveling 180 degrees in the matter of a generation or two.

The reality is, you don’t need co-workers to engage in some debauch. And I imagine young people in the business still do what we did, and maybe better.

From here on out, I’m going to talk about specific people, naming names, and I hope everyone recognizes that 99 percent of what I intend to write comes from a sense of fondness or wonder or respect or some combination of the three.