Hero in a Hawaiian Shirt

Newsrooms are hot houses. Newsrooms are asylums. 

The bigger they are, the bigger the neuroses and general dysfunction. Newsrooms are like cities that way, or even high schools. Once they reach a certain density, they become zoos. 

I wandered into such a place in 1990: the Los Angeles Times.

The Times back then was impossibly rich, incredibly powerful, shamelessly grandiloquent. The heart of it, a sprawling newsroom across from City Hall, was stuffy, uptight, coffee-stained and rather humorless. I compared it, with all its egos and too-tight neckties, to a high-end law firm. 

It was a place in desperate need of a drink and a belly rub.

Back then, the paper was run by a swashbuckling editor named Shelby Coffey III, who seemed to be doing Ted Turner schtick as he peacocked through the newsroom. 

Shelby was a nutcase, as most executive editors are. But he was creative, passionate and relatively young. I liked the guy. He’d later run ABC News.

The overall staff back then was very bright and quite capable, yet their skill sets were musty, which was good for a young guy like me, who had bounced between papers, soaking up every trick I could. 

Most recently, I’d been at The Miami Herald, which I believed was actually better, inch for inch,  than The Times — more aggressive, more blood in its veins.  

But the L.A. Times had resources — wow, what resources. It was the golden age of news in Los Angeles: the Northridge quake, Rodney King, the O.J. murders. In moments like that, the Los Angeles Times was magnificent.

With legions of reporters, The Times gang-tackled every big breaking story. The depth of coverage could blow your socks off. The photography and graphics were world class too. Pulitzers poured in like rain through a bad roof.

Holding it together, deadline after deadline? Hundreds of seasoned editors.

My favorite: Barry Zwick.

You wouldn’t know the name unless you worked there, or maybe read one of his occasional travel pieces. 

Barry’s primary role was “makeup editor,” responsible for the final stages of production. Really, though, he was our Willy Wonka. 

Let me paint a picture: Barry wore Hawaiian shirts and his hair a little too long, split at the ends … surfer hair. 

“Were you ever with the Bee Gees?” I asked him once, for he had the tanned good looks of one of the Gibb brothers.

Best of all, for every barked out order, Barry Zwick had a funny retort. Imagine a cross between Judd Hirsch and Alan Alda.

When the Berlin Wall fell, Barry was on the clock. When Gorbachev suffered a coup, just after the late deadline, Barry saw it through, signing off on a historic Page 1 with a light-blue marker.

In his off hours, Barry had a bit of Hollywood flair. He drove E-type Jaguars and any other European chariot that caught his eye. He was like the cool guy in an ’80s cop show.  How he survived The Times, actually thrived there, defies all the odds.

According to lore, he was once sprung from a Hollywood jail by a cheeky 20-year-old copy boy posing as the top editor of The Times, with bail money from some shoebox slush fund.

“I’ll take it from here, Sergeant…”

Back at work, Barry usually closed the place, turned out the lights, the last of 1,500 newsroom employees to head for home. 

Over the decades, more Pulitzers followed — more prestige, more pressure. Executive editors — most with more blarney than brains — also came and went, yet fortunately Barry stayed around. At least till 2004, when he took a buyout after 37 remarkable years. By then, big metro papers were pretty much cooked, the internet stealing everybody’s food.

“There were some nice people on The Times staff,” Barry recalled in his farewell speech. “There were also a number of snarling old men…one of them used to take the headlines we wrote on little pieces of paper, crumple them up, toss them into the wastebasket and mumble, “piece of .…”

When I hear that everyone prefers to work from home these days, I think of Barry. Forced fellowship is fellowship just the same. We need the company of co-workers, even the know-it-alls, the grumps, the peacocks, the psychos.

Because every once in a while, out of the coal mine, an actual gem emerges, the kind of person who makes you glad to be alive. 

That was Barry Zwick. 

To this day, none of my heroes wears neckties. 

Last call for donations to the Erskine Compassion Fund, which  benefits struggling families across Los Angeles. Able to help? Please go to LCPCparented.org/give/. If you prefer to send a check, please make it out to LCPC Parent Ed, and send to LCPC Parent Ed, 626 Foothill Boulevard, La Canada, CA 91011. Thank you in advance. If you have any problems with the donation site, please email me at letters@ChrisErskineLA.com

Meanwhile, some changes in the works on how the column arrives. Stay tuned for emails coming from Substack in the next few days. The column will remain free for the first month, and then transfer to ridiculously low subscriptions (starting at $30 a year). Why the change? Writers need to eat too. Thank you for supporting this, some of you for decades. The columns in print will remain as they are.

Also, the Happy Hour Hiking Club returns to the trails of Los Angeles March 21. The hike steps off in Old Pasadena and ends up with drinks and nibbles at the beloved El Portal Mexican restaurant. This will be an urban hike with pitstops at some of the more notable Pasadena locations. Interested? Please email letters@ChrisErskineLA.com. Space is limited to the first 40 respondents. March on! 

Caption: Bottom row, left to right, legendary makeup editor Barry Zwick; former executive editor Shelby Coffey III; Barry with news operations manager David Rickley.