Present for the original unmasking of the masquerade

Scan of July 1973 rewrite job -- without a by-line. What were they thinking?

I thought this was a better Throwback Thursday post on Facebook today than the typical high school yearbook portrait (and it'll be a cold day in Honolulu before mine is posted).

This story was my first writing output for The Honolulu Advertiser after our move in the summer of '73 from Chicago, where I'd been on the copy desk of one of America's great newspapers, The Chicago Daily News. Like so many afternoon dailies, the paper was killed off by consumers' changing tastes, including a new taste for the evening network newscasts.

Being city desk's rewrite guy wasn't my ideal journalism job, but it was the one Executive Editor Buck Buchwach offered when I flew to Honolulu unannounced in May. One previous trip (in 1971) and numerous letters had made my intention to get a job in Honolulu clear. We were done with the moves after I left active duty in December 1969 at Schofield Barracks on Oahu -- first to Philadelphia, then Los Angeles, then Lompoc (of all places), then Chicago, all in a span of less than three-and-a-half years.

It was Honolulu or Bust (based on my wife's residence during my 18 months in Vietnam and my realization that I wasn't likely to succeed Walter Cronkite), and Buck came through. So did Editor George Chaplin a few months later when my probationary period had ended and George/Buck promoted me to the paper's  City Hall reporter assignment tasked with covering Mayor Frank Fasi's Administration and an unintentionally hilarious City Council. Those are stories for another day.

Here's the almost unbelievable follow-up to my 1973 rewrite job:

Bogus Navy SEAL and bogus former POW Thomas Pardick, who was outed after his Playboy Club foray, was still at it 40 years later as seen in the next photo. Retired SEAL Don Shipley has an online presence in which he debunks SEAL phonies; he recorded a phone call with Pardick in 2013.

As the late Pulitzer-Prize winning American journalist Katherine Anne Porter once said, "The past is never where you think you left it." 

Indeed.

A new generation takes aim at the bullseye

 Grandson Jack and his dad Eric scope it out in their Honolulu backyard.

(The purpose of this repurposed blog, here.)

We're liking this.

We're talking X-ring shooting here!     

A repurposed blog to capture this, that and the other

This site had a different title when first launched two years ago when I still had designs on continuing my communications consulting here in Sacramento after 19 satisfying years working in the field in Honolulu. Having been a public utility spokesman, a newspaper  and TV reporter, a critic (see the Your Chore blog), an author and evangelist for good grammar (see the Killing English blog) and a few other things, "I was somebody" then -- i.e., I had a recognizable name. I called people, and they became clients. Other people called unbidden, and they also signed up. So if I moved to Sacramento the consulting biz would keep on a-rolling........right?

Well, not right as it turned out. To be a consultant in Sacramento, you need to know people and they need to know you -- or so I concluded after a year of pushing the rope (joining the Chamber, attending meet-up lunches, etc.) without either side of that equation fleshing out more than a smidgen.

So I applied for a job and got it -- at the Department of Water Resources. It only seemed natural that I would wind up there in the second year of what so far is a four-year drought, the worst in a generation here in the Golden State, which now looks mostly brown. As my LinkedIn Profile asks: "Do we create the recurring themes in our professional lives, or do themes find us? However it's happened, I've been communicating about big issues and emergencies for decades, starting with the 1971 Sylmar earthquake in Southern California while I was with all-news KFWB in LA...." And so it has gone, from crisis to crisis, headline to headline.

So much for explaining this repurposed blog. It's now going to be my miscellaneous site -- a repository of whatever I want to post here, from current events to long-ago journalism, a place that can be linked from Facebook and Twitter (@DougNorCal) when the spirit moves. Accidental visitors may land here, but I don't expect there will be many. If both this blog and I hang around for a while, maybe it'll be the grandkids who'll get a kick out of it.