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.