Christmas 1968

Posted on December 25, 2008 by lmharnisch




1968_1225_cover
The Pueblo crew arrives in San Diego.
Note the bylines: Chuck Hillinger and Bob Rawitch!

1968_1225_torgerson_graf
 My good friend Eric Malnic, retired reporter who’s now recovering from surgery, often talks about the other distinguished rewrite folks at The Times and their techniques. One of the people he respects the most is the late Dial Torgerson, who was killed covering the war in Nicaragua.

Eric often talks about using a "Dial Torgerson graph" that appears high in a long roundup (usually a fire story or a weather story) as a capsule of what’s ahead. At left, here’s a perfect example from Torgerson’s 1968 Christmas story. –lrh

1968_1225_sports
The Times’ Bob Oates thought he found the perfect man to become the next commissioner of baseball: Vin Scully.

Oates, a longtime football writer, seemed a surprising choice to
write what basically was an opinion piece. The story should have been
labeled as a commentary, but the reader was left a bit confused. Why
was this a story? Maybe he had some inside info? Despite all that, it’s
hard to argue with the endorsement. Scully certainly would have been a
wonderful spokesman for the game.

"He would bring to the commissioner’s office a first-class mind as
well as the self-confidence to act when necessary and the self-control
to abstain from action in other circumstances," Oates wrote.

–Keith Thursby


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About lmharnisch

I am retired from the Los Angeles Times
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1 Response to Christmas 1968

  1. Richard H's avatar Richard H says:
    December 27, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    The most remarkable thing about the entire U.S.S. Pueblo incident was how it got lost in the news during 1968. It was just one event in a year full of major events.
    In any other year, it would have been a political event of major consequence.
    1968 was a PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION year. I don’t recall Nixon or George Wallace make it an issue. Or if they did, it didn’t seem to be something that had much resonance. Nixon’s big issue was “Law and Order” and it was clear to everybody what the George Wallace third party campaign was about. It wasn’t foreign policy.
    There was a major war that the United States was already waging in Southeast Asia. There had been the worst urban riots in the United States since the civil war after the assassination of Martin Luther King. That’s what was on the top of the agenda in 1968.
    A military ship getting seized by a hostile foreign nation and even the soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia
    took a back seat to Vietnam and Race in America.
    Compare the Pueblo incident to the Embassy Seizure in Iran in 1980, and the reaction to the soviet military occupation of Afghanistan compared to the Czech occupation. The embassy seizure and Afghanistan had a critical role in the outcome of 1980 Presidential Election.
    1968 was an amazing year to live through in this country.

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