LeBaron: Before they were stars, they worked at The Press Democrat
I was shuffling around in the online archives when I came upon Cecilia Vega’s byline on a 2002 news story and was reminded that, since January, this former print reporter has been the official White House correspondent for ABC World News.
Cecilia has been a rising star since she left print journalism, including nearly four years at The Press Democrat, for TV news.
When I mentioned this to our managing editor, Ted Appel, who remembered Cecilia well, he asked if there were other former PD staffers who made it, as baseball players say, “to the bigs.” That set me thinking about the people I have known, and some before my time, who passed through the hallowed halls of Santa Rosa journalism on their way to fortune and glory.
I didn’t tell him about the quirky writer out of San Francisco who sold a funny story to the Sonoma Democrat in 1869, signing himself (wait for it!) … Mark Twain. Readers may have chuckled but they didn’t get excited. Who knew he was really Tom Sawyer?
Nor did I mention to Ted that there was a kid from Colorado who wandered the West from the age of 13, working at a dozen different newspapers before World War I, including this one. His name was Harold Ross, which may not resonate like Mark Twain, but, after World War I and on duty in Paris on staff of the military newspaper, Stars & Stripes, Ross came home to New York to become the founding editor of a magazine called The New Yorker.
Those brushes with literary fame are too long ago to be meaningful in local history.
But there are closer encounters.
In the early 1950s, The Press Democrat seems to have been a veritable cradle of literary and journalistic talent.
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There was Michael Demarest, who broke all career advancement records at the PD by going directly from our newsroom to Time magazine.
Demarest worked in Time’s London bureau and in New York. He was on assignment, covering the opening of the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1984, when he died of a heart attack. In addition to his three decades at Time, finishing as a senior editor, he took turns as editor of both Money magazine and Playboy.
In Santa Rosa in the early 1950s his daily “Memo from Mike” was the first of the “around-town” columns in this area, adding a level of post-war sophistication, dropping a foreign phrase on occasion.
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There was Denne Petitclerc - another success story, along a very different path.
As a Santa Rosa Junior College student in 1949, fired from a part-time job by the PD’s sports editor who told him he should “learn to write an English sentence,” Denne accomplished that feat by quitting school and sitting down at his typewriter with a novel by Ernest Hemingway. Typing Hemingway’s prose, he would later claim, he learned clarity and the order and rhythm of the written word.
Soon he was back at the PD, working his way up to the crime beat in the best Hemingway style. He won awards for creating hometown heroes of police, helping to catch a murderer. He even took a turn at war reporting, ala Hemingway, spending a month with an Army unit in Korea in 1951.
He went to the Miami Herald in 1955, wrote a letter to his literary idol and found himself invited to Havana to go fishing with “Papa” Hemingway. This began a lifelong association leading to the release last year of the film “Papa,” a screenplay written by Petitclerc before his death.
In the ensuing years, Petitclerc moved back to Sonoma County, writing novels and TV scripts, heeding advice from his mentor while working at the San Francisco Chronicle, and later the SF News, to support a growing family. With the success of “Bonanza” scripts and his original TV series, “Then Came Bronson,” as well a several novels, he went to live near Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, where he died at 76 in 2006.
Denne donated four of his early letters from “Papa” to Sonoma State University’s library in 1980.
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Which brings us to Frank Herbert. Yes, sci-fi buffs, THAT Frank Herbert.
He was the author of “Dune,” the novel set on the desert planet Arrakis, which beat out both “Lord of the Rings” and “1984” in a 1975 poll to determine the “most imaginative novel of all time.”
But first, before “Dune” put the world’s would-be space travelers on their ear in 1966, Herbert was an imaginative Santa Rosa reporter for four years and more, often teased by his PD colleagues for his propensity to embellish routine automobile accidents and house fires more than his editors felt necessary.
That imagination worked well for science fiction. “Dune” and its sequels (six by Frank and 14 more by his son Brian and co-author Kevin Anderson) became a science fiction franchise, including a 1984 film. Just last week I heard on my car radio that screenwriter Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for “Forrest Gump,” has been selected to direct a new film version of “Dune.”
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