A FRAMED Orange County Evening News front page from 1969.

I recently read Teri Sforza’s final column for The Orange County Register and enjoyed it a lot. It was full of nostalgia over her 33 years with the paper, especially focusing on the competition with the Los Angeles Times, which – once upon a time –had a robust OC operation.

It reminds me of my years with the old Orange County Evening News where we ran our own less-visible rivalry with the Big Paper from Santa Ana. In fact, I’m not even sure if those folks over on Grand Avenue even knew we regarded them that way, except, perhaps on the softball field.

Up until the late 70s, the OCR was owned by the libertarian Hoiles family, who abhorred labor unions, were in horror of public schools and regraded Ralph Nader as the second coming of Caligula.

Over on Century Boulevard in Garden Grove was the News. It was a union operation, had even endorsed John Kennedy for president in 1960 and generally paid its employees a lot more.

When I started with the News in 1976, my weekly salary as a reporter was $166.45, plus overtime and car allowance. The Register paid $120 a week, no overtime (you got “compensatory time off”) and if anybody got car allowances there, I never heard of it.

We tried mightily to match their coverage, outgunned as it were. But our people ran into theirs at Press Club events, city council meetings, high school football games and bars.

Maybe the “battle” between us was only in our minds, but there was a high level of emotion in our company softball games. We met them in fierce contests which sometimes ended up with possibly accidental collisions on the basepaths.
We won most of those games … not that it mattered. They grew and we shrank and there’s no longer a newspaper building on Century Boulevard. Or on Grand Avenue, for that matter.

If we could see into the future, we’d see that competing newspapers were like two people fighting in a burning house. We were all headed toward the sunset; some of us just made it there first.

Long hours, ungenerous pay, and daily pressures. Good times, right, Teri?