A man “walked in off Market Street and went into the squad room” where officers at the old downtown police headquarters were filing reports after their shifts, Thomas recalled Monday.
“He pulled the gun out of the sergeant’s holster. And he was pointing at everybody. And acting crazy,” he said.
A late-arriving cop named Charlie Rucker saw the scene and shot the intruder.
“Bam! Down he went,” Thomas said. “Gunfire at the police station — very rare.”
Also rare: A reunion of 60 old newsroom colleagues from the once-competing sister papers — the morning Union and afternoon Tribune, which merged in 1992.
Summoned by a daily newsletter emailed to 520 mostly retired U-T staffers, the crew calling itself the 919 Gang (after the address of a pre-Mission Valley newspaper office on Second Street downtown) met at the Black Angus Steakhouse in Grantville.
The idea grew out of a planned get-together between former Tribune graphic artist Rex Salmon of Lemon Grove and one-time Tribune food editor Toni Allegra of Napa Valley.
“Usually the only time we get together is at funerals,” said Salmon, 78. “So I said let’s have a happier time.”
Thomas — a La Jolla resident recovering from a traffic-accident back injury (“Not my fault. I don’t even have a lawyer yet”) — started at the Union in 1957, left for Stars & Stripes in 1966 but returned to the San Diego daily in 1974, retiring in 2001.
And he wasn’t even the most senior staffer present.
That was Jack Gregg, 92. He joined the San Diego Evening Tribune in February 1953.
The former city editor and editorial writer also had the police beat — and later became the local smog expert.
“Smog was a big thing in those days,” said Gregg, sporting a monogrammed green Tribune shirt — evoking the green newsprint editions of yore.
As city editor of the afternoon paper, he arrived early in the morning.
He said he was careful not to step on sidewalk cracks (lest he “break your mother’s back”) and when he made it to the third floor “I just kind of continued — not touch the floor.” He walked on desks.
“Desks were close enough so you could do that,” Gregg said.
Also close: photographers shared by the Union and Tribune.
“We beat (the Union) all the time,” he said of the flagship paper of the Copley Newspapers chain. “We had some secrets they didn’t know about. The photography lab was on the Tribune side [of the building], and when two photographers ran out — and it wasn’t our assignment — we knew the Union had something. So we got on it.”
One of those photographers was Chuck Boyd, now 77 and visiting from his home in South Carolina. He had been in Oakland over the weekend to attend a long-delayed wedding reception for his daughter.
But one of his best shots never appeared in the paper. Instead it made the coveted back page of Life magazine.
Flying back from an aerial shoot in 1964, he spotted a giant word — “Quiet” — carved into a San Diego orchard. He took two pictures with his Speed Graphic.
His San Diego editors turned them down, however, so he submitted them to Life.
“They called me back — didn’t write me back — and said: We need a caption,” Boyd (1962-1969) said in the dark Black Angus bar. “I had to rent an airplane to find it.”
Turns out the marking was at the end of a Miramar military runway — and the word was a plea for the fighter pilots to hush up. (Instead they used it for a target — turning on their afterburners.)
Boyd was paid $300. And the San Diego paper earned a photo credit.
The next year, Boyd covered another deafening affair — the Beatles at Balboa Stadium. “And even down on the field, you could tell they were looking back and forth” to see when to play.
Fifty years later, his concert photos appeared again in the U-T.
Longer tenured was Phil McMahan, hired in 1960 and staying until 1999, when he retired as manager of the U-T Photo Department.
“Every year at budget time, the CEO wanted to go all-digital,” said McMahan, 80. “And I kept arguing: It’s not there yet. … I felt — and it turns out I was right — it was going to be improving every year.” He feared having to buy new equipment all the time.
That was one of the reasons he retired: “I told my wife in January, after we’d gone through the budget process — ‘I can stay and fight this. But I’m not going to win.’”
A couple years later, he returned for a visit and asked what their budget was.
The new manager said: “Well, it’s about three times what it was when you were here.” Each photographer had two high-end digital cameras, and a titanium laptop. “I knew that was coming, but it wasn’t there yet.”
The Mission Hills resident isn’t envious of the new digital freedom — the many-shots-per-second speed of current cameras.
“I always prided myself on being able to capture the moment,” he said.
One happened during a car slalom event at a Fashion Valley parking lot.
“I was down to my last five or six frames, and didn’t have any more film with me,” McMahan recalls. “I saw this one car coming in really fast. He hit the starter’s table. People were jumping all over the place. And the last three frames … got all of that.”
Other veteran U-T newsies bemoaned changes over time, including former copy editor Steve Oakey, who started in 1981 and retired in 2008.
The 71-year-old La Mesa resident worked sports for the merged papers at the end.
“It became a battle to make the deadline, [but] nothing like it is now,” Oakey said. “I don’t think we ever went in with a City Edition without the Padres score or some of the West Coast games.
“It’s ridiculous now” — with missing final scores as a result of impossibly early deadlines thanks to the paper being printed in Los Angeles and trucked down to San Diego. “And I don’t think they’re embarrassed about it.”
Proud of the 919 Gang newsletter, however, is Jack Reber of Ramona, who in June marked 10 years as editor.
“We keep adding people,” he said. “This keeps us together. And it also has some entertainment value. I enjoy some of the things I read.”
Monday’s reunion was a treat for Reber as well: “I knew Chuck Boyd in the Sixties. I haven’t seen Chuck Boyd since the Sixties.”
Reber started at the downtown paper in 1961, and rose to assistant managing editor for systems and facilities. He outfitted U-T staffers for the 1996 San Diego Republican National Convention and the 2000 Los Angeles Democratic meeting.
By 2004, another election year, he was ready to go.
“In January, we signed up for an Alaskan cruise in July,” he said of himself and his wife, Mary. “I had not made up my mind to retire. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I realized: Yeah, I made up my mind, or I never would have scheduled that cruise — in the middle of conventions, Olympics, capital budget time.”
The current state of the U-T was noted by several, including Lola Sherman of Oceanside, who helped cover Tijuana during a 1967-69 stint. She then specialized in North County from 1979 to 2009 (and still writes a column for the paper).
“It’s very hard to see any newspaper suddenly become so thin,” she said.
“Newspaper addict” Reber said: “I read the paper every day. That’s the first thing I do in the morning.”
But he’s grateful the U-T has cut back on its “long-ass stories” and says he likes the editorial page. “It’s as balanced as it possibly could be. And it’s very intelligent. I’m a fan of the U-T” and his former co-workers.
Kathy Rodondi of Bermuda Dunes — in the Coachella Valley — recalled her tenure as a U-T page designer from August 1982 to September 2002.
“I had to change what I knew for my job five different times,” she said. Starting out with pencil and paper, she eventually embraced software, with “everything paginated. I had two computer screens going at all times.”
Early on Sept. 11, 2001, she was carpooling with her husband from their home in Temecula. On the I-15 in Rancho Bernardo, the radio told of the first Twin Towers crash. She skipped the gym and went straight to the U-T in Mission Valley.
Photographer John McCutchen was the only one in the newsroom, she said, “and when I got there, I said: Have you called the seniors (the top editors)? He said, yeah. And instead of working out that morning, I put on my work clothes and we got to it. We put out an extra edition,” with a deadline before noon.
Bob Laurence, 75, covered politics and City Hall before becoming a music writer and later TV specialist and critic. But recalling his 1971 to 2006 tenure, he noted another beat with fondness.
“I loved general assignment,” he said of the jack-of-all-stories shift. “Every day when I went into work, I had no idea what I’d be doing. That’s the fun of it.”
If he were still writing about the boob tube, he’d be a booster.
“TV is better than ever,” Laurence said, “in terms of the diversity of what’s available, online or regular network television. Better in terms of quality. My only complaint about TV now is [there’s] too much good stuff.”
But the North Park resident, whose U-T alumnus wife is Pulitzer Prize-winner Susan White, is less jazzed about presidential coverage.
“The media were totally irresponsible” in how they dealt with Donald Trump, he said. “They gave him a blank check. If [he] called up in the middle of the night, the anchorman would be there to take his call. The media made him a dominant force much more than he had any right to be.”
It was another force that Hector Muñoz, 68, recalled Monday.
A news assistant or photo desk aide for 36 years, starting in 1967, Muñoz was the son of a former house worker for the owner and publisher Copleys in La Jolla.
“My first day there. Jack Gregg … said: ‘OK, kid, I’m going to take you around to meet some of the people here,’” introducing the awestruck lad to star reporters and editors.
With Gregg present Monday, Munoz spent quality time with him — showing his appreciation nearly a half-century later.
“I will never forget that,” he said. “There was smoke all over the place, and a couple of people had their little ‘sacred water’ in the belly drawer.
“It was awesome.”
Ken Stone worked at the Tribune or Union-Tribune from 1986 to 2010.
