Joe Brucia has gone over, and following his spirit outbound is a sad exhalation from newspapermen who covered sports, particularly on the West Coast, and especially in San Diego.
Joe was a communications man. His job was to make sure the word – our words – got out, from press tents at sporting events, mainly golf and tennis tournaments. Joe was beloved by the greats and the grunts, whom he treated the same. I was a grunt, a lowly desk man in The San Diego Union sports department sent occasionally to cover the pro tennis circuits as they passed through town. Joe took care of me like he would Jack Murphy or Red Smith or Ring Lardner, whom Joe probably knew.
Joe was happy, and he was enthusiastic, and he was infectious. As far as I saw, nothing ever got him down. He is only the second man (Otto Bos was the first) I have ever said this about: Joe Brucia had a very low threshold of pleasure. His silver linings were a mile wide. He was there before you got there, and he was there when you left. He appeared to love it, every minute.
I don’t know what it’s like on the sports ramble anymore. I hope it’s as loose and collegial as it used to be, but I doubt it. Too many bottom-liners running newsrooms now. The old movies about newspapermen and women over-play the fun part. Not many I knew could ever be that quick or sassy, but I knew quite a few who were slow and sassy. Inside the press tent was a group as professional – sometimes more – than the athletes on the courts. They certainly were more interesting. Being a newspaperman fills up your head with history, and there’s no camaraderie quite like it, when guys sitting around the press tent start playing it back.
History? Joe Brucia was a Western Union operator for 48 years. He started out in the business taking sheets of copy from this or that famous writer at a golf tournament, and sending it out in Morse Code. His obit in The San Diego Union started out with a story, told by obit writer Jack Williams: “It was just a $33.33 check, presented to a promising young golfer at the 1962 Los Angeles Open. But Joe Brucia could see history written all over it. So he photocopied the check – the first of Jack Nicklaus’ storied professional career.”
Nicklaus will exhale at the news of Joe’s passing. Out goes another light in a fading world, so vibrant in its day that they made movies about it. Somebody should make a movie about Joe Brucia. It would start with his fingers tapping a telegraph key, and the camera pulling back and up from the room and the building, RKO-style, following telegraph lines, but faster, faster than speeding locomotives, to tell the speed of Joe’s dots and dashes traveling through the lines, then, appearing out of the air, floating towards us, newspaper pages, and all the dots and dashes morphed by linotypes into words again, words and sentences and paragraphs telling the distant cities what happened on a course or on a court or in a ring.
Nobody out there ever heard of Joe Brucia. Joe’s name never appeared on any of those stories, sent in Morse Code or teletypes or the machine-from-hell Trash 80s into which Joe fed pages when I knew him. But Joe was the story, really, of 20th-century newspapers. I wish I had had the sense to talk to him, get his stories down on paper. Maybe somebody did. Maybe the book is already started. Makes me mad. It would be such a fun book to write.
December 09, 2006
December 03, 2006
Anniversary music
I haven’t been here in awhile. Occasionally I get tired of my own stuff and just don’t want to think about it for awhile. I wish other bloggers did that occasionally. But of course I am not a blogger. Bloggers do stream-of-events or stream-of-consciousness. For that, the online environment is a must. I don’t want that. I still want to be picked up like a newspaper.
Karen and I celebrated our first anniversary this morning. We were married at home one year ago, out on the patio on the hillside, with its totally analog impression of being suspended between earth and sky. “We live in a treehouse,” Karen said, looking out the kitchen window last week. I am 63, she is 55. We are very lucky.
We celebrated at 8, the hour of our vows. Between us, champagne and tears flowed in morning December light in Southern California, light like no other, and a sharp Santa Anna wind out of the east. It all filled me up. In fact it overflowed. I lacked the capacity to hold all the feelings, and trying to do so, stretched me a little. I told Karen that: “You stretch me.” On our second anniversary, I will be able to hold a little more. Our third anniversary, a bit more still. And so on. I will always be too small to hold it all, and that is exciting.
We put our wedding music on again: a CD of an Andre Rieu concert, live in Tuscany, turned up to semi-blast. At some point, they played Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” just the Lone Ranger part, without the reflections-in-a-languid-pool buildup. I wished for the intro – it sets up the hellbent part so nicely – but I guess it would not have been practical, in an outdoor concert venue in Tuscany.
So there went the brass, sounding charge for the cavalry of horns and strings, escorting hearts and souls forward and upward into their own suspension between earth and space, and what I thought was, this music began as notes on paper. Rossini never heard the “William Tell Overture” until he wrote it. A man in a study, penciling music language onto paper, as I do now in my back-room office – or is that where I am, really? - connecting my mind to a page in essentially the same way, though I don’t have to crumple a page and start over.
I thought about how Rossini, at his work, was going to be filled up by what he was doing. His notes on paper were going to create a sound. On this page of mine, I have the liberty to go back to his study, before his overture joined the world’s sounds, and sit next to him in my mind, look at him scribbling away, and think: what is this work he is doing, going to do to him, when for the first time he hears the music it makes?
I shiver at the reality. Rossini, in a hall, the music cavalry onstage, swirling delicate figures in the lanquid pool, until it is time. Then: hi-yo, Silver. How did he stand it? How did Gioacchino Rossini, age 37, survive the evening of Aug. 3, 1829, at the Paris Opera?
Same way I survived the morning of Dec. 3, 2006. I filled up, overflowed, and had to stretch a little. And now I am connected to a page, and I wonder if it were translated into music, how would it sound? Now that it is finished, I hope I can hold at least a little more than I could when I started at the top of the page. And it would be great if people reading this for the first time felt different at the end. What if it stretched Rossini? Always there to shoot for. But you can’t do it every day.
Karen and I celebrated our first anniversary this morning. We were married at home one year ago, out on the patio on the hillside, with its totally analog impression of being suspended between earth and sky. “We live in a treehouse,” Karen said, looking out the kitchen window last week. I am 63, she is 55. We are very lucky.
We celebrated at 8, the hour of our vows. Between us, champagne and tears flowed in morning December light in Southern California, light like no other, and a sharp Santa Anna wind out of the east. It all filled me up. In fact it overflowed. I lacked the capacity to hold all the feelings, and trying to do so, stretched me a little. I told Karen that: “You stretch me.” On our second anniversary, I will be able to hold a little more. Our third anniversary, a bit more still. And so on. I will always be too small to hold it all, and that is exciting.
We put our wedding music on again: a CD of an Andre Rieu concert, live in Tuscany, turned up to semi-blast. At some point, they played Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” just the Lone Ranger part, without the reflections-in-a-languid-pool buildup. I wished for the intro – it sets up the hellbent part so nicely – but I guess it would not have been practical, in an outdoor concert venue in Tuscany.
So there went the brass, sounding charge for the cavalry of horns and strings, escorting hearts and souls forward and upward into their own suspension between earth and space, and what I thought was, this music began as notes on paper. Rossini never heard the “William Tell Overture” until he wrote it. A man in a study, penciling music language onto paper, as I do now in my back-room office – or is that where I am, really? - connecting my mind to a page in essentially the same way, though I don’t have to crumple a page and start over.
I thought about how Rossini, at his work, was going to be filled up by what he was doing. His notes on paper were going to create a sound. On this page of mine, I have the liberty to go back to his study, before his overture joined the world’s sounds, and sit next to him in my mind, look at him scribbling away, and think: what is this work he is doing, going to do to him, when for the first time he hears the music it makes?
I shiver at the reality. Rossini, in a hall, the music cavalry onstage, swirling delicate figures in the lanquid pool, until it is time. Then: hi-yo, Silver. How did he stand it? How did Gioacchino Rossini, age 37, survive the evening of Aug. 3, 1829, at the Paris Opera?
Same way I survived the morning of Dec. 3, 2006. I filled up, overflowed, and had to stretch a little. And now I am connected to a page, and I wonder if it were translated into music, how would it sound? Now that it is finished, I hope I can hold at least a little more than I could when I started at the top of the page. And it would be great if people reading this for the first time felt different at the end. What if it stretched Rossini? Always there to shoot for. But you can’t do it every day.
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