Al JaCoby

I am fortunate to be a small chapter, near the back, in the book of Al JaCoby's life. Many other people have their chapters, too, some small, some huge, some tinged with fame. If the chapters were ever put together in a book, it would be heavier than "Remembrance of Things Past." JaCoby always bragged about having more Rolodexes than anyone else in the city room, and I have a romantic image of those Rolodexes leaking tears on learning the news of his death Monday morning.

JaCoby was The San Diego Union's city editor when, or maybe shortly after when, I reported for work in the summer of 1972. He was gruffish, which was a natural characteristic of newspaper city editors, particularly in the old days, but JaCoby was gruffish with a G. He was also interested, with an I, in life, and jovial with a J. You could hear it in his voice, which had in it a note of a finger being dragged across a string of chimes.

JaCoby – when we became friends, I always called him JaCoby and he called me Mockull – had a very low threshold of pleasure, and I worked on that. Reporters try to get remembered favorably by an editor; you get more interesting assignments that way. He made no secret of his fondness for Mark Twain, and so in my copy I was always trying to turn a phrase. He actually reacted one day when I wrote Carole Channing's voice was like "champagne surf."

He called me Mockull in acknowledgement of my Texas accent. When I started writing a column, he learned of my lifelong mission to proselytize about Texas barbecue. Our friendship broadened. JaCoby liked – hell, celebrated – the good things in life. We had this in common. We embarked on years of lunches. Talk about interesting. You haven't lived until you have lunched at Piret's with JaCoby, Dick Growald, Don Freeman and some visiting dignitary like Dan Jenkins.

His circle was vast, and I was at some of the fabulous dinner parties he and Pat threw, but I never fell into the upper levels of the social ramble, where JaCoby was known and sought-after. Our common turf was the newspaper. When we left the paper in the 1990s, we didn't see each other so often, meeting once a month or so for lunch, barbecue usually, at the Real Texas Barbecue on Miramar Road. We decided to appoint ourselves the resident barbecue critics and actually got paid by San Diego Magazine to find "the best barbecue in town." I have a huge photo of JaCoby and me, at a table laden with platters of barbecue, hard at work in our research.

I hadn't seen him in maybe four years; don't know why, we just had other stuff to do. Some people, though, remain in your mind in a specific way. Every time you think about them, you hope they will never die. I remember a photo of JaCoby, taken at one of the fabled San Diego culinary contests hosted by the restaurateurs George and Piret Munger, over which JaCoby presided with genial authority and aplomb. In the photo, he is 50 feet aloft in a tethered hot-air balloon, leaning against the side of the basket, flute of champagne brandished high, his features triumphant, as if challenging all the gods of pleasure to come down and have half the fun he was having. I know of no other single soul who could have completed that image the way that JaCoby did.