Between the Lines -- Byron de Arakal

Gary Granville typed the “30” to his life last week. Filed his copy.

The gentleman journalist put on his coat -- the knot of his tie drawn

down below his open collar -- and went home. For good.

With his passing at age 72 (I have to mention his age, for were he

editing my copy he’d “blue pencil” me for not including it), I’m suddenly

and keenly aware of Granville’s enormous footprint in my journalism

career and in the tint of my writing.

This isn’t to ignore his steady, quiet and stellar career in public

service as Orange County’s clerk-recorder for the last 17 years. That he

captained the county’s public records warehouse with such grace and skill

was never surprising to me. He had, after all, scratched and poked around

every nook and cranny of the place during his emulative newspaper career.

It was in the dank and dark halls there where he found the hidden news

nuggets that propelled him to his stature -- in my book, at least -- as

the finest investigative reporter ever to prowl a newsroom in Orange

County.

Gary Granville set foot in my life in the spring of 1979. That’s when

I transferred -- following a brief and miserable episode of premedical

studies at UC Irvine -- to Cal State Fullerton to study the craft and

trade of journalism. By then, Granville had already earned icon stature

in the Orange County journalism community for his tenacious but fair

(always fair) investigative reporting of goings-on and shenanigans in the

county as a newsman for the Fullerton News Tribune and the Daily Pilot.

As the advisor to the university’s newspaper, the Daily Titan,

Granville that semester welcomed an eager but tree-green news wannabe

with a few weighty truisms of journalism that set the cut of my jib from

that day on. He instructed that journalists are guardians of the public

trust. With that, he counseled, they have a sacred obligation to report

on and write about fact and truth. But with the facts and truth not

always evident, solid journalists can never cut corners or assume or

guess. They must relentlessly dig and probe and ask and confirm.

By themselves, Granville’s edicts braced me as the cold and sterile

canons of hard-nose journalism but oddly unrelated to the kind, warm and

mild-mannered man who insisted on their practice and who had assembled a

five-star clip book by religiously adhering to them himself. And then he

warned me never to lose my awareness of humanity. Always, he said, be

cognizant that the words you push together in a news story can have a

powerful effect on human lives.

I haven’t always succeeded to that end.

I loved Granville’s presence and his style. It was rugged, blue-collar

journalism. In lectures, he’d burn through a half pack of Marlboro Lights

without pause, regaling us with stories of his reporting exploits. He’d

huddle over my copy, mark it up, taking the time to sharpen my news

judgment and always needling at me in the kindest way when I buried my

lead. He would settle upon a word and say: “You can do better here. Make

the piece sing.”

Granville didn’t just make his minions better writers, he made them

savvy reporters. His assignments would dispatch us to the halls of county

government, where we learned the art of combing through and deciphering

property deeds, death records and court cases. He pressed us to ask

questions the uninitiated would never ponder. And then he demanded that

we write compelling news stories rich in color but sans the taint of our

own biases. He led us -- my colleagues and me -- in a wonderful

exploration of journalism.

He lived by the words he instructed us with and backed them with his

own integrity. He once advised us, as we pasted up copy late in the day,

that an editorial cartoon we had dummied to run wasn’t appropriate and

instructed us to pull it.

Granville then left for the night. And we ran the cartoon nonetheless.

When he saw the paper the next day, he resigned as the newspaper’s

advisor. And because I was the editorial page editor at the time, he was

particularly disappointed in me.

He reminded me then of what he had told me out of the gate, of

journalism’s purpose and the cognizance of humanity you must hold on to

while practicing the profession. To this day, I regret that I

disappointed him so.

But the bigger story here is that Granville’s talent for the news

business and his devotion to the integrity and principles of journalism

shaped some of the best in the business from my class. The Los Angeles

Times’ Chris Dufresne, Keith Thursby and Roy Rivenburg, for instance. And

at the Orange County Register, Tony Saavedra, a Granville-trained news

hound if ever there was one.

So I’ll miss Gary Granville, the gentleman journalist. But I’ll always

remember him. And in so doing, I’ll try to do better.

* Byron de Arakal is a freelance writer and communications consultant.

He resides in Costa Mesa. Readers can reach him with news tips and

comments via e-mail at o7 [email protected] . Visit his web site at

o7 www.byronwriter.comf7 .