The Tomline
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I attended the camp that inspired the ballad about a city kid who first complains, then delights in being sent to the country.
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I graduated from Jesuit-run Regis High School in Manhattan. It’s motto, Deo et Patrie, stands for service to God and country.
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I am standing in the first row, far left, as Master at Arms, responsible for the discipline and morale in our training company.
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October 1974, Future military journalists, studying at the Defense Information School (then at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana) clown around. I am at the base of the pyramid in the lower left.
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Cecil Jones of Corning, California, (pictured) asked me to take the wheel on highway 50 from our broadcast training school to our respective ships in San Francisco Bay. Bud’s two rules, keep the car between the white and yellow lines, and brake for jackalopes.
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I reported aboard the U.S.S. Flint (AE-32) shortly before it departed on a six month cruise to the Far East (a WESTPAC in naval parlance). Our deployment coincided with the fall of Saigon. I had a hand in caring for South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.
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As the Flint’s journalist, I ran KBOM Television — aptly named for an ammunition supply ship. Among my duties, I read the evening news and showed taped sporting events and movies. Each morning, I ran KBOM Radio with help from volunteers from among the crew. Here I enjoy accolades commensurate with my exalted media position.
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I also spent 9 days as liaison between naval authorities and about 1,000 former Cambodian sailors and their families, who fled aboard their ships to avoid the “Killing Fields” of communist dictator Pol Pot.
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This photo shows Filipino boys begging coins from sailors leaving the Subic Bay Naval Station to enjoy liberty in Olongopo City. More often than not coins would miss the boats and the boys would dive into the foul waters to retrieve them.
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Olongopo City catered to sailors with live bands, go-go dancers and bar girls who took men home for pay in a widely practiced, though disguised, form of prostitution.
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In this picture, taken in the waning weeks of my enlistment, I stand just left of center of my ship’s clerical staff. Us topside sailors were held in mild contempt by the deck apes and snipes who did the ship’s real work.
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I ended my enlistment as a Petty Officer Second Class, equivalent to a buck sergeant in the other armed forces.
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After the Navy, I attended UC Berkeley and became editor-in-chief of its campus paper, The Daily Californian. I played a role in publishing the H-bomb “secret” in order to challenge the McCarthy-era Atomic Energy Act, which made it a crime to know certain scientific facts, even if one discovered them independently.
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This photo, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, helped us raise money. In the background, Angela DellaPorta scans wire copy. In a small world twist, this picture was taken by photographer Gary Fong who would, years later, become my car pool buddy during my Chronicle years.
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Pioneer Graphics, a mom & pop typography shop, began in a Victorian flat in Eureka, California. Out front sits my beloved Cortina, bought from Navy buddy Alex Koulakoff.
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As a new member of Eureka’s business community, I am mentioned in a Humboldt County yearbook.
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Our tiny firm taught small press book publishers how to choose and fit type using MicroComposer, the world’s first computer-to-typography interface. This innovation made us extremely competitive at typesetting books.
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My then-partner, Mia Ousley, promoted our move to larger offices in scenic Old Town Eureka.
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Mia Ousley (left) and I started the North Coast Journal of Politics, People and Art, and sold it to Carolyn Fernandez (tallest), Judy Hodgson and Rosemary Welsh. The Journal’s new owners eventually took it weekly and it continues to thrive.
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Before selling the Journal, we sent photojournalist Joe Cempa to El Sauzal, Mexico, after a large Humboldt County employer opened a maquiladora plant there and laid off local workers. That story and its photos established the Journal as a serious publication.
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I got into newspapers with my eyes wide open, as can be seen from this photo, taken during our road trip from Humboldt County to Brooklyn. There, I lived in my mother’s basement, with my then-wife, eldest son and two pets, while earned my degree and found a job.
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I grin with some classmates after we get master’s degrees in journalism from Columbia. Although it took nearly another year to find a job, when I did so it was a great gig — covering science for the San Francisco Examiner.
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The Earth literally moved on my first day as a big city reporter. After I aced a story on the Landers quake, former colleague Trapper Byrne, a Daily Cal buddy, celebrated my scoop with typical newsroom humor: “A-1 on your first day,” he said. “There’s no where to go but down.”
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I named this column for the San Francisco Chronicle to cover the world’s greatest technology cluster, still known by its ubiquitous misnomer, Silicon Valley.
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I wear a smile at the San Francisco Chronicle before it and other papers come under unrelenting pressure to cut jobs.
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This mock front page, a memento of nearly 20 years of San Francisco’s newspapering, was pulled together by my friend and former editor Suzanne Herel.
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Taken during my brief tenure as returned editor of the North Coast Journal.
Hi Tom,
I heard from Deanne that you moved back to the ‘woods to return to the NCJ. Hope everything is going well up north. We miss your writing and incisive economic analysis…Really! Feel free to pester us for economic information and plug in your new venue. Best regards, Richard
Tom, give us a call when you can.
Great scrapbook–it brings back some memories.
Cindy & Neil