I HAD BEEN IN LOS ANGELES only a couple of days in 1978 when the unique pressures on Chicano journalists in this city first began weighing heavily on me, fittingly perhaps, in a bar at the Ambassador Hotel, where I was living at the time, not far from the kitchen pantry where Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Frank Del Olmo, then the veteran Los Angeles Times reporter I had known since the early 1970s, was welcoming me to his town over drinks and conversation that inevitably turned to the man by whose standard both of us would ultimately be judged.
Los Angeles still had two daily newspapers, though barely. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner had recently settled a labor strike whose impact would kill it a decade later.
But in 1978, the Herald was attempting a comeback with big-shot editors, a New York tabloid-style approach to its stories and a stable of young, outspoken, controversial columnists — of which I was one.
“I took the job because I thought they wanted me to be me,” I told Del Olmo over a bottle of Chivas. “But when I got here, they told me, without pulling any punches, that they wanted me to be Ruben Salazar.”
Del Olmo smiled somewhat uncomfortably into his beer. “Too bad. But I guess there’s a lot of people who expect us to be Ruben Salazar. What did you say?”
“I told them, `I don’t want to be Ruben Salazar — Ruben Salazar got his ass shot off!”
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