‘It Was Fun While It Lasted’: A Reporter’s Reflections on the Life and Work of Long-Time Pasadena Weekly Editor Kevin Uhrich, Who Died August 23, 2024
By Justin Chapman, Pasadena Now, 8/25/2024
Kevin Uhrich, an award-winning journalist and long-time editor of the Pasadena Weekly from 1999 to 2020, died shortly before 10:30 p.m. on Friday, August 23, at Kindred in Baldwin Park. He was 65.
In recent years, he had two heart attacks and began experiencing dementia. In his 20s, he got into a car accident that resulted in a head injury, which contributed to his declining mental health later in life. He also had a family history of similar diseases, with his father dying of Alzheimer’s disease in 1986.
He is survived by his son Ted, daughter-in-law Dorene, grandson Kedt, granddaughter Audrey, several siblings and partner Marina.
Uhrich was the youngest of eight kids by their parents, John Uhrich and Faye Shields. He had four older sisters (Martha, Cathy, Cecilia and Mary) and three older brothers (Jack, Tom and Jim). His family was three-fourths Welsh, Scots-Irish, and Irish Catholic, “all genetically linked up by the dominant German Lutheran surname,” he wrote in a recently published book.
His mom was originally from Lemoyne in the Harrisburg area and attended nursing school at Good Samaritan where she met Uhrich’s dad. She was a registered nurse on staff at that teaching hospital for decades.
His dad, nicknamed Brud by his family, was the second oldest of 10 kids, and the oldest of six boys. He read a lot of newspapers, which “wasn’t surprising, considering one of his jobs was managing dozens of paperboys working out of the Lebanon News Agency, a clearinghouse for all the papers operating on the East Coast,” Uhrich wrote.
“The News Agency distributed the Harrisburg Patriot, the Reading Eagle, the Lancaster Intelligencer-Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Philly Inquirer and Bulletin, the Washington Post, all the New York papers. Of course, they carried the ‘scandal sheets,’ tabloids like the Enquirer, Tattler, Globe and others too many to recall. One of his few pleasures [was] sitting alone in our usually bustling kitchen and reading the true-crime stories in the New York Daily News.”
‘A stand-up-for-others kind of rebel’
Uhrich had a deep-seated passion for the news industry — no doubt seeded by his father — and wrote and edited countless thousands of stories over the decades. Later in life, he completed his bachelor’s degree at Cal State Northridge. He also wrote the recently published nonfiction book, Death in the House of Broken Hearts: The Story of the Fifty-Year-Old Unsolved Murder of Teenager Peggy Reber, with his sister Martha Shaak. The book chronicles the brutal and still unsolved 1968 murder of 14-year-old Reber in his hometown of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a former steel town until that industry went under in the 1990s.
Lebanon “was a tough little neighborhood,” Uhrich told Associated Press in 2018. “There were a lot of kids, but it was also kind of tough in terms of sporadic fits of violence.”
Uhrich was born on February 24, 1959, to working-class parents of Irish and German heritage. His grandmother Katherine Murray was an immigrant from Ireland, but the Uhrichs came to the New World in 1734, settling in Quaker William Penn’s Woods in Pennsylvania. In the 1880s, the Uhrichs owned a more than 220-year-old plantation called Tulpehocken Manor in Myerstown, Pennsylvania. In 1793, then-President George Washington stayed at that plantation when he was breaking ground for the Union Canal, the country’s oldest trade canal, in west Lebanon. Before the Uhrichs owned it, African slaves were forced to work on the plantation, until Quakers made Pennsylvania the first state in the Union to abolish slavery.
In fact, the Uhrichs were among Lebanon’s original settlers, led by Valentine Uhrich, who emigrated from Germany’s Palatine region, the site of several wars between German and French monarchs in the 1600s and early 1700s over territory, money and religion.
Kevin Uhrich grew up on Church St. in Lebanon and went to St. Mary’s Elementary School, from which he used to hop on slow-moving trains alongside hobos, traveling past abandoned steel factories in an area called Bum’s Jungle to get home. He played Little League baseball and then football when he started attending Lebanon Catholic High School.
As a young man, Uhrich dreamed of being a politician. In high school, he won the title of “Mayor for a Day,” part of a government appreciation program run by the local YMCA for two local high schools. Juniors ran against seniors at each school every other year, and he was the only junior at his school to win the race in the 30-plus years of the contest.
“We were The Party Party, and we won on a platform of ending the caste system that existed in the sports program,” Uhrich recalled. “Sophomores were forced to fulfill every desire of their ‘masters,’ the seniors. Being a starter on the football team, I was confident we could end this pernicious practice, and we did.”
After high school, he developed a deep passion for the news business and never looked back. He was simply a master of the craft.
In 1979, Uhrich moved to California with four high school friends when he was 19. He lived in Sherman Oaks and worked at a Union 76 gas station and the Sherman Oaks Newsstand on Ventura Boulevard. He spent much of his time at the Sherman Oaks Martian Pollard Branch Library at Katherine and Moorpark avenues, writing letters and keeping a journal. He took some classes at LA Valley College and Cal State Northridge, but didn’t complete his degree until decades later.
“The LA Herald Examiner was by far my favorite newspaper, with its hard-hitting coverage of crime and public corruption, not to mention its incomparable sports page,” he once wrote. “This was real, power-challenging journalism, I thought.”
He took a job as a pressman at the Herald during the graveyard shift, but a strike by the drivers of the Rapid Transit District, now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, ended his “brief career in the messy, inky world of newspaper printing, a world which I had come to love.”
So he got a job reporting for the Simi Valley Enterprise and LA Daily News in the 1980s, writing exposés on such topics as a councilman’s cocaine addiction that led to him taking bribes; another’s penchant for gambling in Vegas with developers who had projects pending with the city; the head of the county family support unit not paying his own child support; the mayor of a local town indiscriminately using the “N” word; a prominent car dealer selling damaged and repaired cars as new; and a prominent landlord exploiting immigrant families in substandard housing; among others.
His was a gritty, no-punches-pulled, expose-the-corrupt-bastards journalism.
“But in that thread of journalism that he did, what set him apart was fairness,” Piasecki said. “Not objectivity, but fairness. He was a crusader, but he would go out of his way to maintain fairness.”
Like a scene from ‘The Twilight Zone’
Uhrich was in the Valley during the Northridge earthquake on January 17, 1994. He’d had an argument with his then-girlfriend and was sleeping on a friend’s couch the night before. He remembered a loud bang, like an explosion, and he was thrown off the sofa, landing facedown on the floor as the earth shook violently.
“I grabbed a pillow, covered my head and crawled under the coffee table until it subsided an eternal 30 seconds or more later,” he told me for an article I wrote in 2014 for Ventura Blvd. and South Bay magazines. “After the shaking stopped, I threw on my shoes and ran out to the car. Storefront windows near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura were shattered, with shards of glass strewn everywhere. A cacophony of security alarms and car horns filled the air. Power lines further down the street had fallen. Street lights were out. Portions of the street had buckled and cracked, and underground water mains had ruptured. It was surreal.”
That morning, the magnitude 6.8 Northridge earthquake shook Southern California for half a minute, killing more than 60 people, including 16 residents who lost their lives when an apartment building on Reseda Boulevard collapsed. At least 10,000 people were injured, and the quake caused more than $20 billion in damage. Freeway ramps fell, streets cracked wide open and houses tumbled down hillsides. A total of 65,000 residential structures sustained damage.
For many Valley residents, the nightmare continued for weeks afterwards. Displaced residents, barred by police from returning to their taped-off dwellings, lived in “tent cities” in local parks. Thousands of aftershocks, felt as far away as Las Vegas, continued to rattle nerves.
“I was one of the very few people outside at the time, and I had the entire street to myself,” Uhrich said. “It was like a scene from ‘The Twilight Zone.’ It was as though parts of Studio City and Sherman Oaks had been bombed, and I was the only person to survive. I finally made it to our apartment, which really got whacked, and ran inside — ignoring people yelling at me to stay outside — but my girlfriend was gone. I finally found her among the other frightened tenants gathered in the parking lot, and she was okay, but all of our stuff — TV, stereo, furniture, personal items — was ruined. Our apartment building was red-tagged, and everything in our unit was destroyed.”
Union agitatin’ at the Star-News
Perhaps shaken by that episode, Uhrich moved to Glendale in the mid-1990s and started working the Pasadena City Hall beat for the Pasadena Star-News. He led an effort to unionize the Star-News newsroom that didn’t go over well with management installed by the then-new owner, Toronto-based Thomson Corp. That was another trait he inherited from his dad, who was let go from Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania in the 1940s after getting involved in union organizing.
“A stand-up-for-others kind of rebel, Kevin was leading a union movement at the time because management just couldn’t keep themselves from flat-out abusing staff,” former Pasadena Weekly deputy editor Joe Piasecki wrote.
“I became upset seeing my friends, mostly women reporters, being taken into the editor’s office after work and being berated by these overpaid pirates, some to the point of tears,” Uhrich told me. “So I went to a super-secret union meeting, got involved and became one of a number of union committee leaders among Thomson’s three papers: the Pasadena Star-News, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News.”
Uhrich brought 10 counts to the National Labor Relations Board, including harassment, wiretapping employees’ phones and reading their in-house email messages on a system called Coyote. He won on all counts on behalf of all employees.
“No money was involved, mainly because I never took any time off,” he said. “I was totally into it, so there was no time lost. And I did not get sick, as one after another of my fellow leaders did.”
Uhrich said others had started dropping out, and soon he was one of only two people left pushing for the union. The company was ordered to admit its guilt and post notices about the ruling in prominent places at all three papers, which they did.
“Unfortunately, they also did as we knew they would and came back with something the union feared but many sick of the office drama had hoped for: buyouts.”
Uhrich explained that this union effort included all employees in every department, many of them of retirement age and some having nothing to do with editorial. He strongly objected to this arrangement and lobbied with the local Guild Board to sever editorial staff from the others and act as a separate unit, but the union “never filed the required paperwork with the boys in Silver Spring, Maryland, home of the Guild, and our 70-30 approval rate flip-flopped overnight,” he said.
“What that meant was I was sunk,” he added. “Without a union, they could fire me, and I have no doubt they planned to do just that at the earliest possible moment. Also, at this particular time, the buyout deadline was drawing near. I had a good chunk on the line, so, waiting until 4 p.m. that Friday, the final hour of the final day, I took the buyout.”
Uhrich added that no media outlet reported on their unionization campaign or the NLRB victory at the time, including the Pasadena Weekly.
It wasn’t until 2021, nearly 30 years later, that journalists at the Star-News and 10 other outlets owned by Alden Global Capital finally voted overwhelmingly to form a union.
“I’m happy for [the new union], of course,” Uhrich told me. “Then again, I can’t help wondering how different things might be now had we won back then.”
The paper of record
After leaving the Star-News, he went on to the San Gabriel Valley edition of the LA Times. He also wrote for the LA Reader, the LA Weekly and the Pasadena Weekly on a freelance basis, while driving a cab. His first story for Pasadena Weekly was called “Scathing Ruling Raises Questions in Kings Villages Case,” which ran on July 26, 1996.
Lauren Holland, a bookkeeper and sales rep at Pasadena Weekly from 1997-99, wrote that she remembered “little Kevin Uhrich when he was a freelancer — so cute in his short pants and sideways baseball cap — typing out feature length stories and city blurbs with only his index fingers flying on the keyboard.”
In 1999, the Times Community News Division appointed Uhrich editor of the Pasadena Weekly, or “the old P-Dub, which, even with its many changes and challenges, has captured my journalistic soul over all these years,” he wrote years later. He served as editor for 21 years, from 1999 to 2020.
He held a grudge against the Star-News ever since the unionization debacle, and turned the Pasadena Weekly into its main opposition paper. During the 2000s and early 2010s, the weekly regularly broke stories before the daily, a testament to Uhrich’s leadership.
His skills as an editor were unmatched. He knew what was missing in a story at first glance and knew how to pull up the lede in an instant. He knew if your story was missing an important voice, and he knew who you should call if it was.
He could write a snappy, short, witty headline like no one’s business. His pithy and incisive editorials are sorely missed in Pasadena, as is his institutional knowledge of this town. He was an informal historian of this great community. He used to call Pasadena “the Paris of the Pacific” and, like Mayor Victor Gordo often does now, “the center of the universe.”
When Uhrich led the Pasadena Weekly, it was the paper of record for this city. He knew everyone in Pasadena at that time, even though he lived in Glendale. In addition to journalism and politics, he enjoyed biking, book signings and learning about the rich history of Pasadena and Los Angeles.
He could often be found sitting at his desk in the Pasadena Weekly newsroom, or smoking a cigarette on the corner of Green Street and De Lacey Avenue while editing proofs of the paper on top of a trash can or news rack, or drinking a pitcher of beer with staffers and friends at The 35er or Old Towne Pub on Thursdays or Fridays after the paper came out.
He eschewed self-promotion. He was an Old School journalist and editor who “subscribe[d] to professionalism on the page and barroom camaraderie off the clock, if he ever really [wa]s off the clock,” Piasecki wrote in a 2006 tribute to Uhrich in the 500th issue of his reign of terror as Pasadena Weekly editor. “Unlike many who have been in the business as long as he has,” Kevin never stopped getting “excited about the stories and even the letters that appear[ed in Pasadena Weekly] and, though he no longer ha[d] to, continue[d] to get his hands dirty with the real work of reporting the news.”
The Pasadena Weekly actually dates back all the way to 1929 — through different names and owners, but published every Thursday — and began using “Weekly” in the title in 1984 when the Altadenan-Pasadenan was purchased by Pasadena Media, Inc., an investment group that included soon-to-be Pasadena Mayor and current District 2 City Councilmember-elect Rick Cole, the late social activist Marvin Schachter, publisher Edward Matys and business manager and assistant editor Larry Wilson, who now serves as public editor of the Star-News, among others.
In the first issue released Jan. 5-12, 1984, publisher Matys wrote, “We are pleased today to present the Greater Pasadena area a ‘new newspaper,’ continuing but broadening a tradition started in 1929.” It was briefly owned by future LA Mayor Richard Riordan and longtime Pasadenan Susan Laris, then by Laris’ ex-husband Jim and his new wife Marge Wood.
In June 1998, Laris sold the paper to the Tribune Company’s LA Times, which added it to its Times Community News Division chain of newspapers and opened its newsroom at 50 S. De Lacey Ave. #200 in Old Pasadena.
William Lobdell, editor of Times Community News from 1994-2000 when Pasadena Weekly was part of that group, said he and the LA Times owners “were big promoters of Kevin Uhrich’s career; it was easy to recognize his talent.”
A reporter’s editor
Under Uhrich’s stewardship starting in 1999, Pasadena Weekly became a truly progressive alternative newsweekly that actually broke news and covered important stories that other local news outlets ignored. He also mentored countless young reporters including myself, when I wrote for Pasadena Weekly from January 2005 to November 2019.
Uhrich was a reporter’s editor if ever there was one. Piasecki remembered that Uhrich once turned down his own private office in favor of a desk in a half-cubicle “in the trenches of the newsroom.”
The Tribune Company sold Pasadena Weekly to Southland Publishing in January 2001. Southland was founded in 1998, originally published the Ventura County Reporter and grew out of the Sylmar-based Valley Business Printers, owned by Michael Flannery, a conservative businessman who stayed out of editorial decisions of the decidedly left-leaning papers.
Uhrich told LA Weekly in 2003 that Southland Vice President David Comden “pushed [Pasadena Weekly] to be edgier” after Southland took over the paper. What was once a “quasi-alternative” paper [under the LA Times] quickly became a true-blue alternative newsweekly that “frequently scoop[ed] the local dailies. When [Comden] came in, in his first week, he pulls me aside as he’s addressing the group, and says, ‘How come you guys don’t have editorials?’ I say, ‘Newspaper people don’t have opinions about things.’ And he says, ‘You better start getting opinions.’”
Uhrich’s editorials would soon become must-reads every week for anyone who cared about Pasadena. His perspective regularly shaped the ongoing public dialogue in the city, and his paper both covered and influenced political, social and cultural events, launching the careers of many award-winning journalists and writers along the way.
Uhrich himself won national, state and regional awards for investigative reporting, news feature writing, editorial writing, arts and entertainment reporting, breaking news reporting and media criticism. He won two 1st place journalism awards from the Los Angeles Press Club, one in the Entertainment Reviews/Criticism/Column category for his 2010 Pasadena Weekly story “Cartoon crisis,” about the endangered art of editorial cartooning. The other was in the News Feature category for his 2016 Pasadena Weekly story “Behind Every Mailbox,” about Betty Medsger’s book about the FBI, The Burglary.
Regarding the latter story, the judge said Uhrich did “a superb job retelling the story of Washington Post religion reporter Betty Medsger’s feat of courage in exposing the corruption in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. This writer holds the attention of the reader from start to finish. Fine job.” He also got a 2nd place award in 2007, an honorable mention in 2009, a 3rd place in 2017 and a 2nd place in 2019.
In 2009, Uhrich and his sister Shaak won a Keystone Press Award for investigative reporting for their stories about the Peggy Reber murder in Philadelphia Weekly.
Uhrich also won 1st place in the Media Reporting/Criticism category in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ AltWeekly Awards contest for his 2006 Pasadena Weekly stories “Uncovering Project Censored,” “And Now the News” and “Dead Men Do Tell Tales.”
Uhrich also won a Certificate of Achievement for Investigative/Enterprise Reporting and multiple awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). The paper itself won several awards in the CNPA’s Better Newspapers Contest over the years. And numerous other Pasadena Weekly journalists won countless awards under Uhrich’s tutelage as well.
“It’s kind of unusual for a weekly alternative paper to win awards for investigative reporting and breaking news, but we seem to do that rather well,” Uhrich said. “I’ve been blessed with some wonderful and talented people, not all of whom were recognized, but are nonetheless great writers and reporters and editors who certainly deserve recognition.”
‘Keep feeding the machine’
In addition to the journalistic mission, there was a sense of belonging and a shared human comedy that transpired in the Pasadena Weekly newsroom on a weekly basis when Uhrich was at the helm. It was a special time and place of which to be a part.
“This paper [wa]s pretty unique,” Piasecki wrote. “In Kevin’s ink-stained hands, it’s become a community paper that actually breaks news (‘It’s the news that sells,’ he says), but at the same time it’s an ‘alternative weekly’ in the truest sense. The Weekly, I’m proud to say, really takes a stand, like [in 2005] when we became the first mainstream news organization to call for the impeachment of President [George W.] Bush.
“Beyond offering a true progressive voice to Pasadena readers week-in and week-out, we’ve also published stories that have resulted in criminal charges being dropped and city laws that were once blown off now being heeded. Members of the community, often the poor or disenfranchised, have consistently found us willing to listen — and more importantly care — when many others would not on issues of justice and civil rights.”
In addition to all that, under Uhrich’s stewardship, the Weekly was “pretty darn readable,” Piasecki wrote. “Without him, would it really be the Weekly? It wouldn’t be half as much fun, that’s for sure.”
And it hasn’t been, since he left. No doubt about that. It’s hard to imagine Pasadena in general without him, too. But he’d been out of the scene for a few years before his death, mostly due to health issues. It hasn’t been the same without him.
He was a workhorse. To produce that much content every week for 21 years straight is no small feat. He once told long-time Pasadena Weekly deputy editor André Coleman, now the managing editor of Pasadena Now, “We have to keep feeding the machine.”
When on deadline, he was as serious as a first responder. There was no “goldbricking” allowed around him.
But he also loved to laugh.
“He encourage[d] outstanding, professional work but also remind[ed] us that our jobs should be fun,” said Julie Riggott, former arts editor at Pasadena Weekly.
“And he like[d] a good joke, especially when it [wa]s on me,” said Carl Kozlowski, another former arts editor at the Weekly.
Social justice warrior
Uhrich was a social justice warrior before that was a trendy thing to be.
He often spoke out against police brutality, corporate fraud, public corruption, government spying, immigrant bashing, social inequities, human rights abuses and the like, in his editorials and beyond.
“My attitude regarding the writing and delivery of these types of news stories remains much the same as it’s always been; a good story is a good story, regardless of its political implications and any other impediments that might stand in the way of its telling, to paraphrase a wizened friend and former editor,” he said.
In 2014, Uhrich and the Pasadena Weekly received a “Pioneer of Social Justice” award from ACLU SoCal’s Pasadena/Foothills Chapter for “taking strong stands on behalf of protecting civil rights and civil liberties.” I gave the introduction at the award ceremony where they accepted the recognition.
Uhrich won a number of other civic awards, including the prestigious John Anson Ford Award, presented by the LA County Human Relations Commission for his work in furthering racial understanding through journalism; the City of Pasadena Community Service Award for coverage of the aftermath of 9/11; the Model of Unity Award, presented by the City of Pasadena Human Relations Commission; and an award for Outstanding Dedication during the LA Riots from the LA Press Club; among others.
I also chaired three panel discussions with Uhrich over the years, which were always engaging conversations. One was an ACLU Pasadena panel on the press and the First Amendment. The other two were about the Pasadena Weekly specifically: one at the Pasadena Central Library and one at the Pasadena Playhouse during LitFest Pasadena, where we discussed how weekly newspapers had carved out a sustainable niche in a rapidly digitizing world.
Ever since I reached out to the Pasadena Weekly about interning and writing for them starting in January 2005, I always considered Uhrich my mentor. He took me under his wing and taught me everything about journalism. He gave me every opportunity to be published right away. I wasn’t just fetching coffee.
It wasn’t just me. He mentored countless young Pasadena journalists. He often told new writers joining the paper, “Make me see with your eyes what I can’t with my own.”
He was very supportive of my run for the Altadena Town Council in 2005. He even endorsed me in one of his editorials. After I won, becoming the youngest elected official in LA County at age 19, he became a political advisor of sorts, helping me navigate this new, rough-and-tumble local political world. He gave me advice and suggested political issues that were worth pursuing. For example, he thought Fair Oaks Ave., with its plantation-esque connotation, should be changed to Jackie Robinson Family Way, or Family Way for short.
He let me write in the first person in the News section of the paper — multiple times! — about my efforts to explore the feasibility and desirability of having Altadena secede from the Pasadena Unified School District and start its own district after the PUSD board started indiscriminately closing well-performing schools in Altadena without that community’s input.
We used to walk around De Lacey and side streets south of Old Pasadena, before those high-end condos were built, discussing all of these issues and more, politics and journalism. Those talks hold a special place in my heart.
Best Of Pasadena
Uhrich also enjoyed a party, and it was always fun hanging out with him at Pasadena Weekly’s annual Best Of Pasadena parties or the staff holiday parties. On 4/20 in 2005, at the launch party for Pasadena Weekly’s new sister magazine, Arroyo Monthly, which took place at the Pacific Asia Museum, I remember Uhrich and others were smoking a joint in the parking lot when then-Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard walked out of the museum, spotting them.
“I see the party has moved out here, gentlemen,” Bogaard said.
“Uh, hello, Mr. Mayor,” Uhrich said sheepishly.
I can still hear Kevin’s deep bellowing laugh as he imitated former state Senator Jack Scott in a Foghorn Leghorn voice: “I say, I say!”
I can still hear his no-nonsense, time-is-ticking, one-word reply when answering the phone at the office: “Newsroom!”
There was nothing like sitting at a table in the office with him and a couple copies of that week’s proofs, red pens in hand. Then seeing our names in print for a week in newsstands across the city and the San Gabriel Valley, in restaurants and grocery stores, in the lobbies of City Hall and the Police Department, in bars and bookstores. It was the last gasp of the glory days of print newspapers. It won’t ever be like that again.
‘It was fun while it lasted’
In August 2019, Southland Publishing sold its papers to Times New Media (now Times Media Group, or Times Local Media), a company based in Tempe, Arizona, that owned 17 community newspapers in that state.
The new owners subsequently stopped paying freelancers such as myself, discontinued left-leaning political cartoons and fired long-time staffers one by one.
Coleman, who started at Pasadena Weekly in 2004 and became deputy editor in 2011, saw the writing on the wall and quit before he was fired, and joined Pasadena Now as managing editor. Before they let Uhrich go, he called and offered me the deputy editor job at the Weekly. It would have been a dream job for me just a few years earlier. I tried for many years to turn my freelance work into a full-time staff position at the Weekly, but the budget was always tight and it was cheaper for them to pay me freelance wages — I was going to write for them, regardless.
Business-wise, for the owners, it made sense. But I wish he had pulled a little harder for me earlier than he did. For example, he got upset when I started writing for the local Patch.com news sites around San Gabriel Valley. “Let’s think about this for 10 seconds,” he said in that grizzly, gruff voice of his. “We don’t shit where we eat.”
What he didn’t realize was that I didn’t eat there — I wasn’t a Weekly staff writer. He later said, “I realized I couldn’t hold Justin back” from doing what I needed to do to further my career.
By the time he offered me the deputy editor position, however, I had better paying, full-time employment elsewhere, though I continued to write freelance articles for the Weekly until the new owners started playing games with altered invoices and delayed payments. So I declined the offer.
“Well, Justin, it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?” he said.
“It sure was, Kevin.”
It was some of the best years of my life.
He was fired soon after that call, in June 2020, after which he considered moving to Washington, D.C., but ended up working as the chief copy editor under Coleman — previously his number two at the Weekly — at Pasadena Now. That’s when his health, of which he never really took good care, deteriorated. He suffered two heart attacks and developed dementia, leading to other complications.
I recently visited him in the hospital before he passed and told him how much he meant to me, how much I owe him for where I am today. He was a legend in Pasadena and it truly is the end of an era.
Kevin, thank you for your work, your words and your mentorship. It was fun while it lasted.
