Night cop beat crafted writer for TV dramas
I grew up on a newspaper. That’s what I tell people here in Hollywood, where I’ve written television series for 25 years.
The paper was the Citizen, and I became a reporter there in 1971, fresh out of Catalina High School. Nightside.
That’s where I first worked under a fine editor, Bob Albano. In those four years, I learned a lifetime. With your kind permission, let me quote from an interview I did for the journal of the Writers Guild of America:
“There, at night, the real lessons were taught. I covered cops and courts. I saw my first autopsy. Covered my first riot.
“(When I called my editor for advice, he told me to ‘get the hell out of there.’) I wrote about hynotists who paid hit men to take out competitors, and mobsters who simply dropped them off buildings. And whatever nobody else wanted to cover, I covered that, too.”
Few women of my generation managed to break into the Hollywood boy’s club of dramatic TV. I did, in part, because I had a secret weapon. It was the Tucson Daily Citizen. Goodbye, Old Girl. It was a helluva run.
Allison Hock
South Pasadena, Calif.
Subscriber’s 55-yr habit will be hard to break
I have been a subscriber to the Citizen since 1954! I was living outside the city limits then, and Rudy Monreal was our deliveryman.
Being a young mother of three children at that time, it was always 9 o’clock p.m. before I could sit down to read my paper and relax.
I find it is still that time when I sit down to read my paper and relax! Now what am I going to do?
(P.S. What a bonus the story of our own Cele Peterson was! Thank you.)
B. EILEEN KEATON
Int’l war crime arrests would hurt U.S., allies
Former President George W. Bush’s recent trip to Calgary, Canada, demonstrated why he should not plan much foreign travel in the future, particularly to countries with vibrant democracies.
Some Canadians had urged their government to deny Mr. Bush’s visit, basing their plea on Canadian law which denies entry to those “accused of war crimes.” Others called for his arrest for “war crimes” should he enter Canada.
Ultimately, his very short visit to Canada was very much hidden from public view but, nevertheless, drew significant street protests, even in a politically conservative part of our friendly neighbor to the north.
Similar travel by Mr. Bush, even to friendly and allied nations in western Europe, for example, is likely to draw even greater protests and potential efforts to arrest him for war crimes.
Our own nation is torn between those who call for criminal investigations of the Bush administration’s senior leaders and those who do not think the nation can afford the inevitably nasty partisan battle when our economy is suffering.
But we should not also have to suffer the damage to our crucial alliances certain from an effort to arrest a former American president in the U.K., France, Germany or Belgium. Can we even imagine the image of local policemen trying to arrest a president under the guard of our Secret Service, and the political fallout which would follow? We do not need that.
Stay home, Mr. Bush, and convince Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove, among others, to do likewise.
John Bryant
Safety net cradles false sense of security
Having an open borders policy with an abutting country that is so different from ours – legally, politically and economically – is just not possible.
In light of the violence in Mexico, which has killed many police and officials there, and now information from the U.S. government that Mexican drug cartels have distribution facilities in 230 American cities, this fallacy is even more apparent.
We cannot solve the problems of other governments or their citizens by allowing them ready access to our country, either for financial or humanitarian purposes.
In fact, giving them a safety net, so to speak, probably decreases their perceived need to do the necessary work to effectively oppose their own governments and provide their own safety and financial security. I seem to recall that a bunch of future Americans had to do exactly this a couple of hundred years ago!
So while trying to save a few piecemeal by allowing them easy access to our country might seem nice at the time, it more likely just exacerbates the problems in the long run.
There is an old saying that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. Let’s let Mexico and Central American and their citizens solve their own problems on their own soil, meanwhile tending to our own security first of all.
Eugene Cole
retired