By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Today (Dec. 23) is comedian Harry Shearer’s 75th birthday.
Most people know him as someone who used to perform on Saturday Night Live and who now provides some of the voices for The Simpsons.
I remember him as the city editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin in 1962, the year I became a “cub reporter” there.
There was an advertisement in the DB offering free coffee and donuts to anyone who wanted to try out to be a reporter.
Never having written for a high school newspaper, I didn’t know if I would qualify, but I figured “why not?” Whatever else happened, I would get a free donut and some coffee, and I’d also get a chance to see the Daily Bruin offices in Kerckhoff Hall.
After we potential staff members enjoyed our coffee and donuts, Shearer and his assistant Dave Lawton explained that the only way it could be determined whether we aspiring young writers (I was a brand new freshman) could qualify for the DB staff, was if they gave us a reporting/ writing assignment to see how we’d do.
I drew an assignment about two UCLA students who were members of the Bruin Mountaineering Club. They had spent their summer hiking in interesting places in Canada and the United States. I recall that they climbed Mount Edith Cavell in Canada’s Jasper National Park at one point in their journey, and met Sir Edmund Hillary in person at another point.
After interviewing the pair, I wrote up the story and handed it in. It was printed with my byline. I was amazed and delighted. I asked for more stories to report.
My mother, Alice Harrison, was less pleased. Sometime later, she told me, with a heavy sigh, “When you got your first byline, the world lost a doctor.”
Although my father, Marty, and mom had brought me up with the idea that someday I would be a doctor, in actuality I was uncomfortable with the idea I don’t like the sight of blood.
Many years later, my wife Nancy told me she didn’t like that first byline either. It said “By Don Harrison,” and Nancy said it should have said “By Donald H. Harrison.” She explained that there are lots of Don Harrisons in this world, including a very talented jazz musician and a CNN reporter (now deceased), but that there were fewer people named Donald H. Harrison. She said that I should use the longer-version byline to avoid confusion. Subscribing to the maxim, “Happy wife, happy life” I acquiesced and have used the more formal byline ever since.
In 2005, my first book, Louis Rose: San Diego’s First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur, was published by Sunbelt Publications, a house based in El Cajon that specializes in books about the American Southwest. After the book was published, Diana Lindsay, co-owner of the publishing house, and I had lunch together at the Westgate Hotel in downtown San Diego.
She asked me how I first got into journalism and I told her the story about the donuts and coffee, and my first story about the Bruin Mountaineers.
“I have a copy of that story at home,” she told me.
I was incredulous. Forty-three years after that story was published in a college newspaper in another city, and she had a copy of it? How could this be possible?
“Because,” Diana explained. “I married Lowell Lindsay, who was one of those two mountaineers.”
What a coincidence! Neither of us, up to that point, had any idea that we had that connection.
From 1962 to 2018 makes for 56 years that I have been writing stories and practicing journalism in one form or another. I love my career, and I think of Harry Shearer as the guy who gave me my start. And I thank him sincerely for that!
So happy birthday, Harry Shearer, wherever you may be today. I hope this has been a wonderful day for you.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com