Don Forst was the wiliest newspaper editor I’ve ever known. The New York Times called him, “feisty” in its obit. Don wasn’t feisty — he was cunning, he was clever, he was imaginative, tough, outrageous and he was competitive as hell. But not “feisty.” That sounds like a yappy terrier snapping at your ankles, which is a particularly off-putting image because Don, in fact, was petite and still looked like a choirboy in his 50’s.
Not only was Don not feisty, he was calm and centered. He was funny. He was warm and bolstering and he instinctively knew all of our buttons. He didn’t push the fear ones — and we had lots of them — Don pushed the buttons that made us as wily and daring and competitive as he was. All of us. Our shock troop of maybe 30 news reporters competed against the mighty LA Times and its armies of journalists that must have outnumbered the Chinese forces. And we often won.
How?
Don showed us how to find our own stories and force the LA Times to chase us. A few classics:
— Bubbles. When the hippo escaped from Lion Country Safari for the second time…we played it as a lumbering lady who just wanted freedom. Bubbles became a story followed ’round the world. I was working the night we got the call from Chris Gulker, the photographer stationed on the story. Bubbles had died. The presses were already running. Forst made the decision: Stop the presses! Jim Cramer (Mad Money) and I took notes and cranked the story as fast as we could type. I still get goosebumps remembering. That may be my highest adrenaline surge ever.
— Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth? A series showing waste with government workers. We opened with a pix of two guys sleeping in their city truck with a time stamp showing it was the middle of the morning. The next day Don sent me to secretly watch some street workers in Watts. A blonde in a nice Chevy. What a joke for undercover. I’d been parked about five minutes when two of the men walked over and asked if I was from the Herald. The good news was…people were reading the paper, which they weren’t before the Hearst Corp. hired the new team to save the paper.
— Mario series: The 10-year-old was going to celebrate Christmas at Thanksgiving because his brain cancer would kill him before the holidays. Don seized the story as getting a leg up on the 100-Neediest-type stories that most newspapers run to raise the spirit of giving before Christmas. Truthfully, Don sometimes made you cringe. He named the Mario series: “Tumor Boy,” the newsroom protested to no avail. That lasted one day. We heard Robert De Niro called his buddy, Jim Bellows, Don’s boss, and told Jim to get rid of that name. Gulker and I were assigned the story. Four updates a day. Chris were there with the family when Mario died. Thanks to Don, I not only covered the funeral but wrote a Sunday feature about whether psychiatrists, psychologists, priests, ministers thought it was more difficult to lose a child slowly to a disease or in an instant in an accident. The concensus was that it was profoundly horrible to lose a child no matter how they died. I just wanted to escape the Herald.
— Right Place at the Right Time: A dentist in Pasadena bought a one-man submarine. Don saw his name in the Wall St. Journal article on private subs and assigned me the story as something enjoyable after a lot of grimness. The dentist invited me along with his buddies for the debut voyage. We climbed aboard a big motorboat and were pulling the sub out to deeper waters when suddenly the dentist gasped: “Holy Mother of God! It’s sunk!” The ropes were splashing empty through our wake. I grabbed my camera while the dentist and friends frantically tried to figure out where the sub was so they could salvage it later. “Mayday. Mayday,” they radioed for a fix on their location. That’s how the LA Times et al knew something had happened. I stopped back at the Hex with my film, slammed the story out and went home. It was sweet indeed the next day when I checked back with the dentist for a follow-up and learned that a LA Times reporter had called and chastised him for giving the story to the Herald first. “She was there,” the dentist retorted.