Ken Reich, A Final Farewell

Ken Reich & Ed Padgett of the Los Angeles Times Pressmen
I didn't know Ken Reich. But when I first came to Los Angeles, I got to know his byline through the L.A. Times. I was from a small town with a thin newspaper. The Times back then was a giant compared to what I'd been used to. I could buy eloquence, sharpness and worldliness available for fifty-cents. There are some names synonymous with the paper during its heyday before corporate thugs took it over and homogenized it. Ken Reich is one of those names.
This is the biography Los Angeles Times Journalist Ken Reich wrote about himself on his blog, Take Back The Times

"Ken Reich worked for the L.A. Times for 39 years, retiring in 2004. Before The Times, he worked for Life magazine, United Press International and the Riverside Press-Enterprise. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1960 and received an M.A. in political science from UC Berkeley in 1962. While at The Times, Ken covered the Presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, was the paper's Southern correspondent in 1970-72, served briefly as Op-Ed Page Editor, was the lead writer on the preparations for the 1984 Olympics, covered insurance and the law, for three years wrote a Consumer Column, and covered earthquakes and volcanoes off and on for 25 years."

It's an enviable list of accomplishments. He wrote during the halcyon days of Otis Chandler. Ken died this morning.
And how he went out --well, there's a certain beauty about it that only a writer might understand.
A few hours before he died, he posted on his popular blog. The Roll of Honor is a recounting of the 75 writers forcibly laid off by the L.A. Times. He described what they had done and what they were (or weren't) doing now. Among the 75 were friends he'd known for a long time. Up to the end, Ken decried the corporate assininery that has gutted the soul of journalism. Here's an example of his opinion taken from the list:

"...she was, I am told, shoveled out the door in a bureaucratic maneuver of the kind so loved by the Tribune fools. She was replaced by a far more timid leadership, not nearly as able as she was and is."

It was his final piece. A kick in the ass to the corporate hoodlums and a generous nod as to the ability and worth of his fellow journalists.
Then at 2:00 a.m., he wrote an email to lifelong friends in India.
I'd like to think he thought, "Job done. I'll start again tomorrow."
He went to bed.
He passed away in his sleep.
A writer to the end.

His final line as a blogger to the journalism community bears remembering:

"This is a bad time in the newspaper business, as it is, economically for the country in so many ways. But, I fully believe, brighter days will come, and we must do what we can to insure that they do."