Author of “Always Running” began as a crime reporter for The Sun in the early 1980s. Rodriguez tells columnist David Allen: “It was a great news town.”
a memoir of his troubled youth in and around gangs in East L.A. that is a staple of high school reading lists.Rodriguez was a crime reporter for The Sun from 1980-1982. We all have to start somewhere, and sometimes where we have to start is San Bernardino.
Rodriguez, who grew up in San Gabriel and Watts, got into newspapers from a blue-collar background. He’d worked in a steel mill, in construction and in a lead foundry, among other jobs. His first marriage had failed and industrial jobs around L.A. were fading. That gave him the sense of freedom to try something new.Luis J. Rodriguez got his start at The Sun in San Bernardino in the early 1980s before moving on to other endeavors, which included penning “Always Running.
At a fellow reporter’s urging, the rookie raced out one day because of a “Code 7” call. This turned out to be cops taking a break at a doughnut shop. When Rodriguez returned to the office, everyone roared with laughter and he smiled sheepishly, knowing he’d been pranked. “When I got there,” Rodriguez writes in “It Calls You Back,” “the city had a hundred thousand people and the second-highest murder rate in the country.” Most killings were on the Westside and many involved gang wars. Meanwhile, more than half the city’s residents lived below the poverty line.
Luis J. Rodriguez poses in front of the Jai Alai Palace stadium in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1982 while on a reporting trip. The Sun sent him to Mexico for a story about an orphanage that received clothing and food from a San Bernardino mission group. Rodriguez says his colleagues were hardnosed, streetwise and talented. A copy editor, a woman whose name he can’t recall, worked with him to improve his writing. He figured out how to collect facts and quotes, tell a story quickly, not misrepresent anything and be accurate.After two years, he resigned when his editors refused to back him on a story about a possible police cover-up. His attempts to land another newspaper job in Southern California went nowhere.
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