RIP Earl Gustkey

Earl told me "crocodiles" was easy to type because you can do it almost solely with the left hand. It didn't make any sense to me at the time but I didn't argue because I never won an argument with Earl. After a while I started using "crocodiles" as the subject on conversations I initiated, too.

Earl was my mentor and the person who gave me my start in journalism. I was 15 and had started my own women's basketball newsletter on the Internet -- an absolutely awful spectacle of teenage-girl fandom with appropriated photos and brightly colored text. But it was 1997 and I was catching everything in embryonic stages -- the ABL, the WNBA, the Internet. When Earl got hold of the newsletter (I'm pretty sure my dad snail-mailed some copies to the LAT, although my dad never admitted to it), Earl called me for an interview.

I thought he was going to do a story on the newsletter itself, but instead he wrote a blurb in in his women's basketball column under the subhead, "No media savvy." I had mentioned on the phone that the WNBA wouldn't send a media guide, and he wrote in his column that the WNBA media relations guy was an idiot who didn't seem to understand teenage girls were the backbone of the league's fan base. Not only did the ABL send a media guide, he wrote, the Long Beach StingRays issued me a media credential for the upcoming game.

I called him to say the StingRays hadn't issued me a media credential.

"Call them," he said.

After that, I had credentials to every StingRays game. And when WNBA season rolled around, I got credentials to every Sparks game, too.

That's where I learned about journalism. At my first StingRays game, Earl taught me how to keep score. I noticed everyone else wrote players' jersey numbers in their play-by-play notes, but Earl used initials, so I used initials. I watched the way he interviewed players and when I finally got the courage to ask my own questions, I mostly just asked things I'd heard him ask in the past. I read his game stories and compared mine to his.

In college, I used to send my stories for him to critique, and he'd send them back covered in ink. At first I was Deeply Offended, but the stories I was writing at 18 needed that kind of editing. I had journalism professors who were happy with everything I wrote, so I didn't start getting better until Earl told me how *unhappy* something in my story made him -- whether it was writing paragraphs that were too long, writing too long altogether, or overusing "that" ("I must point out that you have a case of 'thatitis,' he wrote in 2005 after I sent something I'd written at my first newspaper job. "One of the first things you should do in editing your copy is to go through it and throw out all the`thats.'"). He also hated when I used "graduate" as an active verb. It's AP Style but he refused to accept the rule because it's not technically the correct usage of "graduate."

I was pretty fixated on sports, mostly basketball, and he was constantly trying to open me up to new passions. When I lived in Wilmington, N.C., he sent me packages of articles and a giant book on the Wright Brothers because Kitty Hawk was nearby. When I lived in Modesto, he sent packages of articles and a giant book about the Migrant Mother because she was buried nearby. He was always trying to motivate me to do more than I thought I could.

I visited him in Montana once, about three years ago, and he was more excited than I knew anyone could be to to take my friend and I to a landmark about Lewis and Clark. He was sooo hurt when I told him we didn't make it to Pompey's Pillar on our way out of Montana. I told him we didn't see signs for it. His response: "ay, yi-yi! it's a major freeway exit!!"

We e-mailed less in the last couple of years. I started covering news instead of sports and rarely e-mailed him my articles. Our last exchange was in January, when he told me about his new kitten. He said Hobbs had died of kidney disease and he lasted four days without a cat before going to the shelter and adopting a new one. "A tuxedo cat, 4 white paw, white hind leg and a white nose," he wrote. "She's a peach."

I'm sorry I wasn't better at staying in touch this last year. I'm also sorry I didn't send more stories for him to edit (many of them definitely could have used it). But I guess his hand is still on everything I write. Even this one. A few grafs ago, I went through and deleted a bunch of "thats."

 

Pardon the usage, but that's an outstanding post.

 

I sat next to Earl at an event in 1996 and he was incredibly gracious to someone who was just out of school who was probably asking too many questions.

Stayed in touch with him for a couple years. Great guy. As I think someone pointed out, he wrote a portion of the LA Times' Morning Briefing, which was usually one of the best things in the paper.

RIP