Word: richardson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Buddha-faced, butcher-fisted Jim Richardson seemed by talent and temperament to have been a natural-born Hearst-man, he also had the luck to land in Los Angeles in the headiest heyday of the city and of Hearst newspapering. Hired at 19 by Hearst's old Los Angeles Herald (for $7.50 a week). Canadian-born Richardson shrewdly plied the creed he learned as a cub on the old Winnipeg Telegram: "Walk like a newspaperman...
...city editors in the U.S., few are as well conditioned to subdue tigers barehanded as the 15 who work for Hearst. Of that little band, none has reigned longer or more despotically than the Los Angeles Examiner's asp-tongued James H. (for Hugh) Richardson. In a 20-year running feud with slow-moving staffers and half the officialdom of Los Angeles, one-eyed Jimmy Richardson (he lost his right eye in a slingshot accident at the age of seven) has driven a long parade of newsmen to pressagentry. the bottle-or to fame. He also bullied and blarneyed...
Last week, when City Editor Richardson, 62, announced that he was retiring from the Examiner after 45 years in the business (40 with Hearst), some of the blood drained permanently from one of the last great arteries of blood-and-guts journalism...
...Bloody Angle. Jimmy Richardson was always bored by news of government and politics and was convinced that readers were, too. "Unless there's a bloody angle to it," says one longtime staffer, "Jim just don't care." His particular talent, in the '40s and early '50s, was to make it seem as if bodies in trunks were arriving hourly at Union Station-and when one did, Richardson expected every staffer to hop on the story as if the next body might be his own. When Richardson himself scored the biggest local beat of the decade...
Swaggering Newspaperman Richardson assiduously cultivated his sources, righteously used them to sniff out corruption, solve crimes, dredge up scandal. In 1924, after finding a missing friend for Hearst's famed Editorialist Arthur Brisbane, Star Reporter Richardson found himself, at 30, the Hearst chain's youngest city editor. Then he drank himself out of his first Hearst career in less than four years, spent the next four lurching from despised publicity jobs to outright handouts. Asked what he had done between 1932 and 1936, Richardson once rasped: "I was drunk...