Column Alums

Back in the ’90s, in my early newsroom days, the editors would let us cub reporters stray from our beats into a journalistic DMZ dubbed the “Reporter’s Notebook.” This was where we could write in the first-person, hone our voices and basically indemnify the paper from any of our outré opinions.

Such columns were a sanctuary for those of us, like me, who were generalists and fancied ourselves more “writer” than “reporter.” Sigh. Can your career be summed up by a Kinks’ lyric? Here’s mine: “And now we’re back where we started / Here we go ‘round again!” I write that with gratitude, which I’m paying forward by injecting the Reporters Notebook ethos into these pages. Why? Because I still believe in alt-weeklies and the pack of lone wolves who howl their truth at the paper moon to make them.

Yokels like myself hesitate to proceed in this regard without first nodding to Santa Rosa’s own Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It or Not fame, whose column of cultural curios first dropped 90 years ago this month. That was long before the TV series and the tourist attractions that came to bear the same title-also before he hired Norbert Pearlroth, a Polish-born polyglot, as the sole researcher, qua writer, for the endeavor.

Pearlroth worked 10 hours a day, six days a week scouring the New York Public Library’s Main Reading Room for the bits that comprised the one-panel strip. Ever…