Late yesterday afternoon, an email circulated that Glenn Esterly, the unassuming editor of the Culver City News, was leaving the newspaper, which is a loss of personal and civic proportions.
Glenn and I worked together for a number of years on Sepulveda Boulevard. For me, it was an epic interlude because he is a genuine newspaperman, the quintessential commendation, a vanishing lot that is as prolific as technicolor silent movies.
Some people in this town never got his name right, addressing him as Eas-terly instead of Essssss-terly. I never heard stoic Glenn correct any mispronunciation.
A Middle Westerner by birth, which makes one solid statement about his values and personality package, he broke into journalism by reporting for a wire service, in the Dakotas, I believe. That is like constructing a newspaperman out of cement. For pure solidity, Glenn is unsurpassed.
Our approaches to a story are as different as the 100-mile gap in our personalities.
Just the facts, m’am, is the style that Granite Glenn learned from his teachers and the philosophy that he has faithfully followed for the last 40 years.
In later years, we covered City Council meetings, but not exactly together. A psychologist could have fun with this. I had my seat in the front row blocked out. I would dispatch an advance party to rope off the space in giant purple block letters. Glenn, choosing unobtrusion, would slip into a rear row.
Let Me Entertain You
As an Irish Jew, my feelings were on my face as I would hunch forward and react. I don’t think Glenn has adjusted his single expression in the time I have known him.
His reports on Council meetings differed slightly from mine, by another hundred miles. His writing was lean, spare, economical. For awhile, I thought Glenn was under the impression that he had to pay the newspaper $20 for each word he employed. He told you with painstaking fairness and grunting objectivity what happened and its meaning, without a trace of hyperbole or understatement.
He wrote as if he were double-parked. A journalism teacher could formulate a semester’s syllabus around Glenn’s writings. I must have hoarded all of the florid writing and colorful adjectives on the planet because I don’t remember that he ever used an adverb or an adjective, much less a dangling participle. No one had to use a broom or shovel after Glenn had written. His pieces were tidy, and, best of all, accurate and proportionate.
He always got the story right, another attribute as uncommon as an archer hitting the bullseye from 800 yards.
When journalism changed for the worse at the turn of the century, and suddenly the lords of the newspaper business, desperate to stay afloat, ordained that it was all right to leak opinions into news stories, Glenn, at least figuratively, wagged his finger in disagreement. He refused to join the suddenly dominant crowd. Stubbornly, he probably slipped into the minority by insisting on doing what he knew was right, not what was faddishly popular.
Glenn was loyal to the moral truths of his family roots.
I wish you strength and only the best, my friend. You have earned it.
