After Visiting Friends (24 page)

Under
PLACE OF ACCIDENT
, she writes
3930 North Pine Grove
.

Under
PATIENT
BROUGHT TO HOSPITAL BY
:
CPD
.

Under
DIAGNOSIS
:
D.O.A. (5:07 a.m.)

Under
TREATMENT
:
Coroner notified by police officers
.

And finally, under
STATEMENT OF PATIENT OR INFORMANT
, Nurse Gray writes,
Found in living room, apparently dead, by Roberta Hess
—
Fire Dept inhalator (Amb #6) at scene.

#

Roberta Hess. 3930 North Pine Grove.

There it is.

A friend, visited.

#

I Google
ROBERTA HESS CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
and find her obituary from the
San Francisco Chronicle
dated Wednesday, November 5, 2003, headlined,
BOBBIE HESS—VETERAN S.F. JOURNALIST.

What crushes me is the date. She died a month after I began this search.

#

I read her
Chronicle
obit.

As a newspaper editor, Bobbie Hess went after the truth of world events with the fierce
tenacity of a general mobilizing for battle.

On her own time, she was a generous soul who baked thousands of batches of holiday
cookies and gave them away, stitched needlepoint Christmas stockings for scores of
nieces, nephews and friends, and still had time to track every move of her beloved
Ohio State Buckeyes and Chicago Cubs.

Ms. Hess, who held many positions at the
Chronicle
and the
San Francisco Examiner
over the past 26 years, died of pneumonia during the weekend in her apartment on San
Francisco’s Russian Hill. She had been a newspaper editor for most of her 58 years,
most recently as a copy editor in the
Chronicle
’s Date-book section.

She was “a damned good newspaperwoman,” said recently retired newsman Larry D. Hatfield,
a colleague of Ms. Hess throughout her time in San Francisco.
Chronicle
Executive Vice President and Editor Phil Bronstein said the paper was mourning “a
fine professional and a truly fine human being.”

Born and bred in the rural town of Tiffin, Ohio, Ms. Hess grew into an amalgam of
her roots and aspirations
—
part small town, part urban sophisticate and world traveler. She doted on her family
back home but adored San Francisco, along with London and its royals.

Journalism was her lifelong love. She was the first female editor of both her high
school newspaper and the Ohio State University
Lantern.

Two days after graduating from Ohio State in 1967, Ms. Hess plunged into the mostly
male world of big city newspapering, taking a job on the
Chicago Sun-Times
copy desk. She was a small blonde sprite invading a bastion of hard-bitten, cigar-chomping
men who didn’t really want her around.

“She was a pistol. She was young, brash and eager to get ahead, very serious about
her work, anxious to do a wide range
of jobs,” said Paul Berning of Alameda, who then worked with Hess at the
Sun-Times.

She proved her mettle and was lured away by the
Examiner
in 1977.

In her new position, too, she was a pioneer, the “first of several women we hired
on the copy desk in an attempt to end its long-time status as an ‘old men’s club,’ ”
recalled Jim Houck, then
Examiner
news editor and now city editor of the
Visalia Times-Delta.

Quickly promoted to national and foreign editor, Ms. Hess served as the newspaper’s
filter on Washington and the world, strategizing coverage of the Falklands war, presidential
campaigns and the Iran hostage crisis.

“She was great on a big story,” Houck said. “She was a ball of fire.”

Never was she better than on Jan. 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated
and Iran was releasing the U.S. hostages
—
both events happening right on the 8 a.m. deadline for the
Examiner,
which published in the afternoon. Ms. Hess kept a phone line open to the Tehran airport,
refusing to run a story saying the hostages’ plane was in the air until she confirmed
it for herself, all the while supervising coverage of the Reagan inauguration. Her
efforts paid off. A less thorough wire service reported the plane had taken off, then
had to retract the story when the plane turned out to be a decoy. The
Examiner
’s story got it right.

Ms. Hess threw the same energy into covering the 1984 presidential campaign. She served
as Bronstein’s editor on his reporting trip to the Philippines, offering him advice
on what to expect. “She saved me from being naïve,” he said.

Peter Bhatia,
Examiner
news editor after Houck and now executive editor of the
Oregonian
in Portland, said: “Bobbie was one of the most knowledgeable and able national and
international editors I have known. Her ability to prepare the news for readers in
a way that offered context and explanation was without peer.”

Later she reinvented herself as a Style editor. Spinning off her love of mysteries
and thrillers, she created the Book ’Em Bobbie column, reviewing the latest releases
in the genre. After the Hearst Corp., then-owner of the
Examiner,
bought the
Chronicle
in 2000 and merged the staffs of both newspapers, Ms. Hess worked on the Datebook
copy desk.

Throughout, Ms. Hess did the small things that made her newspaper world like a family.
She was “Aunt Bobbie” to her co-workers’ kids. On Oscar night, it was always Ms. Hess
who turned it into a potluck and ran the office Oscar pool.

Among friends and family, Ms. Hess’s generosity was legendary. There were cookies
and stockings, Ms. Hess also gave much of her time, and her shoulder was always there
for friends to cry on.

She volunteered for the San Francisco Ballet Auxiliary for years, and served as a
stalwart steward of her union, the Northern California Media Workers Guild. She liked
entertaining friends and she engineered more than one lasting romance with her dinner
parties. Ms. Hess was the first to open her wallet for a good cause, once bidding
$500 to win a three-ravioli dinner, cooked by a colleague, in a leukemia benefit auction
—
then she invited her friends to share it.

Ms. Hess traveled the world throughout her life, most recently visiting Spain this
summer.

But Tiffin, Ohio, stayed at the top of her travel list, and Ms. Hess returned every
Christmas to see her family. Last year, when her brother and mother both fell ill,
Ms. Hess went home for three months to help out. Her brother, Richard Collins Hess
of Tiffin, died.

Ms. Hess leaves her mother, Rosemary Hess, and a brother, Tim Hess, in Tiffin. Her
father, Raymond, a General Electric foreman, died seven years ago. Also surviving
Ms. Hess are eight nieces and nephews.

Plans for a memorial service will be announced.

#  #  #

I do what any reporter does when he’s coming into a story cold: Circle back to the
names in the clips. The E.R. report says my father died in Bobbie’s living room. Was
he alone? Had there been a party? I start with Jim Houck—the city editor of the
Visalia Times-Delta
in Visalia, California. It’s a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, just west of
the Sierra Nevada. Houck tells me that he recruited Bobbie from the
Sun-Times
to come work at the
Examiner
. “I’d heard about her from people in the business. I met her at the Ritz-Carlton
in Chicago and offered her a job. She found a big place on Chestnut Street, near the
bay. There were constant parties there. I know more than one couple met there and
fell in love and got married. She was something of a matchmaker.”

“What was she like at work?” I ask.

“She had excellent training at the
Sun-Times
. She smoked Marlboro Lights. And she always defended Woody Hayes.”

“Well,” I say, “my father worked at the
Sun-Times
with Bobbie and—”

“I know.”

“The thing is,” I say, looking for him to confirm what the report says, “I know that
my father was with Bobbie the night he died. What can you tell me about that?”

“I know that your father died in her bed. It was a heart attack or something. She
never spoke of it. Bobbie was like that. I heard the story from someone else at a
newspaper convention.”

“Who was that?”

“So far as I know, only three people know the story of that night. The first is Craig
Klugman. He’s the one who told me. The other two are Paul Berning and the woman who
wrote Bobbie’s obit,
Carol Ness. I know that Bobbie loved your father deeply. It was a longtime affair.
I remember that she could not go to the funeral and that was upsetting to her. That’s
about all that I know.”

#

I look up Carol Ness on the
Chronicle
’s website and learn that she is now one of their food-and-wine writers. I call her,
cold. Ness repeats most of what she wrote in the obit: Bobbie was nice, baked cookies,
babysat.

If you want a good obit, be a newspaperman.

“Your obit said she died at home. Was it sudden or . . . ?”

“Look, she died alone. It was sad. I really don’t understand what you want from this.”

“Bobbie and my father dated. His name was Bob Hainey.”

“I know who you are. And I think you should let it go.”

“I’m just trying to learn about her. It would help me with my life.”

“All I can tell you is that he was the love of her life.”

“The what?”

“That was how she would refer to him. She’d be telling me a story about something
in her past and she’d say, ‘That was back when I was dating the love of my life.’ ”

“The love of her life?”

“It’s what she said.”

“And did she ever marry?”

“No.”

“Did she ever have another serious relationship or a—”

“Look, I don’t know what you hope to get out of this. I think you should let her rest.
Okay? She’s gone.”

She hangs up. No good-bye.

#

I find Paul Berning at his law office. I tell him I’m Bob Hainey’s son and wonder
if I can ask him about the night my father died.

“How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“Ask me anything you want,” I say.

“What did Bob Hainey do at the
Sun-Times
?”

“He was the night slot,” I say. “His brother was Dick Hainey, the executive editor
of
Chicago Today
. Used to work at the
Tribune
.”

“Well,” he says.

He pauses.

“I never knew your father. But I know probably as much as you do.”

He tells me that he was from Morris, Illinois, and that in the spring of 1970 he was
just out of the University of Missouri J-School. “I was set to start on the copy desk
with your father. I went to my parents’ house, and my mother’s at the table, the paper
cracked to the obits. She says, ‘What kind of place are you going to work at where
men drop dead at thirty-five?’ Your father’s death terrified her. She didn’t want
me working on the copy desk.”

Silence.

“I started only days after your father died. What I remember most is that I got his
locker. They were on the fourth floor, in the hallway, built into the wall. They had
padlocks and I had to get the combination. Your dad’s stuff was cleared out by then.
I always felt proud of the fact that I got his locker. I had never met him, but everyone
talked about him. Almost in hushed tones. I wanted to live up to his reputation.”

He tells me he worked on the copy desk and then was a night wire editor from ’73 to
’78.

“The
Daily News
got shuttered in ’78 and a lot of
Sun-Times
people started to leave. I looked around and thought, What is this? I had worked
in newspapers for about ten years and realized it wasn’t for me. So I went to law
school. That’s how I ended up out here, in San Francisco.”

“Tell me about the night he died,” I say. “When he was with Bobbie.”

“Bobbie called the ambulance. But she didn’t try to cover it up to make herself look
better. She did the right thing. It sticks in my mind that she was concerned about
your family. She wanted to protect you. I remember that when the police got there
and it looked like they were going to call your mother—since she was next of kin—that’s
when Bobbie invoked Dick’s name. And then things started to happen.”

“What things?”

“Well, they let her call Dick, and he came, and then that’s probably when the story
got hatched.”

“And Bobbie? What was her life after he died?”

“Think about what she had to deal with. She had to go back to that newsroom. Newspapermen
are paid to know dirt on people. But Bobbie never hid. People never talked about it
in the open. But we all knew it. I think that it all hit her pretty hard. I think
she lived a pretty unhappy life after that night. She was a Catholic girl from small-town
Ohio. She was twenty-four when your dad died. And he was her love. She never married.
I don’t even remember her ever having a boyfriend. She was not one to go weeping about
it, but her grief hurt her mightily.”

“Was it a short affair? How did they meet?”

He tells me that he heard the story only a few times. “It always came up with a guy
named Tom Moffett. He worked on the desk when your dad was the night slot. I think
your dad was the youngest slot man they ever had there. Not an easy job. Your dad
sat at the bottom of the horseshoe, in the center. And around the top of the horseshoe
was a basket where the copy went. The copy would come in and it was all brought to
your dad, every story. And he had to deal the copy out to the guys on the rim. Everybody
smoked—pipe, cigarette, cigar. Nobody used ashtrays. The floor was scarred with burn
marks. There might as well have been spittoons. Not that it would’ve mattered. Guys
always spat in the waste can. I never wanted to have to dig out old copy. Your dad
would have sat at the center with four guys on his right side and his left side. Bobbie
was
one of those guys,” he says. “She was one of the first women on the desk at the
Sun-Times
.” Berning tells me that as the slot man, my dad would have worked 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.
and was responsible for putting out three editions of the paper: the three-star and
the four-star and the five-star. I ask him what those are. He tells me that the three-star
(for suburban home delivery) locked and printed at 10 p.m., and the four-star (for
city home delivery) locked and printed at 1:30 a.m.