Larry D. Hatfield: The final of San Francisco’s nice rewrite males

By Lynn Ludlow

Special to The Examiner

The last of newspaperdom’s great rewrite men, Larry D. Hatfield of The San Francisco Examiner, died March 3 back in Iowa. Hey what 80

In the deadline days of daily newspapers, Hatfield won acclaim by his peers for his skills at last-minute crafting of front page stories.

“Sweetheart, give me rewrite,” the well-known line from an unknown B movie is perhaps the only public recognition of the crucial job that Hatfield filled in the last years of the last century. Sweethearts are not uncommon in mystery fiction, but nobody has yet written something like “The Rewrite Man and the Curse of Typos.”

A union leader, human rights stalwart and dedicated libertine, Hatfield died after lethal kidney trouble, crippling strokes and years of seclusion.

Former colleagues spoke out this week about the bearded writer’s outlandish ability to type no-vowel keyboard notes at 80 words per minute with a phone pinned between ear and neck. On a slow news day at the afternoon daily, Hatfield could pound out a jury verdict, a good obit and a funny holdup well before lunch, usually a nourishing interlude at the M&M bar near The Examiner’s old offices. But on a day of terror disaster, mayhem, school shootings, earthquake jailbreak murders or other front page events, he would insert updates until the final edition went to bed. Then a drink. Or three.

“Nobody could turn a breaking story as quickly and as clean as Larry,” said Terry Robertson, a former metro editor at both The Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. “He was a legend in my eyes.”

Other legends of rewrite, now gone, include Jane Eshleman Conant of The Examiner and Call-Bulletin, Carolyn Anspacher and George Draper of the Chronicle, Hal Risdon and Al Martinez of the Oakland Tribune, Jerry Belcher and George Murphy at The Examiner, and many others.

Then came technology.

“Rewrite isn’t really the same,” said Chronicle copy editor Caroline Grannan. “Reporters in the field can write on their phones or whatever technology they’re carrying, especially since we’ve been working from home or from wherever for two years. Of course the same function exists, but in general there aren’t designated rewrite persons.”

Even the job title is misleading. At the Chronicle not so long ago, the go-to rewrite man was Susan Sward.

rewrite? Rarely. At deadline the rewrite wizards wrote the page one stories themselves from an incoming tsunami of notes or dictation from reporters on the scene, messages or memos from other sources, wire stories, statements, police reports, witnesses, experts reached by phone, a grounding in geography and local history and clips from the newspaper library (commonly known as the “morgue” in newsrooms).

Most newspaper reports are unobtrusively structured in an orderly pyramid of facts, developments, quotes, explanatory background, more quotes, settings, descriptions and revealing details. Atop the pyramid is the lead paragraph, or lede, which in most cases will answer the five W’s in unstilted language. For Hatfield, the lede, or lead paragraph, was a work of art.

A copy clerk would take each page from the rewriter’s smoking Underwood, at least in unattributed newspaper lore. (That’s why in old newspaper lingo, pages are called “takes.”)

While most rewrite scribes were noted as quiet, bookish introverts, Hatfield was something else.

“Larry ate wise-ass editors for breakfast.” said former Examiner Assistant Managing Editor Tim Porter. “I should know. And then he would save their asses on deadline while ripping them a new one at the same time. He lived great, in every way, and left his mark on all who worked with him.”

Other Examiner alumni also weighed in on their former colleague:

Carol Pogash: “Will Hearst once told me his family wedged reporters somewhere between gypsies and circus performers. If true, then Larry D. surely must be the King of the Gypsies. Hey, Jim Wood and a few other irreverent reporters were so sharp, so witty, so smart and such fast and accurate reporters and writers of grand grace that no editor of high pay and limited talent could or would challenge them.”

Susan Ferriss: “Larry was just great. Loved his blend of sarcasm and righteous outrage.”

Corrie Anders: “There was no rewrite man better than LDH in his era.”

Gail Bensinger: “I remember the day Jim Mitchell, of Mitchell Brothers theater fame, shot his brother Artie to death. Larry had been on OJ trial duty at the time, but without missing a beat switched over to write Artie’s obit, letter perfect, in time for the next edition. ”

Larry Dale Hatfield was born to Thomas Rex and Evelyn Mitchell Hatfield on Aug. 11, 1941, in Bedford, Iowa (population, 1,500.) His dad, known as Rex, listed his occupation as “teamster.” In his rural high school, Hatfield worked on the paper. As “Doc,” he was team manager for the Bedford Bulldogs football team. At the University of Iowa, he majored in political science and journalism. As a senior he became managing editor of the Daily Iowan.

After graduation in 1963, Hatfield worked for UPI in Pierre, SD, and then enlisted in November. In off hours he earned a master’s from American University and worked part time at UPI. After leaving active service, he covered the news at the Washington Star.

“There are 1 million Hatfield stories, but none better than when he and I worked for UPI in Washington,” said Corrie Anders, one of the first Black reporters at the wire service and later an award-winning writer at The Examiner. “And he invited me to dinner at his garden apartment in segregated Maryland. And yes, it caused a scandal.”

Hatfield then crossed the country to join the Marin Independent Journal in San Rafael, then The Examiner in 1970.

Hatfield won first-place awards from the San Francisco Press Cub (three), the Society of Professional Journalists, American Business Editors and Writers, the Peninsula Press Club, the Associated Press and probably others. He danced a little jig at the M&M when the University of Michigan named him a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities with funds for Latin American study and travel in 1977-78.

The grant took him away from his union, the Newspaper Guild (now the Pacific Media Workers Guild of the NewsGuild-Communication Workers of America).

Hatfield served many times as president or vice president of the local, which put him in direct conflict with his employer, the Hearst Corp. He tried to be courteous.

“All we know for certain,” said the skeptical rewrite man, “is that Rosebud was a sled.”

He was married in 1980 to Carol Ness, then an editor on the city desk at The Examiner. They were divorced amicably in 1983. In later years his companion was former Examiner-Chronicle travel editor Georgia Hesse, who died in San Francisco a few days before word came of Hatfield’s death at Accura Healthcare in Knoxville, Iowa.

“He was pretty acute,” said his uncle, Dick Hatfield. “But he was blind.”

At Hatfield’s request, no services were held. He was preceded in death by his parents and uncles Hal, Ken and Alan Rex Hatfield. His survivors include Dick and his wife, Cheryl, in Knoxville; numerous nieces and nephews, and thousands of on-deadline news stories in the digital archives of The Examiner.

San Francisco’s Lynn Ludlow, a reporter and editor long retired from The Examiner and Chronicle, is about to wrap up a biography co-authored by Maureen Mroczek Morris entitled, “The Polish 49er: Yarns and Digressions in Old Californy.”

Larry D. Hatfield shakes hands with former Examiner editor in chief Phil Bronstein after a union strike ended at the paper in 1994. (Chris Hardy)