The Register Building
The Orange County Register’s last day in its building, and a career that bent around it.
I am the very least sentimental of ex-journalists, so I hope you’ll indulge a quick detour into the borderline maudlin.
This is the Orange County Register’s headquarters, on Grand Avenue in Santa Ana. Or rather, it was—today was the last day of Register occupancy. Staff have moved out, and the property (sold during the downturn and leased back) is slated for redevelopment.
The arc of my entire career is connected to this building, which I only occupied as an actual employee for a year.
Right out of high school, one of my friends and I drove to the Orange County Register building—under construction at that time—and walked under a lot of scaffolding to get to the temporary HR office and apply for jobs as paste-up artists.
We weren’t hired, but what the Register was doing went on to influence a lot of my work. It’s no stretch to say the paper was a sort of spiritual midwife to every journalism award I won; I used to write op-eds sitting in the cafeteria.
That big, chunky building was something I aspired to, something I even dreamed about, like that pretty girl you don’t quite think you’re good enough for.
Eventually, I’d visit the paper five days a week—the Register printed the community daily I worked at over in Anaheim, and I had to put the paper to bed before it hit the press. Friendships sprouted amid the ground-floor production area. Stephen Elders was the copy editor I wanted to be; Kenneth Grubbs, the editorial page editor, was the writer and thinker I idolized to the point, I’m sure, of annoyance. John Seiler was the first newspaperman I ever met who showed me you could maintain strong faith, uneroded, in that business.
Time passed. I eventually got a job—copy editing advertorials on the fifth floor—in the building. It wasn’t respectable journalism, but it was a chance to work at the Register, and I took it.
More threads in the loom. My best friend of nearly three decades, Greg Lipford, worked there. So did Ken Colombini, the best man at my wedding and a guy too talented for the job he was doing. I met Sam Gangwer at my community daily and not at the Register, but he eventually went to work there and remains that rarest of beasts: The long-term, deeply talented metro daily photographer.
Some I met there are gone now, and my only clear memories—literally, my reality of them in this universe—comes down to cherished memories of a smiling face looking up from an aging Atex terminal or a one-line message sent from another floor in that building.
The Register went from employer to source to client. People I met (and, if they were female, almost inevitably tried to date) early in my career were still there—a few of them—through all of this, becoming managers, grandparents, used-to-be-somebodys.
As I said, I’m not very sentimental about journalism. But if I am nothing else, I am selfish, and I selfishly hold onto hundreds of memories, connections, first shots and blown shots that all stem from inside those four walls.
Gonna miss you, old girl.
Greg W. Brooks. First published on Facebook, April 19, 2017.