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Chris Dufresne, who is taking the buyout, has been the college football guru at the Los Angeles Times for a long time. But since long before that, he was a newspaper guy.
From his farewell column:
My first recollection of the Los Angeles Times is my dad parking his delivery truck outside our house whenever he had a drop-off in La Habra.
My second is scribbling on the blank pages of printing-press paper my sisters and I used for coloring and homework.The third is my pop, who worked graveyard for 10 of his 37 years in The Times' transportation department, slamming the newspaper down on the kitchen table the morning after Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel.
My fourth is hearing a high school English teacher praising the work of Times sports columnist Jim Murray.
I was all newspaper in — hook, headline and sinker.
That guy I knew in transportation landed me a job on the loading docks June 17, 1976, a few days after high school graduation...
Five years later, Dufresne got a job as a newsroom go-fer, he calls it. He moved up to copy messenger, then got a break in Sports when they needed somebody willing to cover the short-lived U.S. Football League. He leaves the Times as a 40-year-man from Cal State Fullerton whose name is very familiar to a lot of football fans in this town.
I like this: "I never cared who won — unless it meant a bowl trip to New Orleans instead of Detroit. My fight song was Switzerland's national anthem."
Photo of Dufresne: Jay Clendinen/LA Times
