Celebrating the joys of journalism with CNN's Kyra Phillips

I have been a working journalist for the better part of 20 years, or my entire professional life. That's no small feat in Los Angeles, where it seems virtually everyone is an actor, writer, musician or artist-when they aren't waiting tables and selling pot on the side to get by. Making your way by doing what you love (if not always for who you love), is indeed a rare commodity.

I'll write for just about anybody, anywhere, whose checks don't bounce more than twice.

I have spent years as a staff writer burning shoe leather covering crime and city beats all over Southern California, a grind that put me in close quarters with civic leaders and professional predators, politicians and gang members. I can tell you the old adage that there is no honor among thieves is true, no matter if his weapon is a nickel-plated .45 or a brief case.

My byline has appeared in most of the major daily newspapers in greater LA, including the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Los Angeles City Beat, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Progress Bulletin, Whittier Daily News and Daily Star Progress. Out of state newspapers include New York Daily News, Arizona Daily Sun, Flagstaff Live! and the randy British scandal sheet The Sunday Sport.

My magazine work has covered an equally large spectrum of titles, with my byline appearing in publications such as Details, Bikini, The Nation, MAX, Southern California Magazine, Inland Empire Magazine, New Mobility, Orthodontic Products, Home Healthcare Dealer, Rehab Management and Hustler.

I have also contributed to online publications such as Wired's Hotwired.com and Hollywood.com as well as other websites such as BurningSocket.com.

On the corporate side of the aisle, I was a lead writer on Southern California Edison's Major Customer Communications team and have written for firms like Sasso & Burgoon, Pacific West Communications, Skilset Communications and Boothe & Associates, churning out screed for clients as diverse as Waste Management Inc., GMAC Financial Services Inc. and Cinema Film Systems Inc.

Then there's whole porn thing, my long dance with Larry Flynt Publications, Inc., a company in which I was an editor, producer and a stake-holder in the subsidiary that brought Larry for the first time into the video side of that multi-billion dollar industry, eventually evolving into Hustler Video Inc.

But that's another story for another time.

I'll write for just about anybody, anywhere.

The Background

It was the autumn of 1965 and the curtain was slowly closing on one of the most watershed years of modern American history; the embers of the Watts riots still glowed in the streets of Los Angeles, a portent of things to come as LBJ kick-started the war in Vietnam while hundreds of thousands of high school graduates received a letter that began with an ominous 'Greetings.'

Uncle Sam declared LSD illegal but Dr. Timothy Leary dropped out of Harvard's psychology department anyway and tuned in to a new reality. The Old South seethed through a long, hot Freedom Summer as college volunteers learned that Southern hospitality was highly overrated.

Malcom X stepped onto a Harlem stage and was summarily blown to smithereens, courtesy of the 'honorable' Elijah Muhammad.

Rollin' Pomona-style in 1968

Of course 1965 wasn't all bad news.

Jim Morrison and Ray Manzerek were kicking around Venice Beach, plotting to break on through to the 'other side' with a band they called The Doors. The Beatles played Shea Stadium and then jetted to the Hollywood hills, where they sparked herbal jazz cigarettes with the new glitterati and dreamed up fabulous happenings to come. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful stood as young Adonis and Venus, casting a sweet shadow that Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love only looked foolish trying to fill.

It was a time when everything was changing, a time when anything seemed possible.

Amid this mercurial haze, in the still quaint hamlet of Pomona, a screaming eight-pound blob of baby fat soon christened 'Mark Ray Cromer' was pulled kicking and screaming from the womb.

And I haven't been the same since.

A second-generation Californian, I was born at Park Avenue Hospital in Pomona and have lived within a three square mile radius from that hospital (which was demolished in the 1990s) for 35 of the past 40 years.

I have been in virtually every major American and Canadian city as well as London, Paris, Munich, Belgrade, Athens and Dublin, I have lived in New York and Beverly Hills, but at the end of the day I always seem to come home to Pomona.

PoorMona.

I interviewed this homeboy from Southside Whittier years back and as we navigated through the streets of the neighborhood, he looked around and remarked "I have left this place plenty of times, but I keep coming back. No matter what it has to offer me, I just keep coming back. It's my barrio. Like a magnet, it just keeps pulling me back."

I can relate.

A product of Pomona Unified School District, I followed in the footsteps of my parents and attended the same schools they did in the 1940s and 50s, though the Pomona I grew up in was a different world all together than the town they knew.

The Watts Riots, which burned while I was still cooling my heels in my mother's womb, sent middleclass blacks fleeing into the suburbs and Pomona was integrated quickly amid block-busting and white flight. Thus, by the time I started school in 1970, Pomona was, well, in the words of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: "Dark chocolate mixed with white vanilla in one delicious drink."

Well, I suppose it was a hell of a malt, no matter the riots that swept through the high schools and various neighborhoods that had to be quelled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's professional ass-kicking squad: the Special Enforcement Bureau. Pomona became another notch on their riot sticks.

By the time I opened my locker at Pomona High School in 1980, a relative calm had settled over the campus and the culture. The worst of the race-related tumult was over. It was the twilight of the Carter Administration and the hostages were still being held in Iran, but the Reagan-era watermarks of AIDS, a renewed nuclear arms race with the Soviets and budget-exploding deficits had not yet taken the stage.

John Lennon was still alive, and making music.

On the island of Ios in the Aegean Sea, summer of '84

It felt like the calm before the storm.

My high school years were also the tail end of an era when a diploma meant something, when a public high school education had at least some weight to it. Pomona High grads could generally speak in complete sentences, had a fundamental grasp of basic math, science, English and history, could demonstrate critical thinking skills and had an attention span that stretched past a nano-second.

We were neither abandoned nor hyper-regulated. We played street ball, spun vinyl and didn't get pregnant or arrested.

Graduation was not an epic triumph in our lives. It simply what was expected of us, and what we expected of ourselves.

After high school I split to Europe for the summer and bummed around from France, through Germany and Yugoslavia (an idyllic country at the time) down to Greece, back up through Italy, England and Ireland. In Paris I made my pilgrimage to Morrison's grave, in Athens I walked the Akropolis and realized man is still just treading water.

Over the next couple of years I cruised through Mount San Antonio Community College on auto-pilot, spending summers on the road driving across America and Canada, hanging out in backwater towns in the South and on the streets in the teeming cities of the North. I got to see Times Square in the end-stage of its glorious peep-show decay before Mayor Guiliani and Disney remade it in their corporate likeness. But if Times Square was the rotten apple that consumed Joe Buck and Travis Bickel, then Boston's infamous 'Combat Zone' was the abyss, a festering shit hole of smut, drugs and street hustlers all watched over by cops on the take.

I'm glad I got to see it before the bulldozers were called in.

By 1986 I had transferred to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and began my studies in journalism. At that time, Cal Poly's Communication Arts Department was thriving, with a robust telecommunications program and state-of-the-art studio. The print journalism program was even stronger, boasting the Poly Post, a twice-weekly, award-winning newspaper and OPUS, a glossy student magazine that routinely garnered awards from the California Inter-Collegiate Press Association.

My first year at Cal Poly was fairly uneventful, at least on campus, though my emersion in Leftist politics continued unabated. I marched (with actor Robert Blake, ironically) on the opening leg of The Great Peace March which called for a cessation of the arms race. As a member of the anti-nuclear Alliance for Survival, I joined protests in front of an array of congressional offices, including the Covina offices of my old friend David Dreier, who I think we were calling a 'War Pig' on our picket signs at the time.

I got involved in the 'sanctuary movement' at the Claremont Colleges that helped hide illegal-immigrant refugees who were fleeing the civil war in El Salvador, yet another proxy war between the super-powers.

I was also volunteer in Senator Alan Cranston's successful reelection campaign against Republican Ed Zschau, which saw the Democrats retake control of the Senate. It had been toughest-and last-fight, a battle that saw the GOP bring out President Reagan to stump hard for Zschau, a moderate Republican. It might be hard to imagine now, but California was pure 'Reagan Country,' a solidly Republican state that the Gipper's party could count on in presidential elections. Cranston was an old-school, unapologetic Liberal who evoked the visage of serious beltway players like LBJ and Sam Rayburn. The Republicans wisely chose the young, moderate Zschau who was quirky (he often sang at campaign stops) but telegenic and upbeat. On a good day Cranston looked like one of those fighting skeletons in a Sinbad movie. But we wanted to whip Reagan's ass in his own state, so Senator Cranston was our guy.

On the Trade Center's south tower, summer of '85

Reagan thought he smelled blood, and I remember him thundering to an Orange County crowd of thousands "Let me sum it up for you this way: Alan Cranston has voted against me more times than Ted Kennedy."

Exactly. Like I said, Sen. Cranston was our guy.

So my friends and I hunkered down over the weeks, filling envelopes and working phone banks trying to make sure what remained of Pat Brown's once formidable Democrat machine in the state-a polyglot of interest groups and ethnic communities that stretched locally from old Sam Yorty Democrats in the Valley to younger Tom Bradley Democrats on the Westside-made it to the polls that November.

On election night, I was one of the foot soldiers who was allowed into the Senator's hotel suite as he watched the returns and got to ride the elevator down with him in the wee hours of the morning, once it became clear that he had beaten Zschau, to awake what remained of the crowd of volunteers and supporters with the explosive news that not only had we won, but we had seized the Senate from the Republicans.

I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up as the crowd chanted 'Six More Years! Six More Years!'

Ah, those were fine, honey days when what was right and who was wrong seemed so clear. How could I have known then that 14 years later I would be standing at the side of the police barricades at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, dejected by Al Gore but disgusted by the parade of losers throwing shit at the cops outside. Sure, the Staples Center was hosting a conclave of corruption, but the flotsam outside was not only no better but quite likely worse. I could not be sanguine about a future filled with college dropouts who hid their faces behind black bandanas and wore cheap Che T-shirts, spouting they had a 'solution' to the Third World debt crisis even as it was clear from the stench they hadn't yet mastered basic personal hygiene.

Still, in the mid-1980s my faith in the Left was strong.

In the late summer of 1987 I split for New York, transferring to the State University of New York at Stony Brook as part of the National Student Exchange. Where Cal Poly had been a fairly cloistered community of Agriculture and Engineering majors, Stony Brook was a free-wheeling blast of debate, discourse and dissent. The campus had three newspapers on campus, including the brilliantly subversive Stony Brook Press, which seemed defiantly anti-ideological, anti-dogma, anti-anti.

It was love at first read.

Suddenly I wasn't driving or catching rides to meetings or marches here and there, now we were plotting them in the basement of our dorm at Toscanini Hall. We built shanty towns in front of the administration building to protest SUNY's investment in South Africa's apartheid regime. Jello Biafra came to campus to tell us "if voting really worked, they would never allow it." We plotted against Barnes & Noble's monopoly over the text book racket on campus. I joined the College Democrats, anticipating volunteering for Senator Gary Hart's presidential campaign, before any of us knew that Gary had been partying Playboy-style with boat drinks and Donna Rice down in Bimini.

Circa 1989

When I returned to Cal Poly from New York in 1988, I was determined that I was not going to simply slide back into a familiar routine of commuter classes and convenient activism. More importantly, I knew I was no longer interested in playing by the rules prescribed by either the administration on campus or the Politically Correct faculty in what they renamed the Communication's Department (appropriately stripping away the word 'Arts' to describe their new vibe)who were increasingly zealous in their campaigns to kill speech and expression they didn't agree with.

Having just returned from a university that truly was a cauldron of free thought and free speech, settling for anything less at Cal Poly just wasn't in the cards for me.

I decided to stir the shit pot.

[link to Low page]