Ross Newhan would tell you it all started in Long Beach with a passionate teacher in a classroom at Wilson High School.
What got started in that classroom was a very long and nationally respected Hall of Fame baseball writing career that ended with Newhan’s passing Oct. 25 at 89.
A Celebration of Life for Newhan will be held at 10 a.m. on Dec. 12 at Santiago High School, 1395 E. Foothill Parkway, in Corona where Newhan lived, according to John Lowe, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Los Angeles-Anaheim chapter.
Newhan was so esteemed that on the day he died, three major sporting organizations – the Mayor League Players Association, Major League Baseball and the Los Angeles Dodgers –issued statements of condolences on Newhan’s passing.
The Players Association said it well: “Over a span of more than 40 years, Ross distinguished himself with his professionalism, skillful writing and thorough reporting in his coverage of the Angels, Dodgers and Major League Baseball. He was beloved across the industry for his kindness and rare ability to forge personal connections.”
Newhan attended Lowell Elementary and Rogers Middle schools in Long Beach before entering Wilson in 1951. Growing up in Long Beach, he played baseball in streets and parks, saw Pacific Coast League games at the old Wrigley Field in Los Angeles with his father and loved all sports – but especially baseball.
In an interview in 2023, Newhan said he didn’t have any real sense of direction when he entered Wilson High until he took a journalism-creative writing class with a teacher, John Gartner, who inspired him.
“Nobody in my life has been more influential than John Gartner on two things,” Newman told me. “He talked passionately about the use of words, and he saw something in me I couldn’t see in myself. He told me that I had the ability to use words, to write.”
When Newhan was inducted into the baseball writer’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 2001, he said, “If a high school journalism instructor named John Gartner hadn’t hollered my name and pounded my desk one day, I might still be there asleep with no real clue what I wanted to do in my life.”
Also in that writing class with Newhan was Richard Bach, who went on to write the bestselling book, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” Newhan remembered Bach as “a great guy with a great interest in creative writing.”
Gartner made Newhan sports editor of Wilson’s student newspaper, The Loudspeaker, in his senior year. That started a brilliant writing career for Newhan. “I could express myself in writing,” Newhan said. “It was a lot of fun.”
At about the same time, the Press-Telegram (then known as the Independent, Press-Telegram, or I-PT) was looking for someone part-time to call in results of high school sports games over the phone to the sports desk.
Newhan took that job and eventually started covering high school and college games and learning how to write headlines, edit copy and design pages before landing a full-time job covering the American League’s expansion team in 1961. That team, of course, was the Angels.
Jim McCormack, who became the renowned sports editor of the Press-Telegram, remembers his early days in Southern California reading the Press-Telegram “with the best sportswriting I had ever seen by George Lederer, Ross Newhan, Jerry Wynn, Jerome Hall, Hank Hollingworth, John Dixon, Don Hardin, Rich Roberts, Doug Ives and Al Larson.”
“It was beyond my wildest imagination that, in 1962, I would be working in the same room with all of those journalistic heroes of mine and that I would be in the best classroom I could ever hope to find,” McCormack said.
“In those days, the writers did everything. When their teams were in season, they were writers. During the off season, they worked on the desk, editing stories, and writing headlines. For beginners like me, their expectations were high, but at the same time encouraging. Ross especially set high standards and expected us to achieve them. The lessons I learned guided me through my entire Press-Telegram career.”
McCormack said that Newhan and Lederer “were the first of what would become a legacy of national-level baseball writers at the Press-Telegram, including Gordie Verrell, Fred Claire, Don Merry, Dave Daniel, Larry LaRue, John Lowe, Dave Wielenga, Tracy Ringolsby and Joe Haakenson.”
While Newhan moved on to the Los Angeles Times, “he always retained a genuine affection for Long Beach, the paper and his former co-workers,” McCormack said.
Dave Daniel, long time member of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Los Angeles-Anaheim chapter, remembered one night in the early 1960s when Newhan was scheduled to work a desk shift, but it was the night he was supposed to be at his engagement party to Connie, who he married.
“He asked me to fill in for him, which I did,” Daniel said. “Ross was always kind to me afterward.”
Although they were two decades apart in age, Newhan and John Lowe shared three major things when they were teenagers in Long Beach. Both went to Wilson High. Both loved baseball. And both got their start in sports journalism at the Press-Telegram.
In 2023, they added something else to share: although they didn’t hit home runs, pitch no-hitters or steal bases, Lowe, then 64, was inducted into the baseball writing Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He joined his fellow Wilson grad, Newhan, then 86, who had been inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2001.
As far as anyone knows, this was the first time that two baseball writers from the same high school were inducted into the venerable Hall of Fame, according to Dave Daniel.
Newhan and Lowe were honored that year at the annual meeting of the Baseball Writers Association in LaMirada.
“Ross and John are an esteemed pair, each with unique and amazing careers” Daniel said then. “They are so special to Wilson High and Long Beach.”
The only other Wilson High graduate in the Baseball Hall of Fame is the late Cleveland pitcher Bob Lemon.
In 1961 Newhan started covering the newly formed Angels. He joined the Army during his time on that beat and then, in 1968, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he covered the Dodgers and Angels and eventually became the paper’s national baseball writer until he retired in 2004.
Some of his favorite baseball moments, Newhan said, included Reggie Jackson’s three homers in one game against the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series; the pitching duel between John Smoltz of the Atlanta Braves and John Morris of the Minnesota Twins in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series (Morris and the Twins won), and the Boston Red Sox winning Game 5 against the Angels in the 1986 American League Championship Series.
In an interview with author Jeff Pearlman in 2014, Newhan was asked about technological changes in journalism.
“When I started in the old days of 1961,” he said, “they had Western Union operators in all the press boxes, and you would hand your typewritten page to the operator and cross your fingers that they would send it to the paper the way you had written it.”
Lowe said that Ross wrote with comprehensive authority. “He won a major award for the top news story of the year from the Associated Press Sports Editors for his reporting on the sale of the Dodgers in 1997,” he said. “He detailed why Peter O’Malley’s decision to sell – unthinkable as it might seem – had many logical motives.”
The reason that Newhan was such a star, Dave Daniel said, “was that he could call anyone connected with baseball and get through to them. He was one of the few reporters who could call the baseball commissioner, or league presidents, or rival coaches, or players or their agents and get to talk with them for a story. He could talk about any team or any circumstance with anyone. Everyone would take his call.”
Three years ago at the Baseball Writers lunch in La Mirada, Newhan said he felt fortunate to remain productive after more than half a century in sports journalism.
He was living in Corona with his wife, playing “a little” golf and was active with the Corona Rotary Club and other nonprofits. He had written books on the history of the Angels and one on coaching baseball successfully.
He also kept in touch with his son, David who lives in Arizona. David played for several Major League teams before going into coaching. Because of his father’s writing job, David had the nickname, “Son of Scribe,” while he was playing.
After the Baseball Writers lunch in LaMirada, Newhan and Lowe posed for photos and talked more about their times at Wilson High.
“I was way earlier than John,” Newhan said with a grin, “but both of us can say, ‘Go Bruins!”