The Creek Beat: Saying Goodbye To The Contra Costa Times Building

For 37 years, it's been an icon in Walnut Creek.

The Contra Costa Times building has stood at 2640 Shadelands Drive since publishing magnate Dean Lesher brought his thriving newspaper and its state-of-the-art printing press to that two-story rectangular building in 1976.

After this week, it will be no more.

On Friday, the last of the handful of Times employees who still work out of that facility will move out, ending an era in Central Contra Costa.

The Times doesn't have enough employees left to justify staying in the huge complex. So, the newspaper owners have sold the building.

On Saturday night, a group of 100 former and present employees held a wake in the nearly deserted, cleaned out newsroom.

I went without hesitation because I have a lot of history there.

I did two stints at the Contra Costa Times.

From 1977 to 1980, I was a reporter there, fresh out of college. From 1985 to 1993, I returned as an editor on both the copy desk and the city desk.

When I arrived as a 22-year-old rookie journalist in 1977, the Times had only been in the building for a little more than a year.

Lesher has moved his newspaper from downtown Walnut Creek to the Shadelands office complex because he needed a large space for his new printing press.

At that time, the Contra Costa Times was the only newspaper in California capable of printing color photos on its front page.

Things were certainly different then.

First, this was only three years after President Richard Nixon had resigned. The Washington Post's coverage of the Watergate scandal was still fresh. Newspapers were strong, viable and relevant.

Technology had not arrived either.

There were, of course, no computers and no cell phones around. There weren't even FAX machines.

We had an office manager who arrived early every morning and sorted the mail. When we walked in at 9 a.m., there was a small stack of envelopes on our desk, many of them containing press releases sent to us.

Once in awhile, we'd get a call from the front desk telling us someone had dropped off a release. We'd go pick it up in the lobby, where a trio of employees sat, typing in the classified ads people were phoning in.

The newsroom was filled with smoke in the late 1970s. There were no anti-smoking laws. Half the journalists puffed on cigarettes while writing up their stories. Two sports editors smoked cigars.

I handed out stogies in that newsroom on Oct. 18, 1979, the day my oldest daughter was born and I became a father.

A decade later, almost to the day, on Oct. 17, 1989, I was standing in that newsroom when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit.

I was acting city editor and had one final task before I was going to go home on time for a change. I was talking with environmental reporter Jim Bruggers about a story when people at the south end of the long newsroom yelled "Earthquake!"

I watched the hanging tiles in the ceiling fluttering as the seismic wave rolled through. I actually saw the quake coming toward me.

People dove under desks. I remained standing, watching. I was in charge of the newsroom and I illogically thought I should stand guard and make sure everyone was OK.

On Saturday night, I returned to that newsroom for the first time in two decades.

There was a handful of working desks in one corner of the large, vacated room. I found my old desk from 1977 still in the same spot.

I talked to a number of people who toiled with me in that room.

Jim Bruggers had flown in from Kentucky, where he still works at a newspaper.

I saw Greg Berardi, who I first met in 1978 as a 16-year-old sports stringer. He returned in the late 1980s as a reporter when I was on the city desk. He's now a 52-year-old father of two children, both older than he was when he first set foot into the newsroom.

There was Jackie Pels, the head of the copy desk who led us in song on many an evening in the 1980s.

There was Times photographer Dan Rosentrauch, one of the organizers of the wake. He's the only editorial employee left who was there when the Times moved into the Shadelands building.

There was Kathy Maclay. She and I were both hired in September 1977.

I came over from my summer job at the weekly West County Times because the Times had just started a Monday edition and needed an extra police reporter. That's right, the Times didn't publish on Mondays until then.

Kathy had come from the Lesher-owned Antioch Ledger. She too was in her early 20s.

Kathy and I swapped memories. We remembered being in the newsroom on Oct. 20, 1991 when that firestorm raged through the Oakland Hills. We were both taking notes from reporters and photographers in the field and writing up the Times' front page stories.

We decided to take one last walk through the building. We went to the back portion of the building where the printing press once hummed. It looked like a vacant warehouse from some cheap horror film.

We went upstairs, where the skeleton of the composing room remained. We wandered by Lesher's old glass-encased office in the southeast corner of the second floor.

We went back down to the quiet lobby, where the press releases used to wait and the classified ads used to be sold.

We went back into the newsroom and each picked up a discarded plaque representing one of the Times' many journalism awards. I took one from 1993, the year I departed.

We decided to walk out together. It seemed appropriate.

We went down the hallway, still trading memories and out the back door that we walked through hundreds of times as employees.

We said goodbye in the nearly deserted parking lot that used to be filled with cars back in the day.

Working in that newsroom together in the late 1970s seems like another lifetime.

And in many ways, it was.