What does the passing of an alternative journalism legend have to do with Hilltromper? Nothing. Except that Hilltromper wouldn’t exist without him.
by Traci Hukill
March 12, 2014—The first time I laid eyes on Buz Bezore he was sitting at his desk at the old Metro Santa Cruz office on Union Street across from Jahva House. The “ivy-covered bunker,” as it was called, was tiny, dark and deserted—it must have been just after deadline—except for a guy in the corner working at a computer in front of a huge whiteboard lined with colorful magnets. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and had a hooked nose over a small, mischievous mouth. The overall effect was of a cartoon owl.
I introduced myself, said I was applying for the internship and handed him the only writing sample I had, a battered college English paper from five years earlier. “Thing looks like it’s been to Bosnia,” he snorted, and tilted his head back to read. He looked like a doctor with a new patient’s charts.
“Well, kid,” he said finally, “can you come in Tuesdays and Thursdays?”
That was 1996. Buz had spent the last two decades working at alternative papers in Santa Cruz: Sundaz, the Santa Cruz Independent, the Santa Cruz Express (his first editor-in-chief gig), Taste and a few others. When Metro Santa Cruz started up in 1994, Buz was the obvious choice for a founding editor.
Enrobed in Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops, Buz set about creating a clubhouse atmosphere for his new gang. The office was a noisy, convivial place, a cocktail party without the booze, even on Monday mornings. Especially on Monday mornings. I actually could not work there—I had to leave to get any writing done. People were gossiping, sharing movie reports and opinions, savagely making fun of each other (usually without drawing blood) and sharing vicious jokes at the expense of public figures, self-important writers, management from San Jose and anyone else not in the room.
When Buz wrote a cutline kicker he was particularly proud of, he would go around the office, flip-flops flapping, to show everyone. It was always the same pantomime. He’d hold the flat up in front of you and point at the gem in question, a delighted grin on his face. Under a photo of Jesse Collin Young: “Help, I’ve Fallen Down The Charts and I Can’t Get Up.” With a photo of invasive French broom, a nod to the Coneheads of SNL: “We’re From France.” Equally brilliant but less biting kickers and headlines littered the paper each week: for a James Beard Award-nominated wine article by Christina Waters, “Waiting for Merlot.” A feature about KPIG: “Ham on Wry.”
We heard stories about Buz’s vivid past in the Santa Cruz press and at Hustler, where he’d briefly been the humor editor. He knew Althea Flynt, wife of Larry, had limitations as Hustler’s co-publisher when she mangled a common French expression, pronouncing it like the stringed instrument. “Viola!” Buz mimicked with a faux-elegant flourish of his hand before doubling over with laughter. [Actually, Lee Quarnstrom, former executive editor atHustler, corrects the record: Buz was hired to write captions at the magazine but never showed up to actually take the job.]
He claimed to have evidence that Jay Shore, original publisher of Good Times, had starred in adult films, and one day brought in a glossy publicity still as proof. As I recall it showed a bare-assed guy with wavy shoulder-length locks in a boudoir. I could not tell you if it was Jay Shore, but Buz was laughing so hard he was crying.
There were enmities going back years that no intern could have understood. Former friends and acolytes were “those whores.” I had to call India Joze and find out what the soup was once a week, then call back with an order and go pick it up because the restaurant refused to knowingly sell to Buz. I fetched the soup, honored to be an accomplice in the mischief, whatever it was.
It was heaven. It was a crash course in Us versus Them. It was the Howard Stern Show live, and for credit. It was adoption, at last, by a pack of wolves.
A Writer’s Editor
Somehow it worked. People did great work for Buz. The word on him was that he was a “writer’s editor.” He prided himself on making edits so subtle the writer herself could not detect them. His technique was simple: find talented people and let them write about what they wanted to. “Love for the project,” he called it. If you had no love for the project, if you dragged your feet on an assignment and turned in something that was off, he didn’t force you to do more of that kind of story. He found something else for you to do.
He was also extremely organized; hence the white board with its grid of magnets, each with a slot for a slip of pastel paper bearing the working title, author’s initials and due date. Anyone could look at the board and see what was scheduled six weeks out.
I took it all in. Between filing photos and cutting up pastel paper for the whiteboard, I eavesdropped on Kelly Luker’s phone interviews and proofread the resulting articles, learning how an incomprehensible one-sided conversation turns into a news story. Reading Christina Waters’ pieces on the flats I learned what it means to have a distinctive voice and unapologetic opinions (it starts with a spine). I read Mike Mechanic’s music column, Notes from The Underground, and figured out that it was real work that only looked effortless.
On the rare occasions when Buz and Kelly would have a serious conversation about some news story, my ears would perk up, alerted by the change in tone. It usually lasted less than a minute and consisted of Buz reeling Kelly in on some point or another, but the gravity of it always struck me. Beneath it all, our leader took things somewhat seriously, or at least sometimes seriously. Though Buz joked that his motto was “to spread joy, further the revolution and never pay for anything”—and the trade accounts did flow, with an open tab at Caffe Bene for all on staff and quarterly family dinners at O’Mei—in fact the real motto truly was “to spread joy and further the revolution.” This was something to get behind.
There were rules. Don’t be gratuitously mean to people not in public life. Don’t write about yourself all the time. Don’t start articles with a quote.
Beyond that, though, prohibitions were few. After the internship ended I stayed on as a freelancer, and when a position opened up I went to work full-time for Metro Publishing, spending two days a week at Metro Santa Cruz and three days at Metro, the weekly newspaper of San Jose.
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Around the time my new job started, my longtime boyfriend dumped me. Reeling from the one-two punch of loneliness and the demands of my first professional job, I slid into a deep funk, which I desperately tried to mask with jokiness. Nobody was fooled. On Valentine’s Day some of the women from the paper went to hear Maya Angelou at the Civic Auditorium and dragged me along. The Metro Santa Cruz gang assured me I’d meet someone and teased me relentlessly when I started dating a local chef. Buz nicknamed me Two-Ton Traci and joked that I was trading sex for food. This was how the pack—Buz’s preferred metaphor was a meerkat colony—cared for its own.
In late February a stranger came to town. He was from a newspaper in Montana and was here, it seemed, to assess our operations. I heard about him before I saw him. It was afternoon at the San Jose office. He wore jeans and a black polartech vest and had a nice laugh. He was older than I was and had a ponytail, so obviously what I was feeling could not possibly be a crush, but I did find myself wanting to be where he was. When we met one-on-one to talk about my job at the two papers, I learned that his name was Eric Johnson. He was nice and I thought we would get along well if he came to work there.
Eric Johnson, of course, had a story of his own. Forced to sell his own weekly, the Missoula Independent, after seven years of hard work (and non-payment of taxes), he had stayed on as editor. At a meeting a few months later, the new owner let Eric know that he was planning to fire the Independent’s publisher, Eric’s friend and business partner, Erik Cushman. Furious and sad, Eric J. ditched work early and went home. When he walked in the house the phone was ringing. It was Buz Bezore wanting to know if he was interested in coming to work in Santa Cruz as a news editor.
Eric had roots in Santa Cruz. He’d lived here from 1974 through 1981, an escaped New Jersey hippie kid camping in the woods, climbing redwoods for fun, and, as fatherhood arrived, fixing Volkswagens for a living. Every Thursday on his way home from the shop in San Jose he picked up a Santa Cruz Express, where he religiously read Stephen Kessler’s "Polygraph" column, Roz Spafford’s news features and Michael S. Gant’s arts writing. The Express was, in fact, the template for the Missoula Independent when Eric started it in 1991. It was almost called the Missoula Express. Chance meetings at alt-weekly conventions with Buz’s longtime partner Christina Waters and founding Metro Santa Cruz publisher Jeanne Howard had closed the circle.
After several days of interviews that February, Eric Johnson vanished, and I thought no more of him. But then we learned that he was coming to work at both papers. He would divide his time between Santa Cruz and San Jose, same as me, and start in April. Buz gave him a nickname in absentia: Mountain Boy.
I took little notice of this development. I was too low on the food chain for management changes to affect me much. Buz had me hopping with assignments on Satanists, artists and activists. Besides, the spring of 1997 was a glorious one, with little rain and lots of good weather. I had some friends, a pretty good tan and a job as a writer. Life was getting all right again.
There were rough days, though. The Band-Aid boyfriend wasn’t working out so well. I still missed the other guy. I was complaining about it one day in the office when Buz gave me a sly look.
“Don’t worry, Trace-oid,” he said. “Mountain Boy will be here soon.”
The Two of Us
Unlike anyone else on staff, Eric and I both knew what it was like to work in head-spinningly different offices. Mondays and Fridays in Santa Cruz were fun, but it wasn’t much time to get the workload assigned by Buz accomplished, especially with the jovial distractions. “I have an idea,” Eric announced one particularly raucous Monday morning. “Why don’t we use the time we’re at work to work, and talk about the movies when we’re hanging out with people we like?" Barking laughter at this suggestion.
Tuesdays through Thursdays in San Jose were altogether different. More serious. It was big-city journalism, and I was having to fake it. Eric knew the ropes. After a rocky start—“He’s destroying my style!” I whined to another editor—I started to trust him journalistically. He was my news editor and he had my back. We were becoming allies.
We would go for coffee together. When he asked for half-milk and half-half ‘n’ half, I got it. I laughed at him, but in fact it made perfect sense to me. One morning in Santa Cruz I proofread a piece he'd written. There was a phrase I liked: "evolved volcanically." I turned around in my chair—we sat back-to-back in the tiny office—to tell him about it, and we spent the next 10 minutes absorbed in conversation. When our conversation ended the rest of the room was quiet. I felt inexplicably embarrassed.
It would be another eight months before our friendship finally bloomed into romance. In vain we tried to hide it from our colleagues, but the holiday party season was upon us and neither of us had the discipline to keep our hands off each other once we’d had a few. A gourmet dinner party at Buz and Christina’s place, to which each guest was instructed to bring one ingredient for the cioppino and a bottle of blanc de noirs, was the first place we probably got busted. A few weeks later when Buz called me “Mountain Girl” I knew the jig was up.
On our off hours Eric and I were outside a lot. We dreamed of a regional publication just for outdoor recreation—hiking, mountain biking, surfing, backpacking. Why didn’t it already exist? We’d call it Go, or Off-Ramp, or FishBird. That was Tai Moses’s playful suggestion. It would naturally be a print publication (ha!). It would rule the world!
Our romance upended both newsrooms. Eric could no longer be my supervisor, of course, so awkward arrangements were made. Besides, Eric’s editing and management style—shaped by journalism school and years of running his own business—had begun to clash with Buz’s free-for-all. Buz was running afoul as well of management in San Jose. That was inevitable.
In time Eric and I both left the Santa Cruz paper, and eventually we both moved on from Metro altogether. Buz got booted from Metro Santa Cruz after five years on the job. It was a miracle he lasted that long. We lost track of him, but there were reports: Buz had an infection in his back and was in the hospital. Buz had taken a job in Half Moon Bay, then left a month later. Buz was thinking of taking a job in San Luis Obispo. Buz was working at a video store.
For six months in 2000-2001 I worked with Buz again at Coast Weekly (now the Monterey County Weekly. It was fun to be working alongside my hero. But we were in small, separate offices, and the staff dynamic wasn’t the same. This was not a madcap group of creative misfits. An era had passed, and everyone from the ivy-covered bunker knew it.
After Buz left the Monterey paper, a cast of exasperated managers in his rear-view mirror, I had little contact with him. We talked a few times while I was the editor of Metro Santa Cruz (later Santa Cruz Weekly), 2007-2012. When he called me out of the blue a couple of years ago with praise for a short piece on the murder of a local business owner, I cried afterward. Praise from Buz always meant a lot, especially at that time, when management in San Jose was being particularly malevolent. As there had been with Buz, there was now a bullseye on my back. I understood much more about my old mentor than I had ever dreamed I would.
That’s all over now. Buz died on March 6, 2014, two months shy of his 69th birthday. Eric and I are gratefully off the sinking ship of the newspaper industry and are now knee-deep in Hilltromper, our online Go/Off-Ramp/FishBird.
We don’t have a lot of rules, but there are some. We don’t start stories with quotes. We don’t write about ourselves all the time. We are bringing all the love we have to this project.
So thanks, Buz. We owe you big time.
Wallace Baine spoke to a bunch of Buz's old friends and colleagues for the Sentinel.
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