Trafford Publishing: Ink In My Veins

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Ink In My Veins

by Eddie Lopez

134 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); photographs; catalogue #06-0264; ISBN 1-4120-8509-8; US$19.95, C$22.94, EUR16.39, £11.47

An inspiring remininscence of an ambitious and energetic boy exploring the joy of becoming an imaginative and dedicated newspaperman.

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About the Book Review About the Author Excerpts Catalogue Information

About the Book

With a nostalgic touch of warmth and humor, Eddie Lopez recaptures youthful and early manhood experiences that will interest both youngsters and adults as he weaves his way through a myriad of boyhood jobs and learns about life's unexpected joys and disappointments. This is good story telling in an era when more and more Hispanics are adding to the world's body of pleasurable reading.

Review

A MAN ON THE PULSE OF VALLEY SPORTS
By Jim Houck
Eddie Lopez was the San Joaquin Valley's (Calif.) first Hispanic - and most likely first minority - journalist. He had worked for two years in Madera and in 1949 sports editor Walt Little Walt Little hired him at The Bakersfield Californian.
For The Californian it was a momentous event, not because the paper was getting its first minority journalist, but because it was doubling the size of its Sports department.
Lopez would work at The Californian until 1961 (with four years out in the U.S. Air Force). It was when he, and the paper's sports section, first began to shine.
His stories brought more attention to high school sports and athletes than they had ever known. He ran weekly high-scorer lists. The Californian's readers knew who scored every point and set every record in just about every high school sports event in the Valley.
For 44 years, Lopez worked for Valley newspapers, moving from Madera to Bakersfield to Fresno, as a sportswriter, then features writer, book editor and travel writer. It was not until the mid-1960s, close to 20 years after Lopez started, that any Valley newpspaper would hire another Hispanic journalist, or any minority journalist for that matter.
Now retired in Los Osos (Calif.), Lopez has written a slim volume, "Ink in My Veins," that captures those years, the people he met and the adventures he had.
Lopez was a Depression kid, born in 1929, who survived the tough streets in West Oakland (which he describes compellingly) and the more gentle neighborhoods of Santa Ana.
By Lopez's account, being poor with an alcoholic father was a much more immediate hurdle than being Mexican-American (actually half - his mother was Irish and English).
His childhood was spent earning money in ways long forgotten except by those who experienced them: peddling magzines door-to-door, selling newspapers on Oakland street corners, cleaning up in a cookie factory, bagging day-old bread in a bakery, selling ice cream outside of a shipyard.
Lopez spent 25 years as a sportswriter, and during that time he saw ithe inside ofn every rickety high school football pressbox and every high school gym in Kern County and all ofthe other Valley counties. He knew every coach and most players.
"Ink in My Veins" doesn't dwell on race or ethnicity. There's nothing on what it was like being the only Mexican-American in a newsroom (or in the press box) for most of two decades. There's no inference that his ethnicity hurt his career. By 1961 he was a seasoned star, and The Fresno Bee came looking for him.
Scattered throughout the book, though, are indications that below the surface, Lopez always knew he was a minority living in a non-minority world.
But "Ink in My Veins" is not an essay about valley race relations. It's about making it, about how one kid, growing up poor and a minority, got to places others had never been, with some help along the way, some smarts, lots of hard work and some luck. It's a great road map, set out for many, regardless of skin color, to follow.
Jim Houck is assistant managing editor of the VisaliaTimes-Delta and Tulare Advance Register. Eddie Lopez gave him his first newspaper job when he was a junior in high school as a "junior correspondent" in the sports department of The Bakersfield Californian.

About the Author

It is a joyful journey to follow in the footsteps of a young Arizona-born, California-reared, half-Mexican, half-Irish-English boy as he experiences his earliest introduction to eventually becoming a tireless, relentless and dedicated newspaperman in California's San Joaquin Valley. Lopez has crafted a story that every young man or woman of his generation will recall with new-found pride and self-esteem, characteristics that were not easily found in a culture with few role models when he was trying to cope with the daily challenges that confronted someone who was trying to straddle a fence between two cultures.
Teachers simply were not accustomed to dealing with Hispanic youths who were bursting with curiosity and driven to achieve as when Lopez was being yanked in and out of schools frequently as his family followed his ex-prizefighter father from job to job and town to town. Although it seemed to him that he was always playing catch-up, Lopez none-the-less succeeded in skipping half-grades three times en route to graduating from high school just a few weeks after his 17th birthday.
Lopez became a fulltime sports writer on a daily newspaper while he was still 18 and retired after 44 years of chasing deadlines. He has vividly recalled how it all began, not an easy journey for one so young and without professional role models to emulate.
How did it begin? He wrote a school play as a seventh-grader in Oakland. He then wrote for high school and junior college newspapers and was a stringer for hometown papers for as little as a nickel-an-inch. After one year of Junior College, he was a professional, earning $21.50 per week in Madera. His next stops were Bakersfield and Fresno, followed by some freelance travel writing when he retired. Ink in My Veins will not be forgotten easily by anyone who reads it.

Excerpts

Catalogue Information