In the ’80s, after I’d cycled through ambitions of being an actor or poet, I settled on what I wanted to be when I grew up: staff writer for the LA Weekly. I was raised with the Los Angeles Times and with the idea that journalism was a service, not an art, that journalists were read but not heard. The LA Weekly, which I discovered as an undergrad at UCLA, exploded all that. I loved how it wedded newspaper convention to narrative and personal experience with ease but also with dedication. Its writers illuminated so much about a city I thought I knew and strove to make sense of the world at large. The Weekly’s chorus of distinct voices became my spirit guides. I came to feel I knew the people behind the bylines, even though we’d never met.
Marc Haefele, who died Nov. 11 at 82, was one of those bylines that I finally met in person — to my great delight — after joining the staff in 1997. We hit it off immediately. Marc was the quintessential alt-paper writer, a seeker who came of age in the ’60s, a humanist by nature but also an iconoclast who went against the grain more often than not. Marc had enormous curiosity and an eclectic résumé that enabled him to write authoritatively and eloquently about pretty much everything, from the Los Angeles government to Renaissance art. He fit the part of New Journalist — burly, with a bushy beard and a gruff, commanding voice, but also kind and thoughtful.
He was a larger-than-life figure who could have been a character actor, though I think that’s the one job he didn’t do. He somewhat intimidated me at first. I’d come to the paper after a few years of covering distressed Black communities in the long wake of the ’92 civil unrest — worthy coverage, to be sure, but earthbound. My journalistic range felt narrow. I wasn’t quite sure how to expand, or whether it was a good idea.
But Marc embraced me right away as a fellow traveller, a fully formed journalist/seeker on the same quest of divining and deconstructing L.A. and the rest of humanity through my particular lens. The lens didn’t matter so much as the passion to seek, explore, figure out and, of course, to put it all down in words. I learned a lot just from our conversations and his continual musings on art and music, from classical to classic rock, the stories about his peripatetic life and amazing work history that took him from Montana to New York to L.A. I expanded my own journalistic vision listening to the many story ideas he was refining at any given time and often wanted my input about. We were friends, and at least as important to me, colleagues.
As impressive as Marc’s breadth of knowledge and experience was, what stood out was his sense of humor, his dry, witty observations and hilarious one-liners. Nothing and no one was sacred to him. He loved holding court in his backyard during his annual birthday gatherings, entertaining guests with anecdotes, riffing on current events. Once, during a morning radio show on Pacifica that we co-hosted for a time in the early 2000s, he followed a news segment about Jesse Helms with a dead-on impersonation of the North Carolina senator.
Irreverent as he could be, Marc was equally devoted to the things that mattered to him. It surprised me to learn he was an Episcopalian — I didn’t take him for religious, I guess because of his counterculture leanings. But his faith, I came to realize, was a reflection of his love of possibility and improvement, an affirmation of a great optimism that was at the heart of his writing, and the heart of who he was.
During COVID, we began to meet routinely for lunch in Inglewood, where I live and where he attended church. Sometimes I was dispirited about a whole host of things — the pandemic, the state of politics, the lack of meaningful work and professional validation that was becoming more elusive as journalism teetered on the edge of collapse and papers like the Weekly were disappearing from the scene.
Marc commiserated, but never shared my despair. There were always good stories to pursue, editors to pitch, passions to tend to that were their own validation. As he described to me his latest story or book idea — he could have written a million — I always felt elevated and re-encouraged. This remained true even as he tired, as illness gradually wore him down, and as sources of satisfaction — to say nothing of paid gigs — became more and more scarce. He sometimes expressed discouragement about it all, but it wound up being only exasperation; Marc’s own view of himself as a vital force in the persuasion business never dimmed. He knew what he was capable of, what he had to contribute to a world that would eventually change for the good.
He left us at a point where that feels hard to believe. But hard is temporary, belief endures. Marc will always be a rock in that way, a reminder that if you’re a journalist or any kind of writer — say, a poet — faith comes with the territory. You just have to claim it, both the territory and the faith. Thanks to Marc, I did.
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