Lightning Strikes Twice for 'L.A. Times' Bill Stall

By: Mark Fitzgerald Like many things in life, editorials are all a matter of timing. Just ask Bill Stall, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his series of editorials in the Los Angeles Times about California's state government.

Stall had been writing about these issues since becoming the Times' Sacramento-based editorial writer in 1997. ""I hate to say it was like spitting in the wind,"" he said by phone from Los Angeles. He paused for a second and struggled to come up with a better description, finally saying, ""You might get a call from a legislator, maybe. ... I've been an editorial writer for two stints now, and it's always surprised me how little reaction there is to editorials.""

But that was back before the discontent with former Gov. Gray Davis morphed into an angry recall drive, and then into a national spectacle with the candidacies of porn stars, child actors gone to seed -- and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a national stage for the Times editorials as well.

"Particularly after Arnold got in (the gubernatorial race), it got a lot of people thinking about reforming California state government,"" Stall said. ""These were all measures we had called for in the past, but what we did was integrate them into a series while we had the public's attention.""

The Pulitzer Board cited Stall for ""incisive editorials that analyzed California's troubled state government, prescribed remedies and served as a model for addressing complex state issues."" Another Times editorial writer, Andrew Malcolm, was named a finalist for what jurors said were ""his refreshing, richly textured editorials that illuminated a variety of life situations.""

Stall said the experience of winning the Pulitzer was ""pretty overwhelming.""

"I suppose deep in his or her heart every newsperson thinks of one day winning a Pulitzer,"" said Stall, who turned 67 in February. ""I just never thought I'd have a realistic chance of doing it. It's like lightning striking.""

In Stall's case, it's like lightning striking twice: He shared in the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting of spot news awarded the Times news staff for its coverage of the first day of the 1994 Northridge, Calif., earthquake.

Stall grew up in Wyoming, where his father briefly owned a weekly newspaper. ""I was too young to have had anything to do with it,"" he said, but a seed had been planted. When he went to the University of Wyoming, he allowed, ""I had to major in something. I knew something about journalism, so I majored in it.""

From his hometown Laramie Daily Boomerang, Stall moved on to the Associated Press and over the next 13 years he was a reporter in Cheyenne and Reno, and a political writer and bureau chief in Sacramento, Calif.

Stall had one brief stint inside government that was about as quintessentially Californian as it gets: In 1975 he became the first press secretary of then-Gov. Jerry Brown. He joined the Times a year later as a Metro section writer. In 1981 as a writer in the Times' Washington bureau, he moved to The Hartford (Conn.) Courant to serve as its bureau chief in the capitol. He returned to the Times in 1984 for his first five years as an editorial writer.

He was covering government in general out of L.A. in 1997 when he was approached by Editorial Page Editor Janet Clayton, who had the idea of stationing an editorial writer in Sacramento. ""I said, 'Janet, that's a brilliant idea,' and a couple of months later that's what I was doing. I'd been wanting to get back to Sacramento, anyway.""

And even without the spotlights of the recall or the Pulitzer, Sacramento is a place an editorial writer can have some impact, Stall said: ""I know we do in terms of endorsing bills (under consideration). There's a couple of issues that we pushed strenuously, and had little chance of passing, that wound up passing. In terms of motivating the electorate, well, you can do that in subtle ways here and there. But if you just get a good discussion going, you've done a lot.""

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