The city of Claremont, my hometown through middle school and most of my college years, recently held a memorial service for Janis Weinberger, who with her husband Martin, owned and published for many decades the Claremont Courier, a small community paper they bought together as newlyweds back in 1955.
When I was growing up, their little semiweekly was a friendly and familiar presence, chronicling—as small-town papers do—the comings and goings of prominent citizens, school activities, the police blotter and the doings of local politicians. More importantly, for my purposes here, Martin and Janis and their Claremont Courier kept my journalistic aspirations afloat when they were seriously taking on water between college and graduate school.
I’d set my cap on a career in broadcast journalism, but after graduation I was having no luck getting a radio news job. I cut amateurish audition tapes, sent out dozens of resumés and interviewed unsuccessfully at tiny stations in San Bernardino, San Clemente and, memorably, at KHAY, a little cinderblock building in the middle of a Ventura fruit orchard.
Meanwhile, I’d taken a part-time job working the counter at Rhino Records, then a local record store catering to the college trade. While it indulged my vinyl fetish, it wasn’t doing much for my journalism career so, when business began to slow down and my hours were cut back as the school year let out, I approached the Courier and offered to become their occasional film critic.
I’d been a movie hound for years, helped curate my college’s film program, and even worked for several years as a projectionist with large, floor-standing, carbon-arc projectors. I’d also reviewed films for the campus paper. Martin couldn’t say no, and offered to pay me $7.50 per review (about $28 today). Counting the running time, travel and writing, it was barely minimum wage—but it was a helluva lot more fun.
I reviewed some great films for the Courier, like The Fury, The Deer Hunter, Alien, and Autumn Sonata; some interesting smaller genre films like Who’ll Stop the Rain, The Buddy Holly Story, The Warriors, and Go Tell the Spartans (with a great supporting turn by Jonathan Goldsmith, the actor who later became famous as the most interesting man in the world); and some outrageous stinkers like The Passage, Players, and The Greek Tycoon. I raved about Animal House, and panned An Unmarried Woman (for which I was roundly attacked as an anti-feminist.)
It was a welcome respite from my crap summer job moving furniture and driving a big truck for a low-rent shyster outfit in Ontario while I waited for the students to return so I could go back to the record store. But it also cured me forever of dreaming that I could ever become a professional film critic. I found that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to pick and choose only the good films to review (a distinct minority of all releases anyway.) Worse, when I had already suffered through a bad film, I learned how much my suffering was compounded by having to waste time revisiting and writing about it afterward.
After a year, I eventually figured out that if I was really serious about journalism, I needed to go back to graduate school. When I was admitted and began the summer prep program before beginning full-time classes in the fall, it came time to say goodbye to managing the record store and movie reviewing, and I’ve rarely looked back—until I recently came across a couple of albums of my yellowing Courier clippings in a box out in the garage. At least I can still read them without blushing.
Today, with his parents Martin and Janis now gone, their son Peter Weinberger is the publisher and editor of the Courier, paid circulation 4,520 (in a city of some 11,000 households, not too terrible a penetration rate). They still do a great job covering the community, in print and on-line, a warm reminder of how important a small-town newspaper can still be to its community—and how much the Weinberger family once did for me when I really needed them.
Rest easy, Janis.
