Laid off from his newspaper job of 54 years, Bob Dunning remains the voice of Davis | Opinion

More than a half century ago, an aspiring law school student walked through the streets of Davis looking for a job to pay the tuition. Robert “Bob” Jerome Dunning struck out at Jack in the Box and Taco Bell. And then he came across the city’s newspaper.

“I walked into the Davis Enterprise with no journalism experience,” Dunning said. “They asked me if I had any clips,” newspaper slang for copies of previous work. “I didn’t know what a clip was. I thought they were hair clips.”

Despite no literary background beyond “bonehead English,” Dunning became the new sports editor in town on Jan. 27, 1970. And so began a remarkable streak. He has been a constant of the Davis universe ever since, writing an estimated 28,000 city columns and sports pieces.

Opinion

His storied 54-year career at the Enterprise comes to an end today. Dunning, 77, is the latest casualty in the economic retrenchment of American journalism. The reason he was let go? Dunning wasn’t told.

For Davis, this is nothing short of a civic emergency. It is Dunning who coined Davis as “The City of All Things Right and Relevant.” It is Dunning who has emceed more than a thousand civic events. It is Dunning who brought Davis to national attention when a mayor once proposed building a police station out of straw with a small tunnel for toads, one of which was actually constructed.

“We’re self-important in a fun way for a writer,” Dunning said of his community. Davis “provides a lot of material.”

No other city in the Sacramento region has enjoyed a journalist of such longevity and proclivity as Dunning. Statewide, Dunning’s one-city stint approaches the late Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose remarkable 60-year run earned him a special Pulitzer Prize.

To say that Davis insiders (which describes the entire community) are in a state of grief would be an understatement. Lois Wolk, a former city council member, county supervisor, state assemblywoman and state senator, recently summed it up: “He has been our historian, a storyteller and an astute observer of Davis community life,” Wolk said. “He made sure that no one in the community took themselves too seriously, and he did it in good humor.”

The single-parent columnist

Dunning did graduate from law school in Davis, but it was too late — at the Enterprise, he had already found his calling.

“I fell in love with the job,” he said. By 1976, he also added a daily community column. That meant he covered sports and wrote five columns a week (as the paper was printed Monday through Friday at that time).

“This is impossible,” Dunning thought of the writing load at the time. But it became part of a remarkable professional and parenting routine.

The McNaughton family, owners of the paper then and now, did something remarkable for the era: Dunning was allowed to work entirely from home. A young father, he was raising two young children (toddler Ted and newborn daughter Erin) alone. Dunning typed his work from home and drove it to the paper by the deadline. Some years later, the McNaughton family gave Dunning a raise and a down payment for his Davis home so he could afford to live in the community.

Dunning brought his children along as he covered athletics at UC Davis.

“I was going to games in a basket as an infant,” Erin said, who now lives near her father in Davis as she raises her own two children. “I grew up in a press box.”

She remembers the sound of the typewriter in her home at night as she went to sleep — her father’s work was never done. “It was like a lullaby to me,” she said.

UC Davis Chancellor Gary May says Dunning “has been the pulse (of) the community.”

“We feel so strongly about his expertise and perspective that we’ve asked Bob to write about UC Davis football and continue covering the team for many of our ESPN broadcasts,” May said.

Humor and heart

Dunning saved his satirical side mostly for his coverage of the Davis community. There were his one-liners about Davis: “More nuts than Winters;” “Gateway to Woodland.” And there was, years ago, a woman cited for snoring by police while she slept in her duplex home with thin walls, the offense documented by a decibel meter.

“She, by golly, was over the limit,” Dunning said.

No Davis resident ever received such a dose of affection and comedic ridicule as Dunning’s “Julie from Mars,” about former mayor Julie Partansky, a fixture in city politics in the 1990s.

Partansky got her other planetary status from her off-kilter ideas. She did not want to fill potholes in alleys to sustain their resident tadpoles, prompting a column crusade by Dunning to “save the potholes.” She was the one who sought (but did not achieve) a new police station built of rice straw. But she did manage to build a six-inch pipe under an overpass near Pole Line Road for amphibians to safely avoid a dangerous roadway crossing.

Dunnings’ coverage of Partansky reached the attention of a young comedian named Stephen Colbert, who came to Davis to interview the mayor and the columnist. “She was so genuine, everyone loved her,” Dunning said. “No other city could have created Julie.”

Column after column, Dunning’s heart came through from the tips of his type-writing fingers. He wrote, for example, about meeting a woman named Shelley at a laundromat in Idaho in 1995, while on a family vacation. “By the time the rinse cycle came around, I was ready to marry her,” he said.

And he later did.

Bob and Shelley Dunning went on to have four children: Maev, Molly, Emme and Mick.

What’s next for Dunning

Davis has had a handful of horrific, violent crimes that have shaken the community in Dunning’s time. He learned to grieve out loud right, in print, along with his readers and his city. “He was like a healing voice,” said Debbie Davis, his editor for 37 years.

For Wolk, a Davis Enterprise without Dunning is unthinkable. “It’s terribly sad,” she said.

Publisher Burt McNaughton did not respond to an email request for comment. The Enterprise recently announced a publication shift from three days to two. Dunning said he was making $26 an hour at the time of his unceremonious departure.

But Dunning said he is not going anywhere. He plans to keep typing about city life and Aggies athletics. He will publish in his own digital space, thewaryone.com. He will seek to keep his readers laughing and crying, like that tear-jerker he wrote when his daughter, Erin, went off to college in Arizona.

“I cry every time,” says Erin about rereading the column. ”And that was 30 years ago.”

The two drove together from Davis to Tucson.

“As we laughed and sang and stopped at nearly every roadside attraction that offered a chance to eat or to play, it was like every other vacation we had taken since she was just a baby,” Dunning wrote.

Then they arrived at Erin’s dorm.

“We sat for a long while in the warm Arizona night on a cement barrier surrounding a tree outside her dorm room. Talking only with our hearts. Wishing we could freeze the moment forever and never move again.

Yes, there were tears, but you can’t cry if you don’t love.”

Erin would soon write back.

“Now I am in college, hundreds of miles away from my Dad, yet he is still my best friend. It broke my heart to say goodbye, but I know we are always in each other’s thoughts. He will always be my best friend.”

Was he sad?

“No,” Dunning wrote.

“I’m the luckiest guy on the face of the Earth.”