Former Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times
journalist Larry Spears dies at 86
He was a questing journalist trained in old-school observation, finding news in communities where others did not look. His reporting that spanned four decades reflected often-still-unresolved controversies.
Suffering from dementia, Spears died in Sacramento on Sept. 25. He was 86.
Former colleagues mourned the loss of a masterful writer who was dedicated to probing news stories and who brought a quiet, oddball wit to his newsrooms and his writing.
“Larry was a wonderful man — kind, thoughtful and big-hearted,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan. “Wicked sense of humor, with that gentle Dakota edge of his laced in. I always appreciated how encouraging and helpful he was to me as a young reporter at the Oakland Tribune, generous and wise with his advice.”
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, who was on the Concord City Council when Spears covered the community, praised him as a journalist who asked “tough thoughtful questions. Full of integrity, professionalism and humanity.”
An intrepid outdoor adventurer, Spears was an avid skydiver and excellent skier who in later years spent happy times with his wife Sharon travelling up and down the West Coast to hike, camp and canoe in their boat named Towanda.
At the Tribune, Spears worked in the sports and features departments before joining the paper’s Walnut Creek and Martinez bureaus in the 1980s, reporting on local government, courts and other stories.
From the 1960s into the 70s, he covered UC Berkeley during its turbulent period of student activism, including the Free Speech Movement and the civil rights and Vietnam war protests.
He wrote a three-part series examining the May 1969 People’s Park riots involving students and others opposed to UC’s plan to develop an empty site three blocks south of campus. After park advocates had briefly taken over the property and planted a garden, workmen for the university put up chain-link fencing around the land and police guarded it before violence erupted.
“One side used bottles, bricks and steel stakes; the other, gas, clubs and firearms,” Spears wrote. One onlooker on a roof was fatally wounded and another man was blinded.
Last month, more than a half-century later and just days after Spears’ death, UC regents approved a student housing project on the People’s Park site, and foes vowed to block it in court.
Spears’ storytelling was plainspoken, concise, clear, colorfully descriptive and eloquent, said former colleague Andy Jokelson. The two reporters jumped from the Tribune to the Times in 1990, reversing a pattern of the Tribune hiring Times’ journalists in the two papers’ intense competition for suburban readers. Newspaper consolidations in later years led to the two papers merging, creating the East Bay Times.
At the Tribune and Contra Costa Times, Spears covered Concord’s roiling controversies as they drew national attention: The 1985 death of Timothy Lee, a young black man found hanged in a tree near the downtown BART station, was ruled a suicide though many thought it must have been a lynching. Police officers sued the city for installing a spy camera in a men’s room. Residents vociferously griped about and mocked the Spirit Poles, a public art project that resembled giant knitting needles stuck in Concord Avenue’s median strip. And backlash to an upsurge in gay activism led to voters striking down ordinances protecting AIDS patients.
“If Concord didn’t have enough problems,” Spears wrote in the Times, “TV talk show host Phil Donahue cuffed the town around in front of 11 million to 13 million national viewers.” Spears called the episode a “free-for-all debate on gay rights in Concord that bounced around from issue to issue like a racquetball.”
“It was from Larry that I first heard the words ‘homeless people,’ ” wrote Barbara Falconer Newhall. “He assigned me a story on homeless people in our area. … That assignment says a lot about Larry — his nose for news and his compassion. He was a kind and thoughtful coworker.”
Spears retired from the Times in 2001, moving with Sharon first to Lake County where he briefly reported for the Lake County Record-Bee before moving to Oregon and finally settling in Sacramento.
“He so supported me,” Sharon said. “He was a wonderful husband and father.”
Their relationship began even though they lived far apart. A mutual friend from Spears’ home state of Minnesota suggested Sharon might like him, she said, and she became smitten after more than a year of correspondence. She finally met him in person when he came from California to visit the friend. Five days later Sharon and Larry decided to marry.
It was another victory for Spears’ writing. “The letters were why I fell in love with him,” she said.
Lawrence Maitland Spears was born April 11, 1935, in Bemidji, Minn., and was raised primarily in Grand Forks, N.D. His mother, Margaret Mae Spears, was a teacher, and his father, Arthur Lawrence Spears, was a meat inspector.
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