The passing of Al Martinez, author of "Get the kid his peaches"

Sad to hear today of the death of Al Martinez, the great storyteller of the Los Angeles Times. We've featured his "Get the kid his peaches" story every Christmas Eve on this blog (you can read it once again HERE). May he rest in peace, rise and glory, and his words continue to inspire, amuse and push us from our comfort zones.

The greatest Christmas story ever told: Get the kid his peaches

Here again, my friends, is the greatest Christmas story ever told by a great story teller, Al Martinez, formerly of the Oakland Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily News. Al is known as the "Bard of LA" and has won three Pulitzer prizes since he began writing columns in 1952. He wrote his last column on March 30, 2013. 

I run this story every year in Fiat Lux, and it brings a tear to my eye every time.  So here it is, the Greatest Christmas Story Ever Told:

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A Christmas Story

By Al Martinez

IT happened one Christmas Eve a long time ago in a place called Oakland on a newspaper called the Tribune with a city editor named Alfred P. Reck.

I was working swing shift on general assignment, writing the story of a boy who was dying of leukemia and whose greatest wish was for fresh peaches.

It was a story which, in the tradition of 1950s journalism, would be milked for every sob we could squeeze from it, because everyone loved a good cry on Christmas.

We knew how to play a tear-jerker in those days, and I was full of the kinds of passions that could make a sailor weep.

I remember it was about 11 o'clock at night and pouring rain outside when I began putting the piece together for the next day's editions.

Deadline was an hour away, but an hour is a lifetime when you're young and fast and never get tired.

Then the telephone rang.

It was Al Reck calling, as he always did at night, and he'd had a few under his belt.

Reck was a drinking man. With diabetes and epilepsy, hard liquor was about the last thing he ought to be messing with, but you didn't tell Al what he ought to or ought not to do.

He was essentially a gentle man who rarely raised his voice, but you knew he was the city editor, and in those days the city editor was the law and the word in the newsroom.

But there was more than fear and tradition at work for Al.

We respected him immensely, not only for his abilities as a newsman, but for his humanity. Al was sensitive both to our needs and the needs of those whose names and faces appeared in the pages of the Oakland Tribune.

"What's up?" he asked me that Christmas Eve in a voice as soft and slurred as a summer breeze.

He already knew what was up because, during 25 years on the city desk, Reck somehow always knew what was up, but he wanted to hear it from the man handling the story.

I told him about the kid dying of leukemia and about the peaches and about how there simply were no fresh peaches, but it still made a good piece. We had art and a hole waiting on page one.

Al listened for a moment and then said, "How long's he got?"

"Not long," I said. "His doctor says maybe a day or two."

There was a long silence and then Al said, "Get the kid his peaches."

"I've called all over," I said. "None of the produce places in the Bay Area have fresh peaches. They're just plain out of season. It's winter."

"Not everywhere. Call Australia."

"Al," I began to argue, "it's after 11 and I have no idea . . .”

"Call Australia," he said, and then hung up.

If Al said call Australia, I would call Australia.

I don't quite remember whom I telephoned, newspapers maybe and agricultural associations, but I ended up finding fresh peaches and an airline that would fly them to the Bay Area before the end of Christmas Day.

There was only one problem. Customs wouldn't clear them. They were an agricultural product and would be hung up at San Francisco International at least for a day, and possibly forever.

Reck called again. He listened to the problem and told me to telephone the secretary of agriculture and have him clear the peaches when they arrived.

"It's close to midnight," I argued. "His office is closed."

"Take this number down," Reck said. "It's his home. Tell him I told you to call."

It was axiomatic among the admirers of Al Reck that he knew everyone and everyone knew him, from cops on the street to government leaders in their Georgetown estates. No one knew how Al knew them or why, but he did.

I made the call. The secretary said he'd have the peaches cleared when they arrived and give Al Reck his best.

"All right," Reck said on his third and final call to me, "now arrange for one of our photographers to meet the plane and take the peaches over to the boy's house."

He had been drinking steadily throughout the evening and the slurring had become almost impossible to understand.

By then it was a few minutes past midnight, and just a heartbeat and a half to the final deadline.

"Al," I said, "if I don't start writing this now I'll never get the story in the paper."

I won't forget this moment.

"I didn't say get the story," Reck replied gently. "I said get the kid his peaches."

If there is a flash point in our lives to which we can refer later, moments that shape our attitudes and affect our futures, that was mine.

Alfred Pierce Reck had defined for me the importance of what we do, lifting it beyond newsprint and deadline to a level of humanity that transcends job. He understood not only what we did but what we were supposed to do.

I didn't say get the story. I said get the kid his peaches.

The boy got his peaches and the story made the home edition, and I received a lesson in journalism more important than any I've learned since.

I wanted you to know that this Christmas season.

Al Martinez is a former reporter and columnist for The Oakland Tribune, from 1955 to 1971, The Richmond (Calif.) Independent and Los Angeles Times to now. Born in Oakland, he also has written several novels, for television and the movies. This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 25, 1986.

Jesus saves, and the people on our doorstep

Sign on the roof of
the Church of the Open Door,
Los Angeles

Today's readings are 1 Samuel 2:1-10, Psalm 16, Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25, Mark 13:1-8.

Here is my sermon for today:

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“My heart exults in the LORD; 

my strength is exalted in my God.” 

 -- From the Song of Hannah

Last Wednesday, as is our custom here at St. Paul’s, we had our community night dinner and fed everyone who came through our doors.

We had adult classes, showed a film, and the youth group went bowling. People prayed, they were fed, and had a little fun, and, we hope, they learned something.

It was a good evening – until the very end, when a young man in a hoodie asked me if he could sleep in the church. He said he had nowhere else to go.

I told him he couldn’t sleep here. I made sure he had something to eat, and let him stay inside until it came time to lock up.

It was too late for him to get to PACEM, the program whereby churches in our area take turns housing homeless people in the cold months. Our turn to host PACEM will come, but it wasn’t yet our night. I talked to this young man about how to get to PACEM the next night, and I haven’t seen him since.

I went home praying he would be OK, and feeling low and frustrated that I offered so little when the needs are so great all around us.

Could I have done better? Certainly.

Yet the truth is we see a great many homeless people regularly on our corner, and sometimes they sleep in our bushes.

We live in a deceptively bucolic community, but beneath the surface we have a great deal of poverty and homelessness right here.

You may not know this, but Charlottesville adopted a plan in 2009 to end homelessness by the year 2012. The plan had concrete steps, and a few have come to pass, like a low-income apartment house called the Crossings.

But very little else has happened with that plan.

And we still have people who arrive on our doorstep. If we are to truly claim to be followers of Jesus, then we here have a role, and we have just got to do better.

I want to take you to another place today, a place that in its own way gives me hope. Many years ago, when I was a news reporter, I carried a notebook into gritty neighborhoods where life is hard, and often violent and short.

One of the places I used to go is Skid Row in Los Angeles, where there is an old bleached-out boxy building, dating from 1935. On the roof is a big red neon sign that flashes “Jesus Saves.”

You can see that sign for miles.

I must admit, the sign has always entranced me, but also bothered me. Why would anyone who lives on Skid Row even believe it?

It may not seem very Episcopalian to talk about “Jesus saves” – and we certainly don’t like neon signs, and I am not putting one on the roof of this building, thank you.

Yet, that neon sign underlines an audacious claim by this Christian religion we practice:

“Jesus saves.”

It is up to us to make that sign real. Why? The Bible tells us so.

If you read the Bible closely, you will discover that most of the stories of God’s salvation are in this world, with real people in real places. Very few stories are about salvation in the next world.

The Bible and our prayer book, our baptism and our Eucharist, and the very words of the hymns we sing, all proclaim the very same thing:

Jesus saves – now, here, today.

So what does that mean?

Back up a little. Our religion is built on the idea that we follow a Jewish holy man who lived 2,000 years ago half a world away, in a place very, very different than Central Virginia.

He was no hippie, no Zen monk. He worked with his hands and he enjoyed a good meal and strong drink, and he could spin a good yarn.

But he could be quite harsh with his followers, and he did not shy away from telling them about the gritty realities of the world – and what they had to do to be his follower. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, turn the other cheek, give away your possessions.

Why would anyone follow this Jesus? Why would anyone claim he saves anyone? He could not even save himself from the Cross, as his detractors pointed out. Over the centuries, many have tried to explain why Jesus willingly goes to the Cross, and to be candid, some of those explanations fail.

We get one explanation today in the Letter to the Hebrews. The letter writer wants his listeners to believe that Jesus saves.

And he explains it with words that are strange to our ears, words about blood sacrifice and “curtains of flesh” – language that meant a great deal to people steeped in the ways of the Hebrew Temple.

The problem is that the language of blood offerings doesn’t resonate well in our own time, and, worse, is easily misunderstood.

Some have heard in these words the image of a bloodthirsty hateful God. If we take these images literally, as many do, we end up with a God who is satisfied only with death.

Is there another way to understand this?

I go back to the neon sign on Skid Row:

Jesus saves.

Jesus loves the world enough to experience everything we experience, even the pain and loss we suffer, and to live with us, especially in our hardest most perplexing moments. That is why he goes to the Cross, to be there with us – and not to satisfy some bloodthirsty deity.

He brings every ounce of his own divinity to be with us in the lowest places, to live on all the skid rows of this world.

In today’s gospel lesson from Mark, a passage laced with images of apocalypse, Jesus tells us wars and famines do come. Great buildings like the Temple will fall.

Yet Jesus offers us another way of seeing: look beyond the appearances, he says, because pain and hardship will fade into history, and I will be right here with you, and will never let you go no matter what.

But there is a challenge for us in this:

If, indeed, the Risen Christ is within us, then what are we doing to bring God’s dream of compassion alive here and now? How are we the hands of Christ?

Skid Row is right outside our doors some nights, and the weather is getting colder. It is up to us – all of us – to make real that Jesus saves. It is up to us – up to me – to do better.

But have heart: All will be made new, all will be blessed, and God’s dream of love and compassion is coming alive within you and around you – so have eyes to see and ears to hear – and hands and feet to act!

This is the faith of the ancients; we hear it echoing in the Song of Hannah, our Old Testament lesson for today:

“He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts up the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”

And this is the faith of people I’ve met on Skid Row:

Jesus does save, here, now. Today.