Employees members at Frank Del Olmo Elementary had been puzzled after I requested concerning the faculty’s namesake.
His identify was throughout us, in any case. On the fanciful mural of books, a falcon (the varsity mascot), a quill pen and ink effectively with the slogan “Make a Distinction within the World.” On faculty T-shirts marketed on the market on banners in English and Spanish hanging from a fence. On the framed, fancy metropolis proclamation signed in 2006 by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to mark the opening of this boxy, two-story, three-acre faculty on the sting of Historic Filipinotown.
However I couldn’t discover a lot that instructed the world who Frank del Olmo was. A trailblazing reporter, columnist and editor for the Los Angeles Occasions. The primary Latino on the paper’s masthead. A founding member of the California Chicano Information Media Assn. An inductee into the Nationwide Assn. of Hispanic Journalists Corridor of Fame. A longtime champion of the oppressed, and a burr to the highly effective.
I visited Frank del Olmo Elementary on Tuesday to pay my respects, a day after the twentieth anniversary of his dying from a coronary heart assault at simply 55 outdoors his workplace on the outdated downtown Occasions headquarters, which drew condolences from then Mexican President Vicente Fox and Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez. At Del Olmo’s funeral, then-Occasions editor John Carroll instructed an viewers of practically 900 that the paper and Los Angeles would “all the time bear in mind” Del Olmo.
We didn’t.
The one trace of Del Olmo’s accomplishments I may discover was on that mural dealing with Vermont Avenue. Beneath his identify was the phrase “journalist.” The inkwell bore a faint define of the Pulitzer Prize medal, which he and different staffers received in 1984 for a pioneering sequence on Latinos in Southern California.
I assumed I’d discover extra on the faculty’s entrance, the place two plaques had been bolted on columns. Nope. One plaque commemorated “the Americanization of Godzilla,” which came about in 1956 when footage was filmed right here for the English-language model of the monster traditional. The opposite saluted the agency that completed constructing the varsity, greater than a 12 months delayed.
A secretary then remembered that there was one thing scratched out on the sidewalk simply in entrance of the attendance workplace. I briskly walked outdoors. A concrete slab bore the identify of Frank del Olmo Elementary’s founding principal and imprints of his fingers.
Del Olmo by no means entered the general public consciousness like his predecessor, Ruben Salazar, the Occasions columnist killed in 1970 by a tear gasoline canister fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy in the course of the Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles. Del Olmo’s work barely registers in journalism colleges at this time. This paper way back ended its Frank del Olmo Affect Award for a highschool newspaper whose work made a distinction locally. One of many solely traces of him within the journalism world is a scholarship in his identify from CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California. A good friend needed to remind me that Monday marked 20 years since Del Olmo’s dying, after which I needed to remind colleagues.
Obsolescence is unfortunately the destiny of most reporters. We write our tales, we hope for a response from readers that always doesn’t come, we transfer on to the subsequent article. Our clips inevitably collect literal and digital mud, remembered solely by a couple of. And that’s a profession.
It’s a destiny that Del Olmo doesn’t deserve. He and the late Wall Road Journal reporter Daniel Pearl are the one journalists with a Los Angeles Unified faculty named after them. It’s due to Del Olmo that The Occasions has as many Latino reporters and editors as we do. He fought for illustration within the newsroom and in our tales to the literal finish of his life. On that day, Del Olmo was presupposed to have lunch with Latino staffers to debate how administration may higher help an initiative to cowl Latinos, recalled former Occasions editor Frank Sotomayor and present Occasions editors Steve Padilla and Nancy Rivera Brooks.
We’ve by no means marked the anniversary of Del Olmo’s dying within the 5 years I’ve been right here — not a Slack submit, not a companywide e-mail, nada. So I wasn’t shocked that the varsity has forgotten as effectively. If there’s little to mark Del Olmo’s legacy at his namesake faculty and the paper the place he labored, how can we count on the remainder of the town to recollect him?
Employees buzzed me again into the workplace. Ready for me this time was second-year assistant principal Veronica Ciafone.
“I didn’t know who Frank del Olmo was earlier than I transferred right here, so I learn all about him,” the 45-year-old South L.A. native mentioned as we walked throughout campus towards the library. Somebody had talked about they thought a Del Olmo marker was there. “I needed to know why they’d identify a college after an individual and never after a road.”
Simply contained in the library entrance was a framed yellow poster that includes a black-and-white picture of a smiling Del Olmo. “My hope has been for a profession that might enable [me] to make at the least a small distinction on this planet,” it acknowledged in Spanish.
“He died younger, didn’t he?” Ciafone mentioned earlier than asking the librarian if there was the rest. Nothing.
The lunch bell rang. I anticipated a rush of youngsters. I hoped to ask in the event that they knew something about Del Olmo. Nobody got here.
“Wet day schedule,” Ciafone mentioned with a smile.
We walked again to her workplace, embellished with mementos from her profession — pictures, a small Chinese language dragon, a USC pennant. She reached into her desk and pulled out a hardcover version of “Frank del Olmo: Commentaries on His Occasions,” an anthology of his work printed a couple of months after his dying.
“In faculty, we heard quite a bit about Ruben Salazar, however nothing about Frank del Olmo,” she admitted. “Even the place I used to be earlier than, I bear in mind there was a Ruben Salazar scholarship.”
Ciafone searched on her laptop computer. She confirmed me a flier for it.
“It’s unlucky,” mentioned the daughter of Mexican immigrants, “as a result of Frank del Olmo’s contributions to Latinos had been clearly important as effectively.”
He was greater than only a figurehead Latino, I responded. Del Olmo is pigeonholed as a Chicano voice — however he was an L.A. voice, interval.
Frank del Olmo, in a black jacket within the again row, with members of The Occasions group that received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Backside row, from left: David Reyes, Virginia Escalante, Louis Sahagun. Again row from left, George Ramos, Noel Greenwood, Frank Sotomayor, Del Olmo, José Galvez and Robert Montemayor.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
He wrote about secession fights in his native San Fernando Valley and the rise of labor in metropolis politics. He excoriated this paper for endorsing Pete Wilson’s 1994 reelection after the California governor hitched his marketing campaign to the noxious Proposition 187. Police brutality, civic corruption, even sports activities: Del Olmo lined all of it in a taut, thorough type.
However his most stunning columns, I instructed Ciafone, had been these about his son, Frankie. Each December for a decade starting in 1995, he instructed readers about Frankie’s life with autism, ranging from the boy’s analysis at age 3. In a dispatch Del Olmo wrote two months earlier than his dying, he introduced that “the 2 nice items” he may give his son “are my presence and his privateness. And he shall have them each.”
Ciafone browsed via a few of these Frankie columns. Her eyes widened with every web page. Then she reached the tip, an excerpt from a homework task Frankie did about his father.
“My dream is that I generally is a nice man like my dad,” the assistant principal slowly learn out loud, “so I can do good issues like he did.”
She closed the guide and dabbed at her eyes.
As we mentioned our goodbyes, I requested if there was any probability that college students may be capable to be taught extra about Frank del Olmo. She considered it. “We’re having Profession Day in a couple of months, so it will be good to honor him.”
“Are you going to have a reporter?” I blurted out.
Ciafone grinned.
“We will — would you want to return and inform our college students about Frank del Olmo?”
It will be my honor.
