Greg 'Newsstand,' 1947-2006
The death of a legendary Valley vendor
By Kevin Uhrich
Print media has taken any number of hits in the last few years, but maybe none was worse for readers in the San Fernando Valley than the loss of Greg, a longtime fixture at the Sherman Oaks Newsstand who died in March.
"Greg the newsstand guy," read the LAObserved.com post that noted his death. Kevin Roderick, the former L.A. Times staffer who operates the popular site, featured three posts about Greg's passing, two of them extremely touching, but neither of those mentioning his last name, mainly because bloggers Jon Crowley and friend Will Campbell, a former editor at the Pasadena Weekly and a longtime resident of Sherman Oaks, didn't know it.
But, hey, that's OK. I worked at that newsstand for years and never knew it, either. Eventually, Dana Bartholomew of the L.A. Daily News wrote a proper obituary of the man, whose last name turned out to be Burgess, and mentioned some things about the 59-year-old that I did not know, not even after spending years working Sundays together on that corner.
I did know that Greg didn't care for porn, even though sex mags and videos were among the stand's best selling items. That was primarily because, at one point in his life, as Greg told me, he had worked as a film editor in the porn industry and had just seen too much of that. What I didn't remember was that Greg liked hot rod cars and was an aspiring artist. He stood about 5' 5", always wore Harley Davison baseball caps and those hip-length barber shirts that you don't tuck in, and sported a flowing white beard that those who wrote about his death couldn't resist comparing to the fellows in ZZ Top.
Greg coo-cooed little kiddies and he dutifully listened to all the weird or hard-luck stories that strangers tend to tell other strangers when the sun goes down. To him, you were either simply "pardner" or "buddy" and didn't have a name either.
But Greg did not suffer thieves or fools. And on that corner, there was no shortage of those types of people to keep an eye on, celebrities included. Like the time Tom Arnold and his then-wife Roseanne pulled up and made a scene, with Arnold picking up magazine after magazine and then running up to their SUV and showing her the photos of women with the biggest tits. People flocked toward the commotion - the perfect cover for crooks, who were always ready to jam a magazine or two in their coats or pants and walk off - which eventually forced me to kick the Arnolds off the corner.
"Honey, he told us to get out," the Ritalin-needy Arnold said into the open passenger-side window in his best hurt-child voice to Roseanne, who was waiting for him to buy four packs of Merit cigarettes and a pile of magazines that actually had her picture in them.
"Oh yeah," Roseanne said, turning her sunglassed-gaze toward me. "You're a fucking asshole."
To Greg's great credit as my manager that day, he didn't object one bit when I took the things Arnold had in his hands, laid them aside, and told them to get the hell out - immediately.
Hey, if Roseanne could have one name, so could we. The one-name thing started with the newsstand owner, Joe. He was a former jazz-club barkeep and one of four very proudly Italian brothers from Buffalo who opened the stand in 1949 and never liked giving out his last name. Down at the newsstand, unless you were being obnoxious, your anonymity was assured
Think of Bob Dylan at around midnight one Sunday spilling out onto Van Nuys Boulevard from the back door of a Mercedes being driven by Tom Petty. Joe didn't know who Dylan was, nor did he care. Dylan was dressed like a bum that night - in Joe's eyes, anyway. I was just happy that Dylan ended up buying $100 worth of magazines before Joe forced me or Greg to kick him off the corner. Hey! This wasn't a library, as the always nervous, cigar-chomping Joe was wont to say.
That was just Joe's style, and ultimately, it became mine and Greg's. At the newsstand, they were characters in their own right: the guys who brought you the news. Greg, may you rest in peace. Long live Greg Newsstand.Published: 04/20/2006
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
