Driving with Clay Felker

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll was Clay Felker's West Coast editor of the Village Voice and an early hire at New West, Felker's attempt in the late 1970s to invent a magazine that would appeal to Southern and Northern California. It didn't work, but Carroll has good memories of Felker, who died Tuesday. He recounts them in today's column:

He had a wonderful knack for finding talent and turning it loose. He wanted good people to get better. He had a million ideas. I remember one editorial meeting when he emptied his back pocket of slips of paper, matchbook papers, meal receipts, each of them containing a few words in the familiar Felker scrawl. A story idea on every scrap....

The first issue of New West was put together in a white-hot, alcohol-fueled burst of energy. (Not Clay, though; I never saw him drink.) No one had a precise job description, exactly, so everyone did everything. Felker was everywhere, yelling and fretting. He stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I remember having breakfast with him once, and then catching a ride with him down to the New West offices, which were on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, a block from Rodeo Drive. Felker always wanted to be where the action, perceived or real, was.

Driving with Clay was not an experience to be missed - or repeated. He drove slowly and talked continually. I was terrified the whole 2 miles. (I once took a 100-mile-an-hour drive on Interstate 5 with another famous editor, Scott Newhall, who also talked a lot. It's hard to say which experience was more frightening - although, since Newhall had a wooden leg, I guess he wins.)

When the first issue of New West came out, Clay gave every editor a golden spike with the issue date on it. Gold-plated, really, but an honest-to-God spike, heavy as a hardball. I still have it.

There are L.A. media people who remember New West (and its later re-christening as California) as some of their funnest time in journalism.