In the rush of events that keep us pumping through life like chipmunks on a treadmill, one finds it necessary upon occasion to take a moment to acknowledge a person of some importance. It's why I pause today to say goodbye to Alice.
As a waitress for 50 years at an L.A. drinking place called the Redwood, she embodied two eras of newspapering, from hard-drinking reporters, photographers and editors to a cooler, more sober clientele of journalists.
The Red Dog, as columnist Jack Smith used to call it, was just up the street from what was once Times Mirror Square, and it summoned us to eat and drink in the presence of each other at a friendlier, less frantic period in the life of the Los Angeles Times.
And then there was Alice.
Her full name was Alice Broude. Tall and lanky, she was the very epitome of efficiency, sailing through the bar room crowds like a clipper ship at sea, bringing our booze and burgers without stopping to chat, remembering exactly what the regulars drank and never spilling a drop.
I arose early Monday morning, before full light, thinking about Alice, bothered by a feeling of guilt that would not allow me to sleep. I had been promising for years to take her to lunch but, distracted by more pressing needs, I never fulfilled that promise. And now I never can.
Alice died last week.
She was 89 and still full of life and laughter when she was brought down by a massive stroke at the retirement home where she had lived since July, abandoning the small, tidy house in Echo Park she had occupied for 62 years. Her husband died in 1984.
We spoke on the telephone many times and she wouldn't let me off the hook when it came to a promise of lunch.
The promise itself had assumed a life of its own, from good intentions to a joke. Whenever we spoke, each conversation would begin with, "When are we going to lunch?" And she'd laugh.
More recently Alice had concluded that if I wouldn't take her to lunch, by God, she would take me to lunch. I was invited to join her at her retirement home, but it never came about.
Something, always something, kept intruding. But we continued talking about it, determined to make it happen.
I was still thinking about it when a mutual friend and former Times employee, Nancy Tew, e-mailed me to say that Alice had suffered a stroke, and then, the next day, that Alice had died.
