‘Journalism rocks!’ – San Bernardino Sun

Rob Lowe’s procedural drama “9-1-1: Lone Star” filmed recently on the quad at Pomona College in Claremont, where Lowe made an impression on at least one student: The actor threw an errant football and hit her in the head.

Does that qualify as a Lowe blow?

“He felt so bad. He ended up running up the stairs to give me a hug. He even got someone to give me a shirt from the show,” freshman Alexandra Szczerba told The Student Life newspaper of the encounter outside the Smith Campus Center.

Continued Szczerba: “I was like, ‘You know, if there’s anybody I could choose to get hit by a football by, it would be Rob Lowe.’”

Lowe’s appeal transcends generations.

The campus quad substituted for the show’s Austin, Texas with temporary gates and a wall of shrubbery adding to whatever look the producers were going for. A phalanx of emergency vehicles parked along Stover Walk, where fallen oak trees from the January windstorm had been cleared days before.

On my morning walk recently I saw an ambulance and police vehicle, lights flashing, and worried another tree had fallen. Then I saw professional lighting equipment and realized — whew — it was a film location.

Student Life reporter Elisa Membreno had her own encounter with Lowe while researching her story. She saw him on foot as he was on his way to film a scene and asked for an interview.

Lowe declined, but exclaimed supportively, “Journalism rocks!”

If only all rejections we journalists get were so upbeat.

More murals

After my column on the half-mile Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, presented as a historical timeline that elevates the stories of women and minorities, reader Bud Weisbart of Fontana emailed about what he called “another profound mural.”

Barbara Carrasco’s “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective” was commissioned for the 1981 bicentennial of Los Angeles, but its unvarnished views made leaders uncomfortable and it was never installed. Carrasco saved and stored her 80-foot mural, which will have a permanent home in 2023 at the L.A. County Natural History Museum.

Oh yeah, I think I read about that. How did Weisbart know? His son is the museum’s director of design and exhibition. Always good to have an inside source.

More books

My column on my reading life in 2021 was appreciated by the bookish set — in other words, a dozen or so of you.

“I’ve been keeping a yearly list of books I’ve read going back to 1992, when I was in college,” wrote Brian Plummer, who said the log helps remind him of books he’s enjoyed, as well as remind him of books he’s completely forgotten.

Plummer continued: “Thanks for keeping your readers abreast of your reading habits and letting people like me know that it’s not weird to keep a list of books read!”

To be fair, it might still be weird to keep a list of books read.

Frankly, we devoted readers are anomalies. A friend forwarded a Jan. 10 article about a worrisome Gallup Poll survey. “Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year,” the first sentence reads, “a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990.”

One book per month? Americans say the darnedest things.

Meanwhile, Mary Sisney, who read more books than I did, got a little competitive at hearing via my column that Janice Rutherford read 206 books last year. Sisney wondered if her own page count from some thick biographies might have put the pair on equal footing.