After serving the army, working 77 years for the San Francisco Chronicle. 98-year-old Science journalist David Perlman took his “early retirement” recently.
"It's high time. My God, I'm 98 years old. If I'm not gonna quit now, when am I gonna quit?" Perlman said just before his retirement.
In his 77-year career at the Chronicle, Perlman wrote thousands of stories on topics such medicine, resource extraction, astronomy and natural diseases. In 2010, he won the Helen Thomas Award for lifetime achievement in journalism.
In a recent interview, Perlman, who has not only won awards but had them named after him, told the website of the Poynter Institute that Perlman, cutting in science coverage by newspapers in order to save money is “absolutely obscene”.
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“I think newspapers have abdicated their responsibility by diminishing the amount of science coverage. There were once, I don't know, 50 or 75 science pages, science sections in newspapers across the country. Now there's The New York Times on Tuesday.
“Whether it's online or in print, the idea of failing to cover advances in science ... it creates a generation with a major disability in what they can think about and understand,” he said.
Perlman had been a reporter at The Chronicle before the World War II — fresh out of a journalism school — and then came back in 1951. He had been away for almost 10 years.
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The New York native was a copy boy at the Chronicle when reports came in of an attack on Pearl Harbor. But he admits that his early inspiration to be a journalist came from a screwball comedy: a play about fast-talking, hard-nosed newspaper reporters called The Front Page.
Interestingly for Perlman, who has spent almost his entire career in science journalism, science wasn’t his first love. He started at the paper in 1940, he was a general assignment reporter who didn't know anything about science.
“It was about 1957, and I broke my ankle skiing, and was laid up for quite a while. A friend of mine, actually our kids' pediatrician, brought me a book called The Nature of the Universe. It was by... a famous British astronomer. That's really interesting. And then, of course, it was competing at that time with what later became the dominant theory of the universe — the Big Bang Theory…Everything I've written about since then has been a learning experience, and that's the pleasure of being a reporter — especially on a newspaper like this one, which encourages reporters young or old to find areas of fascination and pursue them,” he said.
But still "it was all a mystery” to him. "I started getting into a few kinds of stories that involved some sort of technology ... and one thing led to another, and suddenly I was covering stars and earthquakes and God knows what else."
Despite writing scores of stories for both print and digital sections, Poynter doesn’t consider him an expert.
"I don't think any reporter is an expert on anything. It's a matter of finding the experts who can explain scientific material in a way that people out there — readers of the Chronicle, for example — can understand," he said.
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According to him, every story teaches something, and he has been a “lifetime of learning”, which is something.
According to SFGate, the sister site to the Chronicle, Perlman was the first reporter to cover the disease in 1981.
