Arlington Heights transplant finds calling as columnist in California

Just as the newspaper business was hitting rough water, Gail Smith Scandrett was getting into it.

"Just luck," she says, quickly clarifying, "It was good luck."

Scandrett grew up in Arlington Heights, the fifth of six children in a family of newspaper readers. "I've always enjoyed writing," she says. "I grew up reading newspapers in Chicago, with the Tribune and the Daily News and Paddock Publications. We had four or five papers coming in. My whole family, we're paperophiles. So when I went to college I did some journalism," she adds, "but never really got into it at all. I always thought it would be a dream job, but never really considered I would do it."

She met her husband when he was getting his doctorate at Northwestern University and she was working for the City of Evanston. They had their first child, a daughter, 25 years ago, about the time her father was dying, following her mother a few years before. So they closed up the family home on Euclid Street and moved on, eventually settling in Spreckels, Calif., in the Salinas Valley, not far from where her husband had grown up.

"And I was pretty much a stay-at-home mom after that," Scandrett says. "I did a short and not illustrious stint in real estate for a while."

She raised two more kids, a second daughter and a son, until about five years ago when, with her youngest closing in on 10 years old, a newspaper ad in the local Californian for a movie reviewer piqued her interest. She thought it seemed to be for a family movie review, and submitted some work, only to discover otherwise. "They were actually looking for somebody to write some edgy teen thing," she says.

Yet her copy made such an impression, the newly promoted managing editor asked Scandrett if she'd like to replace her as features editor. "God, am I not prepared for that," Scandrett recalls herself thinking, and said yes. Unfortunately, the newspaper changed its mind and left the position vacant, while hiring Scandrett more and more regularly to do features. She eventually turned that into a weekly family-oriented column.

"I had been telling these stories over the years," she says. "I'm kind of a storyteller by nature. So I had a lot I could write about.

"People would always say, 'You've got to write that down,'" she adds. So she wrote about her own family, of course. "It's kind of cool that I feel I've gotten this kind of legacy from my kids," Scandrett says. Yet she's also written about her own childhood. She's a frequent contributor to Facebook's page devoted to "Growing up in Arlington Heights," and has even posted some of her columns there. Oddly enough, those columns resonate well with her fellow California transplants. "Which is kind of why you do it," Scandrett says. "When I write about Arlington Heights, people out here kind of get it. There's a commonality of experience."

She has a deft touch. A recent column addresses the joy of remembered visits by one of her mom's dearest friends, in which the kids would be more or less set gloriously free on their own while the adults spent days catching up. Another tells how she defended herself from her own children against charges of sometimes embellishing the truth for the sake of a little license.

"Now I write a column," it reads, "and like the victor who writes the history books, I get to tell it my way. I may, on occasion, jumble a few facts and, heaven forbid, exaggerate. But somewhere in the story is what I find to be the truth."

It's an approach that has won her loyal readers, leading to another weekly column, "Good Monday Morning," in which she tries to "feature people doing positive things sort of under the radar." It's much needed. "Salinas has gotten kind of wild and woolly over the last 15, 20 years," Scandrett says. "It's kind of a recruiting area for gangs. Long story short, there's a lot of bad news on the front page, and they wanted something positive."

One of her first "Good Monday Morning" columns was about the archivist at the John Steinbeck Center, giving her a chance to see the original manuscript for "The Pearl." Other writers who exerted an influence on her work were Erma Bombeck, of course, and Ellen Goodman, but also an unlikely choice familiar to Chicagoans - Mike Royko.

"Obviously, I don't write like Mike Royko," Scandrett says, but "I get a good, healthy cynicism from Royko."

That has served her as a journalist as well as her own stories have.

For many years, as a child and later as a housewife, she was stockpiling family stories and developing a sense of style she would only use later on in what is now a growing number of regular assignments. "I would say I was an underachiever. Nowadays I'd be called a slacker," she says. Even so, she adds, "It's worked out for me. I'm a later bloomer," an eye-catching development these days in the field of journalism.