San Francisco Loses A Great Reporter: Malcolm "Scoop" Glover

Malcolm Glover was a kid in McCloud, Siskiyou County, when he opened the screen door of a local grocery for a well-dressed gent who had come to town. The older man turned out to be William Randolph Hearst, then summering at the Hearst family's Wyntoon estate nearby, and after dropping out of high school Malcolm found himself in the big city with a job as a "box man," a photographer, for the San Francisco Examiner.

Of such chance encounters great careers are made.

But as a shooter "Mal," well, was not so good. He enlisted and after he was finished with Hitler and Tojo he went back to work for the Examiner - and Hearst - as a police reporter. An editor thought "the beat" would toughen the kid up, get him ready for a real assignment. He stayed "on the job" for 56 years.

Photo: Malcolm on the job at Fifth and Minna, 1949, third from the right..

Say the number again, slowly, and think about it. He was very good at his work.

There are a lot of stories out there about Mal, or "Scoop" as he was known around the Hall of Justice. Most of them are true. He kept a drawer full of Kit Kats and a jellybean jar on his desk as "cop bait," and always responded the same way when a fresh-faced dispatcher who hadn't yet met him took an early morning beat call: "Yeah, honey, that's right... Glover. 'Glove' with an 'r' or 'Lover' with a 'g.'"

They remembered him after that.

He would get surreptitious calls from sources - either cops or b-girls or someone down at City Hall - and listen, eyes shifting and mouth barely moving, looking like an alligator in a pond waiting for the gazelle to come closer. Then he would get up, slowly, so as not to tip the Chronicle ace and dean of the press room, Bob Popp, and mosie off to meet his contact while Bob and Katherine from BCN and the Tribune man and everyone else started hitting the phones - knowing he was going to come in with an exclusive that was going to make them all look very, very bad.

Cop shop stories are almost universally black. You have to work the Hall and environs awhile to appreciate them. They are filled with irony and pathos and sadness and unbelievable pain. It does something to you.

After a year there I found myself angling for the "gunfighter's seat" at a local cop hangout, a chair with a good view of the door. Malcolm saw me do it.

"What's the matter, kid?" he growled. "You wanna see it comin'?"

He loved his wife and kids and would coo to them over the old, heavy black phones we used into the 90s, then switch over and take the details of the most disturbingly grisly atrocity du jour, switching back to his wife again without missing a beat.

He had access to the Hall like no one I've ever seen, hanging around Records or Homicide until the crush of TV cameras and other reporters had gone and then quietly sidling back to pull a mugshot or arrest record. After awhile his editors stopped trying to bring him back into the "cubicle farm" at Fifth and Mission, begrudgingly admitting he was too valuable a resource.

Mal left the paper in 2002 and died last Monday at 83.

He was my rabbi, the cop shop guy who brought me into the newspaper game and taught me a helluva lot.

I'll miss him.