| Main Feature Story - Friday, June 27, 2008
Feature04: Pat Fusco
If you can remember the date the Sun hired you as its food writer in the 1970s, you weren't really there...
I can't remember the exact date I started writing for the Sun but my landing a job at the paper was almost goofy. I responded to a little notice in the early '70s: the paper was looking for a food writer and there was a casual contest underway. The off-hand quality of that appealed to me.
I entered journalism at the age of 12 when I convinced the editor of my hometown weekly that he needed someone to report news about the schools. For years I worked at writing, but I had been on a long sabbatical while mothering two children. I had spent my life in places where eating is a competitive sport—the South and Manhattan—and I was a fairly adventurous home cook. The job seemed a perfect way to return to the typewriter. I decided to send a sample story.
When a call came from Steve McNamara inviting me for a chat, I was surprised and excited. I only had to roll down the hill, as it were, from my house to the Mill Valley office. Steve and his managing editor Don Stanley were waiting, Steve in his trademark preppy clothes, Don in Levi's and cowboy boots. The chat moved very quickly from how they liked my style to arrangements for hiring me. My conditions were clear: I wanted to write about food and people and their connections. I did not want to be a restaurant critic, believing that role requires personal experience in the professional food world. We shook hands, I signed on.
The result? My very long career with a publication that gives me total freedom in what I write about, and how I write it.
I felt lucky to be there when film critic Sheila Benson and writer Cyra McFadden were fellow contributors, the three of us with daughters in the same homeroom at Mill Valley Middle School. Lines blurred between our beats: Sheila took me with her to screenings in San Francisco; I shared meals with her. Cyra satirized places and people we all knew too well in The Serial.
There was a community feeling at the Sun. Notorious for radical politics and our scandalous Personals section, we also reviewed high school theater performances and faithfully reported on town meetings.
When circulation expanded to San Francisco and Sonoma, food coverage expanded, too. Food&Drink had its own big section reflecting the growing obsession with all things gastronomic. I got to cover upscale wine country events and trends in city restaurants. I interviewed celebrities—terrified at questioning Marcella Hazan, relaxed by the time I spent a day with MFK Fisher. The size of the paper waxed and waned with the economy, editors came and went.
For most of my career at the Sun Linda Xiques was my straight-talking, fair-minded boss. I knew I could question editing of my copy and have her hear me. When emergencies arose in my life, she loosened my deadlines. Few people realize how far she went in caring for her crew, like the hours spent helping writer Stephanie von Buchau during her last illness, shopping for food and delivering it to her home.
All the colleagues who appear in this brief remembrance are gone from the masthead now. At times I feel like a dinosaur, but I am as pleased with my job as I was when I wrote my first feature. I happily add a candle to the birthday cake.
Pat Fusco has been sharing her love of food with Sun readers since Richard Nixon's first term. | 
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