Jon Healey has worked at newspapers across the country. He started at a small New Jersey newspaper “that collapsed underneath” him, and continued on to a North Carolina paper that “had a Washington bureau in those days, the salad days.” He landed at the San Jose Mercury News during the dot-com boom, where he first met the man he interviewed for Zócalo, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org. Finally, “after a couple years of pleading,” Healey ended up at the Los Angeles Times. Below, he tells us more about himself.
Q. What do you wake up to?
A. The pressure of two small feet in my back, or a hand clawing my ear.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. Today, I don’t think I’ve heard a single peep of music today, not one. It’s terrible. But I can tell you what I listened to yesterday-The Pains of Being Pure At Heart.
Q. What’s your favorite word?
A. Grimace.
Q. What do you find beautiful?
A. A bright sunny day, particularly in December.
Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Overrated yet underappreciated.
Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. I don’t remember. That was a long time ago.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. Gin martini, up, with Tanqueray Ten.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. Gin martini, up, with Tanqueray Ten.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. I’d go to Australia. To Sydney.
Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. I would like to be the guy who greenlights movies.
Q. What would be your death row meal?
A. Some Szechuan chicken dish.
Q. What is your favorite holiday and why?
A. The politically correct answer is Martin Luther King Day, because it’s my wife’s birthday. But I’d say in all honesty, my favorite holiday is Easter…because it’s the end of Lent.
Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Playing football in the neighborhood.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. Probably my keyboard…. My Kurzweil.
Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. I’m going to blog today.
Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?
A. Hundreds of old emails.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’d most love to have a beer with?
A. My dad.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.