A Cast of Characters
Our offices were arranged in a square with a bullpen for the production crew in the center. Sometimes I’d walk around to think or take a break from my screen and check in with one colleague or another.
Greg Lupion’s office was a favorite stop. He was a good listener, and quick to laugh, especially when stress was high. Greg was Moran’s right-hand man. All the copy and production editors reported to him, and they were glad they did because he was a great manager, supportive and, amid the chaos, a font of calm, common sense and good humor.
Alex almost single handedly put EE Times on the map. His biggest scoop was an exclusive about a bug in Intel’s highest profile microprocessor, the Pentium, the first chip to shed an x86 number and get a real name. Alex’s story was one of several he wrote that was picked up in the New York Times and the first ever to get the words EE Times pronounced by an anchor on CNN.
When the Internet pulled the plug on our business model, Alex was among the first to try out life as a reporter on the corporate side. Last I knew, he was leading digital media efforts for the database giant Oracle.
At the opposite end of a hallway from Wallace sat Nic Mokhoff. A tall, portly Russian bear of a man with a thick beard and unkempt head of salt-and-pepper hair, he was no threat to those who knew him. To the contrary, he showed the world a gentle, kindly demeanor and could be trusted with your deepest secrets. From time to time, he disappeared into Manhattan to lend his deep voice to a Russian choir that specialized in the wintry songs of Serge Rachmaninoff.
Nic had a lot of pages to fill each week. Like me, he cajoled the news editors to write long-form pieces for him, exploring at 30,000-feet (or sometimes with microscopic technical detail) the issues of the day. When pressure built up, he would sometimes make an angry pronouncement and retire to the cave of his office.
The odd couple of EE Times, Marty Gold and Ashok Bindra, worked in offices between Nic and Wallace. They were an unintended comedy team, often arguing long and loud over some minor point about analog chips or signal processors. Ashok held grudges that cast a pall over their corridor for days at a time, but they always made it up and often took lunch together.
Marty was the mascot for news hounds. A balding four-foot something bowling ball, he often got revved up about a story he was working on and sprayed you with his enthusiasm. We learned to keep a safe distance.
Weitzner would tell tales about how Marty backed some chip executive against the wall with his belly and wouldn’t let him go until he answered his questions.
Marty’s mantra was, “There’s always a story, and if they say there isn’t a story—it’s a big story.”
Our two best copy editors smartly avoided the human chaos and worked from home. Diana Scheben lived near Long Island’s southern beaches where most homeowners had a dock and a boat. Under a tiara of tight ginger curls, she maintained a quiet intensity. If Diana was editing your story and there was some element—a factoid or turn of phrase—that wasn’t well nailed down, she’d find it. But she was fastidious. Rather than make a change, she’d call you to ask about it first.
Diana’s closest comrade in the rewrite world was Jackie Damian, who lived in New Jersey with cats who were forever creeping into her conversations. Diana and Jackie got all the hardest rewrite assignments.
Unlike Diana, Jackie wouldn’t hesitate to rewrite a boring opening sentence, sometimes interjecting a florid metaphor, at least once riling Wallace. In these moments, her penchant for color clashed with the straight, serious language of the hard news stories that were the signature of EE Times, a newspaper that, as far as I recall, never had a features editor.
One last colleague I’ll mention, Robert Bellinger, ran our Professions section, the only non-technical department in the newspaper, yet one of the most widely read. His annual salary surveys chronicled the rise of electrical engineers from inscrutable Dilbert types to wealthy and inscrutable Dilbert types.
Like Nic, Bellinger was something of a lone wolf. He commanded his beat with great authority and had it covered, even when on vacation, often with a small warehouse of stockpiled stories. I suspect he also felt like something of a loner because he was gay, when few gay folks were out of the closet. We guessed his status from certain verbal mannerisms and lack of a (public) life partner.
Bellinger lived near me in Huntington near the center of Long Island’s north shore. When one of us had car troubles, the other would sometimes provide a ride.
I got the best part of the deal. Bellinger drove a late model Alpha Romeo that sported heated seats, a rare feature in those days and a welcome one in New York’s long, wet winters. When I drove, I had to pick used coffee cups and muffin wrappers off the passenger seat of my coughing and rattling VW Golf. It must have made my well-dressed colleague wonder if we’d make the 40-minute commute into Manhasset alive and if his trench coat would pick up a nasty stain on the way.
My car was a (barely) living symbol of my life in those days. Like my VW, I sometimes felt held together by duct tape, struggling against a rocky marriage, an increasingly demanding job and a neglect of proper maintenance.
That said, life was, in most respects, good.
I bought for the then-whopping sum of $195,000 the only house I ever owned. (I was sure I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the mortgage payments, but I was.) It stood on a hill in the forested suburb of Centerport, a short walk from Long Island Sound and an even shorter walk to tiny but great pizza and Chinese food joints.
The small three-bedroom house (below) sported a large deck and a crumbling retaining wall that cost us big bucks to repair. The driveway was so steep that on our first and unusually intense winter there, I’d point my snow shovel downhill and slide to the road while my neighbor, an affable Italian who was also our kids’ soccer coach and Father to a large all-girl family, watched and laughed.
“Bet it wasn’t like this in Hong Kong,” he howled.
Our two school-aged kids were delights. We hiked in rocky north shore state parks, flew kites and swam at Robert Moses Beach in summer. We rode sleds down the hill at a nearby golf course in winter. In fall, we picked apples and pumpkins far out on the island and took car ferries to see submarines and restored tall ships in Connecticut.
I fell in love with Huntington, the nearest town, the first time I saw it, in no small part because a local theater billed a concert with Leo Kottke, one of my folk music idols.
A neighbor who worked as a sailor took us out on the sound a couple times. We lived well, but were still far away from the most moneyed pockets of Long Island like Amagansett, where the titans of Wall Street hoisted their sails.
Next: PC Days [Coming in February 2026]
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