Sams: My Boss, David DePaolo

Friday, July 22, 2016 | 4

More than 11 years ago, I answered a job ad for journalists and faced the most intriguing opportunity of my career: Working for a former lawyer who had launched a website and said he wanted to base his business model on doing good journalism.

I took that plunge, mostly because I'd been living out in the desert for way too long at a newspaper where I also didn't seem to fit. The fact that I'm still at WorkCompCentral 11 years and four months later says a lot about David DePaolo.

I'm generally skeptical with business owners share their notions about doing good journalism. But this is what happened:

David for years had been cranking through press releases, regulatory announcements and various blather on the internet to produce a report that he hoped would inform work comp professionals. Even with a reporter to help me, I couldn't keep up that pace. And David didn't want me to. He knew that journalists need to vet the information that comes to them and write stories from a neutral perspective, without the hype and the spin.

So over the years we hired a second journalist, and then a third, a fourth, a fifth and only a few months ago, our sixth. In the weeks before he passed, David was even talking about expanding staff again to make sure we had a large enough team to pursue the in-depth journalism that he believed in so strongly.

Just before his fatal accident on July 17, David had somehow found time to write a draft  ethics policy for the news department. David had asked me to write up an ethics policy a few weeks before. I had had it on my "to-do list," but hadn't gotten around to it.

This exchange of emails was typical of David's management style:

Me: "I have now learned that if I just blow shit off you’ll eventually do it, so that’s a good thing to know :)"

David: "I had it on my tickler too. See? Collaboration makes good shit happen!"

Lawyers, for journalists, are mostly a bother. They are either threatening to sue you over a story that both of you know is completely accurate or — if they are on your side — maxing out billable hours by tying you up in an editor's office poring over every word choice in a long investigative piece while showing a lot more concern about what can be defended than what is the truth.

Not David. He sort of got this whole "good journalism" thing. He even put it in our mission statement. The first words out of the box are, "We are not afraid of the truth."

You certainly weren't afraid to live life, were you David?

About a week before I started working for WorkCompCentral, my wife and I had dinner at his house in Port Hueneme to get to know, what was at the time, a very small cadre of soon-to-be coworkers. The next morning, Eva and I got up at dawn and walked from the hotel to enjoy the beach. We spotted David on a mountain bike riding on a jetty. He was pushing those spidery legs against the pedals to climb rocks with 30-degree inclines, moving methodically down the jetty from one jagged peak to the next.

At last year's Comp Laude Gala, I came across early-rising David again. While I had a smoke out on the lawn by the hotel, downstairs he comes getting ready to pull his bicycle off the back of his pickup. He told me he was going to ride from the hotel in Burbank to his home in Port Hueneme. I looked it up on Google Maps. That’s 56 miles, folks. Just after dawn on a Sunday after the company's biggest event of the year. But that was vintage David. Most weekday mornings I’d log on to my computer and find two or three emails from him that he had written at 4 or 5 a.m.

There was a lot more to the guy than getting work done, though.

After a few years on the job, I had a little bit too much to drink at the company's holiday party. I might have shown a tad too much exuberance with my co-workers at a company I'd grown very fond of.

After the celebration, David and I happened to catch a van ride together with our wives to get safely back to our homes. Sitting across from me, he gave me a look like he had my number.

“Dude, I know what you're like when you're drinking," he said. "You're one of those 'I love you, man' guys."

I worried that I had shown a little too much of my ass that night. But it didn't matter. There he sat with that extra-wide, toothy grin of his, smiling me up instead of staring me down. He was happy that Eva and I had a good time.

David's energy seemed boundless, but he was not restless. For the decade-plus I worked for him, he seemed to always know exactly what he wanted to do and had a pretty good idea about how to go about doing it.

I hope I have learned something from your resolve, David. I know this: We were truth-tellers together, brother.

And I love you, man.

One last thing: For those readers who weren't fortunate enough to know David personally, below you'll find a slice of life from one of our company barbecues with him and the love of his life, his wife, Anne.