Former Desert Sun editor celebrates Fessier's Hall of Fame induction

Editor’s note: Former Desert Sun executive editor Greg Burton gave the following speech as Bruce Fessier was inducted into the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation’s inaugural Media Hall of Fame on Feb. 28.

If you’d never seen his name or watched his mop of hair bob in the wind, you’d still know his legacy. This is a reporter who was there at the beginning of so many things we hold dear in this desert.

He was there in Palm Springs with Sonny Bono talking about starting a film festival. He was there when a hot, dusty protest concert by Pearl Jam showed us what Coachella could be. He was there when a grassroots movement for music theater became the McCallum in Palm Desert.

But it would be a disservice to just say he was there.

Bruce Fessier was a catalyst.

He chronicled the lives of Frank Sinatra and Barry Manilow and Carol Channing and Lucie Arnaz and then he catalyzed their talents for something greater.

Bruce didn’t succumb to the glamor. He did not apply varnish to history.

For 50 years — from his roots at San Francisco State to his four decades at The Desert Sun — he dedicated himself to the workaday job of reporting. He was a lunchbucket journalist at high society socials.

He filled spiral notebooks until they fell like logs off his desk. He filled tape cassettes until they stopped making tape cassettes. He wrote until midnight and kept writing until daybreak.

You didn’t so much edit Bruce as channel his energy.

He would write all night and tell stories all day.

He mingled at ease with mobsters and millionaires. They knew that he knew where the bodies were buried.

But it’s not who he knows that makes Bruce special. It’s who he wants to know. He is a benefactor for the unknown. For the undiscovered. As much as he loved Trini Lopez, he couldn’t wait to figure out the scene where these guys who became Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal played.

That’s why an internship program in his name for the next generation of journalists made so much sense when he retired.As much as he wrote about the past, Bruce loves the future. He’s a champion for tomorrow. He’s a hall of famer who spent every spare moment with the kids on the farm team. That’s just one of the reasons we’re honoring him today. But it’s my favorite.

So, as we recognize this first class of inductees for the Coachella Valley's Journalism Hall of Fame, it's fitting that the most curious and confounding and beguiling scribe of this desert, Bruce Fessier, is the first name inscribed.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Former Desert Sun editor celebrates Fessier's Hall of Fame induction