Mike Tharp: Lesson learned from being laid off

Laid off.

Separated, each word holds lighter meanings. Sex. Holidays.

Together, though, they tell of the end of times. The end of a job. The end of a paycheck and benefits. The end of one-third of your day. Two-thirds of when you're awake.

Laid off.

It's no secret that McClatchy and the Sun-Star are going through another round of layoffs, on top of the two rounds last year. Nearly every newspaper company in the country is taking the same tack. This is the worst financial quarter in the history of the American newspaper business.

The litany of layoffs is all too familiar to us Mercedians. We all know somebody who's been laid off or fears being laid off. Companies here -- big, medium and small -- all have been forced to resort to layoffs to stay in business.

However rational a management decision, it doesn't matter much to those now without a job. All that matters is that their lifeline to labor has been cut. All that matters is how they will cope -- or not -- with the so-called New Reality of the global depression.

I know. I've been there.

I've been laid off.

June 8, 2001. The 45th anniversary of a tornado that roared through Topeka, where I grew up. It came within three blocks of our house, killed 16 people and did $100 million in damage.

On its anniversary I answered the phone in my home office in San Pedro. Over the next five minutes a tornado swept through my life and career. The managing editor of the news magazine I worked for was on the phone. So was an HR functionary.

My 14-year career as a bureau chief in Tokyo and correspondent on the West Coast was history. I sat in the chair, trained by decades of reporting to take notes -- but it was in a scrawl shakier than when I interviewed a Somali imam or a Kosovar warlord.

I wrote down what they told me to Fed-Ex back to the home office: Sony Vaio laptop, cell phone. Papers for me to sign for severance and a nondisclosure agreement that would arrive tomorrow. Sign and send back. COBRA health care for six months.

Do you understand, the HR apparatchik asked.

"Why?" I croaked. "Why?"

"Economics," said the managing editor. "Strictly economics. No reflection on you or your work." More than 100 others were laid off that day, the first of many layoffs at the magazine.

I'd been through the deaths of a father, a mother and a brother, who was closer to me than anybody. I'd been through divorce. I'd been through war, as a soldier and as a correspondent.

This hit me as hard, or harder, than any of those. My life had been my work. Since 16, off and on, I'd been a reporter. Forty years. My business card had been my backstage pass to life.

I never considered what I did a job. It was a calling. It was a mission. Now I'd been relieved of duty.

Now it was over.

How did it affect me? How did I handle it?

"You became a recluse," says Greg Bien, my best friend since high school.

"You were totally not yourself," says Debbie Vasquez, my neighbor for 17 years in San Pedro.

"It depressed you beyond belief," says Randy Riggins, my Gulf War buddy.

For a long time, I was the life of the party. Steve Cameron, our former sports editor here, knew me in the early '70s. "You should hire out," he told me back then. "Any party you go to will be wild."

The party was over.

Dylann, my 15-year-old daughter, had to become my mother. That was an unbearable and unworthy task to impose on her. I lashed out. She left. She was right to leave.

My son Nao came to the United States a few months later from Tokyo to start college. I couldn't control anything, so I tried to control him. We got into fist fights. He left. He was right to leave.