jdmug300214 John Dixon, whose 15 years as sports editor of the Independent, Press-Telegram (I,P-T) were arguably the greatest in that department’s history as well as the best of his four decades at the once-great Long Beach daily newspaper, died Tuesday afternoon at age 86.

Dixon suffered a heart attack and stroke about a month ago. After being treated at St. Mary’s Hospital, he was transferred to an acute-care facility in Paramount, where he passed away.

Dixon began working in sports at the Press-Telegram in 1940 while a student at Wilson High School. He served in the Navy during World War II and returned to the paper after the war.

Dixon was appointed I,P-T sports editor in 1966, a time of rapid growth in professional sports and the emergence of the athletic field as a place where not only games but also social issues were played out. Although Dixon’s style was to rule with an iron hand and an imperturbable countenance, his substance was demonstrated in the room he found on the sports pages to tell the stories of these changing times. Balancing the outside world with the duties of a local paper was quite a challenge, but during this era the I,P-T became one of Southern California’s major metropolitan dailies—as well as a leader in coverage of high school and community college sports and the recruiting of those athletes by major universities.

Dixon was an expert and devotee of the Olympic movement in general and track and field in particular, and he covered several Olympic Games. During his tenure as I,P-T sports editor, the second-floor walls of the department were adorned with the official posters of every modern Olympiad.

Dixon was also a stat freak—although in the parlance of the era, he preferred designations like “figure filbert”—and he compiled a list of everyone from Long Beach to ever become an Olympian or play a significant role in the Olympic movement.

After the massacre of athletes on Israel’s team at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, however, Dixon’s enthusiasm for the Games waned. He never covered another.

Dixon’s passion for accuracy—grammatically and statistically—never took a day off. He read every line of type in the sports section, and the mailbox of every reporter, copy editor or slot man was frequently filled with stories torn from the pages of the paper and marked blood-red with corrections from his marker. Particularly egregious errors were posted on the bulletin board for all to see.

Sometimes this relentlessness led Dixon into quirkiness. He issued blanket prohibitions against the use of certain phrases or words, and the list eventually grew so long that he posted it … and steadily added to it.

Perhaps most famously, Dixon could not abide the use of the term “straight” to mean “consecutive.” In other words, when reporters and editors wanted to inform readers that a baseball team had lost “five straight games” or a basketball player had scored “10 straight points,” they had to find other words.

Rumor had it that Dixon’s law against this use of “straight” derived from a time when someone had written of a pitcher who had thrown “10 straight curveballs”—a contradiction, according to Dixon, who reasoned that a straight curveball wasn’t a curveball because it had been thrown straight and not in a curve.

Dixon remained sports editor until 1980, when newly arrived managing editor Rich Archbold deposed him, installing him as the business editor, and elevating Jim McCormack in his place. Only a year later, however, Dixon returned to sports as Senior Editor, where he remained until his retirement in 1985. Thereafter, he wrote for the Press-Telegram’s travel section, recounting his worldwide adventures with his wife, Reiko.