Enterprise

Retired E-R reporter Nick Ellena dies at 91 – Chico Enterprise-Record


OROVILLE — Veteran Chico Enterprise-Record reporter and author Nick Ellena is being remembered by many community leaders and colleagues as a respected, unbiased journalist, world adventurer and personal friend to almost all who entered his orbit.

Born July 22, 1927, Nicholas Richard Ellena died Sunday, Jan. 27 at age 91 in Oroville.

Over the course of more than four decades as a reporter for the Enterprise-Record, in his “free-time” he had traveled to the farthest reaches of the globe, scaling some of its highest mountains, while jotting notes and photographing the places and colorful people he met along the way.

When he retired in 2001, he continued turning those observations into a weekly column for the newspaper, entitled “Flashbacks From Here and There,” which later became the title of the first of three picturesque coffee-table books.

Just a few weeks before his passing he was able to reconnect with many of his news colleagues, as well as local and state officials, judges and community leaders and readers during a retirement party for long-time Enterprise-Record editor David Little.

“The longevity Nick had on this newspaper is something we might never see again,” Little observed. “He was a traditional watch-dog reporter and a recognized and well-respected figure at the various government meetings he covered.

“Even after he retired, he continued writing a fantastic column of his many adventures that was so readable,” added Little, who was Ellena’s editor for the last few years before retirement. “There were so many things I admired about him. For a shy, introverted person, he did a lot. I was very envious of the many places he got to go in his life.”

Former Butte County Administrator John Blacklock remembered a depth of knowledge, clarity and accuracy about the local journalist.

Nick Ellena

“Nick was a reporter of the highest integrity. He never failed to ask me for clarification on an issue. I always felt confident that he would get the story right, and on a personal level, he was a fine individual. He will be a loss to this community,” Blacklock said

Echoing those sentiments were two former Butte County supervisors who held office for many years during Elllena’s career.

“He knew everything, he saw everything and he knew everyone,” said former Butte County Supervisor Jane Dolan. “He was the quintessential professional; smart and wrote about county government straight forward and respectful … I looked forward to reading his articles, and I thought he was a very sweet man. It’s a loss to newspapering; it’s a loss to everyone.”

Her longtime board colleague, Ed McLaughlin noted of Ellena: “He was a dedicated reporter who wanted the facts straight. He had the best grip on county government now or since and could explain the issues thoroughly … He was one of a kind.”

Among the journalist’s lesser-known interests were in the historic art of fencing, piano, home-remodeling, playing in the Oroville city basketball league and writer of local true-crime stories for several national detective magazines, which he collaborated on with the late-Oroville Mercury-Register reporter-author Bill Talbitzer under the fictitious pen-name “Nick Tallbott” to augment their incomes.

“He was a true Renaissance man,” said one-time Butte County administrator and close family friend Shawn Farrrell, who helped put the idea in Ellena’s head to turn his varied experiences into books and was at the journalist’s bedside when he died.

“He was my friend and mentor.”

Also present at his passing Sunday evening was Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey.

In his “Flashbacks” book, Ellena told how in the early 1970s he and Ramsey — then a part-time sports writer for the Mercury-Register — had enjoyed a two-month excursion of South America which landed the pair behind bars.

When they couldn’t find accommodation for the night in Ricondada, Peru, Ellena wrote that the local police chief cheerfully put the pair up in his jail. In the book, a photo snapped by Ramsey shows Ellena gripping the jail bars from the inside of the cell with a mock grimace.

“I grew up across the street from Nick in Oroville,” noted Ramsey. “He was the epitome of the adventurer I wanted to be. He would go to exotic places and return to write about them. I extracted a promise from him that when I grew up, he would take me on one of those adventures,” Ramsey explained.

“Nick was the dean of local journalism; a really humble guy and the absolute definition of a gentleman,” added the DA, quipping “and he had a head fake which he used to always get past me on the basketball court.”

Said Emmett Pogue, who began as a fledgling reporter and later news editor for the-then rival Oroville Mercury-Register before serving as a deputy county administrator:

“He was a remarkable man. He set the standard. You can’t talk about Nick without superlatives. He had both personal and professional character and integrity that all would do good to emulate.

“Nobody that knew Nick didn’t come away a better person for it,” he said of the long-time journalist.

That he would become an American reporter and published author was notable since English was not Ellena’s native tongue.

Ellena was born in Alice Castello, a small village at the foot of the Alps in Italy. His parents brought him to the United States in the early 1930s at age 8, in part to escape the fascist government of Benito Mussolini.

Images of the mountains of his homeland “stuck in my mind,” Ellena wrote, prompting him to join a climbing expedition in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where the love of the outdoors and mountain climbing took root.

Working as a sports writer for the Associated Press wire service in New York, he got the urge to see other places, particularly the West Coast, and applied to the daily newspaper in Chico in 1956.

Hired by then-editor Bill Lee, who was familiar with the New Yorker’s writing, in between covering county government, courts, law enforcement and the building of the Oroville Dam, Ellena was permitted to go on several unpaid sabbaticals, sometimes lasting a month or more, to remote areas of the world that were not on the maps of most tourists, about which he subsequently related in newspaper stories and travel periodicals.

When he desired to cover the war in Vietnam, the newspaper’s publisher put down his foot, saying Ellena was too valuable a reporter and warning that if he left, there wouldn’t be a job waiting for him.

“I’ll just hire him back,” Lee was said to have responded.

The publisher not only relented, but reimbursed him for much of Ellena’s Southeast Asian assignment.

During the 1968 North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, his vivid observations about the fighting helped local families of soldiers keep abreast of their loved-one’s military actions .

He would later compile several stories from his war experiences in his second book, “A Reporter in Vietnam.”

In “Flashbacks From Here and There,” his first tome, Ellena offered colorful recollections and pictures of the places in the world he visited, starting in the early 1960s, with an epic venture driving from Oroville in the author’s venerable Volkswagen bug with friend Bob Elliott, along the Pan American Highway all the way to Santiago, Chile.

Over the years, he joined expeditions to climb many notable mountains. including a peak on a ridge connected to the Eiger in Switzerland, the first-ever ascent of the North Face of Mount Stanley in the Canadian Rockies, the Mountain of the Moon in Uganda, and closer to home, Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.

In 1987, at age 70. he became one of the oldest known persons to climb above the 18,000-foot-level Base Camp on Mount Everest. That venture became the grist for his final book, “Trekking to Mount Everest,” which he completed in 2009.

Ellena is survived by his wife of nearly 44 years, Gina of Oroville.

Some time ago, the local journalist and adventurer had prepared his own obituary for the newspaper in which he typed up a spare, factual personal history, with the explicit request “please do not embellish.”

A memorial Mass is planned at 11 a.m. Feb. 14, at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church,1330 Bird St.

Terry Vau Dell is retired from the Chico Enterprise-Record and lives in Oroville.



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