University of California Berkeley
REGIONAL ORAL HISTORY OFFICE
Regional Oral History Office
University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Scott Newhall
A NEWSPAPER EDITOR'S VOYAGE ACROSS SAN FRANCISCO BAY:
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. 1935-1971, AND OTHER ADVENTURES
With an Introduction by
Karl Kortum
Interviews Conducted by
Suzanne B. Riess
1988-1989
Copyright (c)
1990 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research
technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous
conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity
and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed
in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.
I
************************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Scott
Newhall dated September 11, 1998. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Scott Newhall requires that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Scott Newhall, "A Newspaper Editor's
Voyage Across San Francisco Bay: San
Francisco Chronicle. 1935-1971, and Other
Adventures," an oral history conducted in
1988-1989 by Suzanne B. Riess, Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1990.
Copy no .
1_
Ruth and Scott Newhall with Tori (Victoria II) in front
of Piru home. October 1989.
CALIFORNIA MONTHLY
December 1992
Scott Newhall
1914-1992
Former
San Francisco Chronicle editor Scott Newhall, who spent 20 years
turning a struggling daily into a media powerhouse, died October 26
after a short illness. He was 78. Newhall attended Cal for three years in
the early 1930s, and his wife, Ruth Waldo Newhall '3 1, served as the Chroni
cle's Berkeley correspondent. Though not a particularly tall man, Newhall
always seemed a bit larger than life, and he brought zest and humor to his
two loves, newspapering and sailing.
Rejoined the Chronicle as a photographer in 1935, rose to become executive
editor in 1952, and later editor, and stepped down in 1971. In between, he
turned a stodgy paper into a lively one, with splashy stories and headlines
that often had more sauce than substance. "Larraburu Splits!" screamed a
1969 headline set in going-to-war type. Had the famed San Francisco bakery
announced a stock split? No; it was launching a line of pre-split English
muffins.
Newhall brought that same irreverence to his love of boats. In 1936, he set
off an a round-the-world cruise, with his wife Ruth as navigator. Though they
had taken a course in celestial navigation with Cal astronomy professor C.
Donald Shane, Newhall couldn't tell a sextant from a sun sight. He intended
to "pick it up along the way," he said. (The trip was cut short in Mexico when
he was injured and forced to return for medical attention). A 1970 Newhall
trip across the Atlantic with a side-paddle tugboat he bought in England was
typical. "He made the entire crossing at five knots," said his wife Ruth, "and
made port with just half a tank of fuel."
That crossing paralleled Newhall's attempts at a political career. In 1971,
he ran for mayor of San Francisco, finishing a distant fifth behind, among oth
ers. Mayor Joseph Alioto and challenger (now Senator) Dianne Feinstein.
After leaving the Chronicle, Newhall and his wife resettled in Southern Cal
ifornia, where he edited the family newspaper, the Newhall Signal, until 1988.
Though not above criticizing Cal he
wrote a famous 1958 editorial blasting the
school for "Los Angelism" in its use of pro
fessionals in football Newhall was a ,
good friend of the University. In 1 969,
while tear gas filled the air and troops
stood guard everywhere, Newhall and a
group of Old Blues stood at Sather Gate
and read an elegant statement about
their love and support for Cal
and offered to put up their
own money, take People's
Park off the University's
hands, and make it into a
real park. That year,
Newhall began to organize
the group of steadfast sup
porters into what would
later be known as the
Berkeley Fellows.
He is survived by his
wife Ruth and three sons,
Skip, Jon, and Tony.
Scott Newhall
in the 1970s
Cataloging Information
NEWHALL, Scott (b. 1914) Newspaper editor
A Newspaper Editor's Voyage Across San Francisco Bay: San Francisco Chronicle.
1935-1971. and Other Adventures. 1990, xxxiii, 563 pp.
Family history, Marin County society; schools, UC Berkeley, Ruth Waldo, art
training; 1934 travels in Mexico; San Francisco Chronicle. 1930s-1940s:
editor Paul Smith, This World, reporting during war years, post-war Bay Area;
Chronicle under Newhall, 1953-1971: audience, promotions, columnists, Charles
deYoung Theiriot, Berkeley beat; the Chronicle -Examiner Joint Operating
Agreement, 1965; San Francisco: mayors, politics, environment, architecture,
tourism, the waterfront, saving the Mint Building, the Exploratorium, fighting
the Embarcadero Freeway; restoring automobiles, collecting and minting coins,
the Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Co.; on fact and fantasy in newspapering;
Newhall family stories, Newhall Land and Farming Co. leadership; the Newhall
Signal . 1963-1989, and development of Valencia, California; changes in
journalism. Includes a joint interview with Ben Bagdikian, emeritus dean, UC
School of Journalism; an interview with Ruth Newhall on her marriage, career,
and family; and a 1967 interview by Ruth Newhall of Scott Newhall on "a
typical day." Appendices include 1967 interview on being a newspaper
photographer, and 1990 interview on music.
Introduction by Karl Kortum, Chief Curator, San Francisco Maritime National
Historic Park.
Interviewed 1988, 1989 by Suzanne B. Riess. The Regional Oral History Office,
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
SCOTT NEWHALL-- Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION, by Karl Kortum i
INTERVIEW HISTORY xxvi
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xxxii
I FAMILY HISTORY !
San Rafael, Marin County ]_
William Anderson Scott, Presbyterian Divine 3
The Structured Society 6
Bolinas 7
Mother, Anna, and Brothers, Aimer and Hall 9
Mother's Free Spirit, and Spiritualism 12
Guests to Sunday Lunch 14
From Riches to Bankruptcy 16
II SCOTT NEWHALL: FLAMING YOUTH 19
Reading and Leisure Time 19
Schools 21
Little Gray School 21
Mount Tamalpais Military Academy 22
Tamalpais School for Boys 23
Webb School 24
Lawrenceville 26
"Old Dad" Against the School 27
Drinking and Driving 29
Lost Weekend in Paris 31
The Social Straitjacket 33
Alaska Cruise with the Stewart Edward Whites 34
Travels with Father 37
Social Teas and Musicales 38
Nevada Tour 40
Those Who Choose Not to Shoot Duck 42
The Poor Girls 43
Resorts, Rubicon Lodge 44
Pre-Depression Sense of Safeness 45
Finances, and the St. Francis Dam Disaster, 1928 46
The Crash and the Move to San Francisco and the Move to Berkeley 48
Ill UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 50
Promoting the Occident
A Promoter at Heart 51
The Art Department
Jazz 53
Philosophy and Gaining Perspective 53
Training in Visual Arts 55
Scott Meets Ruth and They Go To Europe 56
Marriage 58
Candid Photographer for the Chronicle 60
Psychotherapy 62
Hazards of Being a Newspaper Photographer 63
WPA, Artists and Doctrinairians 65
Admiration for Asians 67
IV MEXICO 69
1934 Travels 69
Decision to Leave School 72
Outfitting Another Adventure 73
Going Inland from Manzanillo 74
Hunger in the Corn Patch 77
Desperate Days 78
Staphylococcus , Septicemia, and Amputation 80
V THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. 1930s - 1940s 84
Paul Smith 84
Chester Rowell 85
Filing and Newspaper Libraries 86
Paul Smith's Life 87
The Reforming Young Intellectuals 91
Herb Caen 93
Smith's Style of Running the Paper 94
Power 95
Scott Newhall, Reporter on the Rise 96
This World 97
About Bylines 98
War Years 99
With the Royal Navy in the North Sea 99
"Crowding My Luck" --Raw Fear 103
Wars, and the United States in World War II 106
Women in Wartime, and Ruth Newhall 's Career 109
Showing the Flag- -Australia to Gibralter, 1948 110
Changing Times 111
Post-war Bay Area 111
What San Francisco Was 112
1960s Permissiveness 114
Paul Smith, Continued
Dinner Guests
The Chronicle's Reputation
The Pressure on Newhall
Flickering Flame
Crisis: Debts, Taxes 19n
Newhall 's Position
The Watchdog Committee
VI SCOTT NEWHALL' S CHRONICLE
123
The "Single Focused Energy" ^3
Charles deYoung Thieriot 12
,
Painful Job of Firing
The Community of Readers
American Primitive Appetites 12 9
The Ivory Tower Assessments
Charles Thieriot and the Look of the Chronicle 136
Editorial Stance and Editorial Page
Covering the Loyalty Oath Controversy
Newspaper Promotions
Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt 144
"Great City, Drinks Swill" 146
Columnists -, .-,
Terrence 0' Flaherty 147
Count Marco 140
Warren Hinckle
Art Hoppe 154
Newhall: Keeping Up with the Media TV 156
Lucius Beebe and the Territorial Enterprise 158
Charles McCabe , and Keeping the Writers Happy 161
George Draper Reports from Africa 162
Newhall 's Rejection of Journalism's Cliches 164
VI1 CHRONICLE -EXAMINER AND THE JOINT OPERATING AGREEMENT, 1965 168
The Idea, The Meetings 168
The Cast, The Players 171
Money, Covering Losses 173
Cutting up the Territory 175
Polls 1 77
Divergent Views, Newhall Resigns 179
Entrepreneurial Publishers 182
Editorials Worth Writing 184
Editorial Staff 184
The Captive Audience 186
Vietnam 187
Joseph McCarthy 188
Endorsements --Jack Shelley for Mayor 189
Lack of Investigative Political Reporting 190
VIII CHRONICLE PROMOTIONS 192
The Idea Behind the Promotions 192
Dr. Miller and the Naked Animals 193
Fat Venus 196
Virginia City Camel Races 199
The Persian Lamb 201
Anguillan Liberation 202
The Last Man on Earth 207
The Fantasy 208
The Launch 210
The Rumpus 211
The "Examiner" 212
The Real Success Story 214
IX THE CHRONICLE AND THE COMMUNITY 217
The Police Department 217
The Mayor's Office, George Christopher 219
Environmental Advocacy 220
Chronicle Writers 222
The Editor's Job 222
Training New Journalists 222
Some of the Best 223
Managing Editors 224
Japanese Relocation 225
The University of California at Berkeley Beat 229
Access to Faculty 229
Free Speech Debate 230
Vietnam, 1964 233
Covering the Free Spirits 235
"Mirroring" Society 236
The University, a Force for Democracy 237
The San Francisco Bay Guardian 238
Responding to a Critique of the Chronicle 243
Fighting Pollution and Ugliness 245
Advertisers 248
A Dianne Feinstein Story 249
The California Water Plan 250
The City's Conscience 251
The Architectural Environment 252
Embarcadero Center 254
Bank of America World Headquarters Building 256
Other Schemes 258
Levi Plaza, and Vaillaincourt Fountain 258
Black, Female, and Homosexual Reporters
"Dear Abby"
Newhall's View of the Bay Area
Resignation, 1971
Newhall's Mayoral Race, 1971
Taking the Vows, as Editor
SAVING SAN FRANCISCO AND OTHER THINGS 2?2
The United States Mint Building
Landmark Preservation
Embarcadero Freeway
Tourist Town
The Waterfront
How Karl Kortum Operates
San Francisco Maritime Museum
The Eppleton Hall
Collecting Automobiles
^
Restoring Automobiles
Packard Super- 8 and Successors 290
Mercedes Benz
Chrysler 300D
The Fun of It All
Collecting Coins
Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company 299
Fiction and Fact and Playing Roles
Minting Coins
3Q2
Drag Racing 3Q4
Laurel Hill and Cypress Lawn Cemeteries 305
Exploratorium: Frank Oppenheiraer and Walter S. Johnson 310
XI ONE FAMILY TRIBAL GROUP, OBSERVED 316
Henry Mayo Newhall 316
The Next Generation, and Atholl McBean 319
The Legacy of Uncle Walter 3 22
Pat Calhoun--0il and New Money 3 2 3
Leila "Tangey" Newhall, and Kenny 3 26
XII NEWHALL LAND AND FARMING COMPANY 333
Corporate Leadership 333
Dynasties and Families- -Taking the Good with the Bad 335
Financing the Purchase of the Signal. 1963 337
The Arrangement with the Morris Chain, 1973 340
Valencia--"Shangri-la?" 34 2
Signal Readership, 1978 345
Television, and the World, 1989- -From Bad to Worse 347
"Somewhere between the KKK and Tombstone, Arizona" 353
XIII SCOTT NEWHALL AND BEN BAGDIKIAN IN CONVERSATION 356
Newspapers: Government by Democracy, or Personality 356
Newspapers, and Development in Southern California 360
Money: "A Newspaper is Not a Sausage Factory" 365
The Audience: Readers or TV Watchers 369
Fostering Cowardice and Violence 372
Presidents and Television 374
Community Newspapers 376
The Chronicle 379
Compared to the Washington Post 379
"Taking Things Straight On" 381
The Pulitzer Prizes 382
Sacramento and City Hall Coverage 384
The Hearst Papers 386
Newswriting and Computers 388
Newhall's List of Good Writers 392
Political Fallibility: An End of Innocence 395
Getting Out of Washington: America Today 398
XIV THE NEWSMAN'S LIFE, AND CHANGES IN JOURNALISM 401
A Typical Day 401
Chronicle Editors, and Dolly Rhee 402
Stress, and Drinking 405
Kickback 407
Unions and the 1968 Strike 408
Reporters and Columnists: Delaplane and Caen 409
A Dialogue About Computers and Copy 414
Newsroom: Mirroring Social Change 419
Turning Journalists Into Writers 421
Killing Stories and Journalistic Ethics 426
Cares and Woes 430
Glamour and Good Old Days 432
Developing a Vision of Shangri-La 435
The Newhall Boys 441
XV RUTH NEWHALL, MARRIAGE AND CAREER 442
Meeting and Marrying Scott 442
Scott's Self -Confidence 445
Ruth Joins the Chronicle Staff: Herb Caen 448
Newhall Children 453
Behind the Scenes 456
Vietnam Years 458
XVI AN INTERVIEW ON A TYPICAL DAY- -FEBRUARY 25, 1967 461
TAPE GUIDE 476a
APPENDICES 477
A. Edited transcript of 1967 Interview by Ruth Newhall of 477
Scott Newhall, discussing being a newspaper photographer.
B. Draft letter by Scott Newhall for Bank of America, 484
January 31, 1964.
C. "My Search for Scott Newhall," by John Luce, San Francisco 488
Magazine .
July and August 1968.
D. "Berkeley Fellows at U.C. Sather Gate Meeting," a speech by 497
Scott Newhall, May 23, 1969.
E. "Saga of a Venus in a Fat Trap," San Francisco Chronicle. 502
February 28, 1990.
F. "Even Enemies Mourn Exit of the Newhalls from Namesake 504
Paper," Los Angeles Times. Sunday, August 14, 1988; "Angry
Newhalls Launch Own Paper."
G. "Privileges and Responsibilities of the Free American Press," 507
an editorial by Scott Newhall in the Santa Clarita Valley
Citizen. Sunday, September 11, 1988.
H. "A Razor's Edge: The Life and Times of Scott Newhall," by 509
Elliot Blair Smith, California Business. July 1989.
I. Jean and Karl Kortum and the San Francisco Waterfront, by 514
Karl Kortum, April 1990.
J. Christmas Greetings from the Newhalls, 1985, 1986, 1988. 516
K. An Interview with Scott Newhall about Music, April 1990. 523
L. A Musical Postscript by Newhall, April 27, 1990. 550
M. An Editorial by Scott Newhall: "Garbage From The LAFCO 555
Trough," Newhall Signal. June 26, 1987.
N. Herb Caen's Return to the Chronicle, by Scott Newhall, 555c
August 29, 1990
INDEX 556
ILLUSTRATIONS APPEAR AFTER PAGE 191
INTRODUCTION by Karl Kortum
I laid aside Don Quixote when the Regional Oral History Office sent over this
manuscript, and I started to read a different kind of adventure. But with a
similarity or two. I had gotten as far as page 605 in the translation of the
Spanish classic and there the good knight explains his quest:
"It has been my desire to revive a knight-errantry that is now dead . ."
It seems to me that that comes close to explaining Scott Newhall's chore on
earth.
The difference is that in Scott's case the windmills wouldn't have won.
There is a period where we have doubts: his remarkable youth. He hurls
himself at life, often close to disaster, but after a rocky apprenticeship he escapes
into a new world, the University and marriage to Ruth. He is nineteen, wild, still
wild, getting worse. She will be an anchor to windward. He has to have her.
The proposal is unusual:
". . we went up to Crockett where the old bridge used to cross the
Carquinez Straits to Vallejo. We were in a 1931 Ford roadster ... I
said, 'Ruth, you see that telephone pole ahead of us on the side of the
road?' She said 'Yes.' I said, 'All right. I am going to head for that
pole, and I'm going to put the throttle to the floor, and if you don't
agree to marry me, we're going to go together.'
"I hit the throttle and off we went for the telephone pole, and of
course before we got there she screamed and said, 'All right, all right,
anything . .'"
Presently the horizons begin to broaden, and the old accomplishments (sports and
boozing) are turned in for new, and the knight errantry, the chivalry (not at its
11
demonstrable best, perhaps, in the episode just described) is on more fallow
ground.
But it is always there.
I should really not be so bold as to analyze my friend, my opaque friend. But I
can't help it, now that I have a chance. I notice in the manuscript that when I
tried to study him a bit, just a paragraph, he mutters in my direction "son of a
bitch!" He doesn't like it. But as time goes on others will analyze him. And I
have some privilege: I first got to know Scott forty years ago to the year before
this thick manuscript came to hand.
It is thick and it is marvelous.
It is . . adventure.
Scott's brother and I sailed before the mast in the last Yankee square-rigger to
round Cape Horn. We were carrying a cargo of lumber to South Africa. In this
way I later came to know the editor and in due course, from the family farm in
Petaluma, sent him a long proposal for a maritime museum/historic ships project
for San Francisco. It was a true letter-to-the-editor (although a rather lengthy
one), not a request for a job. But he liked it and got the Chronicle to back the
plan and insisted that I come to San Francisco to try to carry it out. I found the
offer irresistible. Scott paired off Dave Nelson, a resourceful young reporter, to
work with me.
It could be said that Scott and I were sizing each other up at this time, although
he was considerably quicker on the draw or I would still be up on the poultry
ranch. This was my patron; this was our strategist (he had devised a plan to co-
opt the publishers of all the four newspapers then in the city in support of the
museum . .
only then would we assault the Mayor's office). It behooved me to
know this man.
"Your trouble is you think you have me figured out," he remarked one day.
No, Scott. Not then and not now. But let's try.
I
suspect that he was overladen with charm from the start; it is the
Ill
mischievousness that I can't account for. (Those are two of the words that I
choose to describe Scott; the other four are restless, penetrating, oblique, funny).
The new cat in our house is mischievous; the one before was more passive.
Genetic, I
suppose. Scott had no reason to rebel, to be, as Ruth calls him, a
"problem child." He had an enlightened, restless mother, who loved him and
whose projects caught his fancy; he had an engaged, business leader father
(president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce) to whom he was
devoted.
It is his father, not himself, that Scott agonizes for, when after a visit to the
bootlegger Joe Finnochio on Stockton St. and with the illegal siren on his Model
A going full blast ("Here comes the great Scott!") he runs into a police car on
Chestnut. And his father comes to bail him out.
The line later becomes more majestic: "Here comes King Scott!" and gets him
thrown out of Lawrenceville Academy.
(Pullman porter at Chicago, "Isn't the young gentleman returning early?" The
porters knew all the young gentleman going back and forth across the country to
the eastern prep schools).
An aspect of this insurgency, but not the entirety I
suspect, is that he was
exploring and "experimenting" to avoid the "straitjacket of the social order of San
Francisco society ... I
just absolutely, physically almost, had to turn and shut the
door on the social fast lane. I think it is impossible to live this life where you go
duck hunting in the duck season . . . and where you know exactly where you are
going to be year after year by the calendar and there is no time left for free
living and roaming around.
"There are other things in life than entertaining and being entertained
at a country club.
"My mother never lived that kind of life. She always had something
going."
Scott paints a pastoral: his early years at the family home in San Rafael and the
summer home in Bolinas: "It was an enchanted, privileged life." The Newhalls
and the Scotts going to picnics in a big, sidewheel Northwestern Pacific ferryboat
IV
diverted from its usual paths. This because Great Uncle Arthur owned the
Northwestern Pacific. Horses, boats, tennis, golf. Music; in due course, girls.
His mother was engaged in causes, many of her own devising. Every Sunday a
pantheon of guests drawn from these activities orphanages, religion, prisoner
rights (Anna Newhall was a supporter of Norman Thomas, for instance)--were
invited to the midday meal. Along with business acquaintances from here and
there in the world connected with Aimer NewhalTs import-export company.
Young Scott, and there is a clue here, was not bored or indifferent to this activity
as might be expected at his age.
"We'd come driving up from church and I would ask, 'Who is
coming
to lunch today?' I
just loved it. The lunches and the guests were
glorious and bizarre. I had to learn my manners there."
His mother presided over these disparate gatherings with skill: "She was
absolutely a glorious hostess. She could laugh and charm everybody . . . She
could talk and laugh her way out of anything."
We get an intimation of chivalry at the junior assemblies and debutante parties
during these years: "I for some reason or other really felt very deeply about how
these poor girls had to sit and wait to be asked to dance.
"They'd have these so-called wallflowers. I used to walk around and
literally try to dance with all of them. Some of them would sit there
the whole evening and I
figured their hearts were literally breaking.
And they must have been . . I can remember them all dressed up with
their white gloves and their organdy gowns-sitting on the side on a
ballroom chair-sitting there and everyone can see that no one is
asking them to dance.
"As a result I didn't like the parties all that much because the girls I
really liked and loved to kid around with, they were always popular
and dancing so you didn't have to worry about their being lonely."
His athletic prowess was apparently considerable: "I was going to be the world's
greatest tennis player." And he liked to read~"couldn't get enough." He used a
flashlight to read under the covers after "lights out" in the junior quarters of his
parents home. Pirates, sailing, Two Years Before the Mast. But this mostly in
winter; in summertime there was action-with his friends, horses, sailing in Bolinas
lagoon. All the pleasures of a privileged life in an unspoiled and halcyon Marin.
His chaotic education began. Rather surprisingly, he enjoyed the rigidity of
Mount Tamalpais Military Academy. "I was never smacked unless I deserved it
. . I loved it. I loved the school. I admired the seniors. They had a great
baseball team." To his regret he was transferred to another school. He liked the
Military Academy, but nevertheless left behind two hundred hours of marching
around the parade ground with a rifle on his shoulder that he still owed,
punishment for infractions.
In due course he was sent to Webb School for Boys down in Claremont, a
boarding school. It was not successful: "I loved to read but I wanted to be
amused; I didn't like to study. I'd usually start out and I'd be the head of the
class. I'd get straight 'A's' usually. Then I'd get into too much tennis, and pretty
soon it would slip. Then as I got down into the 'CY I couldn't stand it. So then
pretty soon, I was down to straight 'F's.' It was a pattern, I'm afraid . ."
His parents were told about the Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey, a larger
prep school, rigid again On the first night everybody had to get up and introduce
themselves. After this the housemaster asked if there were any questions.
A "snotty kid from the upper East Side" got to his feet: "I'd like the fellow from
California to stand up. I've never seen one."
"So it was good old Scott against the school. It was about an even balance. I
had them all in line in about three or four weeks." He was actually soon on good
terms with his schoolmates wherever he was enrolled. His conflict was not with
his classmates. He misbehaved for other reasons: ". . . because if I couldn't be
the best, I wanted to be the worst."
He ran off from Lawrenceville Academy to Philadelphia. He was readmitted.
He was caught rewiring the lights in his room to the fire escape light connected
with an automatic turnoff when the door was opened. He promoted a prize fight
between two of the black house boys. He sneaked off to New York to play
saxophone with the band in a 10-cents-a-dance hall. His end at Lawrenceville,
tinged with majesty, has already been reported.
Back to Webb. He won four block letters in sports, "and that was the best thing
VI
that ever happened. I
thought, 'Man, I'm on my way.' And then I
got in the
bootlegging business. The headmaster found out about it and I
voluntarily left
school in the middle of the night . ."
I have repeated all this out of the text because mischievousness is ever appealing
and it makes good reading. But much of it rested on a sinister foundation: "In
my early life, at fourteen or fifteen, there was nothing but alcohol for another six
or seven years."
"Drinking-they used to call it
flaming youth ... my brothers and cousins amused
themselves with a lot of drinking at the country clubs, social clubs. I admired
them. I wanted to be a raconteur, a boulevardier, bon vivant . ."
In those six or seven years, Scott drank more liquor "than most people drink in a
lifetime." It had a firm lock on him and on the eve of his marriage he had
progressed to the status of "a degenerate," at least in his mother-in-law's harsh
definition. It was years before she forgave him for carrying away her daughter.
However, there is a fitful lodestone at work even in this tempestuous time. It
was put in place when he was young, seemingly casually, but ". .
Presbyterian
doctrines stuck with me all my life."
There was no confessional box, Scott points out: ". . we had to struggle with it
ourselves."
Here, in this narration, the interviewer asks, "The guilt?"
"You put the whole thing in one word for me."
In a novel, at this point, the reader could be forgiven for wondering how it will
all come out. Will the charming young man with the flask in his pocket who was
"brought up winning Charleston cups" come out on top or will his alter ego who
has the guilt implant be the winner?
Suddenly hammer blows . . . and opportunity.
The family's fortune goes on the rocks, his father is broke. He gets a chance to
close-study the sea. His mother wangles him into the University (and he finds it
Vll
a revelation). He wins Ruth. Scott hails these events consecutively in the
following words: "best thing that ever happened" . . . "that cruise saved my life,
seriously . . "U.C. is the greatest thing that ever happened to me" and "it's the
best thing I ever did." The relief-echoing a narrow escape-can still be felt after
all these years.
These strokes of misfortune and fortune and opportunity seized, seriatim, enabled
him to give up drinking at the age of twenty-one.
Scott got into the newspaper business with a stroke of his own imagination. He
offered himself to the Examiner as a "candid photographer." "Candid camera"
was a catchword of the day. He didn't know anything about photography, other
than making snapshots, which he had done casually most of his life. He was
equipped with a letter from the brother of the publisher of the Call-Bulletin that
his mother had arranged. The letter said, 'Take this young man. He needs a
job." But Bill Wren, the hard-boiled managing editor, turned him down. ("I
decided then and there forever that the Examiner was doomed.")
It was a different story at the Chronicle.
"I walked in with my camera, unannounced . . I told the city editor
(and I was terrified at the time) . . I said, 'Look, this is a candid
camera. It is the new new wave.'
"And he said, 'Yes, we've never tried that. We'll try it.'"
It was in the depth of the depression. He had got a job. He had his foot on the
bottom round of the ladder of an institution that he needed and that would
increasingly, as time went on, need him.
The editor (and general manager) of the Chronicle was Paul Smith, young, short,
red-headed; in Scott's words, "the most dynamic personality who had come
through San Francisco in a generation or two." Scott and Ruth were soon part of
Paul Smith's way of life, which meant entertainment of the celebrities of the
world in Paul's apartment, which clung spectacularly to the side of Telegraph Hill.
Here came Anthony Eden, Herbert Hoover, Chiang Kai-shek, Randolph Churchill.
Scott says, "Believe me, this guy was amazing. I
keep coming back to it; I've
never seen anything like it in my life."
vm
The original Gold Rush Newhall was a seafaring man (or lad) and salt water
continued to be a theme in the family. In the mid-twenties Scott's father
chartered a fifty foot ketch, the Nootka. to take the family and friends to the
State Fair at Sacramento. Scott, roaming the fair grounds, encountered the studio
of a tattoo artist and sat for a tattoo on his arm. It was the sailorly thing to do.
When he was done, the artist clapped a paper towel over his fresh work of art,
held it in place with two rubber bands, and briskly accepted a dollar from the
eleven year old. (Approximately eleven years old.)
The tattoo was painful and when Scott got back aboard the ketch, there was
another kind of painthe distress of his parents at what he had done. Things
came to a head at Crockett, as the Nootka motored down river. The engine
failed. The family and guests piled off and went home by train. Scott had been
pestering to set sail on the vessel. I don't know what all the words were, but the
culminating line from his angry father was: "If you're enough of a sailor to have
a tattoo, you're enough of a sailor to sail the boat back."
So Scott and his younger brother, Hall, who was my shipmate in the square-
rigger years later, slammed the big yacht out of Carquinez Straits and down San
Pablo Bay, tack and tack, hour after hour. The winds were stiff; Hall was seasick
but stuck to his post. Scott finally got her around Angel Island and completed
the voyage by confidently picking up the mooring buoy off Sausalito.
The "cruise that saved my life" came later, after he had failed to graduate at
Webb and had a job in San Francisco in the packing room of a wholesale drug
firm. He was, we assume, not too happy, and drinking. The novelist Stewart
Edward White was a friend of his mother, and at a dinner at the White's home in
Hillsborough Scott was invited for a summer cruise to Southeastern Alaska.
Although he suspected that it was a "put-up job," Scott jumped at the opportunity.
The Kuru was a sizeable craft, seventy-seven feet long, and beside the Whites and
Scott there were only an engineer and a cook aboard. The traverse of the Inside
Passage and beyond-out to Sitka~was demanding, and Scott shared in the
navigation. Stewart Edward White was an accomplished master and he taught
Scott the arts of piloting, which stood him in good stead the rest of his life. It
was one of the reasons that I had faith in Scott later bringing a paddle tug, built
for river work, halfway around the world. I
shipped aboard as chief mate and
IX
brought ray son, Johnny, age eleven, as ship's boy.
In the Kuru there were long evenings at anchor in the bosky coves of Vancouver
and lesser islands and the young sailor, when cribbage had exhausted itself, turned
to reading. As chance would have it, he found three books aboard that charted
three paths, three interests, that shaped his future. One was Mayan archaeology;
another was Klee and Modigliani and Matisse-modern art-(he would enroll in art
at U.C.); and the third was William Robinson's 10.000 Leagues Over the Sea.
about circumnavigation in the ketch Svaap.
Scott had not worked long at the Chronicle-though long enough to master news
photography and to have respect for its practitioners, even above reporters in
many ways-when he came into a modest inheritance of $10,000. Nothing would
do but that he and Ruth should buy a boat and sail around the world. The
Mermaid was one of those splendid old-style San Francisco bay yachts with a
swelling and capacious trunk cabin. But not new. Paul Smith joined them for
the first leg of the voyage as they headed for Mexico.
Mexico is a theme in Scott's life:
"There is a chivalrous echo still to be heard in Latin America . . in a
so-called town would be one adobe hut with a fellow with his family
and his kids and a few cornstalks and beans.
"He'd come out, 'Welcome. Be my guest.' You'd say, you know, 'Don
Eduardo, how are you today?' You'd think that you were in the court
of Spain, for God's sake. These are sort of semi-Indians out in the
country. It is an amazing place. Or was . .
"
I have used the word "adventure." The Mermaid sailed into a kind of joy in the
Mexican ports of the day and I think the cruise is still looked on fondly. But
Scott and Ruth also sailed into severities. The first was starvation on a horseback
expedition in search of stone idols on a sacred mountain. But things went awry,
their guides deserted. They were in jungle. There wasn't enough to eat. Ruth's
shoes, drying out before the fire, burned up one night; she went on barefooted.
They tried to scrape a living off the land; they were starving.
"You are out of your mind, believe me, when you go hungry for a
couple of months . . It was really quite an experience, and I'm sorry
that every one of our affluent American fellow citizens cannot
experience it-what true poverty or hunger or malnutrition means."
But beyond starvation lay worse-disease, death's shadow, a leg amputated. I am
tempted to say that all this marked another turning in Scott's life. But it didn't.
Emerging from agony of body and mind, he went right ahead, if not voyaging on
the ocean, at least with life itself. He had summoned a new resource, courage.
Paul Smith dropped by the hospital in San Francisco and told Scott that his
camera was "hanging up for him in the darkroom" when he came back. That
must have helped. (Years later Scott was able to return the favor when Paul,
now in New York, had fallen out of luck and health). In the event, Scott returned
to the Chronicle on crutches to work in the library.
He mastered an artificial leg. He rewrote copy. He became editor of "This
World." He had a chance to begin shaping the message.
In 1933 Scott and Ruth had returned from a trip to Europe on the S.S.
Gerolstein which was a Jewish-owned ship from Germany. Most of the people on
board were Jewish refugees. So the San Franciscans learned at first hand about
the evil that was loose in that land. The '30s wore on: "Hitler's speeches were
broadcast, we used to listen to them. It was the most terrible nightmare in the
world."
Scott, because of an artificial leg, couldn't get into the armed services, but he
managed to get to England on a baby flattop launched at the Western Pipe &
Steel Co. in South San Francisco.
He leased a flat in London and for six months as a war correspondent covered
that city under attack as well as the rest of Britain. Scott could go anywhere, see
everything. He crossed to the coast of Holland and Germany in the dead of
night aboard small British high-speed gunboats. They got into an engagement
with a couple of German E-boats. He experienced an emotion that had not
entered his life before, fear. "And the raw fear is a sour taste. I can't describe
it. But I didn't like it much."
His stories were published in this country and some were picked up by the
London press. As always, in the ward room of flattop, gunboat, or destroyer
Scott hit it off well with the British naval officers. He offers a truism about war
XI
-at least war up to and through that time-that appeals to me:
"I have been talking about fright, the fear of this, that, and the other.
But in the midst of war and fear there are parties, there are laughs,
there are jokes. In wartime there's some sort of counterpart to the
ugliness and fear; when people are living on the edge of disaster there
exists a lot of hysterical laughter too. In the ward room we had more
fun and laughs than any place I've ever been in my life. You know,
when we were fooling along, not dodging bullets and fearing the
enemy. War is
grotesque . ."
It was a different, bemused Paul Smith who returned from the war, and the
newspaper that he had made prestigious, if not profitable, started to suffer.
Instead of ruling with a precise and sure hand, he began to travel a lot and there
were long intervals when he was not in his office. A council of senior editors was
formed to debate the paper's decline. Scott became a strong voice on it.
George
Cameron, the publisher and Paul's patron, was under pressure from the de Young
family to take a stronger hand. ("Uncle George" had a cement company with
which to support his tastes.) The paper was losing a million dollars a year.
A younger generation of the de Youngs, notably Charles Thieriot, demanded an
attempt, at least, to get the newspaper out of the red. Meanwhile Scott was
taking a night school class in welding at the Samuel Gompers Trade School so
that he would have a means of supporting his family if the Chronicle
disintegrated.
Paul Smith returned from a trip and Scott and another editor met him at the
airport to tell him to be prepared for trouble. Followed a meeting between
Smith and the ownership; Smith was imperious. He refused to reduce the staff.
He resigned.
This was Black Friday. I remember it because on his lathe Scott had turned out
an ashtray from a lignum vitae block sheave and fitted in it an old brass
chronometer face. He gave it to me on that day and on the bottom, under glass,
I mounted Time magazine's account of these doings. I still have it.
Scott turned in his resignation: "Unless I can be assured that the Chronicle will
have an opportunity of success, I must dissociate myself from the Chronicle." He
sent a copy to Paul.
Xll
This time we are at a turning. George Cameron and Charles Thieriot did not
accept Scott's resignation. They asked him to be Executive Editor. He said he
would accept if they would give him a free hand. It was a bold reach; it reminds
me a little of the style of a man we are reading about currently, Mikhail
Gorbachev.
Scott writes, "No successful newspaper can ever be published or edited by a
committee. It has to reflect a single, focused energy . ." He knew what he
wanted to do; he had been turning it over in his mind for years: "San Francisco
after all is simply the Camelot of the Bay Area. San Francisco was purely a
fantasy, a legend. But everybody, generally speaking, in Berkeley, Mill Valley,
down the Peninsula, Oakland, wants to identify themselves with San Francisco.
And that's why in the end they all had to read the San Francisco Chronicle. San
Francisco has always been a touchstone. It is a fairyland . .
"
The interviewer: "Did you have an idea in mind for how to get
readers when you came in in '52?"
Newhall: "Pretty much. I felt strongly in the last few years that the
horizon was unlimited for the Chronicle. Somebody could put out a
paper that would absolutely captivate San Francisco."
So presently San Francisco (and its satellite cities) got Emperor Norton. As in
the Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt. They learned that the bones of de Anza,
who had founded the city, had been discovered beneath the floor of a church in
Mexico. De Anza was covered as if he lived. They got front page stories,
straight-faced, about a movement to see that animals wore diapers to cover their
private parts. A reporter was dispatched to Arabia Felix to (legally) buy himself
a slave, specifically a slave girl, and write home about it.
In short, the editor's apprenticeship through age twenty-one had not been wasted.
The only difference is that mischievousness had now been institutionalized. He
reports it all with glee. And San Francisco began to be captivated. More
Chronicles were sold every day.
Scott went to work to lure Herb Caen back from the Examiner. (Because all
Xlll
this, of course, was a circulation war.) New columnists were created from
reporters and other talent-Hoppe, McCabe, O'Flaherty, Gilliam, Temko, Gleason,
Abby Van Buren, Beebe, Hinckle. Others were created from unlikely material,
among them a lovelorn column for pets.
Circulation, which had sagged below 140,000 daily (the "Examiner had about
212,000") started to rise. The pursuit of Hearst's "Monarch of the Dailies," where
Scott had been turned down the first time he ever asked for a job, was on.
Warren Hinckle reported the scene in the Saturday Review in 1973:
"In 1962 daily journalism was still a competitive enterprise in San
Francisco. The independent Chronicle and the Hearst Examiner were
slugging it out for the city's breakfast table readership. The Chronicle
was generally known as a liberal newspaper. Yet its liberalism was, as
is most liberalism, schizophrenic. While the paper's Republican
ownership consistently endorsed GOP candidates for all offices save
dog catcher (that position not being elective in San Francisco), the
reporters, many of whom were refugees from the eastern
Establishment who would suffer anything short of hemophilia to live in
San Francisco, were allowed relative freedom to attempt to write the
other side in the news columns.
"The Examiner, on the other hand, was paranoid. Still coasting on
circulation gains achieved during Hearst's promotion of what became
the Spanish-American War, the paper generally read like the house
organ of the fallout-shelter industry. There were other telling
differences, the women's pages of the two dailies providing perhaps
the sharpest contrast. The Examiner's women's pages ran helpful
household hints, bulletins about parish Bingo games (illegal but then
sacrosanct in San Francisco), and formal photographs of Irish Catholic
virgins in pageboy haircuts and junior prom decolletages who were
about to commit the sacrament of matrimony. The Chronicle's were
filled with Paris and New York fashions, lengthy descriptions of the
vacation plans of publisher Charles de Young Thieriot's friends and
neighbors, and sycophantic reports on the high jinks of San Francisco
society, which was almost entirely Protestant and Jewish. The fact that
a man presided over the Chronicle's women's section was slightly more
than the monumental manifestation of male chauvinism it would
XIV
appear. City-room legend had it that the lengthy chain of succession
of male women's-page editors had originated some years back when
the last female women's editor splashed across the top of her Sunday
section an eight-column headline that read: THE BACHELORS ARE
BACK WITH THEIR WONDERFUL BALLS! (The Chronicle's
women section has recently been liberated and is run by women again,
but the section's name has been changed to just plain "People.")
"The Examiner's slow-motion fall from circulation grace during the late
Fifties was due in part to the fact that the Chronicle, by virtue of its
comparative sophistication and sheer deviltry, gradually became the
San Francisco paper read by the burgeoning suburbs. More
specifically, it was due to the P. T. Barnumship of Chronicle editor
Scott Newhall, a crusading journalist with a magnificent sense of the
bizarre.
"Newhall's operating assumption was that, since most readers got the
news from television or other journals, they wanted something different
to read over their Wheaties. So he filled the Chronicle with the
comments, social notes, and opinions of more than twenty signed
columnists. Newhall bought syndicated columns the way independent
television stations buy up reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and Star
Trek. But the syndicated types were only a minor act in a daily
Disneyland of local features that included a Dear Abby-type column
for pet owners and the dribbling ministrations of 'Count Marco,' a
former hairdresser named Henry [actually Mark. KK] Spinelli, whom
Newhall perversely elevated to phony royalty and whose daily bill of
fare on the women's page ranged from bitchy advice on the grooming
of armpits to such connubial tips as that wives should take baths with
their husbands. For the inventive count's detailed instructions on the
ladylike way to climb into a bathtub while the lady's husband is
watching, see page 49. ('How to Avoid Looking Like a Torn Blimp as
You Enter the Tub.')
"Much of the news that Newhall used to plug the remaining open
space between the ads was of his own invention. He once dispatched
George Draper, an urbane and witty reporter with a drawl that defied
description as either Southern or Colonial British, to Africa to do a
series of front-page articles on the plans of a tiny republic to launch a
XV
space rocket powered by a giant rubber band. [Actually, Art Hoppe.
KK] Another Newhall concoction was a front-page series about a
Southern California man who had started a society to clothe 'naked
animals."
1
In the executive offices, however, all this was not a daily exercise in bounciness.
Changing course had its grueling side. Scott appreciated the opportunity and
sustained it
by his charm. He charmed Charlie Thieriot and contrived to report
to him only rather than to a committee from the family shareholders.
"
. . he left
pretty much the whole product to me. He gave me the responsibility, the
privilege . . and he tried to produce the money to keep the doors open,"
But Charlie was of different temperament, different background, a meticulous
money person, conservative. The collaboration is a strange one, a tribute to
charm, patience-and one can only believe a certain amount of good
sportsmanship on Charlie's part. "He was painfully shy, So was I, but I tried to
hide it," Scott says.
Scott has always liked metal. I do too. He finds solace in it; note the fondness
with which he describes his coin collection, which he could keep in his office and
shuffle during endless conferences. (He favored intuition over conference.) Or
the string of antique automobiles which he restored with his own hands and
Ruth's on weekends at his aerie, their home, at the top of the Berkeley hills.
(Scott won the 1961 Concourse D'Elegance at Pebble Beach with a 1930 Packard
rumble seat roadster he had brought back to life and style.)
I remember his tension during these start-up years for a new kind of Chronicle.
One of his escapes was to get away at lunch time and go spend some time at the
Western Junk Co. We would have a quick hamburger in preparation for visiting
the new collections of old scrap metal brought to San Francisco by the Frucht
brothers. A long prowl followed in this utilitarian shed on 9th St. Among many
pieces over the years, I found an ice anchor and a cast iron stanchion from a
Victorian fence that became a prototype, both used on the Balclutha. Scott
found similar specimens--and surcease. There was an inner room, kept locked,
where the best of the new collections were kept. From there I have half of a set
of bookends in the shape of a leprechaun.
The journalism department of the University of California was of course shocked
XVI
at the aberrant metropolitan daily springing up in their own front yard. Professor
Bagdikian (he mellows later and there is a long give-and-take recorded between
him and Scott) deplores what Scott Newhall is doing, but reaches the bitter
conclusion that "unfortunately Scott is a genius." There was less equivocal
comment on the slopes below the old quarry where Scott and Ruth had expanded
the tool shed into a home (quite a home). Scott left off going to the Berkeley
parties where the guests would be "standing around the redwood parlor with the
Navajo rugs on the floor and the Indian bead curtains, drinking an adequate little
Napa Valley wine and munching on some cheese and listening to Scott Joplin or
Dizzy Gillespie--and they were always telling me what a shambles the Chronicle
was."
Because it wasn't a shambles. Another part of the editor is a concern for how
the world is going, a concern that-then and now took the form of brooding. It is
chivalry's root. Evil to break a lance on-Hitler, Joe McCarthy, the loyalty oath.
Scott went to England because, as best he could, he had to close with Hitler. He
was thrown off a TV program, where he appeared once a week, because he took
on McCarthy ahead of the rest. His theory of newspaper responsibility was that
the editorials should lead; they should brand the paper. Editorials, Scott says, are
where newspapers can get an edge on television. When he got his own paper
later he wrote the editorials himself, strong stuff, and printed them on the front
page. This muscularity was beginning to come through in the new Chronicle.
Anyway, he had a plan for the paper. But at the moment the intellectuals were
in a state of agitation. (To get in that state, he points out, they had to buy the
paper). However it wasn't unanimous. Lewis Mumford came west to teach at
Cal for a semester: "What's all this anti-Chronicle stuff?" he asked. "I've been
here six months and it's one of the greatest papers I've seen. Somebody said,
"But there's never any news." He said, "Well, look, I looked at it
yesterday, and
every story that was on the front page of the Times was on the front page of the
Chronicle."
The statistic was offered at a Berkeley party. Another statistic, in due course,
created a party. It was held in the Chronicle city room in 1963. They had won
the war; the newspaper had passed the Examiner in circulation.
Did Scott take out after the Hearst paper to get even for Bill Wren's snub? I
wouldn't discount it. He holds to an array of simplicities, verities, that live cheek
by jowl with the complexity in this mazy man. In any case, with success comes
XV11
power and he started to use it to see that Camelot, San Francisco, was not
defiled: "Every guy has a little messiah in him." He was at a disadvantage here
because the shaping of a city is
largely a political process and at election time, if
not in between, the ownership of this Republican paper insisted on a slate of
Republicans in a Democratic city.
However, Scott is
endlessly resourceful, and he had charm, and at that critical
time of the year a string of candidates came to his office. On the wall was an
oversize painting of a fake ancestor with a wooden leg, Sir Waldo Lovelock-Scott,
who probably got a couple of glances and must have bewildered them. If they
had taken the trouble in advance to look up the editor in Who's Who, they would
have found that he was the chairman of the board of governors of the Irrawaddy
Steam Navigation Co., a company that had never existed. During the war I had
found a Malay cannon made of brass half buried as a roadside post in the
Chinese cemetery in Manila, and Scott had dispatched a reporter on an
assignment in the Philippines with instructions not to come back without pulling
up one for him. This graced one side of the room.
"I think people-human beings-are the only thing we've got and I
think they're the best thing we've got, and I've always loved them; I've
always tried in the newspaper business to kid them along into having a
little more fun and doing a little more for their neighbor."
I
suppose that Scott's method with his visitors could roughly be grouped under
"kidding them along." It may be that I have used the word "charm" overmuch. It
might be better to say that he has a singularity that somehow makes him-and in
a quiet way-the central figure. And I have already mentioned with respect, awe
really, his penetration. Never have I encountered anyone with such laser-beam
ability to read and map out the next fellow's motivations. As, subsequently, a
situation begins to unfold, one wonders if he hasn't been in the presence of
prescience.
These talents were increasingly put at the service of San Francisco on what he
calls here "the cityscape" . . a sensitivity to architecture, city planning, the freeway
intrusion. Once the rigid little ceremonies of election day were past, Scott had a
free hand with how the news was emphasized. He says that he was playing
Lorenzo de' Medici. He used Dave Nelson as a field man at city hall and his
sometimes icy secretary, Dolly Rhee, a cousin of Syngman Rhee, the President of
South Korea, acted the part of enforcer.
XV111
Charlie Thieriot and Randolph Hearst used to meet every year at a duck blind up
near the Marysville Buttes. ("There's one thing only that all these loyal
Hillsborough people do as religiously as, say, the Pope celebrating Easter mass in
St Peter's Square. They all go duck hunting, starting with the first day of duck
season.") One time, after the Chronicle had pulled ahead of the Examiner, the
two publishers in the duck blind got to discussing a joint operating agreement for
handling the advertising, mechanical production, and delivery of the newspapers.
This would save a great deal of money for both papers if it could be brought
about. Although a couple of other newspapers in the country had achieved it, the
path was mine-strewn because of laws against monopoly.
But the process was started and Scott attended many sessions, the best of lawyers
present, in a room in the Clift Hotel. He liked Randolph Hearst, but is
contemptuous of the "corporate" newspaper talent who attended as well. In the
end the consolidation was worked out, was legal, and the Examiner moved into an
expanded Chronicle plant, with their editorial offices on the second floor. The
government and the city and the subscribers were assured that the joint operating
agreement was entirely about the business end--the editorial departments would
be independent.
Scott posted a notice to his staff: Any Chronicle person found on the second
floor would be fired.
The Chronicle kept the morning field to itself, the Examiner went to afternoons,
and the curve that Scott Newhall had instituted kept rising; the paper was making
more than a million dollars a year before the merger and now it started to spiral
up into multi-millions. The circulation war was over and things were getting dull.
Scott makes reference more than once in this narrative to the fact that he gets
bored easily.
As a boy I saw a model of a paddle tug tending a model of the Flying Cloud in a
showcase in the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. In 1946 there were
fifty-nine paddle tugs still
operating in Britain, but by the time the above events
unfolded many years later there was only one left, still in use, at a small coal port
a few miles down the North Sea coast from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Scott and I
resolved to add her to the San Francisco historic ship collection and Scott and a
cousin flew to County Durham to size up the situation.
XIX
The Old Trafford. now merely a relief tug to modern diesel craft, was laid up
most of the time, but by chance on this winter's day she had steam up and they
went out on the little harbor at Seaham and were allowed to handle the controls.
Scott was enthralled with the handy little craft, each paddle with its own separate
grasshopper engine of antique design.
The only trouble was that this last paddle tug boat was bespoke by Britain's
National Maritime Museum and they planned to scrap her to get a few large
parts for display in their buildings down at Greenwich on the River Thames.
However, Scott, his prescient antennae probing the frozen air of the industrial
north, discovered that a second paddle tug that was supposed to have been long
ago scrapped, wasn't scrapped. He arranged an exchange at his expense of the
parts needed by the Greenwich museum for their display from this second tug.
She was the Eppleton Hall, dismantled, pretty much a wreck, canted over on the
mud at the ship breakers, her wooden decks disposed of by building fires on them
preparatory to the cutting torch. However she still contained the necessary parts
for the display.
Scott got a letter from England about six months later saying that the Greenwich
museum was reneging on these arrangements for administrative reasons, whatever
that means, and that Scott probably couldn't get the vessel to America anyway.
We held a council of war at Foster's cafeteria, corner of Polk and Sutler, and
resolved to go to England and hijack the Old Trafford (now known as Reliant) to
keep her from being eviscerated. As a vehicle I suggested forming The Friends
of the Greenwich Museum; Scott legally incorporated this organization, and
registered the faraway tug as a yacht in Paraguay. Cards were printed. Lest they
feel thwarted, the costs of recovering the Eppleton Hall parts for their display
were to be left on the gatepost for the Greenwich museum. (A not
inconsiderable institution, I
might point out, with buildings by Inigo Jones and Sir
Christopher Wren.)
The "Friends" cards were to be used by a British movie critic by the name of
Otterburn-Hall who made occasional submissions to the Chronicle. Scott felt that
Otterburn-Hall could play a Bertie Wooster-ish role as a friend of the Greenwich
museum, what we call a ship buff, found on the fringes of our kind of museum,
"with scarf, blazer, and thick rubber soles so that he would appear to bounce
along with the ferocity of a cocker spaniel." Otterburn-Hall recruited a beautiful
English girl named Hilary James out of movie public relations who would serve,
with a cigarette in a long holder, as his secretary.
XX
All the pieces were in place. A crew to move the tug to Rotterdam was flown
over from San Francisco to Newcastle and holed up in the Royal Turks Head
Hotel. The caper was purposely planned for a Saturday. From London
Otterburn-Hall called the coal company who owned the tug, asked the price, and
flew north with Hilary James and a suitcase full of ten pound notes.
On their arrival at Seaham to carry out the transaction, the coal company
secretary and his assistant introduced themselves. There were two other men
present. Hilary pleasantly asked their names. The reply was that the names
didn't matter: "We are with the Newcastle police department."
The jig was up.
The giveaway had been the call from London asking the price. A true "Friend
of the Greenwich Museum" would have known the price. The coal company
secretary had called the museum and unfortunately some zealot was at work there
who identified this as a probable American beachhead. Otterburn-Hall says
he just started talking-talking to fill
up the air and avoid questioning, talking to
avoid an interval when the bracelets might be slapped on.
Scott and I
got out of England fast (I remember with fondness the thrust in the
seat of the pants as the jet tilted up at Heathrow airport), but not before Scott
had bought the derelict tug from the shipbreaker. We left behind Bill Bartz,
another shipmate of his brother's and mine from the bark Kaiulani. to resurrect
Lazarus. Scotland Yard duly arrived, but the principals were long gone. Bill
pleaded innocence. When things calmed down, we returned, and despite
forebodings from the old towboat hands on Tyneside, succeeded in steaming this
river tug to San Francisco. The voyage occupied half a year.
Back at the newspaper, with prosperity the horizons had started to shrink.
"The Chronicle had one great weakness, the foreign news coverage.
And I will go along with any editorial critics of the Chronicle on this
score . . I wanted to start a foreign service, because I felt the
Chronicle was on the threshold of being a truly great, recognized
newspaper. We had enjoyed a lot of fun and games to get the paper
in this position . . I felt after the merger that we would have enough
financial energy that we could establish a foreign service and get more
foreign correspondents out and take on some of the establishment
XXI
papers in the country. Hell, we could have done anything!"
But, as Scott says, ". . it was not to be." Charles Thieriot and his family were not
prepared to spend the money to establish foreign bureaus. Scott makes rueful
comparison with the Los Angeles Times which, under young Otis Chandler,
expanded in this style to a position equivalent to the New York Times and the
Washington Post.
Scott bought his own newspaper in Southern California, the Newhall Signal, in the
seat of his forbears. New worlds to conquer. Something to leave to his children.
The San Fernando valley had filled up, and a rogue wave of humanity was rising
to breast the mountains and spill into this next valley north. There was work for
a caring newspaper.
But, San Francisco? In my opinion, Scott is one of the two greatest San
Franciscans of all time; the other is Phil Burton. I
say that simply because of
what they left behind. In Scott's case three museums-three major museums-a
cultural heritage. Burton left us a natural heritage, our seashores. They are
encased in a vast national park that he created.
Scott additionally left something else, I notice. He is
becoming a San Francisco
legend.
Looming up alongside the Western Junk Co. on 9th street, there stood a
rectangular, authoritative looking building all faced in terra-cotta. This was the
headquarters of Gladding, McBean & Company, terra-cotta manufacturers, and
Atholl McBean, its proprietor, married into what Scott calls the "family tribal
group," the endlessly ramifying Newhall cousins and uncles and nephews and
nieces. Atholl McBean, according to Scott, considered all Newhalls morons. In
hard times, Ruth told me, some of the cousins lived off their capital without
giving it much thought. McBean, a fierce tycoon of the old order, moved to put
a stop to all that, and was named president of the Newhall Land & Farming Co.
with its 125,000 acres. He held it
together with an iron hand-this is
part of the
scene that Scott got involved with when he moved to Southern California.
Another was the high percentage of the self-righteous among the population-
"Not like San Francisco, believe me," as he kept telling me on his trips up to this
xxu
city. A good look-in on Scott was written by a young journalist named John Luce
at this time when Scott had just bought the Newhall Signal but was still editor of
the Chronicle. The story ran in San Francisco Magazine in July and August,
1968. A Ku Klux Klan rally, about a hundred strong, some armed, had leased a
box canyon east of Newhall for a rally. The press and T.V. were present.
Luce describes Scott in a scene among his new subscribers:
"The affair got going after dark as the head Klansman, a 'Reverend'
named Fowler, stood on a grassy knoll and harangued the crowd with
cries of violence and threats of the 'Jew-Commie-Nigger Conspiracy.'
Scott, in working clothes, had come out from the Signal with his sons
and was standing near the speaker. At one point, when he had the
crowd well worked up, Fowler spit out, 'We're the superior race; and
the superior race don't want no niggers!' Scott fired back, 'The
superior race doesn't use double negatives.'
"From all reports, the crowd could have killed him then. Fowler
screamed, 'If they're any white niggers here, get 'em!' A group of
rednecks pushed towards Scott, yelling 'Get a rope!' But Scott stood
his ground. Jon, Tony and Skip shielded him from the front, and
Charles Howe, the Chronicle Military Editor covering the rally, stood
behind Scott, protecting him with his body. 'I had my hand over his
heart,' Howe said later. 'It was beating perfectly regularly. The man
was utterly unafraid.'
"Finally, the press saved the day by crowding in to find out who Scott
was. 'I am Scott Newhall,' he told one reporter. 'I am Executive
Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Publisher of the Newhall Signal
and a drag racer-class D, modified. I
dropped in to listen to this
unfortunate and pathetic bunch expressing themselves in uncivilized
language, like children in a pissing contest. Most of them seem to be
unsuccessful middle-aged deer hunters and high school dropouts. My
family has lived in this valley for one hundred years. And if there's
anything I detest, it's bad grammar.'"
The California valley of his ancestors was to Scott a precious thing. If planning
for the wave of immigration was done right, it could be a model for all the
burgeoning west. And the Newhall Land & Farming Co. was in a position, as
xxm
Scott saw it, to show the way with "so much beautiful land on our books at a cost
of almost zero." He threw himself into the fray. He proposed going to Europe
to arrange for fountains by Picasso and Miro to be centerpieces in a series of
"villages," this to avoid crowding the land. He made portfolios to demonstrate his
ideas.
But aesthetic conscience tends not to be the hardiest survivor in a corporate
board room and while Scott brought considerable enlightenment to the design of
the new city of Valencia (which he named) he did not have his way fully. And
off the Fanning Company holdings, up the draws and on the hilltops, venal Los
Angeles County politics linked up with developers for an unregulated land rush.
At one point Atholl McBean came around a little, it should be recorded. Getting
up in years, he offered Scott the job of president of the Farming Company.
It was not taken, of course; the Signal was Scott's center. In every metropolitan
city room, I understand, a dream recurrently surfaces among the newsmen~to own
a little paper in a country town. Well, here it is, in fascinating detail. Scott's
formula for the Signal (jocularly referred to as "hated by 98% of the people, read
by 100%") was to inform his readers even if it
enraged them.
But I cannot comment too usefully on Scott's adventures in Southern California.
He was then at a distance; I
hope that I have introduced him adequately from
knowledge closer at hand. He made a roaring success of the Newhall Signal, a
thin throwaway when he bought it
(a few years later:
"
. . on Wednesdays it is
thicker than the Chronicle.") and in due course it was profitable to the extent of a
million and a half dollars a year. But he had been obliged to borrow money
from the farming company to buy it, and the man of terra-cotta, Atholl McBean,
called the loan because he was put out with one of Scott's editorial positions.
Scott, to raise operating capital, had to give an option to buy to an eastern
syndicate (this in the early, lean days of the paper), and later they exercised the
option.
Part of this agreement, signed at the time, was that he would not start another
newspaper for ten years. The day the ten years were up and he was in his early
seventies, he started the Citizen. Ruth Newhall editor. The staff loyally came
XXIV
over from the Signal ... all except one, their son Tony. With time still to go on
his non-competition clause, Tony was prevented by court order instituted by that
paper from joining his parents. This took the heart out of the operation. The
paper was never to be a heritage.
Always a new chapter. I
give you a fairy story, no less. It had evolved in the
course of the above events. At one point in a family-wide division of shares
involving a couple of dozen people, Scott had stuck up for a distant, very distant,
elderly relative named Alice whom he had never met. She had been disinherited
by an uncle, Walter Newhall, because he did not approve of her marriage. Scott
thought this unfair and churlish and persuaded everyone that the assets be
distributed with an even hand. Years went by and . . lo and behold, Scott and
Ruth were named heir and heiress of her estate. In due course it came to them
and they were rich.
(Scott had not been wealthy at the time of the Eppleton Hall; I remember
telephone calls from ports like Dover and places on the Spanish Main telling
Ruth to sell off another antique automobile to fund the next step of the voyage.)
Scott and Ruth live in a castle erected in front of a spectacular backdrop, the dry
Tehachapis. In contrast to the stark mountain range, the castle is surrounded by
old trees and lawns so that the air is balmy; it is literally paradise on earth. It is
not really a castle, but there is a stone tower at one corner with battlements on
top. The architecture of the rest of the house is Victorian-elaborate with thirty
stained glass windows, many of great beauty.
It burned down.
A painter was using a blowtorch on a day when the hot Santa Ana winds were
blowing off the mountain and the Newhalls weren't home.
Scott and Ruth assembled a band of artisans and the first thing that was done
was to pour a concrete slab in the exact shape of the missing house. Under the
slab, in the basement, was created a vast machine shop with lathes from Austria
and milling machines made in Ohio. Scott worked in the basement and Ruth
worked above ground with tile and marble and glass; together with the crew they
erected an exact replica of the house that had been destroyed. Only better-
XXV
better workmanship.
Ruth calls it "our greatest adventure."
So we leave them.
The reader, be forewarned, has to get used to Scott's way of distancing himself
from the narrative. There is a lot of action here-hazard, pain, things plunged
into, imagination unleashed, successes, things that didn't work out, triumphs-but
he often keeps a space between himself and the event and, more puzzling,
himself and the reader.
He comes that way.
As I see it, his circling and his glancing metaphors are a way to conceal, with a
modicum of modesty, his uniqueness. They are a cover drawn over brilliance.
There is another aspect: "I hate the words right and wrong." After assertion
after assertion the philosophy of an opinionated man as he has worked it out--
the reader will find added: "I don't know." Or equivalent. Scott is
wary of the
cosmic.
Be prepared for perversity. There is an authentic little spat with Ruth preserved
in amber. Don't take everything written here at face value, even some of his
comments on what it means to be a journalist. It is a rhetorical posture to have
some fun.
But when he says that newspapers "are the only trench we have against the
encroachments of a dictatorial society" we are out of the fun and into what he
deeply believes.
March 1990 Karl Kortum, Chief Curator
San Francisco, California San Francisco Maritime
National Historic Park
XXV 1
INTERVIEW HISTORY
The great challenge in writing about Scott Newhall is to create as
gracious a piece of prose as he would write, or wish to read.
Journalists outdo each other in felicitous phrasing as they model verbal
profiles of Newhall --the man and the editor. Appended to this oral
history is one such piece. Karl Kortum's introduction is the most recent
manifestation. Take their word, Scott Newhall is a treat to be around.
And the text of these oral history interviews should make that abundantly
clear.
Before indulging in my own Newhall adjectives, first, the background
for the Scott Newhall Oral History. In 1967, when Scott and Ruth Newhall
were living at One Hill Road in Berkeley, Ruth Newhall began to interview
her husband. She undertook this in response to an invitational letter
from the head of the Regional Oral History Office, Willa Baum. In the
May 26, 1966 letter to Scott Newhall, Mrs. Baum wrote:
"...we propose to shatter precedent by asking you to be
interviewed by your wife. She knows more about your career
than any of our regular interviewers could find out, and her
experience in journalism and history writing quality her as to
training. We would hope to do a full autobiographical
interview, perhaps five or so recording sessions, including
your childhood and family recollections, your education,
especially at UC, your marriage while still in college, your
travels, and then most fully, your newspaper career. In as
much as some of the recent developments such as the merger of
the Examiner and the Chronicle will involve considerations of
privacy, I expect you will want to put all or a part of your
manuscript under seal for a while. Be assured that nothing you
say will go beyond our office staff until and unless you
release it for scholarly use."
The interviews of husband by wife began that August, but very soon
Ruth Newhall was distressed that it was getting much too lengthy.
xxvii
"Possibly an outside interviewer could keep it more under
control, but on the other hand it would mean appointments to be
kept, which would make it difficult, if not impossible."
Both Newhalls were by then also much involved with their newspaper
in southern California, the Newhall Signal. Of the interviews that Ruth
Newhall was able to complete, one is included as Chapter XVI of the
memoir that follows, and the text is evidence for how divided energies
were between the San Francisco Chronicle and responsibilities in the
north, and the Newhall Signal and concerns in the south. The outline of
the interviews was moving far beyond the scope originally suggested.
"Still to be covered," said Ruth Newhall in a letter to Willa
Baum, "are the details of the merger, the family companies
(Newhall Land and Farming Company) of which Scott is a director
and officer, and the planning of a new city in southern
California by those companies... A little more about The Signal
(the newspaper which he owns in Newhall, California) - -the
building of a small-town paper. And, something, if it seems
appropriate, about his overpowering hobbies, into which he
throws fantastic energy. They have included telescope -
building, masonry and stonework, easel painting, coin
collecting old car restoring, jewelry designing, archaeology,
and- -currently- -he is at this moment outside putting together a
super-powered drag racer..."
Our files are bare of correspondence until May 18, 1982 when a
letter to Ruth and Scott Newhall from Willa Baum reads:
"It was good to see you at the Class of '31 Reunion luncheon.
But what bad news that all the tapes for Scott's oral history
were burned. I did not speak to you then about redoing them,
for I knew your first task was to rebuild your home. If that
is under control now, perhaps it is not too soon to say that
the loss of those tapes should not be allowed to be a permanent
loss. So long as you both are all right, they can be re
recorded. . . Would you, Ruth, be willing to do the interviewing
again? Or should we think about another interviewer, who would
require your guidance for questions?... However it gets set up,
it seems to me essential that eventually there be a full and
detailed oral history of Scott (and Ruth) Newhall in The
Bancroft Library. From that could then be drawn a trimmed down
publishable memoir."
XXVI 1 1
That house that burned, with the tapes inside, was The Mansion in
Piru. It was built between 1886 and 1890, and purchased by the Newhalls
in 1968. In 1981, when restoration was four months from completion, a
fire destroyed everything but the circular stone tower and chimneys of
the Victorian landmark.
Ruth Newhall's response to Mrs. Baum's 1982 letter was that Scott
said it was just as well that the tapes were lost in the fire because
they were too long and rambling. They were planning to redo them. Ruth
again agreed it was more practical for her to do the interviewing. "I
know the story so well, I know which direction the questions should take,
and I am also in a position to catch him at odd hours. The most
important part of his history is that dealing with the San Francisco
Chronicle and I think we can still do a good job on that."
In fact two transcripts were salvaged from the fire, and they are
both incorporated in the oral history that follows- -Chapter XVI and the
appended "On Being a Newspaper Photographer."
The Newhalls had things to do from 1982 to 1987 other than redo
interviews, as the oral history in covering those years makes clear. And
so a second round of interviews of husband by wife was never begun. For
one thing, Ruth by then was the editor of the Newhall Signal, and Scott's
was the most significant newspaper voice in the newly-designated Santa
Clarita Valley, and in the town the Newhall Land and Farming Company
built.
But in 1987 the proposal to interview Scott Newhall came up again.
Karl Kortum, an old land and seafaring friend of Scott's, and the Chief
Curator of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, reminded
the Regional Oral History Office that there was still a great story to be
recorded. And this time the San Francisco Chronicle's assistant to the
publisher, Phelps Dewey, and publisher Richard Thieriot, joined the
Newhalls and the Newhall Land and Farming Company in raising the funds to
do the oral history. That meant that interviews with Scott Newhall could
be conducted by the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library.
Of course, by the late eighties, twenty years after the first oral
history proposal, the story had doubled in length. The past was twenty
years further back, the present was full of problems with the Newhall
Signal. Numerous witty and impassioned words had been written by and
about Scott Newhall- -his response to witless and unfair charges in 1987
against his paper, its editor, and the Farming Company is in the
appendices- -a version of Shangri-la was in place in Valencia, California,
The Mansion had been rebuilt within an inch of perfection, and there were
new stories to be told.
xxix
The interviews were scheduled to take place in San Francisco, where
Mr. Newhall was in residence at 1050 North Point, overlooking the
maritime scene, every six weeks or so- -in town to attend to personal
matters, to consider silver pieces to add to his collection, and to see
people. Dolly Rhee, Scott Newhall 's secretary since 1942, and still
briskly organizing his life, arranged the first interviewing date.
Mr. Newhall and I met for a good big restaurant lunch of crab on
French bread- -the first of several lunches, same selection- -and we talked
about doing the oral history. I read numerous clippings and articles
supplied by Ruth Newhall and Dolly Rhee, background on the Bay Region's
press and on current issues in newspapering, I relived the voyage of The
Eppleton Hall, decoded back issues of the Newhall Christmas greetings,
read Ruth Newhall 's The Newhall Ranch, and studied more recent material
on Newhall doings in southern California.
While we were in some sense always dealing with the past in the
interviews, the present was everpresent. In August 1988 things at The
Signal were coming apart. The owners, the Morris Chain, and the
publishers, the Newhalls, were severing relations. The Newhalls were
contemplating starting a competing paper. [See Appendix F. ]
True to
what seemed to be a predictable ten-year cycle, yet another series of
provocative articles on the San Francisco Chronicle had come out in San
Francisco Magazine [November, December 1987] . Not an ideal time for
"emotions recollected in tranquility ,
"
but no matter. We carried on.
In February 1989, when the interviews were winding down, I
telephoned Ben Bagdikian, recently retired dean of the University of
California's School of Journalism. I wanted suggestions from him for
global journalistic questions. After a few minutes of conversation I was
inspired to ask if he would care to be in on a three-way interview with
Scott Newhall. He was agreeable. He had not met Scott; although he had
written critically about the San Francisco Chronicle, he had always
admired its editor. Moderating that taped conversation- -Chapter XIII --
was fun. It was a meeting of two souls wise in the ways of newspapers,
and with plenty of dislikes and opinions in common.
In the meeting with Ben Bagdikian, Scott Newhall reviewed for a new
listener a number of the subjects that had been discussed at length
earlier, themes that would come up again in a windup interview. If this
were a biography en route to publication, the repetitions would be
eliminated. As it is, they are left, and understandable in the context.
In fact their reiteration underscores their importance for Scott Newhall;
while this was oral history, it was also current history, living history.
XXX
The final taping, in July 1989, took place far from the maritime
orientation of the Newhall's San Francisco apartment. I was sent an
airline ticket by the Newhalls that transported me from Oakland to
Burbank. There I was met by Mr. Newhall and Carlos Garcia, the ranch
manager, and Carlos drove us through the lands of the original Rancho San
Francisco- -Scott giving the tour commentary- -from old Newhall, California
to new Valencia to Magic Mountain. The observations of this great-
grandson of Henry Mayo Newhall, the man who gave his name to the town,
were rueful, ambivalent, bemused, apologetic. "These people don't read
newspapers, they don't have time." Then we headed west through miles of
orange groves, home to The Mansion.
It was a southern California scene. We drank freshly-squeezed
orange juice by the pool, a blue oval ringed with water-spouting turtles.
The pepper trees, arching over to shade the patio, dropped the occasional
leaf in the stippled water. White marble goddesses stood their ground.
The grass was bright green, and across it came a Great Dane to intrude
into everything.
We taped some conversation that afternoon, in part using an index of
questions put by two journalism historians, Peter Mellini and Lynn
Ludlow. Then we had dinner, and a tour of the awesome basement workshop
where serious projects were afoot. The house itself was full of
delights, many of them silver, or on canvas. The epergnes were stocked
with chocolate M&Ms . Scott played the piano.
That day, July 12, 1989, was a great day for my hosts. They had
just heard that one of their least favorite editors had been asked to
leave his post at The Signal. It was a vindication, and perhaps an
indictment of the reviled "investigative journalism" school. The phones
were ringing; Ruth and Scott Newhall were in demand, for comment and
advice.
The next morning I woke to the wet sounds of a fountain, and a
proprietary view across orange groves to dry hills. I went out to walk,
herded by the large dog. When I returned Ruth Newhall was stirring
together pounds of breakfast- -dry stuff, buttermilk, canned stuff --for
the dog and a dozen cats, and after that she and I taped a brief family
history interview. Later the three of us drove a short ways to see the
bell at Camulos that came to the Mission San Francisco from Russia via
Sitka, Alaska. The Mission and Camulos were the setting of Ramona. a
novel of a far earlier southern California, and that day the rancho world
seemed very much alive and well.
xxxi
I left the bulk of the transcribed, audited, and edited oral history
with the Newhalls on that trip in July. In short order Ruth read through
it. Then Scott brought it up to San Francisco where he tackled it with
the help of Dolly Rhee, to whom he dictated some additions and changes.
He did not make many changes, but he was convinced that his handwritten
insertions would be difficult for a typist in the Regional Oral History
Office in Berkeley to deal with, and he wanted to be able to stand by to
answer any questions presented by the text. So, working with Joyce
Preetorius, a trusted typist and friend, he set up a temporary office in
a building on his Piru estate and had the entire, very lengthy manuscript
typed onto a word-processor.
The transcript was then printed out in the Oral History Office and
proofread and indexed. James R. K. Kantor, retired University Archivist,
gave it a close reading, and so did I. In addition, Karl Kortum, who had
been honored with the task of writing an introduction to the entire
memoir, became by default and by instinct another proofreader and made
helpful corrections. Also of great importance was the selection of
photographs that Mr. Kortum made available. Several fine scenes that
include him and Scott Newhall are his work, or his daughter Sarah's.
Scott Newhall knew that Karl Kortum would be the right person to
write the introduction to the memoir. He gave Mr. Kortum the kind of
opportunity that seldom comes to a friend- -that of standing back and
analyzing what makes the person unique, effective as a citizen, endearing
as a companion. I won't sum up Mr. Kortum' s splendid introduction,
because it in some ways sums up the oral history, but I do want to thank
him. It was hard work, carefully done.
When Mr. Kortum sent along, by way of illustration, an album from a
musical night at the Newhall 's house in Berkeley, it became rather
painfully evident that not enough attention had been paid to the
importance of music for Scott Newhall. Scott agreed; he was amazed that
he hadn't voiced his love of music, of jazz, insistently throughout the
text. And so we did an interview on music April 25, 1990, to which he
appended notes written two days later as he rode back home on the train
from San Francisco south. That interview is in the appendices.
In thanking people I want to put Ruth and Scott Newhall first. They
could not possibly have been more helpful, or more pleasant to know. And
then it was Dolly Rhee who, in the language of acknowledgments, "made the
right things happen at all the critical times." She always returned
calls, and helped in every way she was asked to help. Tony Newhall did
too.
XXX 11
Scott Newhall's connections with the University of California were
sufficiently invigorated by this oral history undertaking- -andy
DivIs7on
t
T Wi
R
h Be
Va
T
g
?i
klan " t0 P>Pt him to make L Manuscript
'ivision of The Bancroft Library the repository for his papers relating
* '^ Sa"Franci.sr.o rhronlrle. The Newhall correspondence and papers
dealing with three of California's most interesting decades, the <
^cond
world war years through the sixties, will be an excellent resource fo
Lstorians. Journalists and scholars, readers of this oral history, may
wish to continue their research in The Bancroft Library. The Regional
Oral History Office is a division of The Bancroft Library, the University
of California at Berkeley's library of California history
Suzanne B. Riess
Interviewer/Editor
June 5, 1990
Regional Oral History Office
Berkeley, California
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
xxxii i
Newhall
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
Your full name
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
(Please write clearly. IJse black ink.)
Date of birtfr JOM >
2* / / ^ /// BirthpLa
Father's full name ST~I fff f? F
Occupat ion I H^
Mother's full name
Occupation
Your spouse
Your
childrenVs,^^
\
Where did you grow up?
Present community
Education
v ,. / t
"h- , \\ jh Tt_ \ -y
^^^ ww^ t \
r>ji^*^^ < ^" ^* ^^. C^J vAB/i *
r^ / i v v i^ \ o fT"* ~~* r
~
rl f LL . f N/g-vCTu^c CoAH ^(LHC^r&^CL^L^u
Areas of expertise
N
\HcLWCllt* \TOUt6l>tV
Other interests or activities
Organizations in which you are active
I FAMILY HISTORY
[Interview 1: March 22, 1988]
San Rafael. Marin County
Riess: About your early memories: Did you know your grandparents?
Newhall: No, oddly enough, I never had grandparents whom I knew. The
survivor was my grandfather, Edwin Newhall, who was buried the day
my younger brother was born. I was about two years old when he
died.
I had a step -grandmother who survived and was very charming.
My grandfather had gone east to school, I suppose to Yale, and had
married Fanny Hall, a young lady from one of those academies for
young ladies in New England. She died in childbirth when my father
was born. So my grandfather married her best friend, and
schoolmate, who was Virginia Whiting Newhall, who came from Martha's
Vineyard, the island off of Cape Cod there. She functioned as a
sort of distant and awe-inspiring grandmother, but her husband, my
grandfather, had died by the time I was active in the family scene.
Virginia Whiting was one of those New Englanders who came out
here as a young woman, where she married my grandfather, but home to
her was always Martha's Vineyard, and every summer she went back
home to Martha's Vineyard. Her children and grandchildren still go
home to Martha's Vineyard every year in the summertime. I once went
"home" with them, and my brother and I began fighting and kicked
over one of these breakfront glass cabinets full of Indian
artifacts. I was never invited back again, at least with any
enthusiasm.
##This symbol indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun
or ended. For a guide to the tapes see page
Riess: Martha's Vineyard is beautiful.
Newhall: West Tisbury was the town that they lived in. We used to go out to
Edgartown, I guess it was, or Vineyard Haven, one or the other
seaport, when we went up there. And once we went sailing in a
catboat around the Sound. This was my first taste of the Atlantic
Ocean.
Riess: Living in San Rafael was a bit like living on an island too, wasn't
it?
Newhall: Very much so. Marin County was very different then than it is now,
socially or culturally. Not only was Marin a cultural island, but
it supported an entirely different life than exists today in Marin
County or anywhere in California. California was a western island
in itself.
Marin County had been settled by Portuguese farmers, and then
there was overlaid on that a Scotch, Presbyterian sort of feudal
peerage. A lot of what I am suggesting were the Marin County
"nobility" came from San Francisco and went north across the Golden
Gate looking for a country enclave. They would commute then. The
Northwestern Pacific Railroad had train service between Sausalito
and Tiburon, through San Rafael, and north to Eureka. The ferry
boats came across the bay from the Ferry Building to Sausalito.
It was a life that I guess is not going to be lived anymore in
the United States of America. The motor cars were just coming in.
There were these large estates in Marin County. This was an
earlier, basically reclusive society, similar to the society that
grew up down the Peninsula in Burlingame, San Mateo, Woodside,
Atherton, and so on. As I say, it was basically a Scotch-
Presbyterian and Episcopalian community. One's friends went to the
Presbyterian church in San Rafael or to the Episcopal churches.
There was a kind of communal social life. Captain Dollar of the
Dollar family, and the Boyds , and the Fosters, the Johnsons, the
Babcocks, the Abbotts and Andersons, and such were all San Francisco
families. They moved over to Marin County.
The motor cars and the auto ferries were coming in, but we
still as children had our horses. We rode all over Marin County on
our horses and went out and played Indians and cowboys and so on up
in the hills.
It was a wonderful life for a child because it was very
comfortable. It wasn't, in a sense, as gloriously social as perhaps
some of the English country estates, or perhaps Newport or something
in the East, but there were numerous comfortable homes with large
staffs in Marin. They had their own round of parties for the kids,
the birthday parties. Of course, this culture was started before
the First World War and grew up during Prohibition. There was a
certain amount of drinking, which we can get into later, if we need
to. It was a very privileged group. And, of course, it all ended
in 1929 or '30.
Riess :
Why did the families move out there?
summer home?
Did they go out first for a
Newhall: I suppose so because our family- -or the different members of the
family- -all had homes here in San Francisco. This was certainly the
case in my grandfather's generation and my great-grandfather's. But
in my father's generation then they moved out to Marin or elsewhere
--some of my uncles and great-uncles went down to Burlingame, too.
It obviously was just a comfortable routine.
My father would get up in the morning, catch the 7:45 train and
go to Sausalito, get on the "Ukiah," "Eureka," or the "Sausalito,"
one of the ferryboats, cross the bay to San Francisco and work, and
then catch the 5:15 or 5:45 ferry coming back across the bay in the
evening. The commute then would have taken about an hour and a
quarter. Now today, in 1988, I guess, on a bad day it can still
take an hour or more through the heavy traffic.
There were no bridges then, and we were all brought up to cross
the bay by ferry and land at the Ferry Building. The memories of
crossing the bay with the seagulls flying and the fog and waves
splashing around are still exciting. You could buy a bag of popcorn
and then throw the popcorn to the seagulls. Those were memorable
times, and it was a wonderful life. I could actually go on about
this nostalgic life by the hour.
William Anderson Scott. Presbyterian Divine
Riess: When you say, "one was Presbyterian," I take it you were one of the
"ones .
"
Newhall: That's right. My great-grandfather on my mother's side --his name
was William Anderson Scott- -he was a Presbyterian divine, or
clergyman. He had been Andrew Jackson's pastor at his Hermitage
Estate or whatever it was called, in Louisiana, Tennessee, back
there somewhere. He came out here with a lot of children. I think
he had nine. He had, as I understand it, a nanny for each one of
the children, but in those days they were called slaves. This was
before the Civil War.
Riess: They were black?
Newhall: They were blacks. We Americans didn't go in too much for Arabian or
Circassian slaves or anything like that. This was before the Civil
War.
Riess: [laughs] I never called a slave a nanny.
Newhall: I was being a little bit, I'm sorry, ironical about it. What I was
going to say was that each one had a slave nursemaid, if that's what
you want to call it. Not we, I mean my mother's family.
My great-grandfather on my father's side, Henry Mayo Newhall,
was not what I could describe as a devoutly religious man, but he
thought "religion" was good for the people, and so he put my great
grandfather on my mother's side, Dr. Scott, up in business, and they
established St. John's Presbyterian Church out on Lake Street. I
believe Dr. Scott was established in a downtown San Francisco
Presbyterian church earlier.
As the Civil War came along. Dr. Scott, who was a southerner,
became a person of ill-fame because of his slave -holding and
confederate sympathies. The people of San Francisco, numbering many
northern sympathizers, were going to lynch him. My great-
grandmother Newhall, Mrs. Henry Mayo Newhall, called for Dr. Scott
in her carriage and hid him under a blanket. They spirited him out
of town so he did not suffer hanging by the neck!
Dr. Scott came back after the war and they founded the San
Francisco Theological Seminary, which is a group of old Gothic or
Romanesque buildings over in San Anselmo, up on the hill above the
town. My mother always felt duty-bound to observe, at least, the
rituals and related social ceremonies of the Presbyterian church.
Most of the people we knew were elders or they were members of
the congregation of the Presbyterian church there. I, of course,
was put through Sunday school, and my mother finally prevailed upon
me--I was beginning to rebel, this was in the middle twenties to
join the church.
I said, well, anything that she wanted, of course, I would be
happy to do because I had the nicest mother and the nicest father, I
think, any human being could have. I mean that very seriously. I
have never known nicer people in my life. I joined the church and
made whatever promises were required by Almighty God. But, oddly
enough, that was the last time I ever went. I never went back
again. I felt that I had done my filial duty and was, I suppose, a
member then in good standing of the Marin County branch of the
Presbyterian community.
All fooling aside, I must confess the Calvinist, or whatever
they are, the Knoxian doctrines of Presbyterianism have stuck with
me all my life, and they have always been, whether I liked it or
not, a very strong influence in my view of many of the behavior
patterns of my fellow man. I know much of my life has been judged
by me as to how well I measured up to the social requirements of the
church .
I am not a church-going person. I went to Catholic church
whenever I was abroad, until they gave up the Latin mass, and then I
dropped out of that, too, because I used to enjoy again the rituals
and proper Latin of the Catholic church. To me, a wonderful thing
about the old Roman Catholic establishment was the fact that no
matter what country you were in- -America, Andalusia, Austria, or the
great throbbing heart of Africa- -no matter what language you spoke,
no matter what color, creed, or anything else you professed, you
could always find in the Catholic church, in the song and dance of
mass, the same pattern of life going on anywhere in the world. I
always enjoyed the continuity of it all.
Riess: What were the Calvinist doctrines that ruled your life?
Newhall: Well, let me put it this way: My mother and father were very active
in getting ministers or pastors or people to teach. Remsen Bird- -I
was mentioning him earlier- -was a young Presbyterian minister, a
student who came out here, and my mother and father sort of took him
in tow. He taught in the seminary across the bay in San Anselmo for
awhile, but they put him down as president of Occidental College,
which was a Presbyterian college in Eagle Rock, actually, down in
Los Angeles.
Our Marin County Presbyterian world was a vaguely reformed or
liberal ecclesiastical environment. So we didn't really believe too
deeply in brimstone and fire. I never did think I was particularly
going to roast or be sauteed, you know, in hell somehow.
One was impressed with the fact that if you measured up to some
of the rather more stringent precepts of the King James version of
the Bible that you would be well considered in your community. You
are not to lie; you are not to steal; you are not to fornicate; you
aren't supposed to fool around with your neighbor's wife or his
livestock or anything like that.
We all became sinners if we failed to live up perfectly to
those particular doctrines. As we backslid, or fell out of grace,
one would have certain spiritual problems. We didn't have the
Catholic "confessional box" in which to expiate our sins, and have
everything straightened out for us. We had to struggle with it
ourselves .
Riess: The guilt.
Newhall: That's right, exactly. You put the whole thing into one word for
me. But guilt never bothered me too much. I figured everyone else
was just as guilty or perhaps a little guiltier than I was.
"The Structured Society'
Riess: When you talk about "one," I think that's really neat. You were
just like the rest of the boys. It was a homogeneous group.
Newhall: It was. Well, here in America we are not presumed to tolerate an
aristocracy, but during those earlier days in Marin the land was
rich and the world was kind. We were spoiled by an abundance. I
don't know, you just were one of the group, there was just no
question about it. This was a very structured society there. As I
said, Marin County was enveloped by an overlay of San Franciscans,
mostly Protestants.
For example, the deYoung family came over to Marin. They were
Catholics. They had a hell of a time. They were rejected by many
of Marin County's social matrons. This is Mike deYoung and his
family. They are very nice people. We'll talk about them, I'm
sure, later on. In Marin County, for a while, Jews were in ill-
favor; blacks were in ill- favor; Irish were in ill- favor. Well, at
that time the newspaper people, the deYoungs ,
were Catholic so they
were in not accorded a position.
Mike built this very handsome home over there, a magnificent
Victorian estate, but he couldn't make it with the parties and
society. It was too bad because he was looking for respectability.
(We're all looking for respectability.) He finally gave up. So he
got a couple of chimpanzees and put them in the coach box of his
carriage. Then he had his coach driven around town for awhile with
the chimps sitting up in back. Then he left town, went back to San
Francisco and down to Burlingame and gave his Marin County home to
the Catholic Dominican Convent over in Marin. I guess he struck one
last, great blow for Catholicism. I mention that simply because I
think that was a slice of life then.
Riess: The chimps were the big thumbing of the nose?
Newhall: I guess so. He just did it as a gesture. That was before my time,
but I have always admired him for it, believe me.
My mother and father and many of the people there, as I said,
were entirely gracious. They wouldn't be rude to anyone. My father
later became a president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce
and was rather active in San Francisco business affairs, and vaguely
political affairs. We entertained people from all over the world
who came through San Francisco when foreign visitors needed a whiff
of local hospitality.
Riess: That was because of the business connection?
Newhall: Part of it, yes, but my mother loved people. She always had a whole
flock. She'd go around the county with a whole bunch of
Presbyterian missionary students or clergymen or something, like a
tail on a kite, go out to the golf club- -I used to play golf with
them all the time as I got a little older. It was a gay, country
club kind of life and childhood. We would play tennis all day, or
golf. We had parties; we danced.
Alcohol did not become a major source of social life, because
of Prohibition, until when we got to be fourteen, fifteen or
sixteen. Then, of course, most of us started drinking because, I
suppose, that was the way to rebel. There was a lot of drinking in
the middle and late nineteen- twenties, a lot of it.
Riess: What about the girls? You are from a family of boys, and you are
describing the kind of bliss of being a boy in a powerful society.
Do you think it was the same for girls?
Newhall: There was a difference then between girls and boys, in addition to
the obvious anatomical differences. Girls were sugar and spice and
everything nice, sort of. They did live in a female psychological
environment. But I thought there was never anything as beautiful or
as exciting or as desirable as a girl, so I'm not going to be a very
good reporter on that subject. I'm not one to go out camping with
the boys. If you want to go camping with the girls, fine, but not
with the boys. There are other things to do.
I don't know what to say about it except that they were an
immensely important part of our lives as young men. We would go to
the assemblies in San Francisco, then we'd have them over for house
parties in Marin.
Bolinas
Newhall: We had quite a large beach house in Bolinas, and Bolinas was
something. Bolinas was just picked up right out of, I don't know
what, Cornwall or Inverness or somewhere, and just plopped down on
the California coast, just north of the Golden Gate.
Bolinas was Irish- -Protestant, or Scotch--a little seaside
summertime enclave. My first memories of life, almost, are going to
Bolinas as a very small child when my brother or I had the whooping
cough. Either they sent me over there so I wouldn't get it, or so I
wouldn't give it to somebody else. I forget which.
Let's see. The families: the Gilfillins, the Fernettas, the
Pages, and so on. My father bought quite a nice house, and we lived
right down on the beach at the end of the road. Our friends all
came and spent all summertime with us- -my parents' friends, my
friends, my brothers' friends. One summer, as I got to be a little
older, I said to my mother, "Look, I'll be the quartermaster here.
I'll supply the food and watch the cooks, and so on and so forth,
and take care of the cuisine and the catering."
She said, "Well, we have an average of twenty- seven people
living here this summer." They just were everywhere. We had quite
a few guest rooms and guest houses and things.
It was an incredibly privileged life in terms of the freedom
that one had. The whole family would go to Bolinas. We had nurses
and gardeners and cooks and grooms and everyone else who would come
along. Then for three months we could either go barefoot, or ride.
We'd ride our horses all over. Later we had cars to go out snipe
hunting or whatever was doing up on the mesa.
There were always girls during those Bolinas summers. They
were family and friends and guests. They would come over from San
Francisco. Or visit from Los Angeles or Cleveland or Washington,
D.C., New York, or Berlin or South America. Or in one case, we were
blessed with a White Russian family with two beautiful daughters
still on the run from the Bolsheviks.
We'd live in our bathing suits and we had row-boats, sailboats,
speed boats, and canoes and stuff in the lagoon. Unbelievable
perhaps, yet this was all very simple. We were a very simple,
relaxed, informal family. My uncles and great-uncles and so on
would come by for a few days. They were all very stylish. Some of
them were deaf or very fat or suffering from vastly elevated blood
pressure.
In our regular San Rafael home there were lots of people around
to make life comfortable. Up in the attic room there were always
one or two or three of our old servants who were either dying or
otherwise retired. It was all a big family.
I cannot tell you what memorable parents I had. They were so
gracious, even to their own children. After I went off to school,
and responded to the wild call of the Gordon's Dry Gin flask, people
would look at me and shake their heads and snap, "How could Aimer
and Anna have ever sired a person as awful as you are?" That's a
fact. That was the guilt. I had to live up to my parents, they
were perfect. They never quarrelled.
My father was so pleasant. In Bolinas every Fourth of July for
two or three days they'd build this huge bonfire on the beach, and
my father would always bring over from San Francisco literally
truckloads of fire crackers, Roman candles, triangles, bombs and
such wonderful stuff. Every kid in Bolinas would come down to my
father's ammunition dump on the beach and help himself to anything
he wanted. We'd all spend the Fourth of July blowing up the beach
at Bolinas. It was a wonderful life. The beach was full of
walking-wounded kids. I almost blew my right hand off one Fourth of
July.
Riess: What happened to that house? Is it still there?
Newhall: Well, the house is still there. In 1929 we went broke, our family,
just absolutely totally broke. We had to sell the San Rafael home,
the Bolinas house. We moved into the third floor garret of my step-
grandmother
'
s home .
Riess: Where in Bolinas is the house?
Newhall: You come into Bolinas heading more or less south, I guess, along the
lagoon. You come down to the crossroads at the old Community
Church. One road will go around to the left to the channel by the
lagoon. But if you turn to the right, instead, you go out to the
ocean. It was the last house on the right down at the ocean. It
was right on the beach there. The beach is all gone now. There was
a beautiful beach there. The clam patch, you'd go out and dig for
clams and go get mussels on the reef --do anything, ride, boat, eat
picnic lunches or ride the waves on surfboards.
Riess: Were you being taught, as often children of wealthy parents are, a
sort of noblesse oblige? Were you supposed to be good to other less
fortunate children?
Newhall: Totally. Totally. I believed it, and I still do. This is a very
sensitive thing to get into. I don't mean that I would be
patronizing to anyone. We were just the same as anybody else. Our
friends came from almost anywhere. I know that the chauffeur's son
was my closest friend for a year or two or three. Actually he was
the son of somebody else's chauffeur.
Mother. Anna, and Brothers. Aimer and Hall
Newhall: My mother had been very, very poor, very poor. Her father had taken
to the bottle very likely because he couldn't stand the Presbyterian
pressure or something. She had been very poor and she had got a job
at Miss Murison's School for Young Ladies here in San Francisco and
met my father, who was probably one of the bachelor catches of the
generation. I guess my mother would have been described as the very
respectable or genteel poor of San Francisco. They were married and
soon moved to San Rafael.
She had been brought up in great part by her aunt, Louisiana
Scott, who was married to Arthur Foster. Uncle Arthur Foster was an
Irish boy who had come over and got very rich and finally got
10
control of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which ran from Tiburon
north through the Redwood country to Eureka.
The Fosters really had a magnificent estate --it's all gone now
--in San Rafael. It was called Fair Hills. It was full of peacocks
and stables and carriages and everything you might want. The
stables were built in concentric circles of boxstalls. Above it in
the hay loft was a large enough floor so that all of our San Rafael
and San Francisco friends and group of guests could, on rainy days
in the winter, go roller skating up there. Lord, we could play snap
the whip! It was quite large.
The Fosters brought up, in great part, my mother. In a sense,
she had always been the poor relation in the household, although
they gave her everything their own children had. (They had nine
sons and daughters in her generation.) She never forgot that, and
so she devoted her life, really- -of course I'm very prejudiced, I
suppose- -to trying to help other people. She suffered a stroke
which incapacitated her when she was in her fifties, and so her left
side was practically useless.
By this time, as I mentioned, our family fortunes collapsed
with the great '29 crash, but we had enough here and there to eat
with. My mother came to live at the Berkeley Women's City Club
before Pearl Harbor. She taught herself to operate a braille
typewriter, and the rest of her life, for about fifteen years, she
spent transcribing into braille the doctoral dissertations of blind
students at UC.
I admired her so much for doing that. She'd sit there all day
long. I don't know if you have ever run a braille typewriter. She
always had to have, I suppose, dependents to whom she felt she was
contributing something. She had, I'm sure, that feeling. She was
always so nice to me. As I say, I have my moments of guilt. Here I
was, this naughty little boy, even when I was larger.
Riess: You were the second of three sons. What are the names of the
others? What kind of little boys were they?
Newhall: Well, my older brother was Aimer Mayo Newhall, Jr. My younger
brother was Hall Mearns Newhall. Hall was named for his
grandmother, Fanny Hall Newhall. My mother's mother was a Mearns.
In the case of brother Aimer, I had the innate respect for him
that I guess most boys do for their older brothers ;
I always sort of
glorified him, idealized him, or idolized him. Aimer was a
different personality, different from Hall and me. He didn't take
to horses and girls that much- -not necessarily in that order.
He was thrown off his horse, Skylark, and she kicked him when
he was down. She did that to me a few times. She was a nasty, ill-
11
tempered mare. He came home crying one night, "Oh, I don't want
that horse. I'll never ride a horse again." (And he didn't.) I
heard and I went running to my mother and said, "Can I have
Skylark?" And that's how I got my black and white pinto pony,
Skylark. Aimer from that time on went in for motor cars.
I loved my horse Skylark. We had a fine love affair. She was
an absolute, uncontaminated bitch. As I say, she'd throw you off.
She was difficult. If she got you on the ground, you had to roll
out of the way fast because she'd start kicking.
My brother, Aimer, became very interested in motorcars. He was
always building cars. He finally built an airplane that crashed on
its first fight and rather cut up the young man who was flying it.
The pilot had never flown before either. Aimer went to engineering
school and aeronautic mechanical classes at the Boeing aircraft
facility over at the Oakland airport. Then he went, oh, here and
there to one or another of the engineering schools . He ended up at
MIT in Boston. He was going to join the faculty there but he gave
it up because he couldn't stand the weather in Massachusetts. It is
very difficult for a California person to go east and settle
comfortably in the Siberian steppes of the East Coast. You may know
that. It's rough.
Aimer worked as an engineer all during World War II. I guess
he had a good Presbyterian sort of repressive conscience because he
couldn't stand some aspects of common social misbehavior. He was
working for a rather elaborate and sophisticated radar tube
engineering manufacturing firm down the peninsula, Eitel-McCullough,
which was a World War II success story and precursor of the Silicon
Valley industrial wonder electronic firms of the 1980s.
Newhall: Unfortunately, the ultra-human qualities of Aimer's co-workers
bothered him. The young men around the plant apparently were in the
habit of spending their lunch hours or coffee breaks playing "post
office" in the photo dark rooms with the young ladies- -secretaries I
suppose they were then, I don't think there were many female
engineers at the moment- -and my brother didn't approve of it. The
day the Japanese surrendered he went in and told the president, "I
quit. I can't stand this. This is not the kind of place I want to
work in. "
I should say when he was very young Aimer had trouble with his
ears. He had a double mastoid situation. He was partially deaf all
his life and so at times he preferred to live in his own
environment. He was a peace-loving man, much like my father. He
couldn't stand to see anyone hurt or hungry or hated. He kept
retreating. He lived up in Cloverdale and then Sonoma for awhile.
In the sixties he came down with cancer, and he died very young,
12
fifty- one or fifty- two.
My younger brother died when he was about fifty. My father
died at about fifty- five. I think my grandfather died at about that
age. I have often wondered why I am still here and able to indulge
myself in a conversation of this nature. But here I am.
Riess: You definitely are still here! Even your great-grandfather, Henry
Mayo, died young [1825-1882].
Newhall: My mother lived to be in her sixties, anyway.
Riess: Your great-grandfather got on with living very early. He didn't
finish high school.
Newhall: All of us have tended to get on about things. I was frequently
under the impression that there wasn't too much time to waste.
Riess: It sounds like you and your older brother were really very
different. Did you model your life on him in any way?
Newhall: No. I always felt my brother Aimer was a genius. He was very
brilliant in his field. We were going to build a race car to run in
the Indianapolis 500. I was to drive it; he was going to build it.
We were going to call it the Newhall Brothers' Special. But we
never got around to doing it, unfortunately. After he died I went
back to Indianapolis almost every year for the race, I suppose to do
homage to him. I have always enjoyed motor cars myself and racing
and whatnot.
Mother's Free Spirit, and Spiritualism
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
I asked you earlier about your parents.
Did they care about politics?
They cared about religion.
They cared about the observance of religion; about politics, no. I
would say, generally speaking, everyone whom one knew was a
Republican. The result was that my mother would call herself a
Socialist half the time. I was a Republican then, at least I
professed such a faith. I am still registered as a Republican,
although it is still a hopeless political convocation.
Your mother would call herself a Socialist?
Oh, she thought Norman Thomas was just grand. Look, my mother was a
free spirit in her way.
Riess: I hadn't gathered that. That's great.
13
Newhall:
Riess:
Oh, totally. I have seen her in action. She was absolutely a
glorious hostess. She could laugh and charm everybody. I've never
known anybody who didn't love her. She could talk and laugh her way
out of anything. If some Republican honcho would come over and
start spouting the wit and wisdom of Warren G. Harding, she would
laugh and tickle him under the chin. She was totally apolitical
that way.
My father I never heard express a political thought in his
life, except, I'm sure, if anybody had asked him he'd say, "I'm a
Republican.
"
What about suffrage?
in?
Was that something your mother was interested
Newhall: She had a very great respect for the female sex. There were no
barriers, to her. She wasn't out there parading around with a
placard at all, but if there had been any confrontation and she had
to take a choice it would have been on the side of the suffragette.
She was totally independent in thought.
For whatever it's worth, when the DAR boycotted a Marian
Anderson concert --it was in Philadelphia I think- -because the great
singer was a "negro," my mother resigned from the DAR.
I have never mentioned what I am about to say before. I think
it's proper only to say that at one period in my mother's life, when
we were still going to Bolinas, she became very much involved with
what was then called spiritualism. She had some psychic, or
extrasensory, experiences with some of her friends, some quite well-
placed friends. They would attend meetings with people involved in
seances or other remarkable extraterrestrial phenomena. She had
some experiences as a medium. In a sense it didn't ever go
anywhere, but that was a tremendously important facet of her life.
I'm not fit to get off and declaim on the field of hysteria or
anything like that, but she was very much involved.
The Stewart Edward Whites were people who lived down in
Burlingame. He was the author of some very successful novels. The
Whites were very social. He was a preeminent big game hunter,
explorer, and naturalist and so forth. They were involved in
spiritualism. (I haven't thought about this for a long time.)
My mother left a trunk full of documents, theoretically
transmitted to her either through her own automatic writing, or
something historical, which she gave to Lynn Townsend White- -who
incidentally was not related to the Stewart Edward Whites. Lynn
White was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman. He became the
president of Mills College and a very renowned scholar of medieval
literature. I'm just mentioning that in passing; spiritualism was
14
part of my mother's makeup.
Riess: When was this?
Newhall: It was in the twenties. She felt she had to give it up because
physically, I think, she felt it was draining her energy. I cannot
in any way tell you anymore than just superficially. I was aware of
this and observed it to a certain extent. It was something that
people didn't talk about. Psychic phenomena were not a subject for
serious discussion in the supposedly glittering levels of polite
society in the 1920s and '30s.
Riess: Yes. It sounds like one had to be outwardly very normal in that
society.
Newhall: This spiritualism seemed to be quite normal to me. What the devil!
If my mother said there was something to it, it was good enough for
me. I didn't argue one way or another.
Guests to Sunday Lunch
Riess: Did you all dine together as a family?
Newhall: Yes. After we were about eight years old, more or less, we would
all eat together normally. Otherwise, we had a separate dining room
for the children. As youngsters we would eat there. And be served
ahead of time. On Sundays, even quite young, we could come to the
dinner table or the luncheon table.
The Sunday lunch I recall as a charming occasion. I loved it
because we had all these brilliant, garish, wonderful, strange
people who would come to dine with us. And they were strange!
For example, my favorite guest of all time was a Chinese actor,
very famous, Mr. Mei Lan Fan. Chinese actors then played the part
of the female, and he played the female part. And there always
seemed to be a piano teacher at Sunday lunch. And there were always
two or three Korean missionaries, Presbyterian missionary students,
or a couple of clergymen or a bishop would come. At Sunday lunch
we'd play host to about ten or twelve, maybe a few more guests
sometimes.
I will tell you a story- -it has always stuck with me. It was
one Sunday lunch. We'd gone to church, and came home. On the back
porch the Chinese cook was there making ice cream for everybody.
(We always had a Chinese cook, that is until my mother hired a
Filipino cook because he had been on the Filipino Davis Cup team and
was going to teach me tennis.)
15
We'd come driving up from church and I would ask, "Who is
coming to lunch today?" I just loved it. The lunches and the
guests were glorious and bizarre. I had to learn my manners there.
There was usually a visiting daughter or son from some family far
away. My father had business negotiations, investments and so on in
the Hawaiian Islands and in London, Shanghai or Hong Kong. These
people would come to see us and sometimes with great good luck, a
beautiful daughter would come through, too. That was great.
But I remember this time some poor clergyman, a wandering hedge
priest of some denomination- -we were all eating away at a well-
spread table when from under him, just like an accordion, his chair
collapsed. And he lay flat on his back with a mouth full of salad.
I began to laugh because I had no manners! Every glued joint on the
chair had come apart. This was the funniest damn thing, and I
couldn't understand why my mother was telling me, "Don't do that.
Stop laughing. It's awful." This is where, I guess, one learned,
as I say, to a certain extent, how to behave.
My mother's brother--! hope I'm not really wandering too much,
but I wanted to get this down- -his name was Will, William Anderson
Scott III, or junior. I mentioned that my mother's family had been
quite poor. Well, Uncle Will had taken to the bottle also, and he
just pulled out and disappeared. He went into a retreat from the
family. After some years he finally showed up again. I don't think
he was drinking any more , and he had married a Swedish woman who was
a good soul. She loved me, and I loved her. We had a very close
relationship. This was Aunt Mildred, and she was absolutely a
Swedish mama, of sorts, not from the highest levels of Swedish
society, I can assure you.
Getting back to Sunday lunch, Aunt Mildred and Uncle Will would
come over from San Francisco about once a month or so, and sit down
to Sunday lunch. Aunt Mildred was one to speak her mind, and I
didn't realize it then, but she usually fortified herself for this
"high-toned" company by taking a quick nip from the sherry decanter.
I mentioned earlier that we had this great Chinese actor as a guest.
He was the John Barrymore of the Peking theater, or Shanghai, and he
didn't speak any English- -fortunately. So, Mr. Mei just sat there,
and he had an interpreter from the Chinese consulate sitting next to
him. Aunt Mildred was there and everybody was talking to Mr. Mei.
My father said, "Now be sure and call him Mr. Mei, don't call him
Mr. Lan or Mr. Fan."
All of a sudden, in one of these silences, Aunt Mildred piped
up- -and there must have been at least ten of us at the table that
time because it was a pretty busy table she said, "You know, Anna,
my father always taught me that you can't trust a Jap. You can
trust a Chink, but you can't trust a Jap." My God! If you can
imagine what happened after that! I began to laugh because I didn't
16
know it was anything too bad.
In any case I don' t think the Chinese interpreter could have
made any sense with a translation of Aunt Mildred's casual
commentary .
After lunch I asked my mother, "Well, what was wrong?" She
explained it to me. I have never had to have it explained to me
again. You asked me a question about what we were told about
interracial behavior and public behavior. Race, color, creed,
ethnic derivation and whatever, it made no difference as far as my
mother was concerned. By God, you were going to obey that unwritten
law. Now, one can say that this may be, again, noblesse oblige. I
learned my lesson there, and I believed it. I still do, but I find
good manners difficult sometimes .
From Riches to Bankruptcy
Riess: Did your father like what he did? What did he do?
Newhall: I don't know if he liked it. Yes, I could tell you a couple of
little stories about that. My father was an importer and exporter,
what they used to call a "capitalist," which term is currently
obsolete. My great-grandfather had come out to San Francisco and
had been an auctioneer, a rancher, and his sons incorporated the
Newhall Land and Farming Company. Then my father and a great-uncle
of mine were partners in something called H.M. Newhall and Company,
which was an importing-exporting firm. My father just assumed that
was going to be his life, but he had always wanted to be an
entrepreneur .
They got really quite rich. They did very well during World
War I. But from then on everything was downhill, so the brothers
began spending their capital.
My father wanted to do well, and so he would take an occasional
plunge; in fact, quite often. One of those occasions he decided to
go into the quicksilver mining business in Lake County.
My mother also took an interest in bettering the condition of
our fellow citizens who happened to be in prison. She said, "Now,
Aimer, if you are going to go into the mining business, if you are
going to have a smelter up there, please will you see if you can't
make arrangements to take on either parolees, or people who are let
out of prison in order to work under supervision?" "Certainly, Anna
darling." He never quarreled.
I used to go up with him to those quicksilver mines, and
17
everything went fine until we arrived one day and the superintendent
of the mine was barricaded in one house; the parolees, or whoever
they were, the jailbirds, were barricaded in the other; and the
prisoners had the guns and ammunition. There was this occasional
sporadic fighting. Well, my father somehow was able to get them to
stop shooting.
What had happened was that some of the prison gang had run off
with the quicksilver, but some of them were still there, and they
were fighting it out. He persuaded--! never knew the upshot of it
all --them to stop fighting, and it ended up that he managed to
spirit his superintendent across the border into Mexico at night. I
really don't know what it was all about, but it was one of those
horrible financial disasters that beset my father's entrepreneurial
enterprise.
Another time --$25 ,000 was quite a lot of money at that time --he
went over to Maui in the Hawaiian Islands and bought, on the basis
of a conversation with a friend or advisor of his, a pineapple
plantation, because pineapples were going to be very big and Jim
Dole was starting to flood the world with pineapples. He bought
this wonderful plantation on Maui. The only trouble was, if you
know the Islands at all, it rains on one side and it doesn't rain on
the other side. He bought his on the desert side. Our pineapple
crop never did really materialize, and he lost that.
The third one- -he got into a patent can-opener business, but
unfortunately the steel in the can openers was softer than the tin
cans themselves. But all the time the H.M. Newhall import-export
business kept on rolling.
He liked the sea, as many of my family have, and there was this
old sailing ship down near Los Angeles that was for charter because
the steam and the power vessels had replaced sails. This was in the
middle twenties by this time, and my father thought, well, wind
power was cheaper than steampower, and so he chartered this ship.
He chartered it because I think he had bought a new movie camera,
one of those early sixteen-millimeter cameras, and he wanted
pictures of himself on board sailing up the coast from Los Angeles
to San Francisco. But the trip took so long. He had to have them
put into Monterey, and he got off there.
Well, they finally loaded the ship here in San Francisco and
started with a cargo of wood or lumber for Tahiti, or somewhere in
the South Seas. They got about three days out, and the sheriff
showed up and said, "Look, the lady you chartered this ship from
doesn't own it." It was a hell of a mess. The Coast Guard finally
picked them up in the Islands, brought the ship back. That was the
end of that.
Those are some of the things he did. He did those because of
18
the pure enjoyment of it, and he was an importer and an exporter and
quite successful, actually- -it was quite a noted firm- -for the rest
of his life until he died in 1933. He lost his money, and the firm
was sort of bankrupt at the time .
They had their office in the Newhall Building down at
California and Battery Streets, nice old kind of Georgian brick
building. My father and uncles, great-uncles, were all members of
the Pacific Union Club, so every noon they would walk out of the
Newhall Building on California Street, climb on the California
Street cable car and go up the hill to lunch at the Pacific Union
club and then come down.
They were all very, very, heavy men and they were known in the
financial district as "Guts," "Guts," and "Guts." They said that
the cable car went up the hill at about a thirty degree angle
whenever they got on. The reason I say that they were heavy was
that my father was shorter than I, and he weighed about 275 pounds.
My grandfather was a little taller; he weighed 325 pounds. My Uncle
George weighed in at about 300 pounds . There was a lot of weight
going up California Street on the side of that cable car.
Riess: Up to a certain point your family had a kind of Midas touch.
Newhall: They did very well importing or exporting during the war. My
great-grandfather had been very successful- -Henry Mayo Newhall- -he
started the first railroad here in San Jose and was on a lot of
boards of directors. Then he got into ranching. I don't know
exactly how he made it all. He made, apparently, quite a lot of
money. His progeny were able to disperse it pretty well, too.
Fortunately, the land was not liquid. They were not able to sell
all of it, or I guess that today we all would be darning socks or
something.
19
II SCOTT NEWHALL: FLAMING YOUTH
Reading and Leisure Time
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Did your family read a newspaper regularly?
The Chronicle. They didn't read the Examiner because- -you know, the
feeling about the papers was really very high in those days.
Hearst's was the working man's newspaper and so on and so forth.
One just didn't read the Examiner. I don't know anybody who read a
Hearst paper. It was just a bad word. They read the Chronicle.
And the Chronicle was sort of quietly dying, but if you were
respectable, you read the Chronicle . If you believed in ghosts,
you'd read the Examiner. I don't know.
What did you read as a kid?
think?
What were the influential books , do you
Newhall: I couldn't read enough. I remember children are supposed to go to
sleep when they go to bed, and I always had a flashlight. It looked
like a candle, with a little bulb screwed into it for the flame. So
I'd get under the covers, and I'd read until I had to go to sleep.
What did I read? Mostly adventure stories. It wasn't Proust. It
wasn't Tacitus, or it wasn't Vasari.* Mostly adventure stories
involved with pirates or sailing, and I think I read Two Years
Before the Mast for the first time then.
I learned to read on books like the Rover Bovs and Tom Swift
and the Motor Boys. They were the serial books about high adventure
in Mexico or the outback somewhere . I read every one . I loved to
read, but I had to be amused. I didn't like to study. I read until
one of the maids or the governess would come in late at night and
*Referring to interviewer having noticed that Newhall is now reading
Tacitus and Vasari.
20
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall ;
Riess:
Newhall :
say, "Look, knock this off."
Do you think that was the only time that you really would have had
to yourself, and the rest of your life was organized around
activities? Can you picture yourself by yourself much?
No, I loved people. Boy, we always wanted to do something. We had
so much fun. Again, I keep getting back to horses, and from horses
we graduated into buck boards. They were these little four-wheeled
cycle cars with either a motor wheel on the back or a motorcycle
engine in it. Then into cars. I bought my first car when I was
fourteen. That's when you got your license in the 1920s. You
learned to drive when you were about ten.
The activities weren't all that organized,
anything we wanted in the summertime .
We could do
It's not that so much. I think about people who grow up on the West
Coast. There is the cliche that it's a seasonless existence. One
of the things about the seasons on the East Coast is that finally,
ultimately, you are forced to amuse yourself, by yourself. It is
the dead of winter, and you are alone. Mostly, I'm asking were
there ever long periods of time that you had to yourself?
I don't think I read much in the summertime. In the winter I guess
I did most of that reading I was talking about. We were too busy in
the summer. The summer is pretty long here, from about April or May
to October.
It's all pleasure what you have described so far.
Calvinist and have had a life of pure pleasure?
How can you be a
Well, I left the church for the flesh pots, didn't I? [laughter]
Not quite. This version of Calvinism I'm just mentioning was
filtered through some very liberal Presbyterian ministers. They had
a youth club, Good Christian Youth, or some damn thing. There were
always a couple of pretty good-looking girls around the altar rail
back then. But I wasn't involved with altar rail girls at that
time. Our lives were structured to a certain extent. I'm talking
now about the religious and recreation efforts and so on. The
superficialities of religion did not then, or now, ever play any
part in my life. I learned my books of the Bible to get little gold
and silver award pins, and I got all of those. I found it
fascinating. I loved to read some of these Bible stories. But holy
scripture never became a dominant intellectual factor in my life.
I don't mean to have brought it up three times,
system.
It's the value
For whatever it's worth- -the most important sense I have ever
encountered in my life, in terms of its impact on me, and I cannot
21
quote you now what book it comes from in the New Testament,
certainly is the so-called Golden Rule, whether you put it
negatively or positively. "Do unto others as you would have done
unto yourself." That's been totally my governing credo. Or, in
negative terms: "Don't do unto others as you would not have done
unto yourself."
That covers an awful lot of territory,
similar that way, and I can't tell you why.
they call "fair."
My sons are very
They want to be what
Schools
Little Gray School
Riess: What did you want to do? When did you start being conscious of
being a person with an option, choices? Can you think about
yourself that way?
Newhall: I didn't know. I'm sure I wanted to emulate my father.
Riess: Business would have been all right?
Newhall: It might have been inevitable. My father went to Yale. I went
through school, and I was accepted by Yale. Fortunately, the
Depression came along. When I was first asked the question "What do
you want to do in life?" I was a junior in one of the prep schools I
went to. The master asked each one of us in the class, "What is it
you aim for? What do you want to do?"
I was a snotty little kid, so I said, "I want to retire."
That's the way I behaved. That was my first option. Because I
enjoyed life. I did. Life was such a marvelous experience, the
life that I lived. Why did I want to put myself in either handcuffs
or a straight- jacket when I could have the whole world as a
playground? I suppose that if things hadn't worked out differently,
I would have died of alcoholism by the time I was thirty. I haven't
gotten into that. From the time I was fourteen, on up to twenty, I
did more drinking than a great many people do in a lifetime.
Riess: Is this what accounts for your problems in school and the
delinquency? Tell me about going to school.
Newhall: I started out in the Little Gray School which was on Fifth Street in
San Rafael, next to an old mansion there --the Katherine Branson
School for girls moved into that mansion in San Rafael in the early
twenties. But I went to what was called the Little Gray School. On
22
the way to school the chauffeur would stop and we would pick up
Caroline Roddin and Mary Katherine Zook, two of our friends'
children. We would go to the Little Gray School and do our studies.
Incidentally, those two girls were very, very smart, and probably
beautiful. I was a perfectly good student. I never went to the
Branson School as such. My younger brother did, but I was a little
older than that.
Mount Tamalpais Military Academy
Newhall: From there I went to the Mount Tamalpais Military Academy in San
Rafael where my father had graduated. Mount Tamalpais Military
Academy was kind of a spin-off from World War I. Major Vanderbilt
and Major Kirk ran the school. I loved that school. I was a very
bad boy in a sense. At first, I studied pretty hard, and I always
won the drill downs, which was the way you handled your rifle. And
I admired the big boys. My brother Aimer played the trombone in the
band. I just wanted to be a big boy. I was there through the
seventh grade. So that would have been fifth, sixth, seventh
grades. I did pretty well.
H
Newhall: The Mount Tamalpais Military Academy and all those early schools I
went to, there was always a master or two who might be a little odd.
They'd always say, "He was shell-shocked in the war." I never knew
quite what that meant. I suppose they call it psychoneurosis now
in the Second World War generations .
I admired that school. As I say, I misbehaved a good deal
because generally, if I couldn't be the best, I might as well be the
worst. Anything as long as they used my name. The teachers would
administer corporal punishment more or less by throwing chalk or
blackboard erasers at selected student targets. If some of us were
cheeky or soldiering, they lobbed a few projectiles at us . I had no
objection because when I was the target I deserved it.
They'd sometimes hit us with rulers. I don't know if they were
supposed to or not. I learned a lot that way. It was not as bad as
an English public school.
Riess: Do you mean people who are dumb should be hit?
Newhall: No. They had many kids from well-to-do families, and some of them
would be sitting there on their butts doing nothing. One of the
teachers might say, "Look, stupid, I'm not going to waste my time on
you," and maybe crack him one. I am not talking about some student
who was simply retarded. No one was hit simply on account of that.
23
It was when we were not living up to what we could do that they'd
let us have a whiff of grape.
I was never smacked unless I deserved it. One of our military
academy teachers used to come climbing over rows of desks to get
some guy in the back who was being too smart or recalcitrant and
he'd get him, too. No one objected to it, including the kid.
[laughter]
In these sensitive days, in the 1980s, if you send some rotten
little kid to school, and if a teacher dares to lay a hand on him,
his parents will be down there, and they're going to start suing the
school for pain and suffering and the invasion of privacy and the
violation of civil rights and all this crap.
Riess: Did you wear uniforms?
Newhall: Yes. At Mount Tamalpais we certainly did.
The penalties they passed out were what they would call
"marching trail." You'd have to get a rifle on your shoulder and
walk around the parade ground. I ran up so many hours of trail that
when I finally left school I still owed them about two hundred hours
of marching. I loved it. I loved the school. I admired the
seniors. They had a great baseball team.
The best day for gossip we ever had in that school was the day
one of the Chinese cooks was caught making immoral advances to one
of the boarding students. I was not a boarding student; I was a day
student. That kept us going for weeks, talking about the assault
and battery crisis in Foster Hall.
Riess:
Newhall:
A male cook?
Yes. These things happen. Everybody recovered from it. I don't
know if they sent him back to China or shot him. I think he lost
his job, and I hope so because the pancakes they made in the school
at that place were so bad that you could take them and squeeze them
up in your hand and use them in the handball court. This is true,
literally. [laughter]
Tamalpais School for Boys
Newhall: When I left that school, I really didn't want to go. I begged my
parents not to take me out of the school. They wanted to send me to
the Tamalpais School for Boys. My father and a group of San
Francisco "capitalists" decided they wanted an English public
school.
24
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
There were two military schools in San Rafael: Mount Tamalpais
Military Academy and Hitchcock Military Academy. Mount Tamalpais
was where I went. My best friends were there. Hitchcock was
unspeakable as far as we were concerned. Then in the late 1920s the
two military academies were merged and what was originally Hitchcock
became a West Coast version of an English public school.
I didn't want to go there. Tamalpais Military Academy was an
all-male school where real men went. Nobody ate quiche there,
[laughter] The Tamalpais School for Boys was all quiche, although
they hadn't invented that then. So I went there for three years.
It was right at the foot of our hillside home in San Rafael. My
father had put money into it, got it organized or helped to get it
started. A great many of my old friends in San Francisco went
there. You make a lot of friends in school. My experience there
was okay.
When you say "friends in San Francisco,
boarding students?
do you mean that they were
Yes. I happened to be a day student. I was right next door and
never bothered to board. A lot of guys from Burlingame, San
Francisco, Hillsborough, Atherton, and out in the Sacramento Valley
and San Joaquin Valley and so forth lived at the school.
That was in part the point of those schools, the beginning of an
"old boy" prep school network.
Exactly. Then everybody was going to Yale or Harvard- -take your
choice. That was it. I learned quite a lot at Tamalpais, but I got
to playing too much golf.
I have a very good personal friend from San Rafael whose name
is Harry Johnson. He had been a day student at Hitchcock, and I met
him on the playing fields at Hitchcock. When I was a kid, we were
up there playing some touch tackle football. He did something to my
younger brother. We had a hell of a fight. He was bigger and
heavier and probably faster than I. He gave me a bad beating. We
have been absolutely inseparable friends ever since. He's still
alive, and either one of us is afraid the other will die because it
will be a grave omen for the other one's future. I don't know how
we're going to work it out in the end.
Webb School
Newhall: Harry Johnson and I got to fooling around when we were at Tamalpais
together. We liked to play golf. Instead of reporting for
25
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess :
Newhall :
afternoon classes or for afternoon activities, we would go out to
the Marin Golf and Country Club and play golf --every day of the
year. We got into a lot of trouble, and our parents, with the
cooperation of the school authorities, decided that it would be
better for each one of us if we went to different schools, and
neither one of us stayed at Tamalpais.
I went away to the Webb School for Boys down south in Claremont
in Los Angeles County. Harry went to the Dean School in Santa
Barbara. I lasted a year at Webb. Do you want me to go into the
school thing?
Yes.
Webb was kind of a horsey school. The headmaster was Thompson Webb,
Dr. Webb, a very nice man from Tennessee whose father Chauncey Webb
had started the Webb School for Boys in Bell Buckle, Tennessee.
This new Webb School in California was a boarding school and small,
about a hundred kids, more of them from southern California than
northern California.
This was 1928, just before the Depression. There were a lot of
unhappy rich kids at Webb from places like Beverly Hills, Pasadena,
Orange Grove, Hancock Park. It was okay. I liked all my
schoolmates wherever I went, and I did all right.
Why "unhappy rich boys?'
identify them?
In retrospect, that's how you would
There were problem boys there, too. I never considered myself an
"unhappy rich boy." There were a lot of sons there of these strange
and booming new southern California communities. A lot of new
money- -that' s what I would describe it as now.
Are you serious when you say that if you couldn't be the best, you
would just as soon be the worst?
I think that's what I did. I would usually start out and I'd be the
head of the class. I'd get straight "A's" usually. Then I'd get
into too much tennis, and pretty soon it would slip. Then, as I got
down into the "C's," I couldn't stand it. So then pretty soon, I
was down to straight "F's." It was a pattern, I'm afraid. I did
that at Mount Tamalpais. I guess I did it at Tamalpais because I
preferred to play golf instead of studying. I had to repeat ray
sophomore year at Webb.
26
Lawrenceville
Newhall: My father had gone back to Yale for his twenty-fifth reunion. We
came back through the canal, and made the voyage on board one of
these big old liners, the old Mongolia this time. Some people from
Los Angeles who were on board told my mother and father about the
Webb School. That's why I went to Webb. They accepted me. Then,
somehow, I guess, my report cards began to fall badly, and at the
end of the year some friends visiting us at Bolinas suggested that
my parents send me to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Some
people were pushing that. Everybody was trying to help Aimer and
Anna decide what to do with Scott. And so I went back to New Jersey
to the Lawrenceville Academy. %
Riess: Propping for Princeton?
Newhall: Right. It was all very different. The East Coast can be cold and
miserable for wide-open, lazy California kids. The winter was so
cold, and I behaved terribly. But Lawrenceville had thirty-five
tennis courts there, and I used to love tennis, really I did.
I wired my room up- -the headmaster would come around and see if
everybody was asleep, and the masters switched off our room lights
at night- -but I wired up my room to the fire escape light in the
hall outside my door, and connected the wires so that if the door
opened the lights would go out. If you closed the door the lights
inside would go back on. But word got around the house and the
masters found out about it. I just was a non- conformist.
The headmaster was taking all these visitors through school
there one day, and gee, there was the whole student body out looking
at this prize fight I promoted between two of the black house boys .
(It was a good school. You had house boys and cooks and waiters,
that kind of thing. The staff even made your bed for you. I think
it's shocking.) So then a fellow from Colorado, Amos Sudler, Jr.,
and I caught the southbound Interurban and went down to Philadelphia
and then went on down to Maryland- -we ran away from school. The
headmaster let us come back.
One day when spring had just started, and the windows were
open, and I could hear a saxophone being played out in the porch, we
had to go to a school assembly. Mather A. Abbott was the
headmaster's name. I walked in a little late for the assembly. All
the guys --we were all buddies in that school --put their legs out in
the aisle, and to get to my seat down the aisle I had to go over all
their legs. I stood back and I said, "Make way for King Newhall."
They put their legs down. I just started in.
Well, the headmaster got up and he let me have it- -you can't
believe! He threw me out of school- -boom- -right there. He said,
27
Rless:
Newhall:
"You get out of here Newhall, right now.
tonight, and don't ever come back here."
Lawrenceville .
So he had to break your spirit?
And you get the train
So that's the way I left
I don't know. He was an older guy. Dr. Abbott wasn't flexible
enough. Lawrenceville wasn't ready for California yet. [laughter]
I came out and finished up that year at San Rafael High School,
and then for my senior year I went back to the Webb School for Boys'
again. I won four block letters in sports, and that was the best
thing that ever happened. I thought, "Man, I'm on the way." And
then I got in on the bootlegging business. The headmaster found out
about it, and I voluntarily left school in the dark of the night
just two weeks before graduation. Every time it was this cycle like
that. I learned a great deal.
'Old Dad" Against the School
Riess: You didn't choose the easy way.
Newhall: No, it just happened. As far as I was concerned, there was no
choice. I just did it. A lot of what I am saying is twenty- twenty
hindsight as to motivations. I was sixteen then.
Riess: You were very competitive?
Newhall: Very. In my way. Football, baseball, basketball, tennis, and pole
vaulting. I didn't win a fifth letter because at a luncheon before
the All-Valley Championship--! never went out for track, ever; I did
a lot of swimming- -the sports coach asked, "Anybody here know how to
pole vault?" I never pole-vaulted in my life. I had once in back
of the house tried a bamboo pole. I offered to carry the flag for
Webb because they needed a pole vault for the team. I tied for
third place in the All-Valley Championship. I thought that was
pretty good. I probably went all of five or six feet. It was
funny .
Riess: You really took the tennis seriously?
Newhall: I loved it. I was going to be the world's greatest tennis player.
I did not succeed.
Riess: What do you think your best talents were then?
Newhall: None. I felt I could do anything I wanted to do. I was motivated
to try everything. Music was a tremendous part of my life. I was a
28
lousy musician. I loved motors, cars, racing, tennis, golf --very
physical, a lot of it.
Riess: Did you sail on the bay?
Newhall: We lived in the water, starting with Bolinas. Everybody either had
a boat or a canoe or a raft or some such aquatic contraption. We
lived on the water, and we had parties, and we'd go out duck
shooting. It was an amphibious life. When I was very small,
because my Greatuncle Arthur owned the Northwestern Pacific, we used
to go on Sunday- -he'd get the whole family, the Scotts and some of
the Newhalls, and our other friends- -we'd go out for picnics in the
big bay ferry boats. He owned all these Sausalito-San Francisco
ferry boats that went back and forth.
It was an enchanting, privileged life. I say it very frankly.
I usually am quite embarrassed to talk about it. I don't think many
other children enjoyed such a grand opportunity for simple pleasure.
We did not have this big disciplinary life that a lot of the English
had. We ran free.
Riess: When you were back at Lawrenceville , you really felt different as a
Californian?
Newhall: They have a house system there, the quad, around which stood
different houses of about forty to forty- five kids apiece. This was
a big school with about five hundred of us. Most of the schools out
here in California had a hundred to a hundred- fifty students. I was
in Dickinson House at Lawrenceville. The first night we all had to
get up and introduce ourselves .
When we were finished the housemaster said, "Well, do you young
men have any questions?" And so a snotty kid from the upper New
York East Side- -Barney-something- -got up and said, "I'd like the
fellow from California to stand up. I've never seen one." There I
was. So it was good old Scott against the school. It was about an
even balance. I had them all in line in about three or four weeks,
[laughter]
Riess: You were that much of a personality?
Newhall: No. Actually at all my schools we all got along pretty well. Look,
I really loved all my housemates at all schools. (One poor little
guy at Webb I scared to death with a dirty trick by sending a ghost
to visit him in the middle of the night. I have always regretted
that.) Of the kids I have known in school, I can't think of any I
didn't really like. Some I am very close to, but others not so
close. They accepted me pretty fast because we got along, and I was
always pretty active in sports.
Riess: Whom did you most admire then?
29
Newhall: My parents, I guess.
Riess: You talked about your older brother.
Newhall: My brother, yes. But I also admired the lifestyle of Harry
Johnson's older brother. He had a lot of money and drank too much.
Drinking and Driving
Riess: Talk about the drinking. You started drinking when you were
fourteen? Secretly?
Newhall: This was during Prohibition, and my family did not drink. They
never served hard liquor. I never saw my father take a drink. I
don't think he did. He used to go away to the Bohemian Club for
three weeks every year, and he did say once, "Well, there is nothing
like a good old-fashioned cocktail." So I guess maybe up there he
had a drink or two. He was not interested in alcohol, however. He
didn't need to be.
My mother didn't do any drinking at all. Her father's
alcoholism had been too unhappy for her. So my days with drinking
were just rebellion. Again, the guilt deal.
Drinking became very stylish during Prohibition. You get the
F. Scott Fitzgerald scenario the Great Gatsby and all these people
around dancing the Charleston. Jesus, I was brought up winning
Charleston cups! Drinking- -they used to call it flaming youth. We
all tried to live up to this. Drinking was quite an escape. I
don't know anything about cocaine or any of the other fashionable
late twentieth century narcotics. I never got into that.
I admired some of the older boys. My brothers and cousins
amused themselves with a lot of drinking at the country clubs ,
social clubs, and I admired them. I wanted to be a raconteur, a
boulevardier , bon vivant. Out at the Marin Club, I took a couple of
gin fizzes. I think Bill Johnson, my friend's older brother, we
were all sitting around the locker room. I would feel the effects
of it. I'm an alcoholic in that I tend to go out of my mind when I
drink. I normally love people, but when I drink, I love them more.
Even more !
I quit drinking, by the way, when I was twenty-one. Then I
took it up again a little in World War II, and found that, uh oh, I
still can't handle old Demon Rum. Then I quit forever. But before
that I couldn't stop drinking because I was having such a good time
30
spending money. We'd go traveling. We'd hire a plane and fly to
Bolinas and land in the sand strip there on the beach. It was a
kind of carbon copy of the lost generation after World War I. It
was clever, I thought.
I'd come over to San Francisco for an evening of gaiety.
During the winter there were "assemblies" or debutante balls. I'd
get a cab driver, go to a speak-easy and get a couple of bottles of
gin or whiskey, and we'd be off.
My first appearance in print in the San Francisco Chronicle was
an occasion that occurred during the coming-out ball of Jane Henley,
Ben Henley's sister--he was a school-mate of mine at Tamalpais--at
the St. Francis Yacht Club. I'd go to a party and I'd hop up on the
bandstand--! think I mentioned that I loved music and used to know a
lot of musicians --and I'd grab the megaphone and give the dancers a
couple of horrible choruses of whatever they were playing, "Baby
Face" or "Me and My Shadow" or something like that. I was
impossible.
That night I went down to a place called Joe Finocchio's. (It
eventually became Finocchio's on Broadway.) It was right at the
Union Square side of the Stockton Street tunnel, the third floor,
Joe Finocchio's bootlegger speak- easy. I left the party and went up
there, and I had a few gin fizzes. He had a very famous pink gin.
It was horrible stuff. A friend of mine, "Dukie" Moore, was with
me. We got a couple of pint flasks of pink gin. I was all of
fifteen.
I jumped in my car which my father had very sweetly given to
me. It was a Model A Ford roadster- -nobody could afford Packards or
Mercedes any more. I had a siren in the car, which you are not
supposed to have, and spotlights. I got in the car, and we roared
down Chestnut Street with the siren wide open. "Here comes Scott,
the great Scott." But then who should come out of the side street
and directly into our line of flight but another car, and I hit him.
I rolled over two or three times.
I said, "Dukie, are you alive? Are you all right?" He said,
"Yes, I'm fine." He had blood on him, but he was all right. I
said, "Hey, we've got to get rid of the evidence." We opened the
back and got these bottles out and began to bust them on the fender.
Up came the police. The horrible thing about it was that it
happened to be an off-duty police car I'd run into. I was in pretty
bad shape by this time. They dragged me down to the Marina Station
and booked me .
My father came down to get me. This poor man. You talk about
guilt. Me, I didn't care, but I felt that what I'd done to him was
something fierce. That's why I had all this guilty conscience and
depression. He dragged me home. I was sick all over the floor of
31
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
the police station. It was a very unpleasant scene, I promise you.
He got Judge Zook, who was Mary Katherine Zook's father, and
they took me down to the courtroom of Judge Sylvan Lazarus . He was
a fine gentleman, indeed, because he heard all of the evidence, and
he said, "All right. This is a terrible thing you've done. Don't
you do it again. I'm going to put you on probation." He let me go,
and the poor policeman with whom I had collided said, "But Judge,
aren't you going to do anything to this man?" He said, "Yes, I'll
take his license away." So I gave him my license and left.
The next day a voice came on the phone. "Newhall?" I said,
"Yes." He said, "Look, this is the police department. We don't
know what to do with your license. Will you come down and get it
before we lose it?" So I went down and got my license. You can see
what a bizarre environment I was living in. How can anybody survive
this kind of nonsense? I'm telling this story with no trimmings,
and I have never forgotten it. You will find this first item in any
file the Chronicle has on me --where Scott Newhall, the son of Aimer
Newhall, former president of the Chamber of Commerce, was arrested
for drunk driving.
I'd drink. I went to Europe one time--in 1932.
You're still so young in all of this.
Well, I was in a hurry.
I can't understand how the years get so compressed there between
1921 and 1932.
I guess we really lived pretty fast. The timing is pretty accurate.
You see, I was married when I was nineteen. It was the beginning of
my sophomore year. By nineteen, Ruth and I went to Europe in the
summertime. I was trying not to do any drinking --went over on an
old freighter. This was before we were married.
Lost Weekend in Paris
Newhall: I wanted to see the Davis Cup matches in France. We were in London.
So we got on one of these big, old Handley-Page "Hannibals"--they
were huge, absolutely enormous old planes, seventy miles an hour--
and flew over to Paris. They had an open bar on these planes, and
by the time we got to Paris I was all loaded for bear, whatever the
bear was. That's about the last thing I can remember. The Davis
Cup games were going to start the next day at Roland Garros stadium.
I remember I ran into a bellboy on the way to the rooms. He said,
"Do you want to see Paris?" I said, "It sounds good to me."
32
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
I woke up, and Ruth wasn't in her room. I said, "I wonder
where Ruth is?" She'd left word that she had gone to another hotel.
I called her and said, "Well, we've got to get to the Davis Cup
matches." She was pretty frosty and snapped, "What do you mean?
They are almost over." And she was quite right. While I was
drinking my way through the bistros of Paris , two days of Davis Cup
matches had been completed. That year in 1932 the Australians were
playing the Japanese in one of the final rounds, and there was only
one more match to play left that afternoon. I said to Ruth, "Okay,
come on, we'll go." And we did, but anyway I lost two and one -half
days.
I have only one or two memories of it still. I remember coming
out of the sewer in Paris into a fancy jewelry shop on the Champs
Elysee. That's about all I can remember because I was headed for
Harry's American Bar. That was the last thing I can remember.
Alcohol had become a major problem. I don't know if you've ever had
the experience of passing out, but it's terrible, terrible.
When I got back, we were married, but I feared our marriage was
going to break up. So I went to a psychiatrist for about six months
or a year, and I pretty well got off of it. [laughs] I can give you
chapter and verse on some of this Freudian psychiatry. Our marriage
survived, but the psychiatrist who managed to cement our
relationship ended up getting a divorce. Anyway, it worked out
fine.
He was Freudian?
I guess so. It was psychotherapy.
Was he someone that you found on your own?
My mother did, or some friends of hers. I was still, you know,
playing at the part of a "son" or "husband." I didn't want to lose
my marriage. I never wanted to lose Ruth, so I would have done
anything.
Alcohol was a tremendously important factor in the lives of
most of my colleagues , no matter how many of them will try to deny
it. Most of them drank, a few didn't. Many, many, of my friends,
and old-time friends, have died from alcohol or drugs, or it has
ruined their lives.
Riess: Are you talking about the newspaper world?
Newhall: Socially. The newspaper- -that 's a different phase of drinking.
There is a lot of drinking there but a little bit different.
33
The Social Strait 1acket##
Newhall: Many, many women I know who were from that same general environment,
or world culture have been bright and well-educated and totally
frustrated because they have had to be wives. That's the way it
was. Many, many of them turned to alcohol- -perhaps equally
devastating drugs --and have either died or are just living on
borrowed time, pretty well sedated with alcohol or some other
equally gaudy chemicals. This was, I think, tragic, because many of
the social friends I have known were bright, bright women. They
never had a shot at a job or serious career.
I know one girl. I say "girl" --she was a girl then. (Ruth
says I'm never to use the word, "girl," but too bad.) Her life was
saved because she came to work at the paper when I was the editor of
This World. She came from a distinguished family. It opened up a
whole new world to her. It wasn't a particularly happy world, but
it's a totally different experience from just having to be a hostess
for some husband and go to a party or entertain- -which was the life
that many of these people led!
Much of my exploration and experimentation was an effort to
avoid a certain aspect of the life that either my family or my
friends were getting into. That was this straightjacket of the
social order of San Francisco society. I don't know how else to
describe it. I just absolutely, physically almost, had to turn and
shut the door on the social fast lane. I think it is impossible to
live this life where you go duck hunting in the duck season and
grouse shooting in the grouse season, and you go down for the Santa
Anita Handicap for the races ,
and you go somewhere else for the
Kentucky Derby and where you know exactly where you are going to be
year after year by the calendar, and there is no time left for free
living and roaming around.
There are other things in life than entertaining or being
entertained at a country club. I think women have a better shot at
a real career now. The next generation of these same people I am
talking about have almost all got college degrees now. They may
turn to alcohol--who knows but at least the women have a chance to
go somewhere and do something rather than just sit home and wait for
a husband.
Riess: So your mother's spiritualism you might think of in those terms?
Newhall: Maybe. My mother never lived that kind of life. She always had
something going. In my early life, at fourteen or fifteen there was
nothing but alcohol for another six or seven years.
Riess: You were really throwing yourself away.
34
Newhall: I didn't know what I wanted at all. For whatever it is worth, just
as a generalization, that was the way I eventually got into the
newspaper business. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I was
afraid to meet people. I may sound very assertive or assured, but I
was terribly insecure in a way. I said, "Well, Scott, why not go to
work at a newspaper. You'll meet all kinds of people, all kinds of
businesses, and you'll decide what it is you want to do with your
life or your career. Incidentally, I may find out what it is I want
to do." And I stayed in the newspaper world ever since.
Alaska Cruise with the Stewart Edward Whites
Riess: You decided to go to Cal and chose art as a major, but was there any
earlier manifestation of the art interest?
Newhall: Well, one of the most important years of my life was after I
departed the Webb School. I worked in a wholesale drugstore here in
San Francisco, Coffin and Redington: M. Sherwood Coffin was one of
my mother's entouragewe used to call him Uncle Buff--and he had
this wholesale drug firm and put me to work. I went to work there
as a packer and in the chemical laboratory. I had done pretty well
in chemistry in school. So I went there, and I was still drinking.
This is 1929-1930.
Well, I mentioned during her spiritualist role that some of my
mother's closest friends were Betty and Stewart White. He was an
author down in Hillsborough and came from quite a distinguished
family, and Betty came from a marvelous family. And they had no
children. My mother probably told them that poor old Scotty was
having his problems .
Stewart had been a big game hunter, one of the early big game
hunters in Africa. He had explored a lot of Kenya and Tanganyika.
He loved Alaska, and he had a beautiful yacht, eighty-eight foot
yacht- -Kuru was the name of It. We went down to his Hillsborough
home for dinner one night --It was when I was working at the
drugstore- -and Betty turned to me and said, "How would you like to
come on a cruise through the Alaska Inside Passage with us?"
Well I jumped for joy. I never heard such a delightful thing
and I immediately accepted. I think it was a put-up job, but anyway
she said, "Oh, marvelous, because we have never had any youngsters
or children, and we'd like it." I joined them in Seattle in early
June. The Kuru wasn't exactly palatial, but it was very
comfortable. It had the owners' quarters astern and then a couple
of guest suites amidships and then they had an engineer and a cook.
The five of us went cruising from Seattle up through the Inside
35
Passage beyond Juneau, and then we were going out to Kodiak Island
to make photographs of the Kodiak bears.
Stewart White didn't shoot animals anymore. He made movies of
them. He was a remarkable man, remarkable. And Betty was the
warmest, most charming woman I ever knew except for my mother- -very
similar actually. She was very active in the spiritualist thing
too. That cruise saved my life, seriously, I think, though I didn't
quit drinking yet. I loved it. I was deckhand, guest and
quartermaster. I used to keep the teak decks clean, and I stood
watch at the wheel most of the time.
Southeastern Alaska--! don't know whether you have ever been up
there- -is the most beautiful sort of temperate zone jungle you can
imagine. There is nothing but the virgin world around you. There
were very few boats then. This was 1930. You might see another
stray yacht or a fishing boat each day. We'd anchor at a cove every
night, or in a little bay, and there were crabs to catch and clams
to dig. And we could go out with a lasso, or shovel or pitchfork,
and just grab a salmon. There are trout in the streams and halibut
in the bays. I don't know how many people have had this experience.
While I was there on board, I had the evenings to myself. We'd
play a lot of cribbage . I learned to navigate, or at least to
pilot, and quite a lot about seamanship. We went out to Sitka,
which was very isolated then and more or less Russian and empty.
Southeastern Alaska was just totally empty in 1930. Maybe it still
is.
In the library on board the Kuru there was a book, by Sylvanus
Morley I think it was, on the Mayan Indian anthropological
investigations in Yucatan, and another account about digging in
Chichen-Itza by, I think, an archeologist's wife, Ann Morris, or
something like that, and another book on modern art by somebody in
which the author covered the Impressionists or early Expressionists.
On board the Kuru I experienced my first excitement with painters
like Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, Modigliani, Matisse, Van Gogh and the
twentieth century new wave of artists.
I was enchanted by the Mayan Indians and exploring and digging
and so on in Central America. So that became to me this fantasy,
this dream. Art- -I have never forgotten it because I used to try to
paint a few pictures and carve some stuff. So I came back from the
cruise and then I went to school. My mother talked to Mr. Webb, and
he was a very fine gentleman. He wrote a letter to the people over
at Berkeley that although I didn't exactly have a diploma, I had
amassed more than enough credits for college entry. They took me on
at UC. They let me go to school there.
I thought, "Well, what do I know nothing about?" and I guess it
was art. At UC, along with art courses, you could take anything you
36
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
wanted to in Letters and Science. I had to join a fraternity.
What's that mean, "What do I know nothing about?"
Well, some area where I'd had no experience, and that was art.
You might have said, "Well, what do I know something about?"
Well, I still was trying to explore the world. I had to know
everything.
So your ego was very much intact. It's not like you were coming in
the back door.
What, at Cal? I was a big shot. Come on, I always am--the "King."
[laughter] No, no, look, I'm fooling you a little. No, I had some
friends there, one officer or another of the deans. My mother knew
a lot of people, and I was the eighteenth member of my mother's
family to join the Zeta Psi fraternity. It wasn't that I was coming
in as if I had a cloud over my head. They were lucky to get me,
come on, sort of. Look, it isn't that bad.
In fact you could have gone to Yale, you said.
I had been accepted at Yale, at Cal, and at one other university- -
whatever I sent my papers to. I don't think it was Harvard.
Anyway, three schools --Stanford, Yale, Cal. No, I didn't send
anything into Cal.
After all, one should remember that the University of
California was a public school. I mean, in the American sense of
the word going to Cal was like going to Public School Number Ten in
Cleveland, from my point of view. It wasn't until later I learned
that it was the most renowned academic center in the world, and it
still is.
That was a fine voyage with the Stewart Edward Whites.
That was tremendously important,
another life-saving experience.
It really was. Again, it was
Did you take trips with your family?
I never went out in the Pacific or to the Orient with them, but my
father- -being a Yale alumnus was very important to him because all
his family had gone there, so he went back to his tenth and then his
twentieth and then his twenty- fifth class reunions. He took his
whole family back to both the twentieth and the twenty- fifth.
When our family was crossing the country we must have been
something like Attila the Hun with his impediments, all these
37
nomadic people crossing the Asian tundra. We traveled with about
ten or twelve of us because he would take Aunt May who was a Foster
or a Scott relative and "Townie" White [Lynn Townsend White]--!
mentioned him, he became president of Mills- -and Artie Foster, and
Aunt May's son who is a dear friend, and the three of us children.
And then they'd usually take along somebody to help a bit with the
packing and so on. We'd actually be about ten people, and we'd go
to New York.
I didn't go to his Yale class reunion. My father went up to
New Haven by himself. We came back one time by the Panama Canal, a
nice trip. The next time we came back maybe the same way, maybe in
the train. Going back there on the Overland Limited was quite a
thing in itself. It got so where the porters --you know, I'd go to
school back there and other trips and the Pullman porters would
remember you.
I remember when I had to leave Lawrenceville , the sleeping car
porter was a dear man. He said, "Isn't the young gentleman leaving
early this year?" I will never forget that. I said, "Yes, I'm
leaving early." That was all I would say. This was in Chicago.
When I got off the train in Benicia I was so confused I gave him a
$50 bill instead of a tip. That was a lot of money in those days.
Travels with Father
Newhall: My father turned one time to my mother and he said, "Anna, I'm going
to take the boys "--and by that he meant my younger brother and me--
"travelling.
"
A friend of his was this fellow Bill Boeing who built
the airplanes and had a home up in Seattle. He said, "I have to go
up and see Bill, and I think I had better take the boys along so
that I will get to know them better. You've had them all to
yourself.
"
Off we went on the train to Seattle, Hally and I and my father.
We got to Portland, stayed at the Multnomah Hotel, and he hired a
young fellow from the YMCA to come and take care of his sons while
he went out to do his business. This young man in Portland took us
over to visit a couple of huge sailing ships that were tied up on
the river there, and up the mast we went. We had a good time. He
bought us a couple of chocolate milkshakes , which was a rare treat
we thought, and he brought us back. Then we had nothing to do.
We had rooms overlooking the front entrance to the hotel. I
have always encouraged my brother to misbehave while I didn't. We
began filling up paper laundry bags or pillow slips or some kind of
bags and dropping them out of the front window on people as they
38
cane in the hotel. Well, of course, my poor father came in along
with the manager and two or three people, crying, "What the devil is
going on here?" I mean we drove him crazy.
We got to Seattle, and we were pretty good spirited, and he
didn't know what to do with us. Hally and I behaved terribly in
public together. I can't describe it all- -don't remember it all--
but my father was so wonderful . He never hit us or really did much
of anything to discipline us properly.
Then we got on board the Emma Alexander --the old Alexander
ships used to go back and forth up and down the coast. He had
gotten a very fancy suite on board because they had no regular
cabins available. But because my father knew the people who owned
the line they put us in the owner's suite up behind the bridge.
Well, we made such a racket on the bridge, including at one point
getting Hally to run in and start blowing the steam whistle, that I
don't think he and anyone on board ship could have stood it very
much longer.
We came back down here, and I remember his telling my mother,
he said, "Anna, you were right, and I was wrong. I don't ever want
to be seen in public with your children again." That was the only
thing he ever said. We were really terrible, terrible. I don't
know what I would have done if Hally and I had been my children. I
probably would have dropped them into the Seattle gutters and left
town- -and let the police handle it.
We went to this very stylish garden party. Everybody was at
the Boeings' place they had a nice estate up there in Seattle--
everybody was done up in his white linen jacket and the two- toned
white shoes. Hally and I knocked over a tray of drinks, I remember,
among other things. We were rough-housing as children theoretically
will. It was just terribly embarrassing for the poor man, and he
never did anything. He should have put us in leg irons and chained
us to the hotel toilet.
Social Teas and Musicales
Riess: Were your parents interested in the Sierra Club or hiking groups?
Newhall: My mother and father would have contributed or supported anything
like that, but they were not particularly involved in hiking
themselves. They weren't all that physical because my father was so
heavy and so on. But at our house she would continually sponsor
everything. She was very active working for this orphanage over in
Marin County, called Sunny Hills. And the Sunny Hills orphanage
sponsored the great Marin County Grape Festival.
39
In Marin County the big thing was the Grape Festival. The best
people set up booths and sold things in the style of a country fair.
Most of the merchandise was nice, harmless, upper middle-class
schlock. My father and Dr. Lynn White, Sr. ran a famous hamburger
stand called Victor and Oscar. Other booths were pushing cakes,
lemonade, throwing baseballs and kissing booths and other such
cultural memorabilia. One year when I was about twelve or thirteen
I organized Ye Olde Curiosity Shop where I set up a display of old
flasks and whiskey bottles I had picked up from time to time on the
Bolinas beach. Please don't ask me to elaborate on this.
My mother was very much involved with her Thursday afternoon
musicales. I was always fascinated to watch the cars drive up the
hill to the front door. They were filled with ladies with white
gloves and white shoes and skirts. Seta Stewart was a Berkeley
woman. She played the piano very well professionally. She'd be
over a lot for these musicales and tea parties. My mother would
also get some sort of reigning oboists or violinsts and or a couple
of other stringed instruments.
If you have ever heard a woman's tea party from a distance it's
like being in the San Diego Zoo- -trapped in the bird house down
there. If you are a young boy upstairs you can't get a word of it,
but there's this distant indistinct chatter that goes on. Anybody
who has heard an afternoon tea party in full cry will never forget
it. I remember coming home, and I'd go up the back stairs and then
listen to this, and then we'd sneak down the stairs to see who all
was there. It was very nice. It was just part of the routine.
In the springtime or Fall in San Rafael my mother used to trot
all of her captive Sunday luncheon guests out for a walk through
Black Canyon to see the wild flowers or the waterfall or whatever it
was. They'd all have to get out and trot along and identify the
birds and the bees and the trees and you name it. I loved it. I
used to go along. You see, I used to go along on a lot of the stuff
with my mother. My father, he wasn't physical. He wouldn't go
walking along- -couldn' t much. I loved it.
Riess: Who was Seta Stewart?
Newhall: Old Mr. Stewart was a Scotsman who settled in Berkeley. He ruled
his family with an iron hand, or iron rod, and he had four daughters
and one son, Roy Stewart. Roy Stewart became a Matson Line captain,
sailing from here out to the Islands and back to get away from the
females. In the end the old gentleman died, and there was the
mother and four sisters, and only one ever married, I believe.
Seta was the musical sister. It was kind of like a Jane Austen
situation, I guess. During World War II, Roy got a ship, he came
back to the sea, but there again he also took to the spirits. So
40
Riess:
Newhall :
along with being a captain he was the black sheep of his family and
drank his way, I think, across the ocean. I'm not quite sure,
[laughter]
Whenever his ship went out in the bay through the Golden Gate
he would come in quite close to Bolinas ,
because the Stewarts would
be among all our guests in Bolinas. And they had this great big
American flag and they would hold it up so that with a spy glass, I
guess, Roy could see it on shore. He'd come in as close as he could
bring one of those ships. He always lifted a flag hoist, and then
he went on his way to the Hawaiian Islands. So that was the big
thing in Bolinas. We'd all have to get out and watch Roy sail his
ship out of the Golden Gate on his way to the Islands. They all had
a good time.
How about the Boeings? You knew the family?
Sure. My father, he knew an awful lot of people, he really did,
some of whom would be sort of part business and part social. Bill
Boeing was a campmate of his, I think, up at the Bohemian Club. I'm
not sure. I'd met him, but I didn't know him; he was much older.
Nevada Tour
Newhall: The greatest trip we ever had with my father and mother- -now that
you mention the trips --was where Governor Scrugham of Nevada invited
us to take a tour of the state. This is in 1925. Nevada then was
all desert- -not just 99 percent desert as it is today. So off we
started, and it was one of the most memorable trips I have ever
made.
There were all dirt roads, maybe a little pavement. We went
all the way down past Fallen, Yerington, Tonapah, Goldfield, Beatty,
Las Vegas. Las Vegas then was literally a cowtown and a railroad
stop to get water, because there is a water table there under the
desert. Of course, there was gambling in Nevada then. Hell, we
kids could gamble if we wanted to, but we didn't have any money.
But the governor was quite a character. He knew everybody in
Nevada--! mean literally. You had to because there were only about
75,000 people in the state then. That's about the number of people
that go to a Cal game now.
Then we went north on the east side of the state to see a state
monument up there, Lehman Caves, limestone caverns they'd just
discovered. We'd camp out some places because there were only these
little ghost towns in Nevada. But once in a while we would stop off
in an old hotel that looked like something from the TV "Bonanza"
41
set. AC the Lehman Caves Rally and I got to fighting in the
governor's tent. He and I and the governor were sleeping there and
we got to fighting and we knocked over the Coleman lantern and set
his tent afire.
This was the kind of people we were- -terrible! Again, it was
memorable. It was a wonderful trip. Artie Foster was along and
Townie White. I mentioned them before.
I was young, but I had a camera with me --somebody had given me
a camera- -and I wanted to get pictures of all old prospectors and
mine shafts and all the wild stuff. At one point someone said,
"There 're some wild horses." So I said, "All right. I'll be back.
Stop." They stopped, and the governor stopped, and I started off
for these wild horses with my little Brownie camera- -it was just a
box- -and I made some pictures of what I thought was going to be a
marvelous scene from a movie of the wild west in the raw.
Then all of a sudden this damn horse put his head up and began
to sniff, and he took a look at me, and I guess it was the stallion
that had all those mares out there, and he started after me. My
God! I turned tail and I began to run and I began to cry, "This
horse is going to kill me!" Townie and Artie, our colleagues,
started after me in the desert. Well, finally the stallion figured
he had me under control and turned around and left.
During the trip I went out hunting for Indian arrowheads for
the first time. Rally and I each found an arrowhead near St.
Thomas, now under water in Lake Mead by southern Nevada. This
started me off on American archaeology or anthropology. Ruth and I
for many years later on used to go up every week and look for
arrowheads in the Humboldt sink near Lovelock. We found thousands
of them- -beautiful --so much fun to look for them. They were lost in
the fire in Piru. They have a record of our collection over at the
Cal anthropology department. Bob Heizer, a friend of ours in the
anthropology department, put together this record of Piute
arrowheads .
Riess: What did "Kuru" mean, do you know?
Newhall: "Kuru" means water buffalo in Swahili. This was the name of Stewart
White's yacht.
One story- -it has no place here, but Stewart White told it.
He'd been over in Africa big game hunting and stuff at Kenya and
Tanganyika. He told me that coming back from one trip he got to New
York- -he'd been three or four months there in Kenya- -they called for
a Red Cap for the train or something, and Stewart said, "I saw there
was a black man standing in front of me and I just automatically
started talking to him in Swahili. And he got down on the ground
and began bowing to me this way." [laughter] This just wouldn't
42
happen today. At least I don't think .so.
Riess: And a bit more on Coffin and Redington?
Newhall: Coffin and Redington was a wholesale drug firm. The Coffin family
name died out here because they had four daughters. By that, I mean
the name disappeared. Young John Redington married one of the
Crocker granddaughters. I can't remember whom- -both of those
families were among those old San Francisco families.
Riess: Your friend "Dukie," what's his whole name?
Newhall: "Dukie" Moore. He was a localite, too. I'm sorry I can't tell you
his first name. It might have been something like Duane.
Those Who Choose Not to Shoot Duck
Riess : Did you keep up with all these friends from your childhood?
Newhall: Well, Harry Johnson is my closest friend still. I know them all. A
lot of them are dead, believe me. I'm not all that young myself. I
did keep up with them, but now we're all sort of getting older and
apart or dead.
Riess: Some of the ways in which you rebelled didn't separate you from
them?
Newhall: Listen, I was only one of many, many rebels. We all did in our own
way. I wasn't the only person who drank or who passed out in Paris.
Riess: You weren't the only person who thought that maybe this wasn't the
only thing in life- -to go duck hunting?
Newhall: Well, I was one of the few who just went off on his own and into his
own business. There had been no newspaper men in my family here.
It was just one of those things like going to the art department.
Remember the Depression hit us all. It was a new experience.
A lot of my old friends, most of them, went into their old
family business or allied enterprises. A few of them may actually
have become, I guess, artists. Some of their daughters and sons
became nurses, teachers or engineers. Most of them took a more
normal routine career. A lot of them never really did work. Some
of them still had enough money to live on. In my opinion, the
luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that we went broke. I
really mean that.
Riess: Were they your network when you were here on the Chronicle?
43
NewhalL: No. My earlier childhood, youthful friends were different, because
I got into the newspaper business, and that's a whole new world. I
gave it everything I had. That was our whole life --Ruth and I were
in that together more or less the whole time- -and in a sense we
still are--, [pauses] I just didn't have time. Newspaper work was
so consuming.
The Poor Girls##
[Interview 2: March 23, 1988]
Newhall: I've been thinking about the girls. They were bright and they were
attractive- -believe me- -and they were going to end up as either
dipsomaniacs or on drugs of some sort. They died young, a lot of
them, or committed suicide. It was very sad. I remember clearly- -
we used to have these junior assemblies and then the debutante
parties --for some reason or other I really felt very deeply about
how these poor girls had to sit and wait to be asked to dance.
The boy would have to go up--. No girl ever came up and said,
"Here, will you dance with me?" Or if she did, it was very unusual.
They'd have these so-called wallflowers. I used to walk around and
literally try to dance with all of them. Some of them would sit
there the whole evening, and I figured their hearts were breaking.
They must have been. I don't know, you probably never went through
this, but in my generation those girls had a hell of a bad time.
Riess: Girls still wait for the phone to ring.
Newhall: I can remember them all dressed up with their white gloves and their
organdy gowns, sitting on the side on ballroom chairs, sitting
there, and everyone can see that nobody is asking them to dance. I
really felt very sympathetic and felt one had one's duty to do. As
a result I didn't like the parties all that much because the girls I
really liked and loved to kid around with, they were always popular
and dancing so you didn't have to worry about their being lonely.
Riess: I'm glad there were some boys torn up about this dilemma.
Newhall: I tell you, even at that age, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I could
see it. There were always a lot of girls around among our families
and friends.
44
Resorts . Rubicon Lodge
Rless: Was the Newhall land in southern California among your vacation
destinations as a child?
Newhall: Well, oddly enough, the farms, ranches, included lots and lots of
property, but they were basically totally working ranches and there
were no real accommodations for us to go to. We always had a house
or two or something where people could go and stay for just a visit.
But aside from the ranches, there were a number of comfortable
summer resorts that other members of the family had. My Greatuncle
George Newhall, he built his home down in Hillsborough. It was
called La Dolphine ,
a copy of the Petit Trianon over in the France
of Louis XV. It is still there --down in Hillsborough. La Dolphine
was quite grand, but again that was more a regular city winter home.
Uncle George had a tremendous lodge up at Lake Tahoe on the west
side, on the California side. He had a yacht there, quite nice, the
largest one on the lake.
Riess: Where?
Newhall: Rubicon Lodge it was called, about in the middle, just north of
Emerald Bay between the north and south end of Tahoe.
Riess: A number of older families were there, the Livermores.
Newhall: Livermore--! think they're a little further north. One of the
Jewish families from San Francisco had a nice place up there. Many
Bay Area families had splendid Tahoe summer homes --the Me ins, the
Crockers , the Stanley Dollars, the Fullers, and many, many more.
At Rubicon Lodge on the west side of Tahoe Uncle George had his
boathouses and the main summer household, but he also owned about
literally half of the Nevada side. He had a hunting lodge over
there with all the deer heads, stone fireplaces, cook ovens and
stuff like that. And that was called Skunk Harbor. It's still
there, I think. Have you been to Tahoe? You notice on the Nevada
side there is still a huge open stretch, running north from
Glenbrook for ten or fifteen miles up to about Incline Village, or
up to Secret Harbor.
Well, Uncle George owned that whole thing- -it must have been
ten miles- -and finally sold it to George Whittell, who was a real
character out of Hillsborough or Burlingame. The Whittells were
very rich: George had a zoo and a garage full of Duesenbergs and so
forth. All I am saying, though, is that in terms of summer places -
-the family could go over and camp out on the Nevada side if they
wanted to. I think it's now a Nevada state park or some kind of
public preserve.
45
Riess: Yes, maybe it's Sand Harbor.
Newhall: The Fullers I think owned Sand Harbor. Anyway, the Skunk Harbor
Lodge was a big piece of Tahoe scenery going from Glenbrook up. I
think it's still pretty virgin. I don't know. I've not been there
for quite a long time, and all that went down the family drain in
1929 or 1930.
Pre-Depression Sense of Safeness
Riess: When you were a fourteen-year-old did you feel the ripples of
concern about family finances?
Newhall: No. We were oblivious. I always thought we were relatively poor,
seriously, because sometimes our cars weren't quite as big as a
visitor's car. You know, kids are very sensitive about cars --among
other things. As a matter of fact, today I just went out and bought
myself an old Cadillac, and I haven't bothered with a Cadillac for
many, many years because one doesn't really drive them anymore. It
can be embarrassing. But I was looking for a comfortable sedan, and
so I bought an eight-year-old Cadillac. I've got a lot of cars.
I'll get into that someday. Automobiles have really been a big part
of my life. They really have.
In our San Rafael materialization we lived very simply, and my
mother was always saying, "Oh, we don't have enough money, Aimer."
But I just took it for granted that there would always be enough to
keep things going. As I say, our domestic world wasn't elaborate,
it wasn't fancy, but it was very comfortable with plenty of
household help, and we had gardeners and a washerwoman and a sewing
woman and young women to take care of each of us kids, and some
maids, upstairs and downstairs and so on.
I really mean that- -very simple and homey and kind of nice.
Nobody was dressed up much in uniform, except for the butler when
people were coming for dinner. And once they came, they never left.
When any of the staff got old, either my mother would get them a
home or a little house in Bolinas or put them up in the rooms. She
kept putting more and more rooms in the attic to take care of some
of the people who got old and were dying. Of course, they died to a
certain extent younger than they do now.
Riess: That's such a nice feeling, that nothing would ever be discarded in
an offhand way. It must be a very reassuring feeling to a child.
It's like saying there will always be somebody to care for you.
Newhall: You are absolutely right. It was all very permanent. It was a
46
status of living that was going to go on and on, and one thought,
well, one had to sort of carry it along. That first Depression was
pretty shocking to a lot of people.
Finances, and the St. Francis Dam Disaster. 1928
Riess: Was your father on the board of the Newhall Land Company?
Newhall: Oh, yes. He was on the board of Newhall and the Bank of California
and two or three or four other things . It mostly was an ancestral
thing. I'm a member of the board of the Cypress Lawn Cemetery
Association. I think my great-grandfather or grandfather started
out at Laurel Hill. One just sort of does it.
Riess: But it didn't mean that he would come home and say at the dinner
table times when you didn't have mobs of interesting people around
--"Anna, things aren't looking good."
Newhall: They never discussed it in my hearing, to my knowledge. One
Christmas I remember toward the middle of the twenties my father
gave my mother an envelope for Christmas. And she opened it--and I
remember this --and read it and went into tears.
I said, "Well, what's the problem?" "No, no.no," she said,
"nothing at all." My father was sort of patting her on the back. I
think he probably handed her a note or something that had been paid
off. I do know that she always had a worry as to whether she could
maintain this household because they gave so much money away. This
is quite true. Everybody was welcome.
One time she brought over a music teacher who used to come over
from San Francisco to give us lessons. The chauffeur had an
accident down at the gate leaving the home, and so the music
teacher, far ahead of her time [laughs] suffered pain and whiplash.
She ended up in one of our guest rooms for three months. She just
had a ball, I think.
There were two or three times when kids would come in and live
with us from the Hawaiian Islands, or from- -there was a fire at the
orphanage, and one of the kids had a bad foot because a burning log
had fallen on it, and I guess he had a bone infection that didn't
clear up. He lived there for six months or a year. There was
always a little something going on.
Riess: When the St. Francis Dam broke that must have sent a financial
ripple through the family.
Newhall: It's a very interesting story. I don't know if you want me to jump
47
ahead to it, but I will.
Riess: It's not so much ahead if it's 1928. The Depression was not until
1929.
Newhall: Ah, yes. The dam broke in '28, and the flood waters went through
the ranch down there for about ten miles. I think six or seven
people on the ranch- -workers or pickers- -were drowned. And then a
year later in 1929 the bottom fell out. It's a very interesting
business story, family business.
We were all so broke by this time. Families were trying to
settle up their bank loans. I think my father owed half a million
dollars which was a lot of money then. A half million now you can
borrow it from some guy on 42nd and Broadway. My uncles, I think,
owed more, and they tried to sell the whole Newhall ranch down there
in Los Angeles County, about forty-eight, forty-nine thousand acres,
for less than a million dollars. And nobody would buy it. People
were land-poor then.
Well, the City of Los Angeles settled our suit- -we had brought
some kind of a damage suit against the city because the St. Francis
Dam was the Los Angeles City water supply. They paid us about
$780,000 or $790,000. That bailed us out in our ranching business.
So the breaking of the dam, except for the poor people who were
drowned, saved our lives. It's a strange twist perhaps, but that's
what happened.
Riess: A few years later it turned out to be that. But at the time?
Newhall: Well, at the time I didn't pay much attention to it, really didn't.
Riess: I can understand that. I was just curious about whether these were
big impacts or not.
Newhall: I wasn't down there at the time, so we were not so close or tied up
in it all that anything that happened on the ranch had any
significant emotional impact in a sense. You wouldn't want to lose
the ranch, of course.
Riess: How upset was your father? How distraught because of the
Depression?
Newhall: I never heard a word of complaint except, "Well, we have to sell the
San Rafael house," or "We have to sell the Bolinas house."
Riess: You were only fifteen. I realize I am asking you to be a witness to
a whole era at an age where most kids are only interested in
themselves.
Newhall: Are we at what, '29 now? I was in Lawrenceville when the crash came
48
along. The young man at Lawrenceville with whom I ran away was from
Denver. He had a patch in his trousers and he told me this was the
most terrible thing that's ever happened to him. He said, "If it
hadn't been for this Depression problem, I would never have worn a
pair of pants with a patch in them." This hit him hard. Well, it
hit a lot of those guys in Lawrenceville. They were hit pretty
hard- -they came from families of customer's men from Wall Street and
brokers and investment houses and big spenders generally.
The Crash and the Move to San Francisco and then to Berkeley
Newhall: The Depression actually didn't have all that much impact on me. I
got home and my mother and father said, "We have to sell the house."
I said, "Well, what are we going to do?" He said, "We're going to
move over to San Francisco, and we're going to live up in the third
floor of Ginny's house- -Virginia Whiting Newhall--my step-
grandmother's house and so we all moved in to the top floor of 2950
Pacific Avenue.
The house had an elevator that went from the garage up to the
third floor. It's this huge Cape Cod cottage out there between
Broderick and Baker. It overlooks the bay, and it was very
comfortable . I went away to Webb School for a year , and when I got
back we were moved into the third floor of 2950, which was
originally built to resemble the interior of a Yankee whaling ship.
My father still went to work down at the Newhall Building on
California and Battery. My mother did the cooking. They had
friends in. And the traffic at our dinner table was down to a
trickle.
My father had always been a stamp collector. My Uncle Edwin,
who lived there at 2950 Pacific, he also collected stamps. And so
every night the two brothers would come home and talk and go over
their stamp collections. My mother was going crazy because my Uncle
Edwin was one of the most kind people in the world, sort of Santa
Glaus. But he was not what I would describe as a brilliant
conversationalist. He and Dad would sit there and talk about their
stamps by the hour. [laughter]
Anyway, I went away to Webb and almost graduated and got in all
that trouble and came back and moved in there at 2950 Pacific. I
had a little room there that had been, I'm sure, an upstairs maid's
room, and I put some Egyptian sort of King Tut wallpaper around it
so I'd feel kind of different from the redwood finish on the Cape
Cod cottage. I still lived quite a social life.
I worked then at Coffin and Redington, the wholesale druggists.
It was that summer I went cruising in Alaska with the Stewart Edward
49
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Whites. My mother was determined apparently to get me into Cal,
which she did; she did it herself, basically. She got hold of Mr.
Webb and persuaded him to speak kindly of me to the Cal director of
admissions. So then the whole family moved over to Berkeley and
lived in a little house on Hawthorne Terrace.
Why did it require that they move to Berkeley?
I don't know. Some of the Fosters came over to Berkeley too, Don't
ask me why, they just did. My father wasn't very well and I'm sure
that all those financial anxieties contributed to it. He spent all
of his working time trying to figure out his life insurance and his
debts. He never complained about it. He was very stout--! told you
that --and he got sick.
Was it financially practical to live in Berkeley?
support system for you?
Or was it a
Oh, I don't think it was a support system for me. I think my father
and mother didn't want to come back and live in the third floor
attic of a home that they had once owned. I don't know; we never
discussed it that much. They just came over across the bay.
I think they bought the house, rented it or bought it, on
Hawthorne Terrace. It was a typical north Berkeley hillside house,
quite nice. My brothers and I lived in little rooms up in a tiny
attic. I still kept doing quite a lot of drinking. I went to
school, joined the art department, met Ruth there, and soon my life
began to change .
You joined a fraternity, but you didn't live at the fraternity?
lived at home?
You
Newhall: I lived at home. It was cheaper. At the Zeta Psi house I think the
room and board were $55 dollars a month.
50
III UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Promoting the Occident
Riess:
Newhall:
Those were the years at Berkeley of the Social Problems Club,
you belong to that?
Did
Riess:
Newhall:
That was pretty much Popular Front, left wing. I had no respect for
them. They were not the most magnetic people in my opinion. They
were doctrinaire. This was more or less the time of the Popular
Front and they were just espousing a straight, oh, Marxist line
despite what they said. I had always found that very boring. But I
knew a lot of these people, mind you, and some of them were good
guys and good people .
I got involved at that point with the Occident magazine. It
was a literary magazine on the campus. It had been sort of
staggering along. So I got interested in it and went around and
sold lots of subscriptions to it and got it going and became quite
active with it. I guess my interest in promotions and stuff came
out because I started giving interviews to people. Some of the
Occident editors and managers- -Dorothy Fraser and, I think, John
Conrad- -were pretty humorless and, again, doctrinaire.
I tended to be a little bit more mellow in my interests, so I
set up an interview with the Daily Cal. I knew a lot of these guys
around the student union: Wally Frederick, who is an old friend of
mine from Mar in. Did you know Wally?
Yes.
His wife Christine was an old San Rafael girl and a very close
friend. Christine Brooks her name was. George Pettitt was there.
He had been director of the Cal admissions office and sort of helped
me get into Cal. So I began fooling around with some of the Daily
Cal guys on the Occident.
But I set up this big interview. See, I really wanted to get
51
this Occident going. What the hell, if you are going to have a
literary magazine, let's make it the most successful literary
magazine in town! I told the Daily Gal reporter: "From now on the
Occident is going to be more like Esquire magazine or The Saturday
Evening Post. "
A lot of people bought subscriptions.
I came into the Occident office with a very successful
circulation report, but I'll never forget Conrad and Dorothy sitting
there looking so serious and furious. They both snapped at me:
"Oh, we don't want that sort of an image about our Occident. You're
just going to have to go." I was business manager, or circulation
manager. So that was the end of my career with the Occident.
although I had written quite a few pieces for them, articles of art
criticism and other assorted intellectual disquisitions.
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
A Promoter at Heart
So that was your first attempt at a promotion.
I suppose so, but I can't explain it exactly. You see, promotion
and public relations can be fun. Basically, for the interest of the
good people at The Bancroft Library, in some senses I'm a promoter
at heart. I love people. They can be manipulated. By that I don't
mean necessarily for any evil purposes, but it is fun to work with
them. So it was just fun to get the kids at Cal, the students, to
buy a subscription to the Occident. I'd get out there in the court
near the student union and hustle the customers into buying the
Occident at "special prices."
Do you have to know who you are manipulating?
general you don't.
It sounds like in
No. I don't care. I don't want to be too subjective in all this
except to explain sometimes my attitudes or outlook. I keep saying
I love people as a group and individually. I go through life more
or less trying to stimulate them into not being as dull as they
might otherwise be. I don't know how else to put it.
In the newspaper business, for example, an editor's
responsibility is to his customers- -to make them read. But there
are all kinds of techniques for informing people and making them
read. Today the job of making people read is a little tough,
particularly when you see what television is doing to overpower and
sedate whole nations .
However, back to my life at Cal. I was promoting the
Occident, but my major was art. I got into the art
department just because nobody I knew was an artist.
52
Riess: I think that's the darndest reason.
Newhall: It's true. Everybody I knew was going into business. They were
going to start as a messenger boy or going down to Central America
to work in the company coffee plantation or some damn thing, and
then rise to the top. I wanted to be an artist, and so I guess then
I embarked on my Bohemian phase. I was a rotten artist, but I loved
it. There were wonderful people there; we had a good time in that
art department.
The Art Department
Newhall: I remember with great affection and respect most of our faculty
members. There was Chiura Obata who was a Japanese guy- -sent away
to internment camp in World War II. He had a son, Kimio, who is a
very good friend of mine, and a little daughter, too. The faculty
members were great: Ray Boynton, Perham Nahl, Worth Ryder, John
Haley, Margaret Peterson- -there was a character, I don't know if she
is still around.
Riess: I don't think so. There were a lot of politics in that department.
Newhall: Right. That's right. Art departments are not normally the most
stable academic institutions in the world. They finally had to put
in a Latin archaeology professor as chairman of the department
because they were having squabbles .
They tried to put an
administrator in, I guess, to straighten it out a little bit.
Perham Nahl was a wonderful guy. He came from an old family of
California artists. And I knew Eugen Neuhaus one of the department
oldtimers. Bud Neuhaus, his son, and Kimio Obata were about my two
closest friends. He's still around, isn't he, doing something or
other? The son.
Riess: I don't know. The father Eugen Neuhaus is long gone. But you were
not in the modern artists camp?
Newhall: I don't think there were any on there.
Riess: Well, Worth Ryder?
Newhall: Worth- -he was good. He wasn't all that modern, but he was good. At
Cal when I was there, we were concentrating on the Renaissance- -not
Tomorrowland.
Riess: I thought there was a real division between the people who were
trying to bring in Hans Hofmann and the moderns, and the others.
53
Newhall: There probably was. Margaret Peterson- -she painted a lot of these
Picasso-like things. Worth Ryder would have been very eclectic, I
think. I was his lantern slide operator. He taught art history
when I was there, and I liked him very much, and I figured, well,
the only way I could learn a little bit about art from the
Renaissance on up through more or less Impressionism was by running
the slides. I'd pick out all the slides and I got quite familiar
with a lot of this stuff. I just enjoyed it. I took a lot of
courses; I'm not a natural artist by any means. I'm terrible.
Riess: So your concentration was not necessarily on the painting then?
Newhall: Well, I certainly worked hard at it, but it was not my most
distinguished career- -take my word for it. I wish it had been.
I've done all kinds of things. I love all kinds of things, but I've
never done any of them very well.
Jazz
Newhall: Music is another field. [For more on music, see Appendix K.] My
life has been totally wrapped up in what was then called "jazz," or
music of the twenties, thirties, still in the forties. I've known
lots of musicians, but I never became gifted enough to become a
performing artist. I used to play the drums back in the schools.
At Lawrenceville I used to sneak out at night and go up to New York
and sit in with a jazz band at the Orpheum Dance Palace at 42nd and
Broadway. They had to play all the time --ten cents a dance --so
there was always one musician off taking a break. I either played
the drums or a little piano or saxophone with them. I was terrible.
Riess: You just picked up those instruments?
Newhall: Yes. Well, we had to have piano lessons as children. But I was
forever a bust at classical music. I really don't relate to it. So
then my mother got this jazz teacher to come over to our San Rafael
home. She was the one who stayed with us for months after her
little accident down at the front gate.
I'm sorry. I wandered off Cal.
Philosophy and Gaining Perspective
Riess: Not to push this point, but you said at one point in your life if
you weren't doing something well you weren't really interested in
doing it. Now here you have yourself doing a little music, a little
art. It doesn't exactly jibe with that idea.
54
Newhall: All right. I think I was speaking perhaps of academics, just the
prerequisites you take in school. At Cal I really tried to take
courses that I was interested in. I did pretty well there. I got a
lot of "Cs." I got a few "As" also. I tried to take Russian.
(Nobody I knew took Russian.) I never did learn to speak any
Russian at all. It's a complex, terrible tongue. I only studied
Russian for a year in Alexander Kaun's class.
I studied Chinese art. Henry Hart, a San Francisco oriental
antiquities dealer came over and was a lecturer in Chinese art. His
store here in San Francisco was on Union Square. I got to know him
pretty well. I'd get to know my professors pretty well if I was
interested. I really goofed off in paleontology until about the
last three weeks when I suddenly discovered what paleontology was,
and I never enjoyed anything better in my life- -the second time
around .
I took the typical philosophy courses. Psychology. Psychology
I felt was very dull, I just didn't think much of it. You could go
in there and get an "A" if you wanted, with just your left hand. I
guess you still can.
The philosophy courses had a tremendous fascination for me,
they really did, particularly 5A, or whatever the lower division
course was where you ploughed along starting with Plato and
Aristotle and Lucretius and ending up with Nietzsche and John Stuart
Mill.
The University of California is the greatest thing that ever
happened to me. It opened up a whole wide wonderful new world- -
perceptions of life and thought and culture--.
H
Newhall: I am trying to state simply that at Cal "philosophy" as it was
provided to us- -I don't know if one "teaches" philosophy or not--
opened up my life, because after you have been through about five or
six or seven, even superficially, of the great philosophers or
thinkers of history, you suddenly realize that right and wrong are
not quite as right or quite as wrong as most people think. I have
never forgotten that. That's what Cal did for me really.
From the mountaintop of philosophy one can watch the world with
an enchanting, intellectual perspective- -forgive me if I am phrasing
this pompously.
I enjoyed many courses at Cal, most if not all in Letters and
Science. I did not bother with engineering, economics and political
science. Most of the other students were doing that.
55
By the way I took a course in Oriental history tinder Professor
Boodberg--! do not immediately recollect his first name. And this
was the damndest, most provocative experience in my classroom
travels. We spent a whole semester looking at a map of China and
Mongolia that Professor Boodberg had drawn on the blackboard. And
we engaged in long dissertations on the rich Yellow River Valley
soil called "loess" which sustains life in China.
Then we discussed for hours the meaning of certain Chinese
ideographic characters. And finally Dr. Boodberg told each of us to
select some Chinese word of our choice and write a paper on its
historic implications.
Well, we all turned in our papers. I had chosen a character
which in English sounds like "wang," and I believe this "wang"
character means "king" in English. So I worked on my manuscript
very, very hard and finally turned it in and waited expectantly for
word of my great academic investigation into the literature of
China. Well, the semester ended and none of us students heard a
word from Dr .
Boodberg .
The end of this saga is that the next year I happened to run
across Dr. Boodberg down near Sather Gate, and with failing breath I
asked the good doctor what he had thought of my exhaustive research
and my solution to the mystery of "wang."
He wore thick glasses, as I recall, and peered at me with a
kind of strange detachment and said: "Oh, I never read any of these
papers--! haven't the slightest idea. My job is to make you study
and think. Did you?" And then he walked away on his business.
Well this was still actually one of the most illuminating and
exciting classes I ever got into at Cal. Although I still can't
tell anybody what "wang" really means.
Training in Visual Arts
Riess: You have said that you credit your art training with giving you a
kind of facility in laying out a newspaper.
Newhall: I think that the art studies I had at Cal have certainly been
tremendously important to me professionally. The graphic concepts I
assimilated or learned or practiced at Cal have colored my whole
life. It has to do with the cars I buy, the whole life that we
lead, the decorations of our home, our lifestyle. After all, our
whole earthly environment is a perpetually changing art form.
I do know that because of my formal art training at Cal- -if it
56
could be called formal--! never had any trouble graphically as far
as I was concerned with newspapers or magazines or anything like
that. I sat there as editor of the Chronicle for twenty years
redesigning, replanning San Francisco as if I were Lorenzo The
Magnificent himself. And all because I had some art training at Cal
I considered myself--quite improperly- -as the arbiter elegantiae of
the San Francisco cityscape.
Riess: Did you think that you were going to go on with art?
Scott Meets Ruth and Thev Go To Eurone
Newhall: I had no idea what I was going to do until Ruth walked into the
classroom in Art 1A in my freshman year. She called the roll of our
painting class. I was horrified, absolutely appalled that at the
University of California anybody would come in and call the roll.
And if they did call the roll that they would expect me to answer.
Unfortunately this person who called roll in 1A was devastatingly
attractive. I never forgot her.
Riess : How did you pursue her?
Newhall: I never got her out of my mind after that first time. She was the
secretary of the art department at the time. And I began casually
to drop by her office and say "Hi." We got to be pretty good
friends ,
and I remember for some reason or other we were walking
down the street toward her house one day. I said, "You know, I like
to play tennis, but I also like to play jazz piano."
She said, "Oh, I can't believe you're any good. I'm a very
good jazz pianist." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, I
can play anything. I've got perfect pitch." (It wasn't quite that
direct.) Then it sort of went like this, I think: I said, "Well,
prove it to me." She said, "Okay, come on, we'll go to the house.
It's a few blocks over there." She sat down at the family piano and
played, "You're an Old Smoothie." I'll never forget that song. It
was very popular. A woman called Ramona had made a hit- selling
record of it that year. And we got to be pretty good friends and
spent more and more time together. She was two or three years older
than I was, but I was in kind of a hurry. I had to fill up those
years fast.
Well, Eugen Neuhaus had organized a trip to Europe, an art
seminar for his students. So Ruth and I- -she talked to me about it
--signed up for it. My mother figured she could put enough money
together. (My father had just died at this time.)
57
Neuhaus had organized one of those go-go-go European tours, but
for one reason or another we both decided we'd have a lot more fun
and go cheaper doing it by ourselves. Neuhaus was furious because
he needed a certain number of customers to make up his tour. But we
made a deal to meet him and his party over there a little bit. So
Ruth and I climbed on this old tramp freighter here in San
Francisco, the Villanger- - the two of us along with the other eight
passengers or six passengers. It was the interocean liner, Westfal
& Larsen line, routed through the canal, on over to Le Havre and
then London. And we did the regular things. It was all pretty much
proper .
Riess: Except you weren't married?
Newhall: No. We weren't married then. I'd only met her in September or
whenever college starts, and sailed on the Villanger that next
summer. But off we went. We went to London and the British Museum
and the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery. Oh, it was
marvelous. We were living hand to mouth--these little hotel rooms
and so on. That's when I wanted to see the Davis Cup matches.
That '
s when I went to France and I got so loaded . Oh my Lord !
Anyway, I spent half my money for the whole trip in Paris apparently
when I was out of my head and buying champagne instead of looking at
pictures .
After the Davis Cup matches we were walking down a Paris
boulevard and a little fellow came by on his bicycle with pedals and
a little motor in it. I said, "Gee, that's a wonderful thing. Why
don't we rent a couple of those little motor bicycles and let's ride
around Europe .
"
(We planned to run into Neuhaus in Florence , I
think.)
So we bought a couple of Motobecanes--you know, to start the
motor you pedal them and off they go. We started out from Paris and
we went down through Lyons and Grenoble and to Nice, Cannes, around
the French and Italian Rivieras ,
down to Pisa, and finally up to
Florence. Then we stayed in Florence for quite a while because
that's where all artists go.
Riess: Just with a little knapsack or something?
Newhall: Yes. We each had a little bag; it was nothing. You put in about
half a gallon of gas in the little machines and it's good for a day.
We had paid about 700 francs each for the machines. It wasn't much,
probably thirty or forty dollars .
Then we started north from Florence. We had to get back to
school. We didn't go to Venice, but we stopped in Padua because I
wanted to see some Giotto frescoes there. It was a great little
town. And Bologna. And then started climbing the Alps and all of a
sudden there was the Austrian border. We didn't even know we were
58
going through Austria.
Switzerland.
We were headed for Germany, going around
The Austrians were just marvelous and the border guards said,
"Oh, come and visit our nice country, come on." So then we went
through the Dolomite mountains down to Innsbruck and then up over
the hill and hit the German border. This was the beginning of
Hitler. Those goddamn Germans --if you will forgive my language --
refused to let us drive the bikes into the country because we didn't
have an international driver's license. They confiscated our
bicycles. So we had to catch a train, go into Munich.
Marriage
Newhall: We stayed in Munich for awhile, went through some museums and
things, then went back to Paris, and then finally came on back. By
this time I realized I just couldn't live without Ruth. I had been
waiting all this time, my whole long life- -I was nineteen by then--
and I said I'm not going to let this girl get away.
We stopped off in Chicago to see the 1933 Exposition after
visiting Ruth's uncle in New York, a newspaper syndicate publisher.
Then we caught the train and came back home. And I wanted to get
married. I wasn't going to waste any time, because a couple of
young men- -some crazy dentist and some customer's investment broker,
a young man- -were paying attention to her, and I didn't like that.
But her family didn't take kindly to the idea of losing their
daughter. They had heard that I was a degenerate. Those were the
words she used. She said, "I can't have my daughter marrying a
degenerate." Besides, I think my future mother-in-law wanted Ruth
to be the first female President of the United States of America,
and if she was going to throw herself away on a drunk, forget it.
Riess: They were in Berkeley, the other beaus?
Newhall: Yes. They lived in Berkeley. Ruth had been very big in Berkeley
High. She'd been class president, and she was the vice-president of
the student body at Cal, and very active.
When I broached the subject, my mother was all for it. I guess
she figured somebody else had better worry about me. But Ruth's
family really didn't like it, and it was a terrible mess. I was
never allowed in the Waldo house again, and Ruth was in terrible
shape with them. I just persisted, and I did. Poor Ruth! I don't
know how she stood it because there was her family her life had
been all planned out, I'm sure, and Mimi, her mother, was a very,
very domineering person. Her father was furious --my mother had
59
Riess :
Newhall:
known him earlier because he was a roommate of some guy who had been
courting my mother one time.
Anyway, one day- -this was late in November, we'd been back in
Berkeley for two or three months--! said, "Let's go for a ride and
talk about this. It can't go on." So we went up toward Crockett
where the bridge crosses the Carquinez Strait to Vallejo. We were
in a 1931 Ford roadster. I got up there and I said, "Ruth, you see
that telephone pole ahead of us on the side of the road?" She said,
"Yes." I said, "All right. I am going to head for that pole, and
I'm going to put the throttle on the floor, and if you don't agree
to marry me, we're going to go together."
I hit the throttle and off we went for the telephone pole, and
of course before we got there she screamed and said, "All right, all
right, anything! Don't do that." So we drove back to Berkeley. My
mother rented a plane for Reno. We chartered a plane at Oakland
Airport because I was only nineteen, and I had to have her as a
witness to make everything legal.
It was at night, and we flew up over the Sierra to Reno, and
when we got to Reno, there was no sign of any airport. This is 1933
and we were in a dinky little plane with fabric fuselage and wings.
The pilot was confused and went down and started to circle where he
thought the airport was, and we were getting a little nervous. Then
he went down and sort of started to land one place, but instead of
the airport it turned out to be the railroad freight yard at Sparks.
But then, all of a sudden after we had climbed up again, the
lights did turn on at the airport. The guy in the control tower had
finally heard our motor. They did have a control tower. But
anyway, they turned the lights on, so we landed in Reno and stayed
at the hotel across from the Mapes, the Riverside, I think it was.
Next morning at about 10:30 we were married by the Reverend Brewster
Adams, who was one of the marrying parsons at Reno. Some cousins of
mine who had eloped told me to look him up.
Monday morning right after the ceremony we got in the plane and
flew back to Oakland with a friend of mine, Harry Johnson. Harry
and my brother Hall had driven overnight across the Sierras to be at
the wedding. I remember I had two mid- terms that same afternoon:
one was in Chinese history and God knows what the other one was. I
got very good grades in both of them, so Ruth has been angry with me
ever since. Anyway, that was the beginning of our married life.
You mean you should have been more distracted by the event?
She said I shouldn't have been able to get to the classes, let alone
make even a "C" grade. That's the way it happened.
Riess: And you knew you had to marry Ruth when you were nineteen.
60
Newhall: I certainly did. It's the best thing I ever did. I wouldn't let
her get away again either, not yet. I think she probably has wanted
to many times. We've had a few words every now and then.
Riess: You couldn't have done that in Berkeley because of your age?
Newhall: I was nineteen. You had to be twenty-one in California to contract
a legal marriage, and you had to wait three days, I think, and I
wasn't going to wait for any three days or three weeks or whatever
the hell it was. I just wasn't going to. I wanted to get married
and get it over with because this had been a very divisive and
distracting affair really. Ruth's parents wouldn't speak to her for
three years. Actually it's the best thing that happened to us . I
think she will agree to that too. Because we had a lot of rocky
times. I had been drinking and all that. Then it was after about a
year of marriage I had to get straightened out, or it would have all
collapsed.
Riess: Did you have an apartment?
Newhall: We got an apartment. I think we spent our honeymoon with my mother.
I was a student. Ruth was working. She had a $100 salary a month,
but I had no salary, so my mother provided $50 a month which rented
a little apartment down there on LeConte or LeRoy down there by
North Gate. We lived there for a year. Then we moved up the hill
right below Sam Hume's castle. I don't know if you know this; it's
up on La Loma, on Buena Vista- -right up there somewhere. We rented
a little place owned by Jaime d'Angulo. Do you know about Jaime?
Riess: Well, I know about his writings.
Newhall: It was this funny little house built by Maybeck, right above the
Boyntons temple there. You know that Greek temple up there?
Riess: The Temple of the Winds.
Newhall: We lived there.
Candid Photographer for the Chronicle
Newhall: Then, hurrying through it all, I went back to school my junior year,
but I got a job then at the Chronicle. I was such a lousy artist in
a sense that I started taking up photography. That summer Ruth went
to work for Henry Hart who had been teaching Oriental art at Cal.
She got a sales job in his antique store.
61
The summer between the junior and senior years --this would get
me up to about '35- -I felt I had to have a job, so I tried to get a
job as an artist on the Examiner. Bill Wren was then the managing
editor, and he wouldn't have any part of me even though a friend of
my mother's had given me a letter to go and see him. That was Bert
Coblentz, a doctor, and his brother was publisher of the Call-
Bulletin. He gave Wren a letter saying, "Take this young man. He
needs a job." This was the bottom of the Depression. Anyway, Wren
said, "No."
I decided then and there forever that the Examiner was doomed,
and I went up the street, and oddly enough, I got a job at the
Chronicle. I walked in with my camera, unannounced. The city
editor was a fellow called Jack Robinson, and Bill Chandler was
managing editor, and they knew my father and the family I guess.
I forgot to mention, by the way, when I went to work at the
Coffin-Redington wholesale pharmaceutical house, Mr. Coffin asked me
not to use my real name. So I worked there for about eight months
under the name of Douglas Scott because, apparently they didn't want
anybody to think that they were playing favorites or giving jobs to
their friends or something. I was Douglas Scott for seven months, a
hell of a name!
When I started on the Chronicle. I had this little camera. I
got it from a cousin of mine, a Kolibri or something.* It was a
little candid camera, and this is when the phrase "candid camera"
was new and just coming in. I told the city editor (and I was
terrified at the time) but I said, "Look, this is a candid camera;
this is the new wave." He said, "Yes, we've never tried that. We'll
try it."
I'd never developed a picture! I didn't know anything about
photography.
Albert Bender, an old gentleman boulevardier around town, an
art connoisseur and a great friend- -you' ve probably run across his
name- -he was a friend of Henry Hart's. I went running up to tell
Ruth I had the job, and Albert Bender came in. I was this young
punk about twenty at that time. I said, "Oh, I don't know what I'm
going to do ,
I don't know how to make a picture."
He went down to Newbegin's Bookstore and brought me back a
present for my career, a book by Ansel Adams called How to Make a
Photograph, and it told how you go and develop the film. Of course
Ansel Adams wouldn't tell his readers how to shoot a prize-
*Kolibri, made by Zeiss-Ikon, was manufactured between 1930-35, in
Germany. See Appendices for an expanded version of this story.
62
winning photo of Half Dome in Yosemite winter, but he did explain
how to develop the film. I read the book that night, and I started
right away, the next morning.
The city editor said, "Look, Johnnie Weissmuller is here in
town, and he and "Lupe"--Lupe Velez , his on-again, off -again wife--
are having a terrible fight, and they're holed up in the Alexander
Hamilton Hotel, and nobody can get to them. Go up and make a
picture with your candid camera."
Well, that's the beginning of my journalistic career- -whatever
that has been. I went up to the Alexander Hamilton, by O'Farrell
and Taylor, in there somewhere. I said to the doorman or bell
captain, "I understand Johnnie Weissmuller is in there." He said,
"But nobody can speak to him." I said, "Well, gee, look"- -I gave
him a line about it- -"I just got a job, and I've got to get a
picture of him. "
He said, "I'll tell you what. You go over and you sit there,
and when I see him coming down I'll tip you off because they
absolutely don't want to see anybody. It's up to you from then on."
So pretty soon down they came and here was this Lupe with the
flashing eyes and big Johnnie Weissmuller. I went up, and I guess I
looked kind of helpless, and he said, "Okay." So they went and
stood by the mailbox outside, and I made a whole bunch of pictures
with this little camera, and I thanked them, and that was fine.
I went back. Well, of course, the pictures were terrible.
They were sort of out of focus and they were really not very good,
but I didn't know what to do. So I brought them out- -I developed
them- -to the city editor. I said, "Gee, you are not going to like
these much because they are candid, you know. It is not any of this
posed stuff." They were kind of fuzzy.
He said, "That's right! They've got a real feeling abut them,
don't they?" [laughter] So he used them, and then I was a
photographer for a year for the Chronicle .
Psychotherapy
Riess: Not to stick a big pin in the middle of the story, but were you
through with your therapy?
Newhall: Yes. I was through with the therapy. Thank God. I might as well
get some of that on the record. The doctor's name was Kenneth
Francis. He was a practitioner here in San Francisco. My drinking
in a sense got so bad, he said, "Look, you have got to separate from
Ruth. You go live somewhere else." So I got a room in the YMCA
63
hotel down on the San Francisco waterfront. She stayed home.
I was painting. I was painting a big picture of a nude woman
for the Zeta Psi chapter house. I had it up there in my room, using
the wash basin for an easel, and I'd paint away. It was horrible.
I had this little rotten room, and they had a Foster's restaurant
down below on the ground floor.
Anyway that went on for quite a few months. I went to see Dr.
Francis every day, five days a week. After all is said and done, I
can't remember what the conversations were, except that the only
thing I learned was that the only person you've got to blame is
yourself, and the only person you have to satisfy is yourself, and
not your mother and your father. It was that kind of basic deal
according to the gospel of Dr. Francis.
Pretty soon I went back home for awhile, and then I moved back.
Basically I never drank again after I was through. It took about
probably six to eight months. I really don't remember. It seemed
like a long time.
Hazards of Being a Newspaper Photographer
Riess: There's a picture in the article that you gave me by John Luce in
San Francisco Magazine. It shows you with a blackened eye, one eye
swollen shut. What's that picture from?
Newhall: Oh, that was from when I was a photographer. I became a very
professional photographer. I had to get one of these Speed Graphic
cameras. We had flash powder at first, but then in came tin foil
flash bulbs, and now of course it's all different.
I just covered everything in town, and there was a cave -in down
by the elephant cages out at the Fleishhacker Zoo. This was in the
old Depression public works WPA days. People were very sensitive in
those days, the Depression was roaring along, and this was 1935. I
went out to cover this zoo cave-in and get some pictures, and the
WPA people had put up a picket line around the Fleishhacker
entrance. So they wouldn't let us in.
The fire chief came by, and he said, "You got a problem, boys?"
There were two or three of us there. I said, "Oh, these fellows
don't want to let us in." He said, "Here, hop on, and I'll take you
in." So we jumped on the running board of his car--or I did anyway
--and we started through, but a big fellow reached up and pulled me
off. He just went wham! I've never won a fight. I have had three
fights in my life, and I ended up a bloody pulp after every one of
them. I will never fight again if I can help it.
64
He really let me have it- -right across the eye here. The
picture of the fight is still extant. One of the other
photographers made it as the man was just hitting me, and my camera
is halfway from my hand to the ground. I'm dropping it. And he
opened up my eye a little bit.
Our publisher and editor decided that they were going to make a
case out of this. They were going to sue the WPA or whomever you
sued. It went to trial. The man who hit me was named Frank
Foppiano. He was a big guy. His attorney was one of these old-time
slaughterhouse Hall of Justice criminal attorneys. His son, also an
attorney, was there, and he had been at Cal when I was there, and we
were kidding around a little. When things looked bad for Foppiano,
the father looked at the jury and held his hand up to his chest and
groaned, "Oh, just a minute, just a minute." He had a grand stand
heart attack. He sort of staggered back and sat down in the back
row. He said, "Don't worry, your Honor, don't delay the trial. My
son can carry on. He's ready to step into my shoes."
So the son took over the case, and by golly- -it was a jury
trial, we demanded a jury trial because we wanted everything on our
side the jury found him totally innocent of any wrongdoing. And
they had a picture of that guy punching me with my camera going
down. We interviewed the jurors afterwards to ask them why did they
do this. A couple of them said, "Well, look, of course the fellow
was guilty, but we felt sorry for him. He was unemployed. And
newspaper men deserve what they get."
There was a story in the paper about it. You can find it.
That was San Francisco justice as it was practiced on Kearney Street
at the old Hall of Justice!
Riess: And newspaper men "deserve what they get," huh?
Newhall: Some jurors said, "Reporters are always butting into people's
business and they deserve anything they get and it was good for
him." They said that.
Anyway that's the black eye for whatever it's worth.
Then following that about a month later- -this would have been
1936, about April or March, in there --there was a little wreck. A
Walkup truck, one of those stevedore trucks with a low flat back and
stakes around the edge, had a little accident with a Southern
Pacific train down at Third and Townsend tracks. I was sent out to
get some pictures of the crash, which I did.
However, the truck driver took a look at me. He said, "I don't
want any pictures." He walked over and grabbed one of those stakes.
(They were about four or five feet long.) He pulled it out of his
65
truck and came after me. He never caught me, that fellow. Well, I
ran, literally, all the way back to the Chronicle . I turned in my
time and my camera. I said, "Look, this business is getting too
tough for me." I said, "I'm through as a photographer."
Well, about that time we were ready to make a trip around the
world, and we bought a sailboat and so on. So that was the end of
my first year at the Chronicle .
I've always respected the work that a photographer does. It is
the toughest job there is on a newspaper, no matter what any
reporter will tell you, because a writer can always fake a story and
cover up and write it later from notes or get a fill-in briefing
from someone else. If you go to cover a story with a camera, you
have to get the picture right then. You can't go back to the office
and call up somebody and say, "Hey, make a picture for me."
Writers, when they're sent out on a story, the reporters never
got heart attacks much. They'd go along and take it easy. We all
do that. You can write your stories from a barroom, but you can't
make your pictures from a barroom. I just mention that in passing.
WPA. Artists and Doctrinairians
Riess: Speaking of the WPA, did you meet Diego Rivera when he was here?
f*
Newhall: The WPA art down here at the Maritime Museum building has those
marvelous murals in it. I was mentioning Tony [Antonio] Sotomayor .
I don't know if he ever did any work for WPA, but he did a huge big
beautiful fountain for the 1939 World's Fair at Treasure Island.
Then there were the Coit Tower murals and Rincon Annex.
I don't recall that I ever met Rivera, but I met a lot of
people who knew him. That was all very much a part of our scene.
Riess: Emmy Lou Packard?
Newhall: Emmy Lou was a very dear friend of mine, and Amelia Perle. Emmy Lou
is still around, isn't she? Hasn't she done some writing? Somebody
called Emmy Lou is doing it. She had a mother called Emmy Lou, too,
didn't she? [Emma Packard] I read an article about her in one of
the California historical magazines.
She was a classmate of mine, or maybe a class ahead of me at
Cal . Or two classes. It was quite a group there. We used to come
over to San Francisco and suit up for the annual Parilia. This was
66
Riess:
Newhall;
the big artists' ball every year in San Francisco. There was a
group of us that would get into costume and join these pageants and
stuff. The big meeting place was the Varsity Restaurant, a block
from Sather Gate at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph. We used
to go down there a lot and sit around and talk, drinking coffee
until quite late. We were all very sophisticated.
Artists and philosophers , all of you?
Yeah, knew all sorts of things about what was the best, and we were
all pretty liberal. I just objected to the ones that were a little
too far over. I use the word "doctrinaire" --the ones who never
would think. They would just parrot their social philosophy abut
how to save the world. That bored me.
Riess: In some way or other you have been saying that old values are the
best values. Restoration I know is an important theme in your life.
Can you be a liberal at the same time?
Newhall: Well, when I'm with my old colleagues and friends from San Rafael,
I'm a flaming radical. And when I'm with the Student Problems Club,
I'm a reactionary. That's the nature of the beast. I feel that
there always has to be a middle ground, or at least another version.
The philosophy of the world can never be capsulized into one simple
capsule or flavor. You can't.
Look, I suffer a lot of dichotomy or whatever it is. A person
who has been born- -we were discussing it a little bit- -into a
certain comfortable social situation, can take his security for
granted. From there it's easy to divert yourself and go in other
directions and assume other roles. If you have that sort of
security anchor to windward all your life--I don't express it very
well- -it's easy to assume certain poses with whomever I'm with, the
"mucker pose," or whatever you want to call it.
If you are born with a certain stability somewhere in your
background, even after the Depression, or during the Depression, you
can probably have a safe psychological "home base" in your soul. So
then it's easy to be the liberal. You can see this kind of role-
playing in a lot of your politicians.
What kind of a liberal was Nelson Rockefeller? He was a pretty
good friend of mine, but it was the same deal. It was very easy to
be a liberal just as long as he controlled a good percentage of the
nation's wealth. Of course I didn't control any of it.
67
Admiration for Asians
Riess: When you were at Cal, did you develop friends who were blacks or
Asians?
Newhall: Oh, sure. I was very pro-black and Asian. I almost made a point of
it. As I say, Kimio Obata was about as close a friend as I had.
There was this very nice black guy in the class who became, I think,
a very successful practicing artist. I was trying to think of his
name the other night. Women too. I was very unselfconscious then
about all this business. I have always been very partial, believe
me, to our friends in the Oriental group, because I figure they are
going to own the world anyway. The first time I went to China, I
said, "Oh, my God!" They are. They about own San Francisco now.
They're fantastic. It's amazing.
Riess: What was it that you saw in China that so amazed you?
Newhall: I can't explain it. I think patience and hard work. In China- -now
this was before the so-called mainland or Communist Chinese took
over; I was there when the "Communist" armies under Mao and Chou
were besieging all the major cities. I'm jumping way ahead now.
The absolute thrust of world history is over there on the Chinese
and Southeast Asian mainland.
In 1948 and 1949, when I was there, the Chinese merchants or
salesmen would come in and say, "Master (it was then), don't you
want to buy some clothes or bring something home? Some dresses for
your wife?" I said, "Well, I'm leaving on the nine o'clock plane
tomorrow." "Okay, Master, we will have them for you." They made
for Ruth a whole trousseau of pajamas and nightgowns and blouses
from about six o'clock at night until about seven in the morning,
and they brought them there to the Wagon Lits Hotel in Peking in
plenty of time. [See discussion on p. 110]
The work that they will perform with such privation is
something we cannot conceive of in this country, I think. This is
something you don't realize unless you've seen it. And the Chinese
are going through this amazing "Westernizing" period now. But
maybe--! don't want to get depressed now- -maybe Western culture will
somehow debauch them. They are going through this "Western"
metamorphisis very fast-maybe too fast.
Riess: Kill it off.
Newhall: That's right, it may very well. [laughter] But I tell you they are
fantastic people.
Dolly's family [Dolly Rhee ,
Newhall's secretary] --
they came
over from Korea. I think her mother and father were very well
68
connected. They had to get out of reach of the old Korean royal
court. Anyway, Dolly's father came over here. Her mother came over
separately. It was an arranged marriage. They went out into the
San Joaquin Valley, and Mr. Rhee cornered the rice market after
working night and day. That collapsed; they went broke; they lived
on fish heads; they started a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles.
They managed to send their kids, all three of them, through
college. Dolly went on to get a master's in English Literature in
another college, and I don't know any other people who can do this
at such a regular pace. This is the story of all East Asia It's
amazing. Dolly's brother Sammy Lee is a well known world champion
He has won two Olympic gold medals for diving. He became
i
physician, has represented our American government and the White
House many times as a ambassador of good will. [For more on Dollv
Rhee see pp. 403-405.]
69
IV MEXICO
1934 Travels
Riess: In 1934 you decided to take a trip. You thought that your life was
not really going in a direction that made any sense yet?
Newhall: Well, my father had left me what amounted to about $10,000 in
securities, one thing or another. My great fantasy, and Ruth's--or
at least she went along with it --was to travel this whole great,
wide wonderful world. This fantasy of romance, the Indiana Jones
bit, I loved it. (This was very, very pre- Indiana Jones
incidentally. )
We went to Mexico first for a year. That opened up a whole
world there. This was before I went to work for the Chronicle. 1934
it was, the first summer after we were married. Mexico was a
faraway place with a strange sounding name . There was no true
highway or road to Mexico City, but they'd just started building the
so-called Pan American Highway, and I wanted to be out there in the
great untamed frontier.
We had been saving money. Our life style was very parsimonious
then. Our Model T Ford roadster had cost us only $12.50. We saved
on our food bills. We put thirty one-dollar bills in the top drawer
of the bureau each month, and we would take a dollar bill out every
day to buy our day's food supply down at the market. So we were
able to save enough for a summer trip through Mexico .
We had two or three ,
four hundred dollars maybe ,
and I bought a
baby Austin. Those were the tiny little American ones. I don't
know whether you have ever seen one or not, but they were really
small. I thought, well, if we get struck in the jungle or whatever
it is , we can push it out .
So we started off for Mexico. I tried to get a map. The man
at the AAA said, "If you're going to take your wife to Mexico, I'm
going to call the police." This place, Mexico, was just finishing
70
up its early 1900 revolutions, and they were bloody. So we went on
to Texas in the Austin and went down what was to become in a few
years the Pan-American Highway from Laredo through Monterrey and
finally up over the mountains into Mexico City.
I had a cousin in Mexico City who had been very successful. He
was a cousin of my mother' s- -Teddy Finley his name was. He was a
great friend of Bill Holt who was the Caterpillar Tractor family.
They were fraternity brothers from an earlier class in the Zete
house in Berkeley. Teddy was older than I by about ten, twelve,
fifteen years. But he had been very successful down there. He had
the Caterpillar agency for the whole of Mexico, and Mexico was just
recovering from these terrible revolutions and starting to mechanize
their agriculture a little bit. The revolutionary governments had
broken up all the haciendas and the churches.
So Ruth and I went down to see Teddy. We lived the high life
there because the Foreign Club, which was a big gambling
establishment, had just opened in Mexico City out toward
Chapultepec . Ruth and I had developed a system to beat the roulette
wheel. We hit it. We were paid off in pesos, but we had thousands
of pesos. We used the simple system of just doubling up on bets on
the "red" or "black." You had to go in there with a dinner jacket;
I rented a dinner jacket down there. The last time we went in- -it
was too much for my heart- -she kept doubling up and the wrong colors
kept coming up, until finally we were wiped out one night.
We had hired a car and a chauffeur and were living at the
Churubusco country club. Here we were broke! But we were kids. So
I borrowed $100 from Teddy the next morning, after our great loss at
the Foreign Club, and we started north. Well, there were no genuine
roads going north to Guadalajara. It was the rainy season. We went
over to Queretaro and through Irapuato. These towns are up --I
don't know if you know Mexico- -on the plateau country where Emperor
Maximilian was finally wiped out by the native troops. Then we
bogged down in the mud- -no roads, no nothing.
This country, believe me it's not the Mexico you think of now,
I promise you- -(I was going to do a book on it) --it was
unbelievable. There wasn't a priest in the country; there wasn't a
church that hadn't been ruined. It was just getting over the
revolutions. They'd just thrown General Plutaro Elias Calles out.
(I interviewed him later.) There were still generals in charge of
the country. Abelardo Rodriguez had been president and Lazaro
Cardenas was now in the saddle.
The roads were so terrible and there was so much rain that we
would sink into lanes running through the cornfields. So we'd have
to hire these oxen to pull us out. One bunch of rancheros there
wanted to buy Ruth. I said: "No, I can't sell her, she's my wife."
They looked at her gold wedding ring and said: "Well, what about
71
that ring?" I said: "Oh, no, come on. That means that she belongs
to me." They said, "Well, okay, but come and have something to eat
with us," which we did. This is a funny country.
I was able to trade the little baby Austin to the station
master in a flag stop town. He had about seven children, and he
thought he could make money if he could get the little car to
Guadalajara in the dry season. I was able to trade the Austin for
two train tickets to the Arizona border, to Nogales, plus about one
hundred pesos. The peso was about an exchange of three or four to
one.
We got on the train and went to Guadalajara and stayed at a
hotel there. We got a cab, and asked the driver, "Where can we get
some horses?" Between the city of Guaralajara and the town of Tepic
there is this huge barranca. The train then- -it was a Southern
Pacific line --had a track going across the tremendous gorge. But I
thought, well, we should make this a personal trip down to the
bottom through the jungle ravine. And we would have to make the
trip on horseback.
So we went out to the fair. Every Sunday they sell horses and
buy them at these markets. We bought a couple of horses- -about
seventy pesos apiece with bridles and saddles and everything. And
the next morning we started out for Tepic, which turned out to be an
eight-day ride. We rode over the countryside and down into the
barranca, which is one of the most amazing places --huge barranca. I
forget the name of it- -Grande Barranca- -and up over. We went
through the towns. We'd make a day's ride and stop in little towns.
The last night out we stopped at what must have been the last,
true hacienda in Mexico. The patron came riding up with his spurs,
and his foreman jumped down and took his spurs off when he
dismounted. He was a huge man with a white beard, very polite and
humorous and very regal. He was a real Gachupin--a Spaniard. He
said, "My house is yours," and so we came in and stayed with him.
He told us about a daughter at UCLA and this, that and the other.
Don Eduardo Varela--I'll never forget him.
The next morning off we went to Tepic. We sold the horses in
Tepic and lost some money in the Nayarit lottery. Then we still had
our tickets to the coast so we headed up in the third class train,
stopped for a night or two in Mazatlan, came on up to Nogales, and
crossed the border and came home in a Greyhound bus.
We had eleven cents in our jeans when we got home. So that was
that story. It covers a lot of terrain, but this was the beginning
of our wandering or traveling mostly in Latin America for the rest
of our lives. This was before we started out again on the boat, a
year later, in 1936.
72
Riess:
Newhall;
Riess :
Newhall:
That's a real not-to-worry style of doing things that's pretty
remarkable .
Well, you know the world is a wonderful place, and it's been so
screwed-up and damaged and over-ridden now. I don't even like to
travel much because all you do is travel between the Holiday Inn in
San Francisco and Holiday Inn in Singapore, with perhaps a quick
stopover at the Sheraton Shinto, or some thing -or -other, in Okinawa.
There is this horrible sameness about the places. It's hard. The
last trip we made around the world a couple of years ago we finally
got up into some parts of Nepal and Ceylon among others . And the
slick new hotels are there also. It's so crowded; it's so different
now.
Look at Central America. Where is the mystery? The mystery is
where are the next contingent of American troops landing!
You said somewhere that Mexico was full of real ladies and
gentlemen.
We have been in Mexico a great deal, and there is this fantastic
old-world, colonial sense of hospitality, graciousness there. Or at
least it used to be that way. There is a chivalrous echo still to
be heard in Latin America. We'd be out- -and when I say "out in the
country," I mean out in the country where the only thing there in a
so-called town would be one adobe hut with a fellow with his family
and his kids and a few corn stalks and beans .
He'd come out, "Welcome. Be my guest." You'd say, you know,
"Don Eduardo, how are you today?" You'd think that you were in the
court of Spain for God's sake. These are sort of semi-Indians out
in the country. It's an amazing place. It was. Now there is this
tremendous Mexican middle class, of course, that has grown up there.
There wasn't any then.
Decision to Leave School
Riess: So then you came back.
Newhall: I came back to work for the Chronicle . I'm sure that was it. In my
senior year--I couldn't finish it, I couldn't do the job and school
at the same time- -I sort of quit Cal. I never got a diploma.
Riess: Didn't Ruth push you to get that diploma?
Newhall: What good does it do?
Riess: To push you?
73
Newhall: No, to get a diploma.
You know, it's not really necessary. Everyone I'm sure thinks
I have a dozen diplomas. That doesn't make any point one way or
another. I learned so much, and Cal was so great, believe me. I
might even have enough units to graduate. I don't know. I quit in
the middle of my last year. I probably had a couple of
prerequisites I had to do, some American thing you have to study. I
didn't care. Nobody has ever asked me to produce a diploma in my
life, and I went over to teach at Cal later on, as an instructor,
not as a tenured professor.
Riess: Anyway, you decided that you could forego the degree?
Newhall: I had to make a choice. The degree or the job. The job meant a
great deal more to me. It's as simple as that.
Riess: It sounds like you were more of a grown-up. You were married.
Newhall: I don't know if anybody ever grows up.
Riess: Married usually means responsibilities and taking care of the wife
and homema king .
Newhall: She was working. She was kind of liberated then. We had our own
contributions to make. I will never forget Ruth's being willing to
go along on these hare-brained adventures, but she always did.
Outfitting Another New Adventure
Riess: So you had money, and you bought a boat?
Newhall: Yes. We bought this old boat- -a 42-foot ketch. My family had had
some yachts in the bay and so on. I have always liked ships. You
will see I make occasional remarks that there were "old ships" tied
up here or there. My father used to take us up to the Sacramento
Fair and on San Joaquin River. He'd charter a boat. He had his own
boat which he laid up, and my grandfather had quite a nice yacht
here in the bay. The family had always sort of fooled around in the
water.
When I was up in Alaska with the Whites I learned to love the
water even more. Another story I read while I was up with the
Whites was Around the World, which was about a single man going
around the world in a small sailboat.
Riess: Joshua Slocum?
74
Newhall: It wasn't Slocum actually. It was a fellow called Robinson. He did
it later, but I read Slocum' s book too.
So I thought well, we're going to get this old sailing yacht;
we're going to go around the world; we're going to write articles;
and we're going to see the world. So we bought the boat,
provisioned it for a few months, and we brought two young teen
agers along as far as San Pedro and then sent one of them back
because we had learned enough to run the boat. The other came as
far as Manzanillo with us , and then he went home .
We left with provisions for about six months, and I think again
it was fourteen cents in our pockets, literally. We figured we
could either find our food or fish or shoot or earn some money.
Riess: There was some commitment to write?
Newhall: The Chronicle said they'd buy articles --twenty- five dollars an
article. Well, twenty-five dollars is enough to live a month in
Mexico! I wrote quite a few, or Ruth did.
We sailed from here down to San Pedro, and then from there we
ran aground halfway down lower California in a little lagoon. We
finally managed to haul her off with an anchor and a windlass . I
thought the trip might have ended there. It was a hell of an
experience- -but I suppose exactly what we were looking for.
Went into Mazatlan for awhile. And then on the voyage to
Manzanillo we became storm-bound for a month. We couldn't go south
because the wind was blowing against us for about twenty-nine days.
We couldn't go to windward at all. Then we got into Manzanillo
which was a marvelous stage-set kind of tropical seaport then.
There were none of these tourist hotels or anything like that.
Going Inland from Manzanillo
Newhall: Again, this was summer and the rainy season. The port captain in
Manzanillo- -this was a small sleepy town- -said, "Look, I'm not going
to let you clear until after the rainy season because it's too
dangerous .
"
They have some pretty good blows down there in the
rainy season.
So once again, an old Mexican fellow, a story teller came
wandering by the plaza one night and saw us there, and he said, "You
two gringos, I'm going to tell you a story. There is a sacred
mountain down there in the jungle, down there in Michoacan. It's
got a lot of big stone idols. People are afraid of it; it's
75
So what happens? Our eyes became the size of saucers. We
joined up with him. We tied up the boat and left a young man in
charge of it. Went up to Colima, a town that had been pretty much
destroyed by earthquakes, but a wonderful old colonial town. We
bought three horses and off we started through the mountains of
Michoacan with a shotgun, fifty shells, and, I think, seven dollars
in my pocket. Off we went.
It was two months before we got back. This was really the
outback of Michoacan. We were riding through the mountains and
jungle during the rainy season. Mail, if it ever arrived out there
in the hills, took six days by muleback. Of course, we never did
get to this so-called enchanted mountain because things got a little
tough and hungry. We began to lose weight. Oh 'my God, it was
awful !
Riess: But this guy was still with you?
Newhall: Oh, he was to be our guide. Well, it turned out that as a guide he
wasn't all that really sharp, but he was a great story teller. He
was about seventy- two then, pretty old we thought, because we were
in our middle twenties .
We were going up and down; it was the rainy season; the rivers
were torrents; we'd swim the rivers and haul the horses and kick
them and sometimes sleep out in the rain. This was really, as they
would say now, roughing it. I would shoot an occasional dove or a
quail or a chachalaca, which is a wild chicken, and sometimes we'd
trade them for eggs or beans. We were hungry.
The biggest thing of that trip in the end was to go through an
experience of total hunger and malnourishment. Unless you have a
real season of starvation, you cannot understand people who, when
they are ill-fed and ill-housed, are ready to kill. We would dream
of food at night. We were hungry. Because, while the countryside
was jungle and there was enough growing in a sense, and in a while
you might pass an avocado tree or something, the people had no food.
This country was still just torn apart following the revolution.
Riess:
Newhall :
Why aidn't you turn back?
Well, there's always the next mountain. We finally just ran out of
time and started to head down to the coast. We had more or less
been paralleling the coast through the mountains. Then we went over
and down to the coast and ran into a miner, a Texan who was running
a gold mine there. This was near a little pueblo called Arteaga.
They'd hit a big bonanza proving out at about $90,000 a ton, which
is high grade ore and a lot of money.
But the local Indians --and I cannot stress this too much, this
76
But the local Indians- -and I cannot stress this too much, this
was a very violent country, except that people were marvelous to us,
they took care of us --the local gentry had been stealing, and so the
Texas miner hired the bandidos to protect him. And that was the
state of affairs when we were there. The mine shack had sheet iron,
boiler plate, all up around the place so that the owner could hide
if they began to shoot.
The head bandido also had come from an old, old hacienda
family. His name was Zefarino Guzman, and he was about twenty-
eight years old. He had a record of eighteen violent killings.
There had been an awful lot of trouble in this area, and I'm not
exaggerating in the slightest. The whole scene was exactly like
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ,
"
although I hadn't seen that
particular movie yet.
We started out toward the coast from this mine and Zefarino
said, "Look, you've got to go see my mother. She hasn't seen me for
a long time because I have not been able to appear in public." So
we rode, as his "guest" almost, through the countryside for two or
three days till we got to Ahuindo, the hacienda, and saw his mother.
We rode armed, by the way- -the first trip on horseback too. I
had a pistol and machetes. Everybody did. I didn't really know how
to use the pistol. I dropped mine once. It fell out of the holster
somehow on that ride through the jungle. Two days later this little
fellow came plodding along and said, "Don Zefarino said to give you
this. I found it lying on your trail."
Then we got down to the coast and started to ride and hike back
along the beaches. You go up the beach until you come to the next
river, and you then go inland to a point where you can find a
roaring ford on the river. Sometimes you'd be stuck for a day or
two. It was slow going, slow going. We were walking. Pretty soon
the poor old horses got so thin and tired we were behind them
pushing them.
Sometimes there would be an Indian town here and mestizo town
there. That was the way it stacked up sociologically. We got into
one town, and local folk were having one of their feuds. The big
man in the town had the biggest house, I guess, which was about two
rooms. I remember how we were so hungry at this place- -Coire it is
called, for whatever it's worth- -and a fellow had a branch of
bananas on his back. You know how bananas grow, a whole branch of
them, and they were for sale. Usually you were able to buy a banana
somewhere. We bought the entire branch. Before we got off our
horses, we ate the whole thing. The three of us ate a whole clump
of bananas. I have never eaten so much in my life.
77
Hunger in the Cora
Newhall: I just want to pause enough to try and give you the enchantment of
it all. The rivers that we crossed- -we would get sticks or stones,
and you'd see these sort of floating logs in the stream, and you'd
throw the stick at them because they were alligators usually- -to
scare them away so you could cross. This was living to me. Oh,
man, that's it! [laughter]
Riess: You sent back stories about all this?
Newhall: Some. People 'd think you were kidding. [laughter] We'd go through
these swamps up to here, and you didn't know what was going on. It
was truly very primitive, truly. The people again were so
hospitable.
We were stuck at a flooding river one time. The household at
which we stayed was the only shack we had seen all afteroon, and it
might have been totally as large as most of this room. It was a few
poles under a thatch roof. The mother was running it. I don't know
if there was a father around or not. There were four or five young
kids. She must have been all of thirty. She was wonderful. They
had a little corn patch across the river. So while we waited there,
she would go across the flooding river once or twice a day and bring
in corn, and all we had to eat was just this corn. It was very
good, of course. But we couldn't eat all of it because you'd try to
let other people have some corn too.
Egg was the delicacy. The beans were even difficult to come
by. People were living in thatched huts, and the pigs lived there
too. Ruth and I amused ourselves one night by pushing with our feet
on different pigs. They had a different pitch, you see, each one of
them, and they'd grunt. [laughter] We sort of kept ourselves busy
with a melodious evening.
I mentioned the town we'd come into where they had this feud,
and the people were killing each other. They'd lock the town at
night, so you were locked in, you couldn't even get out of the hut.
The day before ,
we were coming over a hill and we suddenly ran onto
a corn field coming down toward the river. It was very hilly, with
rivers going down to the ocean. Another hill, another river. So I
picked a few ears of corn which I probably shouldn't have done, but
I did.
The horses- -and they were sick and hungry by that time too
stopped to eat and I became very angry with my mare and I gave her a
kick to move her along. She hauled off and kicked me in the shin.
I'd never had such a kick before, and I thought, "My God, she's
broken my leg", but it wasn't broken. It hurt, but I went on. That
night, halfway down the hill, we ran across the fellow who was in
78
charge of the corn field. The farmer would come out at night in
those areas --we used to call them corn herders- -because the little
coatis or raccoons roamed around at night and ate the corn. So
every hour or two, our farmer host would let out a hell of a yell
and a bellow and beat a pan to scare the animals away.
We stayed with him, he had kind of a lean-to, and then we went
on to this town with the bananas that I mentioned. From there we
decided to go down to the coast because we knew that we were close
to a lighthouse, a place called Punta San Telmo. My leg had really
begun hurting me quite a bit. So we went down the coast. We got a
boy from a hill village to guide us because we were getting down
into dense growth.
Toward nightfall our young guide suddenly remembered he had a
wedding reception he had to go to somewhere, so he started away over
the hill. I said, "Well, I won't let you go until you get somebody
else." Then he found somebody. But our new guide suddenly
remembered there were tigers --they used that name for mountain lions
or ocelots --in the brush. And he left. So we camped that night.
This was our last night on horseback. We were about ten or fifteen
miles from San Telmo.
Desperate Days
Newhall: I was being very protective. We were at the site of a beautiful
stream, really--a sandy beach, and the streamand a couple of
lemons came floating down and we made lemonade . We had some sugar
cane. I thought, Ruth has been so gallant and she's so tired and
our feet were so wet from all these rivers and stuff, I'd put her
boots there by the fire to dry, and of course, the boots burned up
because we fell asleep. So Ruth was left barefoot.
We literally had only the clothes we had on our backs. I had
boots on, but the soles were gone. The tops looked pretty good.
And so that's the way we ended up. We went on down and finally got
to this lighthouse, a plaster or stucco place, kind of colonial. We
rode into the courtyard, and there was the lighthouse keeper there,
and his assistant, and the lighthouse keeper's son, and this very
pregnant Indian girl.
Ruth was on the horse. I said, "You ride the horse." We had
sold one horse and Antonio, our original guide, headed back to
Manzanillo with the other. We couldn't even ride them. They were
bones --poor animals. Ruth burst into tears. It had been a long,
hard trip, about five weeks, I guess. We were really, really,
really tired. I guess she probably lost about ten or twenty pounds.
I know I was down from about 150 to 120 pounds.
79
So the lighthouse keeper said, "Come in, we'll take care of
you. The ship will be here. It's due now, but it probably won't be
here for a week." So we lived with them. They gave us a little
room with some slats. It was very nice.
My leg had broken out into quite a nasty infection which turned
out in the end, of course, to be osteomyelitis. It just wouldn't
heal. The lighthouse keeper, whom we called "Pops," said, "I'll
take care of you." He kept dousing my leg with hot water, and I
think he had some permanganate or something.
The interesting part of that was that all that he and his
helper had to do was tend this light because this is a very major
light on the Mexican coast. Well, the assistant lighthouse keeper,
a handsome young man, had had an affair with this young Indian girl.
There was another fellow sitting on the verandah of the lighthouse,
all the time polishing his pistol, his revolver, and so
I asked, "Who's this fellow?" He was the brother of the
pregnant Indian girl, and she was a local native. Pops said, "He
has sworn, unless they are married, he is going to kill my
assistant." I said, "Well, why is he sitting there polishing his
gun?" He said, "Oh, he can't kill him as long as he's a guest in my
home. No problem."
The whole time we were there, this fellow sat around. He ate by
himself, but he sat around cleaning his pistol. The girl, of
course, waited on the table --whatever the table was. They
slaughtered a cow while we were there so we all had meat to eat and
chicharones and stuff like that. What we ate mostly was this dried
salt meat, a heavy tough jerky.
These Mexican guys had big strong teeth and they could eat it
so fast. They put a bowl of the jerky on the table. Ruth and I
would sit there almost in tears watching all the meat disappear
while we were still chewing our first mouthful. You are out of your
mind, believe me, when you go hungry for a couple of months. So we
developed a technique where while our hosts weren't looking or
eating or something, we would grab a piece and let it drop in our
laps. Then we'd go back and get another piece. Then at night we
would lie in the bed there and gnaw on the beef that we had been
able to pirate.
It was really quite an experience, and I'm sorry that every
single one of our affluent American fellow citizens cannot
experience it- -what true poverty or hunger or malnutrition means. I
can never forget what I went through there.
The boat finally came by and picked us up and brought us back
to Manzanillo. To give an idea again of what this food problem does
80
The boat finally came by and picked us up and brought us back
to Manzanillo. To give an idea again of what this food problem does
and hardship does: There had been a Chinese fellow's restaurant in
Manzanillo and he had fed us for a peso and a quarter a day--
breakfast, lunch and dinner --everything, very good. And when we
came back, he came to our hotel and brought a banana pie. Well,
we'd eaten a full meal, full breakfast, full lunch, full dinner. He
gave us the pie. We sat down on the bed and ate the whole pie.
My mother then came down. She'd heard we'd been having some
problems, and she hadn't had her stroke yet. She brought us a lot
of jam because she had written and said, "What do you want?" I said
something sweet, jam or jelly.
We all went up to Guadalajara, which is a day's train ride from
Manzanillo, and stayed at the Hotel Frances, a little colonial
hotel. There in those countries they used to serve you your
vegetables and vegetable dishes on platters family style. They
bring it in, you help yourselves, then they'll take it away when
you're finished. Well, Ruth and I would eat, and they would come
and take the vegetable dishes away before they were clean, bare
empty. We didn't dare say, "Gee, we'd like some more," because we
thought that would be rude or greedy, or they would think there's
something strange about us.
We were still unbalanced on the subject of food. I know Ruth
once went into tears when they took the vegetable platter away too
early. This was three weeks later. It took a while to get our
health back.
Riess: It must have affected your thinking, too.
Newhall: I know at one time we found a big horse banana when we were out
there with Antonio Renteria, who was our "guide." And instead of
cutting this banana instantly into three equal pieces, I said to
Ruth, "Don't you want it?" She said, "Oh, no." I said, "Antonio,
wouldn't you like this?" He said, "Oh yes, I would," and the
bastard took it and ate the whole thing! We didn't speak to him for
a day. We never said anything. I hated him. I hated him! That's
what starvation does to you.
Staphylococcus . Septicemia. and Amputation
Riess: That didn't contribute at all to your general health. If you had
been healthier, do you think you would have survived the leg injury?
Newhall: I don't know. I had started to come down with a series of
Staphylococcus infect ions --they didn't know they were Staphylococcus
81
it. It went on for years, incidentally, even after I lost my leg.
By the way, that horse' kick is basically what started my leg
problem because I got this general bacterium or bacillus, whatever
it is, in my blood. I think I had kind of a septicemic condition,
and then when we got to Acapulco two or three months later it really
broke out in this leg, and eventually I had to have it cut off.
Riess : You got back on the boat?
Newhall: Oh yes. We got back on the boat in Manzanillo-- fixed the boat all
up.
Riess: But you must have been in pain all that time?
Newhall: No, it sort of receded. The skin never really healed up, but it was
not a great problem. It was arrested, I thought. But that must
have started it all going. I still have the leg that was kicked.
It was the other leg that was finally amputated. That was certainly
an indication that I was no longer resistant because what I had was
a total bone disease right here.
We had gone on to Acapulco. We had cleaned up the Mermaid.
We'd re -rigged her to a certain extent. We probably worked on her
for a month or two after getting back from the horseback trip. Then
we sailed on to Acapulco. We did the Manzanillo to Acapulco run in
three days--just the two of us by this time. It had taken us thirty
days to go the same distance from Mazatlan to Manzanillo. We went
three days down to Acapulco with a following wind, and as I dropped
the anchor there, my right leg began to hurt.
I ran across an old schoolmate of mine, Lewis Riley, from the
Webb School who subsequently married Bette Davis and Dolores del
Rio- -not at the same time, but that was afterwards. He picked me up
in his fancy Cord convertible car. Acapulco when we were there was
literally the bay, the Mirador Hotel up on the hill, and the rest of
it was just a town. There had been a hotel down below, the
Tropical. That had blown down in a hurricane.
Acapulco, then, was just a fishing village. My friend and a
partner started the first real estate development down there, and
they made a lot of money. The last time I saw it was when I came
back in the Eppleton Hall, and oh my God, Acapulco was like Biarritz
or Monte Carlo or something- -worse.
Riess: Were they the people who put you in touch with the doctors?
Newhall: Yes. Lew came down, gave me a lift up to see ray cousin Teddy in
Mexico City. The doctors in Mexico operated and opened up my leg
and sort of arrested the infection. But they said, "Look, we don't
want to take your leg off down here because it may not be as bad as
82
we think. You better go home, because if you lose your leg down
here you're always going to think, well, you could have saved it if
you'd gone to San Francisco."
My mother than came to Mexico. The doctors told her to come
because I wasn't going to make it. Nobody thought I was going to
survive , really ,
because they operated on me about five times .
They
told Ruth, "Oh, he won't wake up tomorrow," but I did.
I will make a point of saying here and now, the reason I am
alive today is that I was in Mexico when it all started. There was
quite a good deal of contact between German pharmaceutical firms and
Latin America. A medicine called Prontosil had just been developed.
It was a red dye, and it was the first of the sulpha drugs. They
would not permit it here in the United States because it hadn't been
approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Prontosil supposedly
had a capacity for combatting staph and strep.
I was then suffering from streptococcus septicemia. The doctor
in Mexico said, "Well, we don't know what to do, but we're just
going to fill you full of this." They gave it to me by mouth; they
gave it to me in injections. I woke up, and it arrested the
terrible virulent part of it. But that whole leg episode was the
most terrible pain I have ever suffered. I have never had anything
like it.
And I got up here into the hands of our San Francisco society
doctors, and they damn near managed to kill me. I can go into a
long oration on the subject of malpractice and social ethics in the
American sickroom, but anyway, I got into the hospital here in San
Francisco. The doctor said, "Oh, we've got to straighten your leg
out, Tiger, or you're going to have a stiff knee the rest of your
life." (My leg had been kind of bent at the knee in order to ease
the pain of it, and it had been in a cast. I had made the air
flight from Mexico to San Francisco with the leg in a cast.)
So they put me out- -boom- -without any preparation for it. They
straightened my leg out apparently- -I didn't see it of course, I was
out. But by sheer force they straightened it and then put it back
in a cast. The damn fools managed to break my leg while they were
straightening it. They didn't have any idea really what shape I was
in. I promise you I have never, never suffered anything like that-
before or after. I went down to about 100 pounds or less. I was
just lying in bed. I couldn't move for about three or four weeks
from the pain of it.
If somebody came into the room and happened to hit my bed, I
would just start screaming. It was something fierce. The doctors
let me lie there until Ruth and my mother said, "Well, we've got to
do something." They got Leo Eloesser who is one of the great heroes
of my life. I don't know if you've ever heard of him or met him.
83
do something." They got Leo Eloesser who is one of the great heroes
of my life. I don't know if you've ever heard of him or met him.
Riess: Sure. In fact, I associate him with Mexico.
Newhall: We got to be old buddies. He went down to Mexico and got a little
ranch there. Anyway, he agreed to take on the case. My old
psychiatrist showed up. He came in and said, "Hi, how are you?" and
started to shake hands, and I let out a yell. He went out and said
to Ruth and my mother, "You've got to do something. This man's
going to die."
They had let me lie there really, these guys. So Eloesser
agreed to take over. He said, "Yes, this has got to come off."
They took me down. I had not been able to turn over to reach the
phone. I was immobilized in this cast. And pain. Oh, God! They
took me down, and they were going to take it off, but they opened it
up, and he and one of the other doctors had an argument about how
much they could save of the leg.
It made a big difference if you take off a leg at the hip or
down halfway to the knee. So they sent me back up again and studied
some more X-rays, and the next day they took me down, and they took
it off. Well, when they cut around the muscles, the leg fell off.
There had been this spontaneous fracture. So it was a hell of a
mess. The morning after that, when I woke up, I rolled over, I
dialed Ruth, and I said, "Hey, how are you?" I was on my way back.
It's tough to get into one of those involved ethical debates as
to whose patient are you, but he [Eloesser] agreed to come in to do
the job. He took care of me on and off ever since, and we've been
very close. He always came by to see us. I never got down to his
ranch though. He loved that ranch. It was in Michoacan.
Riess: That's a grisly story at the end, isn't it?
Newhall: Well, I'm sorry, I'm telling exactly the way it went. Let me hasten
to say with a big smile on my face: This, I think, is probably the
luckiest thing that ever happened to me--like going broke. You lose
the leg, and then you react to it in a certain way and make certain
arrangements. So then you get on about your business.
84
V THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. 1930s - 1940s
[Interview 3: April 6, 1988 ]##
Paul Smith
Riess: You said you had gone off with the notion that you were going to
file some stories from Mexico. Did you? And was there a job
waiting for you to come back to at the Chronicle?
Newhall: Well, we sent a few stories by mail, you know. But they were very
few, because we would be at sea for a month or so, and come in and
write a story. And they were just a little casual adventure stories
or travel stories, you know. It wasn't much of anything. Of
course, then I got sick and so was sent home.
But I was very fortunate- -if you'd like to talk about how I got
back in the paper--.
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: A very good friend of mine was a young man called Paul C. Smith,
Paul Clifford Smith, who was the young boy wonder of San Francisco.
He was quite a personality, quite a skyrocket around town, and a
very important man in San Francisco over a period of ten or twelve
years. He had come from somewhere up in the northwest. He had been
hitchhiking around. He led a kind of adventuresome life.
When I first met him on the San Francisco Chronicle. I had just
been hired, and he was a red-headed kid or young man who had just
been appointed executive editor of the paper at the age of twenty-
six. He had been a financial editor of the Chronicle. He had
caught the eye of George Cameron- -Uncle George as we called him- -who
was the Chronicle publisher. Paul Smith was also a protege of
Herbert Hoover.
The Chronicle was listlessly floating along in the journalistic
85
doldrums. It was pretty much a right-wing conservative newspaper.
Herbert Hoover was "the great white god." He was a very fine
gentleman, as a matter of fact. And Uncle George, --he was the son-
in-law of Mike deYoung and publisher because Mike deYoung had left
no male heirs living- -had appointed Paul Smith executive editor to
see if he could somehow shock the Chronicle out of its lethargy and
into some kind of a vital newspapering.
Riess: What is this title "executive editor?"
Newhall: Well, every newspaper has its own system of titles. There's no
uniformity as you might find in a monarchy, or the peerage or
anything like that. An executive editor in the case of the
Chronicle is anything you made it out to be. I was executive editor
many years later, and I ended up, more or less in conjunction with
the then-publisher, responsible for everything the paper did.
Paul was a very dynamic young man. He was friendly, charming,
brilliant. And as executive editor he promoted himself into general
manager and editor-in-chief and everything else. He was called
executive editor, and was in charge, to answer your question
directly, of all editorial activities, including the production. I
mean, from the editorial creative side of the whole newspaper. And
he sort of took over the editorial page itself.
It all depends on how the executive editor operates ,
or how the
rest of the paper is made up. Titles really have not much meaning,
except in terms of the actual- -oh, well, the proof of the pudding is
in the eating?
Chester Rowell
Riess: Yes. And Chester Rowell was the Chronicle editor?
Newhall: Chester Rowell would have had the title "editor," and his activities
were confined totally to the editorial page. He was a sort of an
old-time Republican journalist who had come up from, I think, the
Fresno Republican. I think that is correct. Maybe Fresno or
Bakersfield, down in there somewhere.
Mr. Rowell, like William Allen White, had been one of the
Republican party sages, and he came to work on the Chronicle . He
was a roly-poly old gentleman, I loved him. He lived in Berkeley,
up on Tamalpais Road. He was a man, I think, of great integrity.
And I'm sure the people at Cal, in The Bancroft Library, will have a
lot of material about him. I hope so, because he deserves it. [The
Chester Rowell papers are in The Bancroft Library.]
86
He had kind of a nervous tic, and if he came in to sit at your
desk, or you sat at his desk, he always had his hands busy. I
remember one time there was this box of paper clips on Paul Smith's
desk. Paul and I had been talking and Chester came in, and he began
fussing around. Then he left, and Paul said, "Well, here, I've got
these papers. Take them." And he reached for a paper clip, to take
one out, and there came a whole chain. Mr. Rowell had put the whole
box of paper clips together in a chain! (I'm sorry I wasted your
time with that.) But he was a very fine gentleman.
But back to Paul, the reason I went into Paul at this point was
that we had become very friendly on a personal basis. For some
reason or other, he was very warm toward Ruth and me. When we had
set sail out the Golden Gate in the "Mermaid," our little yacht, he
had flown down to San Pedro where we tied up for about three or four
or five days . There was a girl called Jean Muir who was a young
starlet at the time, and they came down on the boat. Then we went
up and had dinner and fooled around with them in Hollywood for a few
days. So Paul and Ruth and I were on pretty good terms, very close
friends . He had made arrangements for my mother to fly down to
Mexico when I was so sick, and had chartered a plane and so on.
Filing and Newspaper Libraries
Newhall: Immediately after my amputation, Paul came by the hospital and said,
"Oh, by the way, your camera's hanging up in the darkroom for you
when you come back." So I had a job waiting for me, basically
because of my friendship with Paul.
Everyone at the paper was very nice. It was a very warm place
to work. I enjoyed it always. But I did have a leg off, and I was
on crutches. I was on crutches for about a year, because the
surgeons had not been able to suture the amputation, because there
was still so much toxic material draining from the wound. I had to
leave it open to drain for about a year, and I couldn't get a wooden
leg during that time.
So that year when I was on crutches I went back in the
Chronicle library filing stories. Those were the days, of course,
long before computers. And the library clips were made up of
cuttings from the paper, filed according to either subject matter or
the biographical name of the person involved. And I did that on one
leg with the crutches, and it worked out very well. I was much
lighter then than I am now, and I got around pretty darned well on
one leg. It took me about two or three months before I could really
get up and around and function. So in answer to your question, they
were waiting for me at the Chronicle.
87
Riess: And would you say that filing is the ideal job to get introduced to
the paper?
Newhall: Oh, it was the best thing. Sure. Like being a photographer. Those
were the best things that ever happened to me. Because, you know, I
was an uneducated person in a sense, really, and still am. And I
learned an awful lot about people and things by having to file
stories about the world and the human beings in or on it, and to
know where to go, for reference books and all that kind of thing.
It helps to learn a little bit about how a newspaper is put
together.
A library on a newspaper is an immensely important asset,
although not all publishers are aware of that. A good newspaper
library is crucial--! think the phrase they would use now is "an
important community resource." I remember when the Oakland Post-
Enquirer went out of business. This was an afternoon paper in
Oakland, published by Hearst, and the people who worked there were
more tuned in on covering crime stories and the eleventh race at
Tanforan or something like that.
But when they closed up the paper--. A paper's usually closed
up at a moment's notice, with no early warning; somebody will come
in and call the staff together and say, "We're closing up; lock the
doors," and that's the end of the newspaper. This almost always
happens that way. And at the Post-Enquirer when that paper was
suddenly terminated they threw the whole library out in the trash.
Took all the files out. Some smart reporter came along and picked
the files up, and I think he sold them for quite a lot of money to a
library or something.
The Chronicle' s old files are here in San Francisco somewhere.
I think the California Historical Society may have them.
Paul Smith's Life
Riess: I read quickly through Paul Smith's book called A Personal File. It
sounded like he would be a very appealing person. I hadn't realized
you were that close in age.
Newhall: Well, he was twenty- six at that point, and I would have been twenty-
one or two. We were three or four or five years apart. He was a
fantastic apparition in San Francisco. He was something very
special. And as executive editor of this Chronicle . which then had
a circulation of only about 150,000, he was a big man on the Pacific
Coast.
88
town, always ended up at Paul Smith's apartment for dinner. I met
so many people there. It was fabulous. He could attract people as
no other human being I have ever known. Nobody was ever neutral on
the subject of Paul. They all either admired or loved or enjoyed
him Immensely, or they disliked him thoroughly.
Riess: Why would they dislike him?
Newhall: Because he would walk into a room- -he was not tall, he was probably
even shorter than I, and he had red hair and he was what people
would describe normally as cocky- -he would walk in with a big grin
and people reacted to him, they truly did, because he stole the
show. He was like Brayton Wilbur, Sr. I don't know, short guys get
that way sometimes, I guess. He knew everybody. And people came to
pay court to him or to visit him.
Riess: It sounds like he made up his own life, that he really could have
been one of those characters who could get to be the top surgeon in
a hospital without having gone to medical school.
Newhall: That's right. That's what he did in the newspapers. He was
resourceful, imaginative. Where he got his vision, I don't know,
but he was headed somewhere . And the war came along and he was in a
hurry and he had a most remarkable war career. But in terms of his
lifetime, Paul rose so high so rapidly and reached such rarefied
levels, that by the time he was forty, forty-five, he was burned
out. He came back from the war and was never the same after he
returned. I guess he knew somehow or other that he wasn't going to
go as far as he had hoped.
The whole Paul Smith story is a fascinating one. If you've
ever run across people who knew Paul, you will never get any sort
of, "Yeah, I remember him, let's see, what was he? I'm not sure."
They'll remember him.
Riess: Mortimer Fleishhacker in his oral history--
Newhall: Mort and Paul were very close.
Riess: He said that Paul collapsed of some mysterious illness, and
Fleishhacker wasn't really sure what it was all about.
Newhall: I haven't seen Mort for years. Is he still alive?
Riess: No.
Newhall: Oh, I'm sorry. I met him and Janet quite often at Paul's. They
were really quite close.
Riess: And Paul Smith ended up living with you and Ruth for a summer?
89
Newhall: For a period. We had a house on our property in Berkeley, had built
a home there for my mother who had been so sick.
Paul had gone to New York when he left the Chronicle- -under
strenuous circumstances which I suppose you might want to discuss
later on, I don't know. He went to New York, to Collier's magazine
as an editor- -then later, I believe, as publisher or president- -in
time to preside over Collier's collapse. They just handed him a
sick magazine and it collapsed under him. And he lived the New York
life with a view apartment over on the East River and so on. He was
still keeping his salon there with the jet set and beautiful people
coming through town, the artists and the intellects and so on,
intelligentsia, celebrities. And he just gradually sickened. He
had some kind of a seizure or something. He fell, a lamp landed on
his leg and damaged the sciatic nerve. And he was sort of on
crutches and in terrible shape.
To talk about myself, I had a very difficult situation of
succeeding him in his job at the Chronicle while being a loyal
friend. I was torn between the paper itself and my personal
friendship with Paul. We were always very close, but it was a
difficult situation because Paul was not good for the Chronicle any
longer at that time, he finally left the paper, and it was certainly
not good for Paul.
When he went east he got round the town partying to a certain
extent, sitting up late, drinking a lot of scotches and sodas and
talking with his friends and so on, and he was just abusing himself,
too much. I don't know, Paul- -the fire gradually died. So he came
back out here. We had this house available and he lived there with
us for a year or a year and a half, maybe more, I don't know. He
wrote his book there. Ruth assisted him quite a bit. For a year,
anyway. And then Paul went down to Big Sur. And he lived up in a
little house on a hill down there. We would see him on occasion.
My lord, he went in and had his abdominal cavity carved up. He got
a little bit of everything. I don't think medically anybody can
tell you what all happened to him. He had some brain surgery. He
had a lot of trouble.
Finally he was broke. It was the saddest thing I've ever seen.
He had a big blue car that meant a lot to him, an Imperial Chrysler,
robin's egg blue, 1957. The motor burned out on it and he couldn't
pay the garage bill and he finally went to the Veteran's Hospital
down in Menlo Park or Palo Alto, wherever it is. He was so sick. I
went down to see him and I realized that he didn't want to remember
his past or his friends- -this idea of going down so a person can
remember the good times is not all that good because under some
conditions the good old times can become pretty unhappy.
Paul fell out of bed one night when he was in the Vet's
90
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall ;
Riess:
Newhall;
And there he lay immobilized, this man who I promise you quite
objectively was by far the most dynamic personality who had come
through San Francisco for a generation or two. I mean, this was
something, I had never seen, as I say, anyone rise so fast, so high,
and come to such an unkind denouement. It was so sad.
Well, it's interesting. He wrote his book certainly before he had
come to that stage in his life.
He wrote it mostly while he was living in our place. Ruth, my wife,
helped a great deal with it. He still had a couple of houseboys
with him who sort of took care of him.
I do want to say, while I'm on the subject, though, that I saw
so much of Paul in all those years, on so many occasions --and it was
difficult sometimes because he was a very demanding, he wanted
attention and demanded people around him- -but I learned more, I
picked up more journalistic ideas or ideals, journalistic notions,
principles, more from Paul than from any other single human being
I've ever known. He was something.
He picked them up where?
I don't know. It was almost magic. He read. He was never
educated, really, beyond Pescadero School down below Pacifica there,
down by Half Moon Bay- -and I think he went to school in Oakland. He
had been put out into foster homes . His mother had been married or
his father died or something, who knows. It was a very hazy
background and he always made quite a point of that. He never had
any family stability whatsoever, never knew his father, I know that.
So here is this little redheaded guy, going to fight his way up
through the American establishment, which he did. He had guts.
It was the establishment that he obviously identified with.
Well, he used them.
Yes.
But finally he couldn't beat them, though he thought he could. He
wanted to buy the Chronicle at one time, but of course that wouldn't
have worked out, or didn't.
Yes. "He had the mistaken notion that ambition and talent were
thicker than blood," I read.
That's one way of phrasing it. He didn't understand the
complexities of California feudal family life. Feudal, not futile.
You asked where did he get his ideas. He read voraciusly, as
one would say, or omnivorously. And many of us around him read
91
one would say, or omnivorously. And many of us around him read
these books by Walter Duranty, Vincent Sheean, John Gunther, all the
current fashionable books on journalism. We all were sort of fired
up and brought up in our twenties on the Chronicle . under Paul, as
young reforming intellectuals--! don't know what you want to call
them, I don't knowbut we were all cast from the same kind of mold.
Also he was a Republican, and we were, many of us, Republicans,
at least nominally. But we were all set to make the world into a
bigger and better place. We did not go along particularly with the
old Republican gang. And there was Paul writing for Hoover. It was
all kind of strange.
The Reforming Young Intellectuals
Riess: You're saying you didn't go along particularly with his political
views?
Newhall: Oh, yes. Paul's first big journalistic splash at the Chronicle- -
this old eighty-year-old, ninety-year-old newspaper which had always
been somewhat to the right of Hoover or Chester Arthur- -was when he
went down personally to cover a lettuce strike in the Salinas
Valley. You've probably read this, I don't know. And the Chronicle
came out really on the side of the lettuce workers --on the side of
the pickers and the strikers. Oh, my god, this set the whole town
on its ear. So here you had this dashing young man on the flying
trapeze of liberal politics in San Francisco, trying to breathe life
into the Chronicle.
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Who were the what you would call young Turks?
appropriate expression?
Is this an
Oh, I don't know. I was just a young good guy. I don't know about
the rest of them. Maybe they were Turks, I don't know. But who
were they? Was that your question?
Yes. Apparently they were all young.
Paul favored young men. And I went from the Chronicle library to
the Sunday magazine- -oh, and I wrote the society items for a while.
But then I went to the Sunday news magazine, the tabloid-sized
magazine called This World. The editor was a young guy then called
Bill Richardson who was a brilliant, brilliant semanticist. He was
young, twenty- four or twenty- five. He had a pretty wife called
Antrine from the deep south. But Bill began bouncing checks or
something, and Bill finally left.
These guys, they knew their grammar, they knew their syntax.
92
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
They were on fire with the future of journalism. Jack Pegues was a
young man from Alaska who had come down, from which college I don't
know. Jack was on This World, the Chronicle's Sunday news magazine.
Larry Fanning became assistant managing editor later. He was from
San Francisco University, USF here. He was going through this
horrible fight that so many young Catholic Irishmen go through
between, you know, original sin and Catholic doctrine and the wild
and wooly world of sex. I don't know. Larry was a charming guy.
He was another of Paul's young newspaper proteges. Linton von
Beroldinger later became managing editor of the Examiner .
But here were all the old guys on the Chronicle who had been
hacking out these stories for so many years and the paper was going
along losing money. And Paul came along, started this fire under
it, turned it into the New Republic of the West. He always kept
wanting to turn the Chronicle into the New York Times of the West.
The Chronicle never became that at all. It was just kind of a
stodgy and very small newspaper. But the idealism, if I may use
that word, was certainly there. Everybody was on fire with
principle and we were going to reform the world and do wonderful,
great things .
Paul would go out on a vacation, driving around the countryside
or going east or traveling somewhere, and these young guys would
show up at the Chronicle managing editor's desk. And they would
say, "Mr. Smith told me to come here for a job. He picked me up
hitchhiking in Idaho." This would happen all the time. God, the
place was full of them.
Did George Cameron just withdraw from the scene?
Uncle George and Aunt Helen- -she was Helen deYoung, the oldest one
of the deYoung sisters --had no children. And I think Paul was
probably their long-lost son or something, I don't know. Uncle
George was really fond of Paul, and vice versa.
And he could do no wrong?
Exactly. Uncle George said, "Gee, my boy," you know. Uncle George
was not essentially a newspaper man at all. He was in the cement
business and very much involved with the Crocker Bank, as were so
many people I knew then. He kept picking up Paul's bills and
backing Paul's sometimes flashy lifestyle. Fortunately the cement
business was somewhat better than the newspaper business. They
built the Golden Gate Bridge, among other things, and the Bay Bridge
out of a lot of cement then. So the cement kept the paper afloat.
I said to Karl Kortum, it sounded like Paul Smith and you were the
same kind of guys. And he said, oh no, that Smith was always
putting on some kind of a show.
93
Newhall: So am I in a sense, I guess, but no! Paul had to prove something,
because Paul, I guess--! mean, without resorting to expert Freudian
psychoanalysis--! don't think Paul had any knowledge or feeling of
belonging anywhere. He came from nowhere. He didn't know what his
parentage really was, no matter what the legalities of the matter
were. And therefore he had to assemble his family around him as he
raced through life. I suppose this was a massive, in a sense,
insecurity. So his whole life was proving that he was a very
important somebody. I can only sympathize enormously with the man,
because in my case anyway, I have always been able to fall back and
know where I had grown up and been born and so on and so forth. And
Paul apparently didn't have that to fall back on.
Riess: Yes, well that's a big difference.
The staff under him included William German.
Newhall: Yes. German is still there.
Riess: And [Abe] Mellinkoff. They started with you?
Newhall: Yes. Abe came to work I think a few months before I did, because we
went out together on a story right in the very beginning. We had
just started at the Chronicle, both of us kind of green. Bill
German came in a few years later, I think, two or three years later.
Herb Caen
Riess : And Herb Caen?
Newhall: Yes. Paul got him, and Herb has a real fix about Paul.
Riess: Negative?
Newhall: No, no, not at all. Paul looms to Herb as a kind of a major saint,
one of the archangels or something. Herb spent a great deal of time
in Paul's company. I would say Herb and I were probably the two
closest- -by close I mean we were up there at Paul's apartment
headquarters most. Paul had us around the most.
Riess: You mean up in his office?
Newhall: In his apartment, you know, at his parties, his salon, his soirees.
Not so much in the office. Herb and Paul were in a sense so close
and so intertwined and perhaps shared some equal psychic problems.
But Herb walked out and went to the Examiner, so he has carried with
him like Saul of Tarsus or whomever, this horrible guilt because he
had walked out on the Messiah. When Herb did come back to the
94
Chronicle Paul then was long gone. And Herb has had to go through
life reassuring himself and everyone that he was really the most
faithful of all Paul's disciples. I don't want to get too deep into
this.
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
It's one thing to walk out on your boss, another thing to walk out
on your father or on God. It's a little problem. Apostates aren't
always so happy.
But this prodigal son--
Yes , but Paul was gone when Herb came back home ,
back when I was there .
You see Herb came
Smith's Style of Running the Paper
Riess: Give me a little sense of how the Chronicle ran under Smith.
Newhall: Well, Paul ran the paper pretty much by delegation Incidentally,
there are times when he would do some stories. When England went to
war he went over to London for the "blitz" and wrote some stories
then.
He wanted to participate from time to time in the dashing
foreign correspondent aspect, too. But he did have to try to run
the paper successfully enough to build up advertising, and he had
plenty of editors and managers available. And his social life and
newspaper life and business life all sort of melded into one scene.
Paul would go to the editorial conference usually every
morning. The editorial conference included the editorial writers,
two or three, whatever there were, and the cartoonist, and then Paul
would come in to join them- -which is actually what I did later on,
usually. He would not go to the daily news conferences or
participate in the daily coverage or anything like that. He would
talk to each one of his editors or subeditors or whatever you want
to call them from time to time on specific things, or they would go
to him. He ran a pretty good ship that way. The paper was able to
come out because he had a lot of people working for him who admired
him and liked him.
It wasn't all that different years later when I was there, not
all that different. We rolled along in somewhat the same style, but
with some different people. I can be more specific on it if you
want. I didn't attend the editorial conferences myself until a
couple of years after the war. I had been editor of This World for
95
long time, and later, after the war, became Sunday editor. The
Sunday editor more or less produces the whole Sunday paper minus the
regular daily news. And then, when Paul left, I became executive
editor. I didn't have as much control, right away at least, as he
had enjoyed.
Power
Riess: There's a lot of power there and I think it's interesting how it
works .
Newhall: Well, if you have a paper at your disposal in a community of this
nature you can theoretically, or presumably, wield a great deal of
power. I don't know how theoretical you want me to get, but one of
the great motivations of the members of any community to participate
in the life, the cultural, intellectual, political or sports life of
that community, is the reward of seeing your name in print. It's an
ego trip on the part of the politicians, celebrities, artists or
such I'm talking about.
When you go into any community and you're going to start a
paper, you think, okay, who shall be included in the cast of
characters. And you can wield influence- -not power necessarily- -by
the amount of publicity or exposure that is given to different
leaders or candidates for leadership in the community.
Now I don't know if it's very clear what I'm saying, but this
is why papers are one of the few industries in the United States of
America that can be losing $20 million a year and yet somebody will
pay $30 million for the privilege of owning such a paper. A
newspaper publisher can achieve instant social status and wield this
influence by the use of publicity, by sprinkling his favors on the
beautiful people of the town, in the form of stories and photographs
and selected publicity in his newspaper columns. I do not mean to
sound too cynical or surgical about the whole thing, but this is a
fact of life.
Riess: How are those messages gotten across? By innuendo or is it very
directly said?
Newhall: I can't describe it exactly At least I wouldn't, and I don't think
Paul would have said, "Well, I will give you this coverage, or use
your name in the paper if you will do that, so on and so forth."
Or, "I will support you or publicize you or laud you, praise you,
whatever." But you do hold this weapon of either criticism, or
damnation- -or glorification- -of individuals who are within the
political, cultural structure of the community.
96
Riess: And usually that's decided by your publisher, isn't it?
Newhall: It all depends.
Riess: But for Paul Smith it wasn't the publisher?
Newhall: Well, Paul Smith was dominant on the Chronicle .
Absolutely he was
dominant. He would cave in once in a while. (Usually one would
cave in in terms of the society page, just to be sure the
publisher's family was happy with the social coverage or something
like that.) Paul was dominant because he made a point of endorsing
liberal candidates, liberal causes, and shocking and jolting the
family and the Chronicle out of the complacent Republican rut it had
been in for so many generations. A publisher certainly controls the
corporate reality of a newspaper, which means the circulation of
paychecks. And therefore, in the end, the publisher is the dominant
personality because he can hire and fire all the editors he wants
to.
Now you have to watch out again for titles. Many publishers
are hired hands, so they have no power- -no true endemic power. Many
newspapers are now controlled by corporations. So again it's the
chairman or the president of the corporation who has the power.
Then the publisher just becomes an editor and manager- -a hired hand.
So watch out for titles. Do you follow me?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: In the Hearst papers, for example, a board of directors in New York
can hire and fire publishers more or less at will. In the end the
power does reside with the group that is in control of the treasury.
It's as simple as that. But if you get a good, smart editor or a
good, smart publisher and he's making them a lot of money, then who
is manipulating whom?
Riess: Yes. All right. Wonderful business!
Newhall: Tiresome after fifty or sixty years.
Scott Newhall. Reporter on the Rise
Riess:
Newhall:
Where did you start writing once you were really on two feet? It
was the society page first, did you say?
I went in there from the library I guess for a period of three or
four or five months. I was writing Sunday handouts, about a party
given by Mr. and Mrs. Crossett, or Mr. and Mrs. Fay, you know.
"Among those present were the Monsieurs and Mesdames So -and- So and
97
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
So -and- So."
Did you cover them, or did you just rewrite?
No, I didn't cover them. I was still on crutches. In most papers
they have just a lot of routine social coverage. There's a party
list, guests so-and-so and so forth. Like the box scores at the
ball games and such. But I didn't cover any of the World Series
games in the society section.
[laughter] I was looking at some old Chronicles . Those were the
days when they had really big pictures of weddings. I mean, really
big!
Oh, yes. Well, that was big. In the old Chronicle at the same time
you will find two or three pages of shipping news with big pictures
of people coming in from the East Coast and China and the Hawaiian
Islands and all that. And that's all changed, it's gone. There's
no more shipping news and there's not much more social news, unless
it's a benefit for the crippled children of Sausalito or something.
This World
Riess: Let's see. From that social page you said you went to This World?
Newhall: This World. Paul started that.
Riess: Paul started that in 1936.
Newhall: Totally. He used to like to run around with people like Luce and
the Cowleses. Look magazine and Life and all that crowd. He
thought, well, the Sunday newspaper ought to run a competition with
Time magazine. So This World, as it was called, was born. It was
just a copy, in a sense far better of course--but nevertheless
patterned on Time magazine, weekly news style. We would pick our
stories from the wire services and papers and magazines. We wrote
and sweated through a four -day week, because This World came out
once a week on Sundays. Those were long, long days.
Riess: But didn't a lot of writers develop there?
Newhall: It was a wonderful place.
Riess: Joseph Henry Jackson.
Newhall: Joe, yes. He wrote book reviews and put together a stable of
critics for his book section. That was a major section of its own.
The main news review section of This World was written in the chatty
98
condensed prose developed by Time. This boiled-down news writing
style can teach a reporter a hell of a lesson in craftsmanship. The
writer must try to hold his reader's attention by spinning a short
yarn about what supposedly is going on in the world of news. You
have to write it tight, try to get some color in there, but no
editorializing or no opinion in it. You do your best, anyway.
Riess: But you said they were wire stories.
Newhall: You cull all the information on a current news topic. For example
today, if we were putting together This World right now, there would
be a main story about Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, and the
current political convulsions. I think, the Chronicle subscribed to
ten or eleven news services. We also subscribed to a lot of
newspapers and local magazines and speciality magazines and material
like that. We just filed all the incoming news material according
to subject, then the writers would go through all the sources on any
given news item and bang out a story.
About By-lines
Riess: With by-lines?
Newhall: No, no by-lines. This World didn't use them. Well, they do put by
lines in Time now, I notice. But no, none of that in This World. A
by-line used to be something rather desirable and important. Today
it's just, well, you say to a guy, "Do you want a raise or a by
line?" Most of them go for the by-line. But then, of course, they
want the raise afterwards. Take the little Signal, our own paper
down south in Newhall. We've got more by-lines in that paper every
day than we had in the Chronicle in six months, then. Everybody
gets a by-line now. I'm not particularly sympathetic with that,
because it tends to personalize the news. But I suppose readers are
used to it now. You'll find those big by-lines in every major paper
in the country. The real newspaper business has gone to hell.
Riess: It implies that there's an editorial stance if there's a named
person writing the piece?
Newhall: I think some of it comes from the fact that some smaller papers want
people to think they've got a lot of reporters on the staff. I
don't know. And it's an ego trip for the reporters, you know. As I
say, "a raise or a by-line."
Riess: It's always struck me as being more meaty somehow when you see a by
line there.
Newhall: Psychologically, more people are used to it. I don't know when you
99
began reading newspapers, whether they had by-lines then or not.
There used to be no by-lines in newspapers, then pretty soon if a
story was wonderful they would give the writer a line. It was time
for an award or a bonus .
Riess: The first time I noticed newspapers was when I was writing for one
myself.
Newhall: Where was that?
Riess: The Bethlehem Globe-Times.
Newhall: Did they give you by-lines?
Riess: Well, I was doing interviews, and I think, yes, and I was called a
feature writer.
Newhall: That's pretty wild, that's nice.
I will say, at one time if a person got a by-line it was
recognition that he or she was a top person, fit to run with the old
pros on the staff, the fast track. And it was a real recognition.
Now it's a cheap shot. I'm not trying to belittle it, but I finally
had to make a rule down at the little paper in Newhall: no more than
one by-line per person per page. Because then you're giving away
the awful truth that you've got only two people on the staff --if you
see what I mean.
Riess: Yes [chuckles], I have seen papers that looked like that, that's
right. And those same people were there with their cameras, too.
Newhall: That's absolutely right.
War Years
With the Royal Navy in the North Sea
Riess: Up to World War II you were editor.
Newhall: I was editor of This World.
Riess: Yes. Then you were aboard a Royal Navy destroyer? How did you get
that assignment?
Newhall: Well, would it be of any help if I just quickly ran through the
chronology of my overseas stint?
100
Riess: Sure.
Newhall: I was editor of This World at the time of Pearl Harbor. Here in San
Francisco a lot of our Chronicle staff had gone off to the war, most
of the guys. There were just a few of us left around. This was in
1942, when San Francisco was booming with shipyards. This was when
the city began to blossom as part of the arsenal of democracy. At
the Western Pipe and Steel shipyard they were building these little
aircraft carriers. They were escort carriers --baby flat tops --for
anti-submarine work. And we were building them for the British.
British crews would arrive from England to take them back across the
Atlantic.
While the British servicemen were here in the Bay Area they
were entertained by San Franciscans. I've always liked the British
and we were very close to the public relations people in the British
Information Service who were using the Chronicle as a pipeline to
drum up "hands across the sea." They were lobbying for poor old
beleaguered England and all that. And we got to be very good
friends. We went to a lot of hard-drinking parties and various
celebrations with the young Royal Navy airmen and the aircraft
carriers crews and officers.
So they invited me, to put it briefly, to come back to England
with them on board one of the carriers. I said, "Sure, that's
fine." So they talked to our managing editor, who was then a fellow
called Bill Chandler- -a nice family guy. Paul was away at war.
Bill said, "Sure, you can't miss that opportunity."
Well, I climbed on board the carrier and went off to the war.
[later addition] May I interrupt here for the purposes of
clarity and provide a quick vignette of how and where I went to war?
On a personal basis I had become very close to the officers of
a couple of baby flat-tops that the Western Pipe and Steel company
was building down in South San Francisco- -HMS Attacker and HMS
Stalker. Their ships were essentially nothing but tanker hulls,
slightly beefed up, with landing decks on top. In a sense they were
floating bombs or mines --they went to sea with thousands of gallons
of aviation fuel sloshing around in their bottoms. But they became
a key to solving the problem of German U-boats destroying the trans -
Atlantic convoys.
Anyway, at some point, my friends who were about to take the
Attacker to sea asked me if I would like to come along. And
obviously I jumped at the chance to participate in the excitement
and fame and perils of war. You see, no one would draft or accept
me as a volunteer for military service because of my wooden leg.
Many of my friends were away, to do their duty, so I was restless.
But a problem arose. Shortly before the Attacker was to sail out
101
the Golden Gate, my amputation began acting up and the doctor had to
open it up and clean it up a little.
The Attacker sailed without me, but my friends on the Stalker.
which was due to cast off in about a month, invited me to join them.
That was perfect, except that in the meantime I was taking things a
little easy. I was on crutches because I could not wear the wooden
leg. And one morning early when I got out of bed and hopped to the
shower I happened to stumble and fell down and broke my wrist. And
this was really inconvenient.
Anyway, my great and good hero Dr. Leo Eloesser was on hand to
patch me up. Leo Eloesser was a substantial San Francisco giant- -
he was less than five feet tall, but he was still a giant, and I
owed most of my life to him. In any case that same evening I went
over to the old Stanford Hospital in San Francisco where he was
going to set my wrist. The treatment rooms seemed to be occupied at
the time, but with his customary celestial indifference Dr. Eloesser
decided to do his bone setting on a magazine table in an upstairs
visitors lobby. He summoned a nurse or two and asked for the
requisite plaster of Paris bandages and a pail of water and some
towels or papers with which to cover the table.
The nurses were pretty frosty, but they finally hustled up the
stuff and brought a copy of the day's Chronicle to cover the table.
Without cracking an expression, the good doctor thereupon stated,
"Nurse, will you please get an Examiner for the table cover. I
can't set this man's wrist on a Chronicle. Please bring me the
Examiner. It's better for this kind of thing." Well, if anyone
could have seen the poor nurse's reaction- -an expression of horror,
disbelief, mingled with scorn and frustration! But she did finally
provide the proper paper. It was gaudy. However, Dr. Eloesser did
indeed set my wrist on the front page of the Examiner and he never
did explain to the nurse the relative therapeutic merits of the
Examiner and Chronicle.
And back to the war. I was still heading for the war zones,
and I must confess that the spectacle of my departure for Armageddon
must have had a touch of peculiarity about it. I appeared for the
Stalker' s departure from the San Francisco waterfront in
correspondent's dress. That morning I was off crutches and able to
strap on my wooden leg for the first time in a month. My left arm
was in a cast and I suppose I was limping a bit more than usual
because my leg was still throbbing somewhat. I was afraid to show
up at the pier with a set of crutches in my hand, because I was
terrified that I would be weeded out as an undesirable member of the
ship's company by the officer of the watch. Anyway, I got on board
and collapsed in my appointed cabin until we had cleared the harbor.
And we were off to the war. And now let me add a couple of
chronological and geographical paragraphs of where and how we went:
102
from San Francisco through the Panama Canal to Norfolk, the big navy
yard in Virginia, where a second or third cousin of mine, Captain
Scott Baker, was in charge of the shipyard. At Norfolk I caught up
with and transferred to the Attacker. From Norfolk we went down to
the Caribbean to Jamaica and Curacao to join up with the oil convoys
to Britain. Then across the Atlantic to Liverpool eventually,
without losing a ship. From Liverpool I went to London, leased a
flat around the corner from Madame Tussaud's waxworks. And from
London I spent five or six months roaming all over England covering
both American and British and exiled continental troops organizing
D-Day.
The Germans were still bombing London every night, but by this
time nobody paid as much attention to the bomb shelters as during
the Blitz. The city of London at war was unforgettable. It was
life and death, love and hate, laughter and tears, I don't know,
soldiers and sailors and pilots and Red Cross girls, Wrens and women
sergeants, homosexual boulevardiers , and generous cab drivers. I
visited everything I could think of --American army rehearsals for D-
Day, RAF giant bomber squadrons that flew deep into Germany every
night. They wouldn't take me along with them, thank god! American
air fighter groups north of London, the elite exile Polish army
division headquartered in the Earl of Weymss' (which is pronounced
Weems)--the Earl of Weymss' castle at palatial Gosford House outside
of Edinburgh, the anti-aircraft battery at Ladywell east of London.
At one point my friends at the Royal Navy provided me with a
plane, a Fairey Fulmar two- seat fighter complete with a marvelous
young pilot with a wooden leg. We were a fine pair. We flew around
the south of England out to Cornwall and then up to Scotland for RN
torpedo plane exercises at Crail and Arbroath.
I spent a time out at Great Yarmouth with the motor gunboat
squadrons. It was strange somehow, crawling and pitching along the
coast of Germany and Holland one night, and then the next night
sitting comfortably in a choice seat at the London Palladium theater
enjoying a musical review and supper party. London in the blackout
was something- -bombs going off somewhere in the distance, on foggy
nights queues forming up to lead each other across an intersection,
Chelsea cigarettes available by the carton at the American PX
stores, girls available everywhere for a single package of Chelseas.
The Americans were so rich and the English were so hungry. I
remember that up at the U.S. airbases around lunchtime the RAF
fighter planes often suffered engine trouble and had to make forced
landings. The British pilots were always asked to stay on for lunch
or dinner- -and they ate so much, as if they hadn't seen serious food
for a month. Oh, yes, I almost forget, I had to go up to an
American army hospital in Oxford for a week or so to have a little
repair work done on my leg. Anyway, the London of World War II was
103
Riess :
Newhall:
a splendid scene- -a city wounded, but vital and vigorous. A
confusion of destruction, compassion, togetherness, and survival. I
went almost everywhere I wanted to go, saw as much as I could hold,
and then I felt it was time to come home and maybe digest some of
it.
So I went back across the North Atlantic on an old World War I
British destroyer. This was the roughest sea voyage I have made.
But we made it to Argentia in Newfoundland. And then came back here
to the Chronicle . I served for the rest of the war, here on San
Francisco Bay with the auxiliary temporary reserve Coast Guard on a
patrol boat. We were called the bald-headed SPARS. Finally, the
war was over.
Then in 1945 after V.E. Day, before V.J. Day, the founding
conference of the United Nations was convened at the San Francisco
Opera House here. And Ruth and I were very active covering that.
We were handling the Latin American delegations. Paul came back and
the pieces sort of began to be picked up again. I became Sunday
editor, and then Paul got in all this trouble and I became executive
editor. Then for nineteen years I was trying to be very helpful in
putting out the Chronicle . and I left the Chronicle in 1971. For a
year or six months I was at San Francisco Magazine. After that I
had a dreadful time running for mayor of San Francisco,
unsuccessfully. In the meantime--.
[chuckles]
Well, I'm just trying to tell you what the sequence was! I left San
Francisco Magazine after about six months. In 1963 I had bought the
Signal down south. So then when I left the Chronicle we sort of
moved south to put out the Signal. I've been at the Signal ever
since.
'Crowding My Luck" --Raw Fear
Riess: Much earlier, what did you do when you were on the British
destroyer? You were on board as a reporter?
Newhall: Well, I could do anything I wanted, you know. I could go anywhere
in the world this side of Germany and France and Japan- -this was
before D-day of course. The assignment was to just do whatever I
wanted, to cover any war-related stories I could dig up. Remember,
I was unfit for an active job at the fighting front because of my
wooden leg. The next best thing to war service was riding along as
a kind of passenger in warships and planes- -writing stories of the
warriors. But I was crowding my luck.
104
Riess: What do you mean, crowding it?
Newhall: Well, crowding my luck. You know at one point I was out in the
North Sea and getting into these little patrol boat skirmishes with
the German E-boats, and, you know, nobody but a damn fool wants to
get shot at unless it's relatively necessary. Why put yourself out
there for no reason other than simple curiosity?
Riess: The feeling of the rest of the people on the boat probably was
mortal terror.
Newhall: Well, I was more scared than they were. I promise you. Oh, the
fright was something. Fear has an unpleasant taste in one's mouth.
But that was destiny. The others were there because they had to be.
And I didn't. I asked myself, "Why are you doing this? What are
you proving?" Anyway, I used that as an excuse for why I came home.
And I had to get back to work.
Riess: Did you file stories from that ship, feature stories?
Newhall: I wrote some pieces on the torpedo boat actions for the North
American Newspaper Alliance syndicate. Oddly enough, the London
papers picked up some of the stuff, as well as the Chronicle . There
was something slightly eerie--! was living in a flat in London and I
received mail from the parents of young British sailors who had been
killed or wounded in some actions I had covered.
I remember I had some pieces on the old World War I destroyer,
the Vidette . These were just color stories where they've got a
submarine on the way back. But there wasn't anything to that, you
know, you don't even see it. The trip on the destroyer was from
Londonderry to Argentia, in Newfoundland. It was the North Sea
convoy route ONS 10. This meant Oversea Northatlantic Slow, I
think, convoy. It took us about nineteen days, because our mean
rate of advance was only about five nautical miles an hour. You go
in this great circle in the North Atlantic, just south of Iceland,
and come around off, there's a Cape Farewell or something in
Greenland. Our true rate of advance was a good five knots or
something like that, because we were continually zigzagging and
everything else.
In terms of a sea voyage it was something! I have never been,
with one possible exception, in any rougher situation. It blew.
You get the westerlies up there in the North Atlantic, and a World
War I destroyer is even smaller than our old four-stackers from
World War I ,
the American destroyers in World War I . And we were
pounding into very, very severe gales. One night --you know, you
sort of tie yourself in your bunk so you wouldn't be thrown out--
there was a big crash and I tell you the whole boat shuddered. I
figured we had had a torpedo, I really did. And I remember I just
rolled over and said, "Hell, I can't make it to deck. I'm going to
105
die nice and warm, right here, when I do." Well, a massive wave had
carried off our deck guns, just the seas coming over that poor old
ship.
We made it all right, but I must admit I never had a trip like
that, ever. I consider myself very lucky, honestly, to have gotten
back. I'm not trying to build it up. I've been in some blows here
and there, plenty of them. But that North Atlantic is something.
Riess: Yes. You're talking about the elements now, not the war.
Newhall: I'm just talking about getting that ship across. We were supposed
to be protecting a convoy and here we were trying to stay afloat.
And you'd see these little trawlers. I mean, the American people
have basically no concept of how the British had to fight this war.
The British went to war in stuff that would have been surveyed out
and put in a junk pile here in the United States. This little
destroyer we were in, I don't know what they would have done with
it. I doubt if we Americans would have sailed it across San
Francisco Bay.
After these months I had with the Royal Navy, I have the most
profound respect for the British navy. And no American is supposed
to say that. I would never tangle with them as long as I lived as
an American, believe me. They are amazing. They get these kids out
of Oxford, you know, it's the same thing with the RAF. Some of them
have a handkerchief up their sleeves, and they have this very broad
Cambridge or Oxford accent. But my god, what warriors they are!
They are fantastic. After all, as you know, they did control half
of planet earth with a "thin red line" for one hundred or two
hundred years. They have been bred and brought up for that, believe
it.
Just about a month ago I drove to San Diego and I met one of my
old shipmates, ward shipmates on the HMS Stalker. He's over here,
he's still alive. He had run the laundry on board. Of course he
was also the fire control director, but ran the laundry, so we were
good friends . He came over here with his wife who is now an author
of Gothic novels, a very successful author, and I went down and
traded a few memories with him from forty- five years ago.
Riess: They knew that you were an American journalist.
Newhall: Oh yes, sure. I was in uniform, oh sure.
Riess: Did they tell you any tales? Were you privy to everything?
Newhall: Oh, sure, I was the assistant to the code officer on board the
Vidette .
Everybody went to work. Oh, sure. As a correspondent you
were all part of the show. Those motor gun boats in the North Sea
--that is another type of service- -that' s where I was the most
106
frightened of all.
Riess: Do people pray on boats like that?
Newhall: I'm sure they did. They used to have service on the larger vessels.
You would do anything. You don't waste your time and effort not
believing in anything. Anything that will preserve your life you're
willing to go through, believe me. Because as far as I'm concerned
it's the only time in my life--. In the North Sea we got into a
little engagement with a couple of German E-boats. And the raw fear
is a sour taste. I can't describe it. But I didn't like it much.
Wars, and the United States in World War II
Riess: I was thinking maybe you were leading up to the idea that everyone
should experience this.
Newhall: It helps. A little fear goes a long way. One doesn't want to go
back to war, right away. You know, right now this poor old country
of ours --this is 1988 that we're talking- -is so restless and so
ready to go back to war. And we are restless. I don't care what
anyone says. At the moment we have a president there in Washington
who can't live or breathe without sending troops somewhere. I used
to write editorials for the Signal saying, "Okay, if they want to do
it, fine. Any president can send his army to war as long as he will
be riding in the first landing ship to go to shore." I tell you,
it's ugly, there is no glory. War is only tragedy. But people do
get so damned bored, they're willing to trade, I guess, trade
tragedy for boredom, I don't know.
Riess: And if you've ever seen any of the movies that have come out
recently, the Vietnam War movies, you'd think they'd be enough- -but
there is that sort of balance between it being terrifying and it
being quite, quite thrilling.
Newhall: People do survive. The heroes normally survive, the hero figures.
I didn't think much of "Apocalypse Now." Did you see that?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: I couldn't quite follow it all, but it did show some of the
hopelessness and the utter, I think, the ugliness. Some of those
scenes in there were just terrible, it seemed to me.
Riess: Yes. But it is the survivor's story, always.
Newhall: Always the survivor tells the story. Dead men don't talk or write.
Very few movies will dare come out and kill off the hero.
107
Riess:
Newhall:
Let me add one little thing to this. I have been talking about
fright, the fear of this, that, and the other. But in the midst of
war and fear there are parties ,
there are laughs , there are j okes .
In wartime there's some sort of a counterpoint to the ugliness and
fear; when people are living on the edge of disaster there exists a
lot of hysterical laughter too. In the ward room we had more fun
and laughs than any place I've ever been in my life. You know, when
we were fooling along, not dodging bullets and fearing the enemy.
War is grotesque .
And that was encouraged?
Oh yes, you had to, to survive. Oh sure, it was jolly. And you
formed very, very close friendships, and they would go on for a long
time. Some of the fellows, I was in the same ship with them for a
matter of weeks or something, but you'd feel you knew them all your
life.
Riess: Were you pro-war?
Newhall: I felt it was inevitable. I felt it was a necessity. Inevitable,
really, more than a necessity. I didn't see any other resolution to
the rise of raw power and raw brutality in Germany.
Riess: About getting into the war, was the paper early on the bandwagon?
Newhall: There was never any debate about it. We were so anti- Hitler and
resentful of Germany that there was not much talk about it, not much
yelling or shouting around the paper. As I say, Paul was totally
sold on getting into the field himself. He volunteered the day the
Japanese made their sortie over Pearl Harbor. My feeling was very
strong that it was inevitable, it was fate, there was no way out.
Hitler had to be stopped. And it was a matter of time.
I remember, I was a great admirer of Roosevelt, particularly in
his first two terms. I didn't think he should have run for a third
term; I thought it was very un-American, but that's one of those
things .
I was irritated with Roosevelt because, as with every American
president that I can remember, his platform was, "I'll keep us out
of war, I hate war," all this. And the guy was lying through his
teeth because he knew he had to go to war and he didn't have the
guts to lead us into war. Now I think he was probably correct,
pragmatically and politically, the way he handled it. But there was
no escaping it, no matter what anyone would like to think now.
Riess: You didn't come from a conscientious objector point of view.
108
Newhall: Oh no, no. I felt, unfortunately, we've got to.
Lately there's all this talk, mostly from some of the Jewish
groups, that gee, we didn't do anything, we sat by, we didn't know
what was happening in Europe. Well, as far as I'm concerned I knew
what was going on in Europe.
You know, there's a lot of 20-20 hindsight in all this stuff.
In 1933 Ruth and I came back on the S.S. Gerolstein which was a
Jewish-owned ship from Germany. And most of the people on board
were refugee Jews coming out then. This was '33. But the stories
were all over the place.
I don't know what people mean when they say, "We let it happen.
We didn't know about it." I do not recall anytime when I was not
aware of the brutality and menace of Germany. I didn't know in '33
everything I would know, say, in '39, but many of the American
people, and certainly I, felt that the greatest incentive for our
going to war was Hitler's terrible behavior with reference to not
only the many Jews but all of the people who were in concentration
camps. And we couldn't stay out of it. Now, we might have gone
into the war sooner, but perhaps we even did better by not going
into it quite as soon and by sending all this stuff to the British.
There was a lot of anti-war feeling in this country at the time, but
I never encountered it. I have no recollection of it whatever. I'm
sure many people will tell you differently. But oh god, it was
coming.
You probably wouldn't remember, but Hitler's speeches were
broadcast, we used to listen to them. It was the most terrible
nightmare in the world. And it was. The editorials we used to do
about Chamberlain and all that stuff--. Anyway, I think that
hindsight tends to be 20-20. But we did get into it, and it was a
tough thing, and a lot of people got rich from it.
Riess: That's a funny conclusive remark.
Newhall: Well, I was just thinking and sermonizing that war was a terrible
thing for the country. Then I thought of all the thousands of
people who came out here, the boilermakers who were women, the
shipbuilders, pipefitters of America, and they would go into
Magnin's buying mink coats for cash. It was quite a scene. You
know, we had hundreds of thousands of war workers out here, and they
made out like bandits.
109
Women in Wartime, and Ruth Newhall's Career
Riess: Yes, and as you were saying about the paper, women got a chance to
show what they could do. And then of course, they were sent back
home.
Newhall: Well, that had been understood. And there wasn't much of a hassle
because most of the women on the paper had husbands or gentlemen
friends who were serving overseas, and they were totally sympathetic
and understood that they had to give up their jobs to their husbands
or sweethearts or whatever. Everyone who came to work had to sign a
note stating that they were replacing a male employee. And everyone
who left the Chronicle . who either volunteered or was drafted, was
given a guarantee to have his job back. This is on the Chronicle .
Riess: That was the policy of other businesses?
Newhall: I can't answer that. All I know is we did it. I think it was
certainly understood and agreed to, not legally or formally perhaps,
but by many, many businesses.
There was this real patriotic war fever abroad, of course.
When you get a bunch of Japanese flying over Pearl Harbor and
dropping bombs on poor old Americans, American soil, you're going to
have an upsurge of patriotism you can't believe. Pearl Harbor meant
war. This wasn't a silly Vietnam farce. The difference between
World War II and Vietnam are so striking as to be incomprehensible.
Riess: Some of these women, like Carolyn Anspacher, went on in their jobs.
Newhall: Some of them did. Carolyn was there long before the war, and she
was permanent. I think a few of them did. We had copy girls. It
was strange to see girls instead of boys hustling copy and fetching
coffee. That was the first thing. Some of them stayed on and went
onward and upward with the art.
Riess: What was Ruth doing during this time?
Newhall: She worked on This World for almost the whole war. Incidentally she
also bore and reared her children at the same time.
Riess: After the two of you got married, she worked all that time?
Newhall: When we got married she was working at the art department at Cal as
a secretary. We went out traveling and we came back. I was sick, I
lost my leg. I went to work on the paper. Ruth came to work on the
paper writing on This World--I'm sorry, I'm not sure when, because
she came and went. She'd come to work for a while and then go home.
She'd have kids and then she worked on the World writing. Then
she'd have a child or two, and she'd come back and she would work
110
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
maybe in a different department. She worked writing editorials for
a while, later on. At one period she stayed in Berkeley and worked
the police beat in Berkeley for the Chronicle. Then when we went
down and bought the newspaper in the south- -she's the editor down
there now. Hell, she's the editor-in-chief.
Riess: Very impressive.
Well, you know, the girls now, the ladies now, they have a child and
they get to reading books and they start bonding themselves to their
child. They're ruining a whole generation.
See, we were able with Ruth at work to afford household help.
We always had a housekeeper to take care of the kids. And her
record was remarkable --it was probably only about six weeks after
each child was born that she came back to work. I don't know how
she did it, I really don't know. Because she went home and she took
care of that house and she took care of those children. It was
quite a life. I thought it was wonderful.
And almost all the time we worked together in the newspaper
business. Our whole life, basically, we always worked together
except for periods when she felt it was very necessary for her to be
home at a stretch. I think when I first took over as executive
editor I said, "Hey look, we don't want too much nepotism around the
plant. You'd better knock off for a while," which she did. Then
she would come back to work from time to time Paul always tried to
hire her, because she was awful good.
A good writer?
Yes, she's a good newspaper writer.
United Nations. We had a ball.
We worked together on the
Showing the Flag- -Australia to Gibralter, 1948
Newhall: One more war story, post-war. In 1948 I had a fascinating trip
around the world with the American carrier, Valley Forge. I was
Sunday editor, or maybe editor of This World. Paul Smith was still
the editor and general manager of the Chronicle. He'd received an
invitation to make a cruise of the Pacific aboard the Valley Forge.
one of the old American aircraft carriers still in service.
The navy was embarked on a kind of a pseudo-goodwill tour, and
to show the flag in the Pacific Basin. They'd patched up what they
called Task Force 38. Task Force 38 was a very well-known wartime
navy group that had been down in the South Pacific, I believe it was
under Admiral Halsey or Spruance. It was very big with the public.
HOa
Paul couldn't go, and he asked me would I like to go along? I
thought that was a very nice invitation, a very gracious thing to
do, and I accepted.
We flew out of here in the fall, about October, November of
1948. I left Alameda airport on one of the old Martin "Mars"
seaplanes, and they were the biggest damn planes I ever saw; they
were awfully big. We left from the water down there at Alameda air
station and flew out to Oahu. We landed near Pearl Harbor there, on
the water. This flying boat took a lot of people; it had two decks
in it. It would fly at about eighty or ninety miles an hour.
It took us eighteen hours to Hawaii, and that's a long time,
but we got there, stayed around for a couple of days, and then we
sailed out on the Valley Forge, accompanied by four destroyers as an
escort. We headed out southwest across the Pacific to Sydney,
Australia, on our goodwill tour and we arrived with very little
incident and were entertained very nicely by the Australians. I
know I met all the publishers there. One of them was a fellow
called Frank Packer, and I think there's a Sir Frank Packer or Sir
Something-or-other Packer who's a big deal now in either TV r
newspapers or something in Australia.
Then we went north to Hong Kong. We went up the Coral Sea and
along the north coast of New Guinea. We got up towards the
Philippines, and we sent all the messboys ashore in the Valley Forge
fighter planes so they could visit their relatives. (You know,
they're mostly Filipino messboys in the navy, all proper style.)
They had a nice visit, and then we went on to Hong Kong. From Hong
Kong the ship then went up to Tsingtao, which is just south of the
Shantung Peninsula. It was a former German kind of colonial seaport
port of entry.
The Valley Forge then received orders to go on around the world
because there were Communist troubles in Italy and they wanted to
show the flag there with some American warships . We proceeded from
Tsingtao to Singapore, visited Singapore. We then went to
Trinconmalee Harbor in Ceylon- -what is now called Sri Lanka. Then
we went up the Persian Gulf to entertain and again show the flag to
the Arabs because Araraco , the Arabian-American oil company, was just
now putting down big wells in Arabia and the oil was beginning to
flow. Then we went around, up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal,
and over to Gibraltar, and stopped at Gibraltar. From Gibraltar we
went up to Bergen in Norway.
At Bergen I said, "I better get back to work." So I flew back
via London and Casablanca and the Azores to Patuxent, Maryland, and
I flew home to California, and that was the trip.
Now, to me the remarkable thing about all this is this was in
HOb
the beginnings of the Cold War. I don't know if the Berlin Wall had
been built quite yet. But everything was in kind of a tumult.
These were in the absolute ashes of World War II, and the planet
earth was still about the same place it was that I knew when I was
much younger and traveled. The cities were about the same size, the
population was about the same, and the foreign ports were faraway
places with strange -sounding names. Today, as you know, everything
looks like downtown Burbank or something. No matter where you go,
there is no longer, from my point of view, any exotic or exciting
experience in foreign travel.
Well, I had this wonderful opportunity to see the world, the
pre-H-bomb world. Sydney was just recovering from the war; there's
nothing to say there. Hong Kong, it was an interesting experience
to sail into the harbor through these hundreds and hundreds of junks
floating all over the horizon. In Hong Kong harbor there were still
the masts of all the tankers and freighters that had been sunk by
Japanese bombing in the harbor. There was no real recovery from the
war. It was still a British colonial outpost. We went around and
had tea on the veranda of the Repulse Bay Hotel where they'd kept
the British prisoners --civilian prisoners the Japanese took during
the war.
I asked the admiral, I said, "Look, you're going to go up to
Tsingtao in three weeks. Do you mind if I leave the ship and rejoin
you later?" He said fine, so I hitched a ride in a Marine plane up
to Canton, and from there I picked up an Air Cathay plane- -
Chenault's old Flying Tiger airline, they turned it into Air Cathay
--and I flew up to Shanghai.
Now, I meant to mention, while I was in Hong Kong, in the foyer
of the main hotel there, the old King George Hotel or whatever it
was, colonial hotel, I ran into an old buddy of mine whose name was
Franc Shor, who subsequently became, I think, editor of National
Geographic . I think he was editor there for quite a few years. He
was sort of an old-time con man who had worked for the Chronicle a
little bit; he'd been a public relations agent and so on, but he'd
also spent some time in San Quentin prison for either rubber checks
or something. We were pretty good friends.
Franc said, "Oh, Scott, you've got to go up to Shanghai.
Chiang's on the run, and I've got the only Cadillac in China." (I
don't know how he promoted it.) "My girlfriend is in the hospital"
--she had hemorrhoids, and that's not becoming to a woman; to a man,
maybe, but not a woman- -"Will you go see her?" "I'll have the driver
meet you," he said, "I can get word to Shanghai."
So I went off from Canton, flew to Shanghai, and landed. Now,
I must say this was the end of '48, and just for simplistic reasons
let's call them the "Red Chinese" or the "Communist Chinese"- -they
had gained all of China except for Peking, Tsingtao, Tientsin,
HOc
Shanghai, and Canton, I think. They were literally surrounding
these cities, the Red Army, but you could fly in, still. So I flew
in to Shanghai and I stayed at a place called Broadway Mansions down
on the Wangpoo Creek. I just had a good time wandering around town,
and I did some stories.
I sent some stories about how the Chiang Kai-Shek and the
Nationalist forces were about to fold up and be run over by the Red
Chinese. Our American intelligence officer there called me and he
said, "Look, Mr. Newhall, I will transmit these stories of yours
because we have to. After all," he said, "it's a free press. But,"
he said, "if only you had access to the classified information that
we have here in the intelligence community, you'd know that this is
all nonsense." I said, "Well, I don't think it's all that much
nonsense. It looks pretty sad to me with all these Red Chinese
troops outside of town."
"No," he said, "things are going to be all right. But I'll
send your stories anyway." And he did, he transmitted the stories,
and they were published. And of course, it was only two or three
weeks before Chiang Kai-Shek got out of town with his airplane and
his gold bars. Chiang used the Cadillac limousine. It was the only
one in Shanghai, but I was able to use it while I was there, with
the driver.
Franc was an operator; he had a country house. It was an
absolute stage-set place out of House Beautiful in China, with the
moon windows and the moon entrance and pavilion. I dozed off to
sleep the first night I stayed out there. It had a staff, a
houseboy, and the waiters, and so on. I heard all these
firecrackers, you know; the Chinese were really celebrating stuff.
So in the morning I said, "Hey, what was the celebration last
night?" He said, "Oh, that's the Red Army. It's just out there
across the other side of the field." So I left and went back to
Shanghai immediately; I wasn't going to get into that. I had a very
interesting time. His girlfriend, I'm happy to report, recovered,
got out of the hospital.
So then I took a plane and flew up to Peking. Forgive me for
talking about it so much, but it was one of the remarkable
experiences of my life, to fly into Peking. The army was around it,
the railroad had just been closed. There used to be a railroad up
from Tientsin to Peking, and the Red Army just finished closing that
off. They come around with a pincers movement. But from the plane
I could see Peking, and at that time I guess it still looked the way
it had been built in the fourteenth century or whenever it was
built. I guess it was originally Mongol rather than Manchu, but
anyway, it was a big, square city with big, big walls around it. I
believe it's all different now. But at that time in 1949 you could
see the whole city, just one big square-walled fortress-metropolis.
LlOd
We landed, and I drove in. The stewardess was a very nice
girl. She gave me their personal cards because I said, "We may have
to get out of China." One of them was Shirley Liang. I forget who
the other one was. Anyway, I got in the bus at the airport to get
into Peking, and going through that wall was an unforgettable
experience. It was one of those almost medieval walls where you go
in one entrance and then you go around like an "S," an elaborate two
or three curves, so nobody had a chance getting through any of those
walls on foot with the old infantry. Then you get to the city gate
of the wall and there you are, in the city.
I stayed at the Wagon Lits Hotel, the French Wagon Lits . One
of our Chronicle fellows had become a language officer in the
legation up there in Peking. His name was Gayle Anderton. And I
ran into another old Chronicle-San Francisco friend, Chris Rand, who
had been editor of the West Coast magazine, what do they call it?
It was put out in the thirties. Doesn't matter. Coast magazine.
He was one of these sort of semi -snotty guys from Harvard, Beacon
Hill or the East Coast, Massachusetts. But Chris had been a
Chronicle man. We were buddies. You found people you knew
everywhere in the world.
We fooled around there, and I went to a banquet for China's
most revered artist, but I won't bore you with that story. He sat
next to me. I will only say the interpreter--. Well, it was an
elaborate Chinese banquet, quite formal, and this guy's eight-five
or ninety, the Robert Frost of China. I made some remarks to the
interpreter about what a fine -looking old gentleman he was, and he
interpreted it, and he came back to me, the interpreter, and said,
"He thanks you for your compliment. He wants to know if you would
like to know why he is in such good health." I said, "Yes, I would
indeed." He talked to him again. He said, "It's because he has a
bowel movement only once a month." [laughter] I said, "That's
interesting." Then there was some more talk and he turned back to
me and he said, "He had a bowel movement this morning." [laughter]
Well, that's the end of that story.
After my visit with the nice Chinese poet and going around to
the Imperial City and the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven,
which are unbelievable, or they were then, I flew down to Tsingtao.
I joined the Valley Forge and we went off to Singapore, which was a
Chinese city then. This was all fascinating to me. It was the
exploration of the wonderful planet we're living on and the
frontier, and here were all these strange -sounding people and so on.
Singapore was all a one or two-story Chinatown.
They had Chinese theater and amusement parks there; I never
will see the equal to them. The Chinese theaters there, the
costuming was so magnificent. You've seen Chinese theater, I guess.
It goes on all day, literally. You go in and they throw you the hot
towels and the oranges and all this; it was great.
HOe
I got to dancing with some colonial English girls at a dance
hall at one of these amusement parks. After dancing with them to
"In the Mood" or some American swing song, I bowed very low to the
young lady and I said, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for
this exquisite experience," or something along that line. The next
thing I knew, she had belted me one and knocked me halfway across
the room. I don't know why to this day. I think she felt I was
putting her on or something. I really don't know. That's my memory
of Singapore.
Okay, in Singapore we talked to Sukarno and some of those sort
of Marxist guys who were getting Java or Sumatra out of the Dutch
colonial hemisphere. Then we went to Trinconmalee ,
a wonderful,
wonderful natural harbor on the northeast coast t>f Ceylon. I've
never seen anything like it. I left the ship at the naval base there
for a couple for days- -the port is a little, tiny village; there
really wasn't much of a harborworks- -to go up and see some of the
ruins .
I always wanted to go to Kandy, the capital of Ceylon. I
hitched a ride from the ruins. The navy sent all the troops up to
see the ruins at Polonarua. I hitched a ride with a couple of
English ladies. I went up to Kandy and stayed there and saw the
Buddha's Tooth pagoda, and then hitched a ride back. The
interesting thing about that- -again, it was 1949 by this time --when
I went ashore first in Trinconmalee, the sort of village around it,
a little guy came running out of the shadows to me . I don't know
why; I just looked regular, I guess. He could speak English,
because in Ceylon there are or were a lot of English.
He said, "You're from America, is that right?" I said, "Yes."
He was a little guy, barefoot, probably. He said, "Could I get to
America?" I said, "I guess so; a lot of people have." He said,
"Yes, but what about this?" and he held his hands out like this. I
said, "What do you mean? I don't understand." He said, "They're
the wrong color." He said, "I'm not white," or something. I said,
"Oh, look, you can make it, just keep trying," or something. He
wasn't threatening or anything. I just mention that because it
struck me at the time as to what the rest of the world must think
about America and so on, and the troubles we might have been having.
You know, they had a lot of trouble in Ceylon; they still are
having trouble. Ruth and I went there about four or five years ago,
and we were just able to squeeze in the trip when the killing had
ceased for a while. There's been a lot of violence there, and I
guess that Ceylon- -or Sri Lanka- -is going to be violent for a long
time still.
Riess: That was your only kind of incident like that?
HOf
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall ;
Riess:
Newhall:
Oh, yes.
For the most part your encounters were with the American or English
community?
Yes. Or with the newspapers. I didn't have time, or I wasn't out
on foot, you know.
I have not mentioned China--.
Yes, why did you end up feeling they were the greatest people in the
world?
Okay, I'll try to explain that. While I was in Peking at the Wagon
Lits Hotel some little guy came in and said he wanted to make some
clothes. Did I want to buy some clothes?
That story you told.
Okay, well, that was it. They made them overnight. It's this
Oriental work ethic and this family ethic that is so phenomenal. I
went out with Chris Rand, and there were rickshaws then. I did a
story on the rickshaws and the rickshaw coolies. They're something.
They're all skinny and die of consumption eventually. But they work
and work without stop.
Whenever traveling- -and I say this advisedly--! liked to cover
a house of ill fame. In Peking I sat there and I looked at the
family, the girls and their lifestyle. It was a tiny family home
and the mother and two daughters were doing anything to raise some
money. There was a certain hospitality and pride, and utter abject,
horrible, awful poverty. I figured, "These people are going to make
it." I can't explain it to you, Suzanne. I had the experience of
watching people selling me stuff in the markets and managing to
survive while the Chinese collapsed and inflation went from 1 to 10
to 1 to 700,000. The Chinese are going to survive forever.
Nobody's going to put them down. They're just too many and they
will accept things, and they will survive.
I can't describe it very intelligently, but I just saw their
persistence and their native hospitality. It's a remarkable
culture. They're either down and resigned and they will accept it,
but they don't die. They survive. If you don't have a slick
Italian car in this country, or a wind-up laser-operated teddy bear
when you're a kid, you're finished--. But I don't want to get into
that. I'm going around the world right now.
Well, I think you're just about done.
Okay. Well, the visit with the sheik in the Persian Gulf was pretty
interesting. King Ibn-Saud was still the king, but his crown prince
HOg
was younger, King Saud. He came down to visit the ship and we took
him for a ride. The story I always tell is --it takes time --he was
surrounded by all these guys in robes, and a lot of black guys and
stuff, and I said to one of them, I said, "You speak English?" He
said, "I sure do." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Oh," he
said, "I'm from Brooklyn." I said, "What do you mean? What are you
doing over here?" He had a gold dagger on and the headdress. He
said, "This sure as hell beats Brooklyn." [laughter] It was a
funny conversation. I talked to him for a while, and he was
American as I .
The king's grand vizier or something apparently got terribly
seasick and fell to the deck face-down. Nobody touched him. They
let him lie there. He suddenly rolled over when the ship lurched a
little bit. Everybody on board the Valley Forge had been briefed
that the Arabians prayed to Mecca every so often, and if any of our
guests got down to pray, don't bother them, it's impolite. Well,
they thought that this poor guy in robes and headdress lying on the
deck was praying to Mecca. But the fellow was almost dead from some
kind of vertigo. He began to vomit. They finally fixed him up and
the doctors took care of him, but that was always a funny little
incident.
We were entertained at one of the most memorable dinners I've
ever attended, in a palace in Dahran. All this took place at a
place called Ras Tanura, which is an Aramco port. There was a big
party given by the crown prince for all of us on board. We went to
this party. We sat down, about fifty of us, in a tent -like compound
on the ground, no top. The moon came up over the desert, the air
was exquisitely clear, and the guy sitting next to me was a fellow
all done up in robes who turned out to be Sir John Philby. Old Sir
John was a very famous Arabist who was a favorite of old King Ibn
Saud, the father of the Kim Philby who defected to the Russians.
Sir John began telling me about the king. "He's like my father," he
said. "He calls me 'My son.' He told me about his wife. He had a
wife, apparently, in England, and one in Cairo. Philby was finally,
you know, told to get out, but he lasted until King Saud got in.
Then we went on through the canal, past Suez, and landed in
Gibraltar, and I visited there and went up to see the Barbary Apes.
You know, there's the old story about Gibraltar will be secure until
the apes depart. Winston Churchill had said, "Replenish the apes."
So I went up to see the apes. They're carried on the roster.
Whatever it's worth, the apes are carried on the roster of the
Gibraltar garrison, and they all have their ration and it's all
recorded every day, what they're paid in terms of bananas or
whatever they eat. I went up to pay them a call. They gave me a
page out of the roster for a memorandum.
Then we went up around north of England and across the North
Sea to Bergen. And then I flew home.
Ill
Riess:
Newhall :
Changing Times
Post-war Bay Area
When you were made editor of This World was the idea that you were
supposed to be making some sweeping changes?
On the World? No, I just did the same thing. It was quite new
then, and we sort of tightened it up. But basically the whole idea
was there as Paul had founded it, established it.
Riess: During the war you were away a lot?
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess :
Newhall:
I was away for a total of about a year that's all.
But you were part of the team that was really home keeping the
Chronicle going?
Oh, yes. A girl, a woman, Carolyn Stull her name was, from Marin
County, was editor of the World while I was gone. She was a really
smart girl. She went to work on the Ex later on. She started out
as an assistant to Joseph Henry Jackson, a secretary in the book
department .
After the war a lot of people came out to the Bay Area who had been
here during the war and thought it would be a wonderful place to
return to .
Oh yes, that certainly happened. That was the end of California.
In a sense it was a great leap forward,
though .
You say it was the end,
Well, what's a leap forward? I don't know. It was, in a sense.
During the war so many hundreds of thousands of young people had
come through San Francisco particularly, and California generally,
that this is where they wanted to come home to after the war and
enjoy the freedom and excitement. They went home, I guess, to one
winter back in Minnesota or Michigan or something, and then they
came back out here. So this was the discovery of California, even
more dramatically perhaps than the discovery of gold in 1849. And
out they came .
There's an old saying: when you go to war, if you join the
navy, the regular navy's always in charge. If you join the army,
the regular army is soon submerged under the mass of volunteers and
civilians who come in and take over. Well, California remained in
112
charge of its own soul and fate for about twelve, fifteen years
after the war. And then in the sixties that was the end of it. I
mean, San Francisco is no longer controlled by San Franciscans.
It's kind of a melange of god-knows -what. And California is just a
big bouillabaisse or something of middle -westerners and people from
all over the country. There's no longer, I think, any feeling of
local identity out here. This city itself -I could not describe to
you San Francisco today very well, I really couldn't. As a matter
of fact, I was talking about it at lunch. Well anyway, I'm
wandering around too much.
What San Francisco Was
Riess: Well, describe the San Francisco that was.
Newhall: San Francisco was, I think, a remarkable, remarkable community I've
always said, it was a state of mind, it was a legend, it was a fairy
tale. And San Francisco- -I'm talking now about geographical San
Francisco, forty-nine square miles at the tip of this little
peninsula- -was the bright light or the centerpiece of this whole Bay
Area. And when people used to travel--! lived for a long time in
Berkeley, and I've lived in San Rafael- -and when people abroad
asked, "Where did you come from?" I would always write "San
Francisco" on the hotel register, or something like that, because
people knew where San Francisco was.
San Francisco was a mining town, it was not a farm town, and it
was a real international seaport. Therefore the mores of the
community were very permissive. Saturday night was always a big
night. People were allowed to go their own way. The citizens of
San Francisco- -you know the turbulent history of the city. And we
were all very proud of it, we were all a part of it.
This was a city made up of four or five ethnic groups. There
were Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, a very strong Jewish
community, a few blacks and a few Latinos. And San Francisco was
controlled, generally speaking, by an amalgam between what they now
call blue-collar or whatever, South of Market, Irish Catholic
population, the machinists and the boilermakers and the firemen and
the policemen and all that. And some San Franciscans called
themselves Irishmen, or others called themselves Italians, or Jews,
or they called themselves this, that, or the other. And they loved
each other, or at least they respected one another as "San
Franciscans .
"
Now I'm talking in generalities, I know. When I landed in
Londonderry on my way back from the war, the minute I walked into
the officer's club there a couple of guys came running up. One of
113
them said, "Hey, Scott, you're from San Francisco." (I don't know
how they found out.) He said, "My father was Judge Alden Ames."
Well, I knew Judge Ames because we used to take pictures of him in
town in his courtroom in the old Hall of Justice. And the other
fellow who came up was the captain of the hospital in Londonderry,
Captain Bryson Parry Davis from Mill Valley. He said, "Oh, my god,
we've got to have a meeting." Just coming from this city, there was
this camaraderie .
Good fellowshp is- -I suppose the same thing might happen in
Dayton, I don't know. But people loved this city, they were proud
of each other, they liked each other. And they all made a point of
being very sort of casual and cavalier and going their own way and
talking about the good old days. Some of the guys went to Mission
High, some of the guys went to San Francisco State or USF, and some
of the guys went east to Lawrenceville. Hell, you were all sort of
pals .
There was not then this terrible sort of egocentric quality
which you see now in so many people in San Francisco, where they
have come to this city because it was permissive. Now these
tiresome people who came here in recent years because it was
permissive are insisting that the city must be cast in their mold.
There's a whole different spirit about this place. God knows where
all these people have come from.
I started to say that the Board of Supervisors, which sort of
controlled the city, and the mayors, the executive branch, and the
newspapers, and the Pacific Union Club played a great part in it,
and Montgomery Street, all sort of in this symbiotic relationship.
In the past, for example, you'll see the chiefs of police were
either Irish, or sometimes Italian, but mostly Irish. A lot of
Italians and Irish in the fire department. The Scavenger's
Association were men of great substance here. They were mostly
Italian. The fishermen were Italian. But they were all San
Franciscans. And it wasn't an ethnic slur to call a guy by what his
family heritage was.
Now you have to be careful about names, or ethnic derivations
and racial ancestry and such, or at least you should be. And it's
kind of sad. I think it's very sad. As I've described it a little
in San Rafael, there was a caste system and a feudal state here.
This is a very strange city. But now the women have to join the
clubs, and I don't know, you've got all this business. You have to
be careful about what you say.
Riess: You didn't mention any Asian population as part of it.
Newhall: Oh well, that was marvelous. That was the best part of it all. But
they were totally separate, historically, you know, because of the
114
McClatchy newspaper in the Central Valley, and because of the
"yellow peril" that Hearst papers manufactured. There had been this
very stringent immigration policy. And San Francisco Chinatown was
quite a place. Everybody loved it. When I say everybody loved it,
what the hell, I mean I loved it. It was colorful.
I was driving back from lunch today, and as I got here I drove
past the old Chinese telephone exchange. Now the Chinese telephone
exchange -- the operators were all there, outside in the street you
could hear them clacking away, but they never had any numbers.
People would call up and ask by name, you know. And they would
track down anybody you wanted anywhere in Chinatown. You would call
them up and ask for Mr. Wang, and if you could make them understand
which Mr. Wang you wanted, you got him. But now, of course, it's
all on computers. And they're all calling themselves Asians and
they all get hurt if you call them orientals or some damn thing. I
don't know what the vernacular is, I really don't, and I don't give
a damn about it one way or another.
1960s Permissiveness
Riess: You said it ended twelve years after the war- -that makes it up to
about 19-- .
Newhall: In the sixties or late fifties, I think. You know, the flower
children and all this psychedelic business. That's because we were
very permissive then. And you know, we're not that permissive
anymore. Because you got a mayor in there who's always trying to
get the votes from the homosexuals or whatever it is, whatever
minority group, the blacks or Asians. San Francisco is becoming a
city that has no flavor, honestly, except just as a troubled city.
It's a troubled city.
The low point of San Francisco- -I 'm really rambling now, I'm
sorry- -but the low point of San Francisco in my experience was the
night that George Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated. I have
never seen the city in a greater agony. Oh, god! . I was living in
the south then, but I happened to be here that day.
And then the night they had the riot when they let Dan White
off. It was a city that was truly schizophrenic. It was awful.
Now I think we're climbing back up out of it some. But that was a
terible time, just a terrible time. And I don't know all the
answers, I can't tell too much about it because I don't know the
whole story, but I do know that George Moscone had been a very good
friend of mine at the Chronicle . We had more or less put him in
Sacramento, but something happened to him and it was awful. I'm
sorry, this is really--! went down a cul-de-sac there, I'll get back
115
out of it.
Riess: Was there a way in which you were using the paper to try to reverse
these trends?
Newhall: I don't know when it all started, but this was my destiny. I had
enormous respect for the old gentleman, old William Randolph Hearst
himself. I never met him. I knew some of his kids pretty well, but
I perceived the Hearst papers as something evil. I'm sorry to use
that word.
The Hearst press with its "yellow peril," with its stories
about Marion Davies' anti- vivisection hoopla and all this stuff, it
was a fake newspaper. And it was written just to keep the working
man, in my opinion now, in ignorance. The superstitious lower
class, bread-and-butter, lunchbox San Francisco working man- -it was
a paper that he could read, so he would read about things like
ghosts clanking their chains in English castles, you know, and about
the playboy who gave a mink coat to every other chorus girl in
Minsky's. This was no way to put out a newspaper!
I thought all right, I'm going to change it. Perhaps I got in
the newspaper business by mistake or accident, but then I saw what
was going on. And of course I'm sure I was motivated a little bit
because Bill Wren, the then managing editor of the Examiner in 1935,
refused to give me a job. Well, the crazy people at the Chronicle
hired me. And naturally I was seized with contempt for the Hearst
people. Probably back then I thought, "We're going to finish these
guys off."
I figured the Chronicle had to be successful and the city had
to have a paper that would amuse, entertain, and inform, and save
people from the perdition of Hearstian ignorance. It's all kind of
confusing the way it comes out, but these are some of my feelings.
So when Paul Smith got into all this trouble and things turned out
so badly for him and he left, and I had an oportunity, I had talked
to Charles Thieriot, who was the emerging heir apparent to the
deYoung family and so on. I don't know how much of this I've said
before.
Riess: I think we're getting into the beginning of a new story.
Paul Smith. Continued
Dinner Guests
Riess: Let's go on to how you took over from Paul Smith.
116
Newhall: I haven't been able to say too much about Paul because there's so
much to say, and there's not enough time in the world. But while
Paul was here, he was the Chronicle . He was the dog who was wagging
the deYoung family tail. During his period in San Francisco he
lived up on Telegraph Hill in this little apartment and he held
court to people who came through town. So many people, I can't
remember them all, the Chinese lobby guys, the Soongs and Hu Shih,
the Chinese sage .
I've often wondered if there's a truly educated Chinese sage in
the world, but anyway the Dr. Hu, the wise old man, came by. And I
remember in the middle of dessert he turned and he said- -this is
when the communists, the Chinese Reds, whatever you want to call
them, were attacking- -and he said, "Do you know that they are raping
our Chinese men? The womens brigades are raping the men in the
streets in China!" Now this guy, as I say, he was Mr. China.
Vince Mahoney, sitting next to me, was an editorial writer for
the Chronicle. There was this loud silence, and Vince turned and
said, "Excuse me, Your Excellency, would you repeat that please?"
And he said, "Yes, the Communist women's brigade come into Tsingtao,
and they roam through the streets raping these men and there was a
terrible scene." [chuckles] There was no more conversation on that
subject at the dinner table. I'm not sure what really happened in
the streets of Tsingtao, but anyway.
And, oh, Anthony Eden was there. One of the great memories I
have of him- -I happened to be sitting next to him at dinner. Then
England was still recognizing China and we had gone through this
silly business with Nixon and Knowland, cutting our relations with
China, severing our relations, which was the silliest damn thing
that was ever done. And Eden at some point turned to me --here I was
a little guy hustling around with This World or something- -and he
said, "You know, I think we're very unpopular in America because
we're still recognizing the Chinese."
I said, "No, you're not. That was the smartest thing you ever
did. And even so, you're still popular with me. That's all that
matters." He said, "Well, that's very encouraging." I remember
that conversation. Anyway, here he was, and he became Prime
Minister after that. Oh, yes- -I also remember a dinner up at Paul's
when I won some money from Randolph Churchill. He had some problems
usually, but that night his worst problem was that he gave me 2 to 1
odds that in five flips of a coin the sme face would not come up
three times in a row.
Riess: And why did he visit Paul Smith?
Newhall: Because everybody did. Anybody who came to town. Like when you're
in India you visit the Taj Mahal.
117
Riess: You don't need an invitation to get to the Taj Mahal. How do you
get to Paul's?
Newhall: Well, if you're Anthony Eden or Hu Shih or if you're Chiang Kai-
shek or Madame Chiang, you get invited, I guess. He had three
secretaries, and most guys only need one.
Riess: Was he like the Gettys are now, maybe?
Newhall: I really don't know anything about the Gettys, except they have a
name and they're always entertaining.
Riess: Well, is there any equivalent to Paul Smith that you can think of?
Newhall: No, no. I've never known an equivalent of Paul. Maybe Henry Luce.
See, the Gettys can't do anything for Anthony Eden except maybe
lend him money. And Paul could perhaps marshal the forces of San
Francisco, in a way, to back the British policy. I mean, Robert
Frost was there, Carl Sandburg, Clare Luce, these rich Texans. I
don't know, everybody came through.
Riess: How could he afford to entertain them?
Newhall: Uncle George had a lot of money.
Riess: He was backing this.
Newhall: Yes, sure. Paul would charge it off to the paper. As I say, Paul
lived high, in his own way. But he could get away with it. He knew
people and they knew him. What he says in his book I think is about
100 percent accurate. Doesn't he drop all these names, going
through the book?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: Yes. And they all went to this little tiny apartment up here on
Telegraph Hill and had dinner served by the two houseboys , Jimmy and
Cliff. Everyone sat around and drank a lot of scotch.
The Chronicle' s Reputation
Riess: And what was the fallout of all that for San Francisco?
Newhall: What did San Francisco get?
118
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: Oh, it got a lot of conversation at the Bohemian and the P.U. clubs
about what a son-of -a-bitch Paul was, you know, about how he was the
showboat who was lording it over San Francisco. Paul was on this
fantastic--! hate to use the word- -power trip. He had started from
nowhere and he was going to get to the pearly gates ,
one way or
another, whatever the pearly gates were at the time. He was going
to get to the summit. He often considered himself as being
presidential material. Paul had a way about him. Believe me, this
guy was amazing. I keep coming back to it; I've never seen anything
like it in my life. You know I can kid people along in a pinch.
But this guy was a grand master.
And people came to San Francisco thinking that the Chronicle
was the most important newspaper in the world, I'm sure; they were
convinced that Paul was the smartest and richest publisher that the
world had ever seen. And of course, neither one of them was true.
Well he might have been the smartest, but nothing else was true.
The Chronicle was a little old paper in San Francisco, and its
influence was, oh, so-so. Oh, it always had a loyal and odd
following. I remember during the war, in London, there was a little
old man in the British Museum, I walked by him, and somehow I told
him I was from the San Francisco Chronicle. He said, "Oh, come and
see your newspaper. We keep it on file here, it's very important."
So I took a look. This was when the bombs were falling. [laughter]
Anyway.
The Pressure on Newhall
Riess :
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
[laughter] In fact, when you sat at those dinners did you say,
like to be like Paul Smith."
'I'd
No. I think I said, "Jesus god, please don't ever let me get into
this situation." There's too much pressure. And my life was
difficult. Rudolf Hess, you may remember, during the war finally
jumped in a plane and got out of Germany. Well, I often considered
jumping into a plane and getting out of Fifth and Mission, because
Paul was a very demanding person. And he needed attention, and he
needed backup and people to be on hand whenever he wanted.
And you were involved with him in many ways.
I felt at times a lot of pressure trying to live up to what Paul was
demanding, in a sense. I was trying to run the damn paper, I mean
This World or the Sunday part. And all of a sudden there would be a
phone call, "Hey, we're having a party, come on up." And I thought,
119
"Jesus," you know- -excuse my language- -but anyway, it was pressure.
Riess : Did he read the whole paper?
Newhall: He read more of it than I would have. A lot of people didn't have
time to read everything they've published. Believe me they don't.
Other people read everything. I can't stand reading anything I've
either written or anything afterwards. I really don't. Paul read
it, I think, quite well.
Flickering Flame
Newhall: Now, getting back to the original purpose of this, after the war
Paul came back and I said the flame on the candle or the skyrocket
or whatever was flickering somewhat more dimly, if something can
flicker dimly. Anyway, it was flickering. "Dimly" I guess is a
redundancy. Something was troubling him. He'd gone into the navy
as a lieutenant commander, he'd gone into the marines as a second
lieutenant and came back to the navy after his stint in the marines.
It was the unusual, you know, Paul Smith saga.
But something happened out in the Pacific. I may have an idea
what happened, but I'm not sure. He was a different man, in a
sense, when he came back. Suddenly something had jolted him. I
mentioned that the experience of war hits men differently. But it
can hit some men very hard.
So he began drinking more, but it wasn't in the terms of an
alcoholic. He was, I think, removing himself to a certain extent.
And he began traveling. He kept going to New York or Washington,
and when he did, he would take two or three secretaries with him.
And then he made a trip or two around the world. Some of this is, I
suppose, a little personal. But anyway, the eagles or the
bloodhounds of the IRS were after him for taxes. And oh, gee, he
had been living so high and so fast, as they say now, "on the fast
track," that it was catching up to him.
He was paying less and less attention to the paper and thinking
more and more about Paul's career, his own career. And this
bothered me. I'm being very frank in all this, but anyway. Paul
was not the publisher or the editor or general manager (or whatever
title he was using) that he had been before. He was still looking
for- -what is left? His karma. You know, he was asking, "Where am I
going?" And I think he felt that the Chronicle--! think psychically
he knew he had finished with that particular chapter or passage of
his life.
120
He went on a trip around the world once or twice . I remember
he was in a little plane crash in Formosa, one of Chiang Kai-shek's
planes, anyway that's what he said. And while he was gone, oh my
lord, the people began closing in on him. The paper was beginning
to lose copious amounts of money then. It was losing about a
million or better dollars a year, and that was a lot of money in
1952. And Larry Fanning and I, and Dorothy McCarthy, his secretary,
were terribly worried about this . So were Uncle George and the
family. They were getting older. And Charlie Theiriot was coming
on.
There was never this big feud that people might have tried to
say existed between Charlie and Paul or anything. But the deYoung
family were bugging Uncle George. They were really jiggling his cue,
because the Chronicle was losing money and they felt Uncle George
wasn't doing anything about it.
Crisis: Debts, Taxes
Newhall: And the debts were mounting up. We were in terrible shape. Our
circulation was slipping; the paper was not good in terms of being a
success from a circulation standpoint. Our circulation slipped from
a high of maybe 170-80-90,000 daily down to about 150-145,000 daily.
Inevitably Uncle George was going to have to make a decision, let
Paul go or do something. I remember, Paul came back and Larry and I
went down and grabbed him at the airport before anybody else could
get to him to tell him what had lined up. And I'm sorry, my memory
--I can't tell you what all it was, but I do remember he had a
significant tax problem. Oh, people were after him, I guess,
politically, and so on.
Finally- -this was now around Thanksgiving time, 1952, and Paul
was living in this strange half -world or something. These kids were
still coming in from nowhere and saying to the city editor, "Hey, I
met Mr. Smith at a party and he said I had a job." My god, we had
two or three guys a week come in. So the family was insisting that
George do something about this, put an end to it and get the
Chronicle in a money-making situation. It was obviously the end for
Paul. Uncle George said, "Paul, you've got to cut so many people
from the Chronicle staff. You've got to do this, you've got to save
this money.
"
Paul said, "Well, I'm going to handle it my way." He held a
staff meeting and said, "I've been told that I have to fire ten,
twenty people," or something, "and I'm not going to do it. I'm
going to back you all up." And in the end, that was the end. He
made his choice and he left.
121
Newhall's Position
Newhall: To sort of wrap all this up in a very medium- sized paragraph, I knew
Uncle George pretty well. I had known him pretty well all along,
during the war and so on, and I would see him socially every now and
then I wrote him a note, a memorandum. (I knew Charlie Thieriot
pretty well, too.) When Paul left I wrote a note I probably have a
copy of it somewhere. I said, "This paper is in such terrible
condition, it will not survive. And unless"--oh god, I don't know
how I phrased it; I didn't say, "unless I can participate," or
"unless it is worked out to my satisfaction," that's not the way I
worded it- -"unless I can be assured that the Chronicle will have an
opportunity of success, I must dissociate myself from the
Chronicle. "
So Charlie and Uncle George said, "Oh, geez, you don't
want to go. Would you like to help run the paper or something."
Charlie was assistant publisher. I talked with Charlie.
Charles is a very close and dear friend. He's totally different
from Paul, but we were very close and became very close. I said,
"Okay, if we can work this out together, but I have to have a free
hand. Because I just can't go along and always be frustrated
because there's somebody behind my back." I said, "This paper is in
too critical a condition." Paul had left by this time, and he knew
what I had done. I think I sent him a copy of the memo and so on.
Riess: Were you really the heir-apparent?
Newhall: No, not at all. Not at all. Charlie was. And he functioned as such
anyway, you know.
Riess: But if anyone had looked around the paper, would you have been the
obvious person?
Newhall: I can't answer that. I don't think so. I figured this was all kind
of my idea, and I was playing it by ear. I was winging it. I don't
know. I felt so deeply about the Chronicle. I mean, really, the
Chronicle was my own, it was my life. Hearst was still ahead of us.
They were rich, and we were losing. I felt this could be done and I
thought, I'd like a shot at it.
Riess: It was a mission for you. Bill German and Abe Mellinkoff, they were
all there, Larry Fanning.
Newhall: Oh, yes. We were all buddies, you know, really.
Riess: But you reached out for it.
Newhall: Well, I was sort of closer to Paul and closer to the deYoung family,
122
I guess. I don't know. Really, it's very difficult for me to
answer that question. I can't tell you. Paul had asked me to sit
in on the editorial conference for the last year or so. But I was no
heir -apparent as such.
Riess: But you were being groomed for it.
Newhall: I don't think so. I never heard of it, really. But I guess just a
lot of people knew me ,
and maybe they figured this was perhaps the
least of a lot of evils. I really don't know. But anyway, Charlie
did come in and talk with Uncle George and me. So we worked it out.
I would be executive editor, Charlie was going to be assistant
publisher, and together we were going to set the world on fire.
The Watchdog Committee#y/
[Interview 4: April 7, 1988]
Newhall: You had asked the question, had I been an heir apparent or something
like that, and I said, no, I was just going along. I thought a
little bit- -memories came back up about those last few days in the
fall of 1952 when Paul was leaving and before the Chronicle' s
hierarchy was changed around, and an incident or a situation which I
had more or less forgotten occurred to me.
In the spring and summer of 1952 when Paul was off traveling
around the world trying to forget his troubles here, and the
Chronicle was floundering in terms of its revenues and losses and so
on, Paul agreed that he would set up what he called a Watchdog
Committee, to sort of review things and to make suggestions as to
how the situation internally in the Chronicle could be improved.
This was indeed established, and I was a member of it, along
with Al Denny who was the controller. [pauses to think] My memory
begins to falter right there. Al was there; Paul himself, of
course; Larry Fanning might have been. He was the managing editor
at the time. And the advertising manager, Bill Phelan, and the
circulation department would have been represented probably by C.E.
Gilroy. We met once or twice a week and sort of would go over
things .
This Watchdog Committee never really came to anything, except
at that time I remember I began talking more and more, being I
suppose one would have thought bumptious. But I have sometimes a
sort of low threshold of boredom, and I like to kid around a little
bit. I became more and more talkative. Paul was away a good deal
of the time, and I was trying to be kind of protective when he was
there. It was a difficult time.
122a
And I remember I ran into Uncle George coming to work one
morning We were out in the hall and he said, "Oh, by the way, how
are you doing on the Coast Guard?" I shook my head. I said "Well
it s just getting along fine as far as I know, Uncle George "
[chuckles] And I went on back to work. I suddenly realized what he
had meant was the Watchdog Committee, but he said the Coast Guard
Well, I tell that only that Uncle George was at times kind of vague
He was such a sweetie as far as we were concerned, such a nice old
guy.
Anyway, I've already mentioned about how things really i us t
:inally got to a terrible situation. Paul would not fire the
'
people. And I don't say I disagree with him at all; he just
123
VI SCOTT NEWHALL'S CHRONICLE
The "Single Focused Energy"
Riess: In the meantime was the Examiner getting to be a better paper?
Newhall: No, the Examiner was dying.
Riess: You said that the Chronicle's circulation was going down. So if it
was going down, then the Examiner' s was going up?
Newhall: You asked if the Examiner was a better paper. Well, their
circulation went up to about 212,000--! believe they were always
ahead of us in circulation- -but they were a terrible paper. That
was why I knew we could knock them off.
I can wrap up my whole journalistic career in San Francisco in
one sentence. The public doesn't realize that the Chronicle didn't
kill the Examiner . the Examiner committed suicide. And this is a
fact. We perhaps helped them aim the dagger, admittedly.
The Examiner was dead, you see. Old W.R. Hearst had died, and
so his papers were still in the hands of his hatchet men or his
publishers, and the old guard. And there was this enormous
overbearing Hearst Corporation in New York, so that the poor San
Francisco Examiner never had a chance. It was aimless. There was
no chance for a personality to emerge and direct that paper. And no
truly successful newspaper can ever be published or edited by a
committee. It has to reflect a single, focused energy or
imagination or whatever. It has to. And you can go through paper
after paper and find that. A newspaper will grow, some of them, but
then when the original founders disappear or fade away, the paper
becomes amorphous. A drifting or dead newspaper is like eating
mashed potatoes instead of, you know, some fine roast squab in wine
sauce or something like that.
Riess: Did the people of San Francisco know that they were reading a paper
that was edited by Paul Smith in the same way that later they knew
124
they were reading Scott Newhall's paper?
Newhall: They knew they were reading a paper edited by Paul Smith because his
name appeared in the paper every day on the masthead. He had
stories under his by-line in it, he made speeches, he attracted
attention to himself.
And now that you ask the question, it occurs to me, my name
never appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle anywhere, on the
masthead or- -oh, once in a while on a by-line toward the end, if I
covered some special event and wrote a story or something. But that
was not my style. I don't mean to say I hid behind a curtain
somewhere .
Riess: Yes, but people knew you.
Newhall: Don't ask me why. I can't answer that. I got a lot of publicity by
people damning the Chronicle and damning me for putting out the
worst paper in the United States of America. But Paul promoted
himself. This is where he tripped up and fell down. In the end he
was promoting Paul and not the Chronicle .
I promoted only the Chronicle all my life, I promise you. I
went along, I'm sure, and got a lot of freebies on the way. Time
magazine and other people, you know, they look for personalities.
They like to tell stories in terms of personalities. And Charlie
Thieriot was very self-effacing, he just couldn't--. I used to go
out and make a few speeches once in a while, but it wasn't about
Scott or his experiences, it was about the Chronicle, if anything.
And the Chronicle was not my paper. It belonged to the deYoung
family. When Paul was there it was his paper, but the deYoungs
happened to hold the stock. I mean, there was a basic difference.
Charles deYoung Thieriot
Newhall: I had known Charlie Thieriot on and off, you know, around. Not only
at the paper but once in a while socially at parties, something like
that.
Riess: He had had no official role on the paper?
Newhall: He had some. He had always been very nice to me. But Paul had put
him in charge of the television station. And Paul, I will say for
him, because sometimes the history does tend to fog things up a bit,
Paul himself had been very instrumental in acquiring the Channel 4
television franchise for San Francisco. This was one of the first
franchises in San Francisco. There were then three basic channels,
4, 5, and 7. But then he had delegated--! imagine with some
125
pressure from the family or Uncle George --delegated to Charlie the
responsibility for running the station. And Channel 4--KRON TV--
began to make money. Because a television license in 1948 was, as
someone described it, simply a license to steal. You couldn't lose
money on a television station. And Charlie had done quite well with
KRON and set up his establishment there.
Then when Paul left, about Thanksgivingtime of 1952, Charlie
was named assistant to the publisher. I was given the title of
executive editor or briefly operations manager. And Charlie and I
talked together a great deal about how we wanted to operate this
newspaper to try to save it, or at least keep it afloat. We agreed
absolutely that this was to be sort of a joint operation. He would
do nothing I was not aware of, and I at the same time would do
nothing he was not aware of. It had to be sort of a single
operation because our funds were limited.
The Chronicle at that time, to be repetitive, was about 140,000
daily. The Ex was about 212,000, as I recall. All these things can
be looked up on the ABC records, Audit Bureau of Circulation
records. The Call-Bulletin, which was the Hearst afternoon paper,
and the News . which was the Scripps -Howard afternoon paper, were
still alive. The Oakland Post -Enquirer had already folded. That
was a Hearst paper in Oakland. The Oakland Tribune, however, was I
think number two in terms of circulation in the Bay Area. It was
the Examiner, the Trib. the Call-Bulletin, and finally the Chronicle
and the News about neck-in-neck, around 140-some-odd thousand.
Maybe it went down to 139.
So Charlie and I began this long relationship. We were of an
age, by the way, I think only a few months apart in age. Charles
deYoung Thieriot was the grandson of Mike deYoung. His mother, who
had been Kathleen deYoung, married Ferdinand Thieriot, of French
derivation of sorts. Charles had been brought up, particularly
during the Depression, in France. He was totally bilingual. During
World War II he had served as a language officer, after Normandy and
in Paris and in France. But he had come back and had gone to work
on the paper and ended up with the TV station.
Charlie had total responsibility, and he was very good at it,
of trying to organize the finances. I remember I went over one
Saturday and met with Charlie. This was right in the beginning. I
said, "Charlie, I have to understand what you have to work with.
What have we got? Is there backing here?" So he sat down. He
always had good handwriting, very careful handwriting. So he listed
the Chronicle assets. And at that time the Chronicle assets as I
recall were the Chronicle itself, the San Francisco Chronicle, daily
and Sunday, Channel 4, the TV station, KRON-TV; the deYoung Building
in San Francisco, down across from the Hearst Building at Third and
Market; and something-or-other called the Castillia or Castilja
Corporation, which held some real estate in New York City and among
126
them something-or-other called the "Castilja Building," halfway
downtown in Manhattan. And that wasn't much financial backing for
the problem that we were faced with.
Painful Job of Firing
Riess: Was the problem meeting salaries?
Newhall: Uncle George and the Chronicle had good credit, of course, so I
never experienced any problems of meeting the payroll. The deYoung
family had a good line of credit with the Crocker Bank. But now
that you bring that up, the payroll had really grown rather
remarkably. So the most unpleasant job of my life, and certainly my
most unpleasant job with the Chronicle . was the fact that I was
responsible for cutting back the staff; in other words, firing. In
the first few days, I had to discharge thirty or forty- -it ended up
being I think fifty- four people- -all on the editorial side. These
were a few youngsters, but also a lot were older gentlemen who had
worked there and really had served their time. The Chronicle was
dying. It had all these young guys who had come to work, and older
guys who were never replaced. And we just couldn't afford it.
Riess: So the firing hadn't happened under Paul?
Newhall: No, he said he wouldn't do it. And he couldn't have. What the
hell, it was a good way for him to go, because even if he had, he
couldn't have lived with it. And the Chronicle as an institution
meant more to me, the Chronicle, than any individual. Now you can
say Paul has perhaps by far the greater vision here. I mean, he
stands perhaps with more stature. But I felt if we don't do this
painful surgery, well, the Chronicle will not survive. And it
wouldn't have, I promise you. They might have sold it, of course.
But then everything would have changed and we might all have been
fired anyway. Some people were offering ten, twenty million dollars
for it. Lord, what a bargain that would be- -now. But then, it
wouldn't have been such a good bargain.
Riess: But fifty-four people off the payroll was enough to clean up the
negative cash flow?
Newhall: I think it was fifty- four. That's the figure I've used. I remember
Larry Fanning fired some of them. He stayed on as managing editor.
I was executive editor. It was a little difficult because Larry had
been, in a sense, senior to me, and we were awfully good friends.
It's difficult, these situations. In the end I had to let Larry go,
because Larry was pretty much of a doctrinaire liberal, whatever.
And I saw the Chronicle being a little different. But that was
after about a year or so.
127
Now this was 1952, I repeat, and there was no serious
unionization at that time, although there was a guild. But there
were no medical plans, no retirement plans, no serious pension
plans. There was only severance pay for the people who had to
leave .
Some of these people had a fatherly image as far as I was
concerned, and to have to sit down with them and consign them
perhaps to penury- -it was very difficult for them mostly, but also
very difficult for me. We tried to work out some way that they
could continue to survive. Some of them had a little money. They
had their severance pay. And we tried to work out on an individual
basis anything so that life would be livable or bearable. And it
was very difficult. I had great respect for some of them, but they
were absolutely no use to the paper in terms of its survival.
An indication of the superannuation of the Chronicle staff was
that the average age in our composing room- -and we must have had
sixty, seventy, eighty people therewas sixty-six. Now, that's a
little senior. Something had to be done, and everybody had just let
it slide for a couple of generations. There were no serious
retirement plans at the Chronicle, but I felt that if the Chronicle
was to survive we had to make these cuts and then get about our
business and change the perceptions of the San Francisco newspaper
reader as to what the Chronicle was .
The Community of Readers
Newhall: The Chronicle was just flat. It was dull. No matter what anyone
says, it was dull. And nobody really wanted to read it much. There
was a lot of bad talk around town. And philosophically or
psychologically, the problem facing any newspaper editor or
publisher is not what his newspaper is but rather what people think
his newspaper is. Therefore we had to reorganize the paper, reform
it, do whatever we were going to do, refurbish it, and then convince
people that this has indeed happened and that they were in fact
reading the greatest paper that had ever been published. I'm
exaggerating a little, but it's true. There's no use putting out
the New York Times unless the people who are available as clients
realize that the New York Times is a fine paper. It's just no use.
And the word around the Bay Area in 1952 was, "One: Paul Smith
had left, therefore the Chronicle was going to die. Two: The
Chronicle is a terrible newspaper, trash, not worth looking at or
reading. Therefore let's turn elsewhere." And this is what we had
to go to work to conquer.
Riess: So the Examiner had its readers by default.
128
Newhall: Well, the Examiner had all the old Hearst readers. They were the
horse-race crowd and so on and so forth. And again, this was the
old yellow-peril, white -supremacy crowd; the ever -conservative or
reactionary American working man. It was kind of the conservative
Democratic party crowd.
Riess: Did you want to get them reading your paper, or did you want nothing
to do with that crowd?
Newhall: Oh hell, we had to get anybody we could, and you know, change their
whole lifestyle if necessary.
Riess: In other words, they didn't have to apply to read the Chronicle.
[ laughs ]
Newhall: No, no, we were after anybody and everybody, and not only in San
Francisco, but in the whole area surrounding. San Francisco after
all is simply the Camelot of the Bay Area. San Francisco was purely
a fantasy, a legend. But everybody, generally speaking, in Berkeley,
Mill Valley, down the Peninsula, Oakland, wants to identify
themselves with San Francisco. And that's why in the end they all
had to read the San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco has always
been a touchstone. It is a fairyland. I mentioned, you know, that
when Bay Area people travel they say they're from San Francisco, and
not from Vallejo, or Sonoma or Redwood City and such.
Riess : Did you have an idea in mind for how to get readers when you came in
in 1952?
Newhall: Pretty much. I felt strongly in the last few years that the horizon
was unlimited for the Chronicle .
Somebody could put out a paper
that would absolutely captivate the people in San Francisco.
Forgetting for the moment the news itself, the correspondents,
the stock market tables and baseball box score, a newspaper is
basically, or should reflect the life of any community. It is the
only means --and you can almost forget TV in this respect- -newspapers
are the only means that people have for communicating with or
relating to each other in a community. A paper is like the water
well in an old-time medieval or ancient rural country town, the well
that people go to for their water. Well, everyone has to go to
their newspaper for their intellectual or cultural neighborhood
water. This is the role of a newspaper. I'm just preaching.
Riess: It sounds like a kind of one-way communication.
Newhall: No, you have to serve as the catalyst so that people can communicate
among themselves, basically. You're the bulletin board.
Riess: Letters to the editor, but you don't mean that.
129
American Primitive Appetites
Riess:
Newhall:
Newhall: Well, let's put it this way, I had more or less refined my approach
toward journalism in terms of a typical Bay Area family, husband and
wife, happily or unhappily married, maybe with a few children. And
if they are unable to communicate with each other it's not a
successful marriage, not a successful family. But if they come down
to the breakfast table and the Chronicle is there, and they split it
or share it, they don't have to look at each other and say, "God,
you look awful this morning, honey," or whatever it is, or
something. They can say, "Hey! Did you see in the Chronicle here
that South Africa just incarcerated twenty more Zulus!" I mean, if
you give people something to talk to each other about, to have a
joint experience--! perhaps did not describe it too well, but--.
You raise the question of which parts of the paper the husband picks
up, and which part the wife picks up, too.
But in the end we had to put out a paper so they'd all reach for
everything. We tried to. Usually people put out the sports for the
men, you know, and the "women's world" it used to be for the women
and all that. But in the end you find that both men and women all
read the same stories about sex, they all read stories about
violence, and they'll all read gossip. It's a fact.
Now I am a little bit rambling philosophically, but so many
editors think, "Okay we want the children to read our paper so we'll
put out a children's or an adolescent page." And that is nonsense.
The adolescent doesn't give a damn what's happening with another
adolescent, he wants to know what's happening in the red-light
district among the adults. This is a fact.
The dullest and most unsuccessful pages in any newspaper I've
ever had anything to do with are pages that are aimed basically for
one audience or another. You'll find today that as many women as
men probably do read the business page or should- -maybe half as many
women- -but they read it. And editors nowadays have tuned up the so-
called women's pages. Now they call these female departments
"people" or "lifestyle" or some other cruddy kind of title. Many
men will read that, too. Don't make a mistake.
I felt that the Chronicle, if it was to survive, had to be this
rather magical product that was delivered to every home between
about 100 and 2,000 feet above sea level. I'll get into the
demographics later on.
Riess: And it had to come in the morning.
Newhall: It had to be in the morning, you're quite right. San Francisco, and
130
most American cities are morning newspaper towns.
But back to the future in San Francisco, when I took over I was
convinced that all our Chronicle readers should be able to
participate in the glorious experience of being in San Francisco, or
living in the penumbra of San Francisco at least. I'm being very
specific now. This is the San Francisco Chronicle I'm speaking of,
and not Kansas City or St. Louis. We had this wonderful city of San
Francisco to merchandise. And we had a copyright on it. The
Examiner's old trademark had expired, the Ex was still floundering
around with an old version of San Francisco that really wasn't quite
the same .
And I should hasten to say that no newspaper, good newspaper
anyway, was going to be successful unless it had a very active,
progressive as far as I was concerned, liberal editorial thrust,
that it made a serious attempt to cover the news and to keep San
Franciscans in communication, not only with each other, but also
with the rest of the world. So what we had to do was to put out a
package in which all the news- -I'm shortening up these theories --
that mattered, or that was important or interesting, was presented
briefly so people could read it.
Most people are only semi-articulate and semi-literate. Most
people are children. Most of them believe in fairy tales,
particularly the American people. Therefore we had to put out a
newspaper that took into consideration these rather primitive or
adolescent appetites of the American reader.
Riess: Really? What do you mean by fairy tales?
Newhall: Well, I'll tell you. If you want me to discuss it, I will. What my
own philosophy is--in my experience in the newspaper business-
Americans, particularly American women (and men now, there is no
difference) want to read Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, the
princess marries the page or the prince marries the pretty working
girl. Americans, particularly, are living in never-never land, and
they continue to do so.
Working for a newspaper as a photographer, for example, you are
sent out on a story about some prostitute, say, who's run in for
rolling a customer or something like that. Well, any cameraman or
reporter worth his salt, if he wants his picture or story to be run,
is going to try and find out that the prostitute has really got a
heart of gold, or she has a master's degree in comparative
literature, but because of hard times she's had to feed her poor
starving mother or somebody like that by selling her alabaster body
to the ravening mob. You try to come up with the stories, the
Horatio Alger stories or the fairy tales to fit the American
fantasy.
131
Riess:
Newhall;
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
It's a newspaper tradition.
An unwritten tradition. Many editors didn't even realize it. An
editor or a reporter in those days would come to work, and the first
thing he'd have to learn was to toughen himself up so he could look
with a certain amount of cynicism at violence or violent death.
They'd go out and cover their first few murders. You'd find they
used to make themselves put on this cynical front, do a lot of hard
drinking. But newspapermen are at heart Pollyannas, they are
suckers, they're credulous, and they're gossips. And that's why
they go into the trade. They're looking for these fairy tales. I'm
perhaps exaggerating it, but I will demonstrate, I think, the
accuracy of these observations in discussing later on perhaps some
of the Chronicle promotions .
So you are saying that the people wish the fairy tales and the
newspapermen want to write the fairy tales.
Sure they do.
So I don't have to defend the readers, because the writer is part of
this fantasy, too.
Oh, it's a symbiotic relationship. They live on each other.
And it doesn't happen in other countries?
I imagine it does. It's probably even more flamboyant there, but I
have never published a paper in another country. I think it
probably is even worse in other countries. I think the English
papers, in terms of their fairy tale content, are even worse. After
all, they do have royalty on hand. So you can get a fairy tale
going every day.
Did you and Charlie feel the same way about that?
of your interchanges?
Was that the tone
Well, Charlie was a very fine gentleman. I liked him personally,
and as I said, we were of an age and more or less an education. But
he left pretty much the whole product to me. He gave me the
responsibility --the privilege, but also the responsibility for it.
And he tried to provide the money to keep the doors open.
You were describing going to see him and he had written out what the
assets were.
Yes. He said, "All right, this is all we've got to go on." So I
think we worked out when could we afford to put some advertisements
in the trade papers or in our own papers saying, "Read the
Chronicle."
132
Rless: That was one of the first things you did?
Newhall: We had to, yes. You get into promotions. I mentioned earlier, to
put out a successful paper, I think, any proper paper--! don't like
to use words "good" or "bad," but I think what I consider to be an
admirable, proper paper- -you have to publish the product, but then
you have to promote it by sending a message to your potential
readers that this is, indeed, a wonderful newspaper. "And if indeed
you read this you will find a pot of gold at the end of the
Chronicle's rainbow." Or, you will get good news, you will read the
best news, you will enjoy it, and people will respect you because
you can quote things you have seen in the Chronicle.
The ideal thing from my point of view as a publisher and a
promoter, or an editor and a promoter, is to put out a product in
terms of the Chronicle that, if people went to a party, say, or went
to the pub or the bar to drink and their friends say, "Hey, did you
see that story in the Chronicle about so-and-so?" that the person
would feel embarrassed to admit that he really had not read it, he
had not seen the Chronicle. In that way you do develop customers,
if you see what I'm trying to say.
So we had to put out a paper that once people read it, they
would continue to read it, we hoped. Then we had to, as I say, get
the message circulated. You know, "Hurry, hurry, hurry, the show is
about to go on," so people would tune themselves into the San
Francisco Chronicle. And we did this by contriving a promotional
campaign that would attract attention.
The Ivory Tower Assessments
Newhall: I will say early that our promotional campaigns were so successful
that most of my colleagues or contemporaries in journalistic
academia were so smitten by the promotions that they never bothered
to find out whether or not the Chronicle was in fact a good
newspaper.
Riess: Smitten, or stricken!
Newhall: There is still a legend abroad among these poor people that, my god,
the Chronicle is garbage. And it's a shame. This fellow [Ben]
Bagdikian over at Cal--I've never met the man, but I think he's
probably really quite able- -he wrote an article in San Francisco
Magazine and he had the gall to say, "You know, this is the most
terrible garbage that has ever been put out under Newhall 's regime,
133
but unfortunately Newhall was a genius."*
"unfortunately." Well, balls!
Now he used the word
He's a fine man, I'm sure. And I'm not going to hold forth too
much on academics and the world of journalism except to say that a
great many journalism schools are staffed with people who have
either become bored or infuriated by the newspapers and seek their
journalistic rewards elsewhere, or who have failed in the
performance of the duties in the actual press. I say "or" --hell, I
taught over at Cal for a while, and a lot of my friends did.
Riess: In fact, you were living in Berkeley and you must have taken a
certain amount of flak from the University people you knew.
Newhall: I certainly did. As the Chronicle succeeded- -now when I say
"succeeded" I'm speaking in terms of Mammon- -as our circulation
grew, this caused a certain amount of shock among a great many of my
friends, particularly on the north side of Berkeley, up on the hill
there. I'd go to parties--! knew a lot of people and I'd get such
a ragging, you know, about what was wrong with the Chronicle.
Newhall: I got so tired of it I eventually just quit making the social rounds
on Nut Hill. It just wasn't worth the effort They were all wrong,
of course, but that was their privilege.
I met Lewis Mumford at a party at Bill Wurster's when Mumford
was out here at Cal for a semester. He said, "What's all this anti-
Chronicle stuff? I've been here six months and it's one of the
greatest papers I've seen." Someone said, "But there's never any
news." He said, "Well, look, I looked at it yesterday, and every
story that was on the front pages of the Times was on the front page
of the Chronicle. "
I think it was the only time anybody's ever come
up with this. Mumford was great, and he shut them up.
I will jump for one moment, perhaps to simplify some of my
attitudes with respect to the product and readership. In 1963 I
bought a paper called the Newhall Signal down in the little town of
Newhall. It was the kind of southern California Middle West tank
town in which Richard Nixon would be regarded as a roaring liberal.
I mean, this was really John Birch country, 95 percent. This was
also a very competitive situation, and I figured, "All right, I've
got to take over this community," in terms of being a communicator.
This was during the Vietnam period, and I would say that people down
there were 98 percent pro-Vietnam, you know, pro -continuing the war,
*San Francisco Magazine. May 1982.
134
and so on and so forth, while people were rioting against it
elsewhere .
So the Signal became, editorially, anti- Vietnam and anti-Nixon
to a degree which you cannot believe. You know, the KKK held
meetings down there and so on. And therefore, naturally, within six
months we were hated uniformly by 98 percent of the people and we
were read by 100 percent. So reader-baiting is one tactic in
attracting a certain amount of attention, although I was always
totally sincere in my editorial posture. But those pro-Vietnam
people read our anti-Vietnam, anti-Nixon newspaper.
So all these guys we would break bread with in Berkeley- -you
know, they were all standing around the redwood parlor with the
Navajo rugs on the floor and the Indian bead curtains, drinking an
adequate little Napa Valley wine and munching on some cheese and
listening to Scott Joplin or Dizzy Gillespie--and they were always
telling me what a shambles the Chronicle was. And I got tired of
it.
Riess : Did you defend yourself in the beginning?
Newhall: Not much. Not much, I really didn't. Why bother? I mean, they
were my friends. I didn't care. Quite honestly, I didn't care what
anybody thought. That was their problem.
Riess: Was it that old "We'd rather be reading the New York Times"
attitude?
Newhall: Oh my god, that started it all.
Riess: Is that basically it?
Newhall: Sure, well, the New York Times came out and printed an edition here
around 1960 or so, you know. They talked to some of the professors
at Cal and some of the professors at Stanford. I knew them all at
the time, and they came to see me. "Do you think we ought to put
out a paper here in the Bay Area?" Now this was some years ago, and
they ended up by putting out a West Coast edition of the Times .
They wired it into Richmond and printed it there because they'd been
told that the San Francisco market was just collapsing, that the
Chronicle was a disgrace, and if the Times would come it would be
supported.
Turner Catledge, an old friend of mine, was the executive
editor then. I said, "For god's sake, Turner, don't come out here.
I'm telling you that this is not New York, this is not Manhattan.
This place is full of a few very loquacious refugees from Harvard or
135
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Princeton or wherever. It's going to be a failure." Well, it was.*
It lasted for a couple of years and then they had to pack up,
because there is a tendency among charming eggheads never to put
their money where their mouth is. They could read the Times but
they couldn't sit around and quarrel about it over the dry martinis,
you see. The Chronicle was a lot more fun, especially when a
Chronicle basher had a belt or two of bourbon under his tweed
jacket.
And the Chronicle was a damn good newspaper. I'm saying that
--this will sound terrible on tape --but it was a good newspaper
because I will promise you that people in the San Francisco Bay Area
who read the Chronicle were as well-informed and tuned into
international and national news, although it was presented in almost
a capsule form, as anybody in the country. Certainly in the Middle
West. Oh, my god. You know, everybody talks about the St. Louis
Post Dispatch and the Kansas City Star and the Chicago Daily News.
Their papers are "garbage" alongside the Chronicle. I think our
news coverage is probably better.
Did you start the capsule news over the masthead?
Yes. We started that right off the bat, because I figured- -Charlie
was in on all this, a great part of this --we would sit around, and
one of Charlie's great values was he had a very short span of
attention in terms of reading. If Charlie could read the paper, I
figured everybody would or could. So we put that there to beckon
people to the inside. And I guess they're still doing it, aren't
they?
Yes.
I never read the news synopsis on top of the front page. Never in
my life. Because I read the whole paper. But I figured most
people--f ifty percent of your customers are non-readers--they're
going to read the Macy's ads or the Emporium ads, they're going to
read the race results, the box scores from the ball games, they're
going to read the New York Stock Exchange, and a few maybe front
page stories. But they're essentially not readers, because reading
*"Nor did the Bay Area wildly welcome the Western Edition of the New
York Times when it came here nearly a decade ago. True, it was not
a reasonably exact facsimile of the real New York Times . but support
for it was even slimmer than the paper. Subscriptions were
scattered, advertising was slender, and the Western Edition died."
(Rivers and Rubin, A Region's Press . Institute of Governmental
Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 1971, p. 21).
136
takes a little effort. Fifty percent of the people to start with
won't give any effort to an intellectual exercise.
Charles Thieriot and the Look of the Chronicle
Newhall: Charlie had quite an arithmetical or mathematical mind. He used to
like to get things down to numbers. We decided okay, how many
stories do we want on page one? Now this does occur to a lot of
newspapers, all of them. The Chronicle in the past had been running
to pretty heavy gray stuff, three or four stories on page one. And
I think we said the Chronicle should have seven stories on page one.
Then we put the little review of the world news on top of the
logotype there.
Then, for the first year or two, aside from the promotions,
Charlie would sit down- -he was a man for detail, very precise- -and
we went over the size of the type, the size of the columns, the
number of columns, the headline type. It took months! We must have
gone through a hundred or fifty different body types on the paper.
What typeface is the easiest to read? "Easy to read" was the
biggest, most important thing. There was no use putting out a lot
of stuff in ruby type, you know, about a tenth of a centimeter or
millimeter high, that kind of thing. And unfortunately papers were
shrinking all the time in size and in width- -because newsprint was
becoming more and more expensive- -so we had a hell of a problem: how
many columns or how wide are the columns going to be? And how does
the eye follow a column as the reader goes down it? How much will
the person read?
We developed at that time what is one of the great trademarks
of the Chronicle, the boldface leads. They're still using it, I
guess. The Chronicle then used to start out in seven point minion
type. After six months or whatever it was, for the front page we
started out with ten-point boldface, down to ten lightface, then to
eight point for the rest of the story.
Today's Chronicle is probably set in a somewhat larger
typeface. A lot of papers run up to nine-point body type now. I
know at our little paper in the south we run ten-point all the way.
We've reduced the number of columns, and so has the Chronicle. I
see the Chronicle is running six columns. And there were eight
columns then.
And this was all just making it easy to read, easy to read,
easy to read. Because there's no use putting out a paper if a
person can't read it.
Riess: Were these expensive changes?
137
Newhall: Oh, not that expensive. You have to buy a few type fonts. But you
would measure it only in thousands of dollars; it wasn't all that
much.
Riess: It sounds like, in a way, Charlie is a great detail man. You could
have said, "Okay, Charlie, you take care of that. I don't really
care about that .
"
Newhall: Well, he would always want approval.
Riess: And you thought it was important, too, I take it.
Newhall: Oh, fantastically. I don't even know which of us initiated some of
these things. Charlie had a lot of patience and enjoyment in
actually going through all this detailed stuff, but everything,
really all these years I was there, was basically and essentially a
joint decision. Charlie would not go off and make his own decision.
He wanted me to say, "Yes, Charles, that's the way to do it." Or I
would have to say, "Charles, can we do it this way?" or something
like that. But it was joint.
And he initiated some stuff--as a matter of fact, he discovered
Count Marco, but I'll get into that later.
Riess: Did he have an office next door to you?
Newhall: Well, let's see, he started out quite a way down the hall, around
the corner. Then Uncle George died in a couple of years and Charlie
became publisher--! was disappointed at that point, because when he
became publisher I thought he was going to name me editor, and as I
told you, my name was never in the newspaper, you can go back and
look for it, you'll never find it- -he became publisher and editor,
because the family always had a family member as editor of the
paper. Again, these are titles.
Riess: Everyone knew you were the editor.
Newhall: But why?
Riess: I don't know.
Newhall: Neither do I. Really, I guess, because I was more visible, kind of
a front man, they had somebody to yell at. If something was sour
the public had someone to yell at. It was all my fault, you know,
so on and so forth. And Charlie did not like to appear in public.
He was really very, very shy. People would think he was indifferent
or, what is the word? Patronizing or snobbish.
Riess: Or aloof?
Newhall: Yes. But he was terribly, painfully shy. So was I, but I tried to
138
hide it.
Riess: I think that's the case of a lot of the most extroverted and
aggressive people.
Newhall: You bet it is. There's an overcompensation you can't believe.
Riess: So it sounds like circulation was the main challenge.
Newhall: Well, we had to have the circulation in order to get advertising and
we had to get advertising in order to get money to keep the doors
open. It's as simple as that.
Editorial Stance and Editorial Page
Riess: But as far as the editorial stance, you were going along with what
it had been.
Newhall: Oh no, we started to change that right away. Because again, if you
are successful and get the circulation and get the advertising and
get the revenue, you have to deliver a memorable product- -you can
get people to read your paper once, if it's a lousy paper, and you
might be able to get them to read it twice, or three times, but they
won't keep at it. Therefore you have to deliver.
We wouldn't even start any real serious promotion unless we had
something else interesting in the paper- -news or features or
columns- -with which to back up the promotion. So when we would take
on a new columnist or a new service or something like that, we would
get it going and then we would hit it. There was no use taking the
old Chronicle as it was in November of 1952 and starting all this
business, the hocus-pocus and the circus, because the people would
not read it long enough to become addicted.
Riess: Actually, that's interesting. When I say editorial stance, I really
quite literally meant the editor's slot, and you mean the whole
content of the paper.
Newhall: Well, the paper is the editorial product. When I use the word
"editorial" it means everything that's non-business or circulation.
It is the creative written word in the newspaper. And I do not mean
it to be the editorial page only. The comic page is part of the
editorial content, you see. Do you follow me?
Riess: Yes, I do. Recently I've been tossing out the editorial page before
I mean to because it is so regrettably placed right in the
classified section.
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
139
Which is that? The editorial page?
Yes, the editorial page.
No, the reason you throw it away is because the editorials are no
damn good. Come on. Sure it is.
[laughs] Well, and they're in a different place all the time.
I know, but if they were good you'd turn to it no matter where it
was. But you're totally correct, it's difficult.
All right. You're saying it's not that important a part of the
paper?
What?
That editorial page.
It's the most important part. Or it should be.
When I use the word "editorial" when I'm discussing something
on a newspaper, I mean everything except circulation, mechanical,
advertising. I mean everything that is produced by the editorial
staff. And the editorial staff, which is broken down by divisions,
includes all the people who produce everything there , except the
advertisements .
Okay, well then I'll go back to my question,
the editorial page stance?
Yes, oh yes. Oh, totally!
Did you want to change
It was a progressive Republican paper. Did it change?
It was blah editorially. Paul had put in some very exciting
editorial attitudes- -as I mentioned, the lettuce strikers and "let's
go to war against Hitler," and this, that and the other- -but it was
not consistent, and he had some very much older editorial writers.
The Chronicle was one of the old-boy Republican establishment
editorial newspapers that were common across the country. And it
was a disgrace, from my point of view. I have got nothing going for
the Republicans, but I assure you I have nothing going for the
Democrats either. And I wanted the paper to be vigorous, outspoken,
humorous if necessary, and challenge or infuriate or amuse or
delight our readers in our editorials.
[looking at day's Chronicle! Where are the editorials? I don't
even know where they are now. You say they're behind Herb Caen?]
Riess: They're in that World section, right in front of the classified.
140
Newhall: We used to have them on the second page of that section with all the
features-- [continues to look through paper].
Riess: Now see, I just don't think that's a great placement.
Newhall: Well, I couldn't agree more. But they did this, I'm sure, for some
mechanical reasons . I would never have allowed the editorial page
to be played this way myself, I really wouldn't have. Because this
is the most important thing in a newspaper, in my opinion.
Now there are many newspapers published today that don't even
run editorials. I'm glad you brought this up, I think the editorial
page, the editorials themselves on my newspaper, should be the most
important and highly-read part of a newspaper. This is what is
going to save newspapers in our present day world of big time
television. In our little paper in the south, which I'll talk about
later, most of the editorials are played right here on the front
page across the top. And the readership is remarkable. The
majority of the people probably despise them, but they read them.
And in the case of a substantial number of people --it's the only
reason they look at the paper. That's my own feeling about it.
But what the hell have we got here? The editorial: "The
conviction and ouster of Governor Evan Mechem of Arizona's senate
brings a sorry chapter of the state political history to at least a
partial close." Good god!
Riess: Not interesting.
Newhall: That's Thursday, April 7, 1988. (I'm just putting a date in.) Some
tired recitation of how a scoundrel is a scoundrel. Well now, what
the hell news is it if a scoundrel is a scoundrel- -particularly in
Arizona? The news would be if you found some hero and he turned out
to be a scoundrel. If they wrote some stuff like this about Ed
Meese, instead of about Mechem. Here's Jack Anderson: "Why Meese
should go." Well, why am I going through this? Here's another
editorial, "Baby Boomers!"... "The Census Bureau reminds us that the
post-war baby boomers are either reaching or are well into their
forties, a demographic observation that will do more than cause us
to be nostalgic."
Riess: I think that sounds very tired.
Newhall: Well, this is what we had to start with in 1952.
I am delighted again that you brought this up. The editorial
page was my particular interest and baby. I had a little problem
with Charles early on because his family was basically Republican.
I didn't want to be Democratic or progressive or communist or
anything else. I just wanted to be independent and speak our own
141
minds , no matter what .
And we had a pretty good lot of editorials. We went from the
quality of the fruit at the Palace Hotel to Joe McCarthy to the bad
San Francisco coffee that everybody screamed about to Vietnam to
Giants baseball teams. My god, we had to go through tough years.
Covering the Loyalty Oath Controversy
Newhall: The loyalty oath at Gal. That was the best thing Paul ever did.
That was when the Chronicle did its best to keep the University from
really committing suicide. We fought that out alone, I think. I
mean alone in the local newspaper trenches .
They wanted the
professors to take the loyalty oath at Cal--some of the oldtimers
will tell you about it--and we fought tirelessly and won. Not that
we were the deciding factor, but we kept hammering at the regents.
Riess: You had a reporter over at the University to cover those regents
meetings and alumni committee meetings and all of that?
Newhall: Ruth did. She represented me. Oh yes. Well, we told them what to
do, more or less. I'm just shortcutting this.
Riess: You told them what to do?
Newhall: More or less.
Riess: What do you mean?
Newhall: Well, they're children. They are.
Riess: You told them how to--?
Newhall: The Academic Senate. They're the ones who really had to fight this
thing, not the regents.
Riess: George Stewart was one of the people that you were talking to.
Newhall: Sure, an old friend of mine. And I wanted to emphasize here that
unless a lot of fighters and idealists like George Stewart and Jim
Hart and Malcolm Davisson were not out there fighting, we would have
had nothing to support
Riess: So how did you advise them?
Newhall: Well, George Stewart knew that he had the Chronicle behind him. So
he would talk with Ruth and she would talk with him and say, "Okay,
we'll back you up, you want to do this," or something like that. It
142
was all mutual. There's no use their doing anything unless it's
reported, because it would just be forgotten.
Riess: Yes, okay, that's right, that's true. There is no use in taking a
stand on something that you care about unless it's known.
Newhall: I think I suggested the last time I was talking about how a
newspaper has power only because it can back up with publicity
people who will actually do the things. If there is no back-up or
no publicity, which is the greatest reward of all, the greatest
weapon of all, a lot of things won't happen. I know I sound at the
moment very supercilious in a sense and very patronizing. I don't
mean to be. I'm just trying to be brief about it.
Riess: Well, you don't have to be that brief.
Newhall: Here's an illustration from down south at the Signal. A person the
other day came in to ask for our endorsement. This was on our own
paper. I didn't particularly want to endorse her in the election.
She's very moderate, a modestly endowed person. And she said, "But
you don't appreciate what a following I have." I said, "Well, what
do you mean?" She said, "You don't appreciate really my stature in
the community." Then she said, "Look at these editorials that were
in the newspaper. Look what they say about me!"
Well, to begin with I had personally written every word of the
material she showed me. And yet she was oblivious and trying to
convince me that the world was sitting at her feet, because of a few
casual throw- away editorial remarks I had written myself.
These editorials I had written were--to her--the most important
political assets she had, apparently. And all of this was a
startling demonstration of the persuasive power of the written
newspaper word. As an old and tired newspaperman, I sometime forget
how much a paragraph or a column or a mention in a piece of
newsprint means to most people.
Therefore when this horrible fight was going on at Cal between
the Academic Senate and many of the regents and the governor and all
that- -I forget the ins and outs of the whole thing --as long as the
Chronicle was there backing them up and pushing the story the "good
guys" at Cal knew they had support. They knew the public was with
them, and they figured [slaps his knee] god, there are champions out
there. This is like King Arthur's chivalry, or Camelot, or
something like that. In any case we were very helpful, if nothing
else, in this loyalty oath fight. And it took a lot of doing. It
took the effort.
As I say, Ruth handled it for us on the ground. Phil Griffin
was involved in it, George Stewart was deeply involved, maybe Jim
Hart. All the old crowd, Malcolm Davisson of the econ department,
143
you know, the north Berkeley bunch. There are still some friendly
giants at large on the Cal campus today.
I promise you, the other papers wouldn't have fought against
the loyalty oath. As a matter of fact the other papers were
probably in favor of imposing a loyalty oath. The Academic Senate
fought a good fight- -and I am not questioning their courage, because
I am sure they would have battled alone without newspaper support.
Our friends at Cal were wonderful in standing up and winning their
battle. They had to put an end to it. This was all during the
McCarthy period, and geez, it was awful.
But the stupid old Chronicle also fought hard. Of course,
after the fight was over, my good old buddies in the Berkeley
outback were back at the canape tray, as I say, sipping their
Cabernet or whatever it is and figuring out what's right and wrong
about the world. And they're saying the Chronicle is a rag. I've
gone through that all my life. It doesn't bother me, it's just kind
of funny. We're swell when we're on their side, you know, and not
calling them names .
Newspaper Promotions
Riess: The New York Sun, which was called the first newspaper designed for
the common man, invented a hoax in order to sell papers way back in
1833. So that kind of promotional effort has a long tradition?
Newhall: Oh, newspaper promotions have been going on longer than that.
"Hoax" is a horrible word to use, with me anyway.
Fairy tale is better. Or fantasy. When did Stanley go get
Livingstone? I don't even remember. That was a newspaper scenario.
When was the Spanish-American War? That was a Hearst promotion.
You know, literally. He needed to sell papers.
You remember I held forth here rather pompously on the subject
of fairy tales and legends and myths. If you will look at all these
hoopla journalistic carnivals, they're all old, old Victorian or
even 18th century fairy tales, either finding hidden treasure,
getting a reward, or adventure in darkest Africa. That's what the
people love. The princess marries the page boy.
Riess: Let's go to the promotions. What was your thinking as you cooked
them up?
H
144
Newhall: Our problem was by hook or by crook to persuade everybody in town to
turn to the Chronicle for their daily dose of journalistic All-Bran.
Now, an editor comes to realize that the American people- -may
God love and protect them all- -are far more fascinated with the
"incredible," than they are with the "credible." I always kept this
in mind when we were organizing promotions. People have a real
appetite for curiosities and miracles.
However, never in my time on the paper did the Chronicle resort
to the vulgar business of misinformation. Actually "misinformation"
is the property of the politicians and the federal government.
We never did run any story in the Chronicle, that was to my
knowledge a "hoax" --and I'm using the word "hoax" now in its
dictionary sense. We never did, and I never would have sanctioned
the publishing of anything that was either untrue or unethical or
false or fake or anything like that. Some of our promotions may
have been exaggerated, if you will. A good bit of what we published
was amusing or entertaining perhaps, but despite of --and in the
middle of --all the so called fun and games of promotion, morally the
Chronicle was a very chaste newspaper- -and it probably still is.
Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt
Newhall: The first promotion I think we ever came up with was the Emperor
Norton Treasure Hunt. This was brought to me by a fellow called
J.P. Cahn. He had written for This World and he came back to the
Chronicle as promotion editor after a leave he spent selling
imported cars for British Motors on Van Ness Avenue. And Cahn had
heard about a newspaper treasure hunt that had been a great success
in some midwest city.
The most important element in promoting the Chronicle was to
weave the paper into the historic fabric of San Francisco. We
decided to get an exclusive copyright on historic San Francisco. And
one of the most outlandish historic figures in San Francisco was a
man called Emperor Norton. I cannot remember at the moment what his
real name was, but anyway he was Emperor Norton- -a character in a
beaten-up Mexican General's uniform- -who used to go around town with
a couple of hungry dogs. I don't know if you know about him or not.
Those were the days when San Francisco had a lot of savvy and a lot
of style, and everybody used to humor the Emperor. He would issue
imperial decrees, and he issued his own bank notes. The restaurants
would accept his money and feed him lunch and dinner and so on. He
is perhaps the greatest single historic personal legend in San
Francisco .
145
We just thought, okay, the Chronicle and Emperor Norton are
going to get together. I guess I more or less adopted a lot of
Emperor Norton's techniques. I admired him. He got away with it.
One paper in Indianapolis, I think it was, had once come out
with a treasure hunt. They would go in and dig a hole and stick
money into the hole, and then they would publish the clues in the
paper and people would go out and dig for the treasure. Don't think
the American people won't dig if they think there's a pot of gold
under the soil. So we started the Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt. We
got promotions with pictures of Emperor Norton with his top hat on.
Also, he called himself Protector of Mexico. And we buried a
beautiful big bronze plaque saying whoever Digs This Up Will Get A
Thousand Silver Dollars. The plaque was beautiful, about a foot in
diameter, custom made for us by Shreve's jewelry store on Grant
Avenue. We buried the medallion and published the clues and my god
the streets of San Francisco came alive!
People were roaming through the streets with shovels and picks
and going out to dig. And they would dig! We printed daily clues,
sort of jingles. Ruth would compose these rhyming clues carefully
enough so that hopefully the treasure would stay buried for about
four or five or six weeks. People began to buy the paper to read
the clues. And while they were reading about Emperor Norton you
would throw in a little stuff for them about, if you wish, the
loyalty oath in Berkeley, or the atom bomb, or trouble in Singapore.
When I say our readers would dig- -we buried it once right down
here in the beach at Aquatic Park here in San Francisco one time.
Well, they dug up that whole beach. We finally had to pay a lot of
money to hire some heavy grading equipment to bring the sand back in
and replace the whole beach there. It was horrible.
And the phones began to ring. I remember- -again, to describe
human beings. A great big black guy with his Cub Scout troop, he
had a message, he said, from somewhere up in the heavens, a message
that it was buried underneath the basketball court at some high
school out in the Sunset district. And we got a call from the
school authorities that the Cub Scouts had got through the pavement
and they were six feet down in the middle of the basketball court.
I mean, normally you couldn't go through that concrete with a steam
it was terrible. But these people want to dig.
Human beings want to dig for treasure. And if you'll look at
your news, they're always going down somewhere and pulling treasure
up. Hell, they even pulled up the Titanic. Not pulled up the
Tiantic. but they went down to the Titanic the other day. Human
beings are still fascinated with what is under water or under the
earth. I am.
The Emperor Norton was one of our first promotions. And then
146
The Emperor Norton was one of our first promotions. And then
we had- -oh lord, Uncle Muff. I had an alcoholic cousin who had a
big beard like Ernest Hemingway. So we used an artist's picture of
him and billed him as Uncle Muff, and Uncle Muff was going to give
prizes to kids who could find the clues in the trees in the city
parks somewhere. And they almost defoliated the damn parks. You
know, papers have an immense power, and you learn what gets people
interested.
Riess: And each time you did this, you could measure the results in
circulation.
Newhall: Oh yes, the circulation would go up after each promotion was over.
And we would probably retain ten percent of the increase or
something like that.
"Great City, Drinks Swill"
Riess: For instance?
Newhall: Well, Ruth and I were back in New York one time. I was a juror for
the Pulitzer committee at that point. And we were staying at the
St. Regis Hotel. At dinner one evening at the hotel I ordered a cup
of coffee and I began drinking the coffee and I turned to Ruth and I
said, "My god, this is good coffee! I've never had anything like
this in my life."
I said, "Geez, I'm going to tell them to find out what the hell
has happened to San Francisco's coffee." Now!
San Francisco--! may have mentioned it before --when I was a
child this was a huge shipping port. The ships came in from all
over the world. As a small boy going along the waterfront you could
smell the coffee roasting. It was a big coffee town. Hills
Brothers, MJB, Alta Coffee, Folgers Coffee. Five or six, and they
were big companies. And oh, it smelled so good, the coffee
roasting. You could smell the spices in the old tramp freighters
that were tied up along the waterfront, the copra, and jute, and
teakwood logs and all that stuff. Oh, it was marvelous!
I said, "What the hell, here we have San Francisco, the
Chronicle 's trying to stay alive and promote San Francisco, and
Christ, the coffee you drink here is garbage!" So we put a kid
called Jerry Root, Jonathan Root, to do an investigative job of
reporting what the hell were San Franciscans drinking today. We
used to call it coffee and paid a nickel or dime for a cup. Root
went up and down Market Street, he went to the hotels, and my god,
he found coffee urns with dead rats in them and everything else, or
147
the coffee was three or four days old.
selling here was totally junk.
And the stuff they were
So we did a huge front-page expose about "San Francisco Faces A
Swill Crisis." "Coffee Swill," something like that. And it was the
greatest thing we ever did. It was a hell of a piece of
investigative reporting. But- -and I am not going to try to persuade
you or anybody else- -the people read it. It meant something to
them, because they all drank coffee. And the coffee here was
terrible.
Well, this "Coffee Swill" crisis is always used, to this day,
as an example of the irresponsibility of the San Francisco Chronicle
in those horrible years when a madman called Newhall was more or
less promoting it. And I just laugh, because I imagine every one of
them read every word of it. And if they thought about it, they
would have agreed.
Riess : Did that campaign make a difference in the coffee?
Newhall: Oh yes, for a while the hotels and diners cleaned up. You know,
these Market Street chop houses and restaurants were terrible. They
really were terrible. This city had been once really quite great in
terms of being a gourmet city. But, I promise you that today,
twenty- five years later, the citizens of our great city are once
again drinking swill.
Columnists
Terrence 0' Flaherty
Newhall: And we began to concentrate on columnists, and to promote them
heavily in the paper. Herb Caen had left the Chronicle. He went to
the Examiner in '50, and came back eight years later. Del was
already in the paper- -that is, Stan Delaplane. We decided to place
Terry 0' Flaherty's TV column on the front page of the second
section. You know, this second section was a whole feature section
--including editorials at that time.
0' Flaherty- -when we featured him, I had a long talk with him.
I said, "Terry, we're going to put you out on the section page, not
with TV logs. We're doing this because TV is such a big part of our
culture today. Do your column assuming that nobody who's reading
your column has a TV set. Then do your column on the TV world and
you'll be a great success." And I think he was one of the great
columnists on the paper. He was a beautiful writer. That was very
148
successful.*
We tried to develop something in sports- -a fresh approach for
the non-sports fan. I tried to get somebody to write sports who
didn't know anything about it, a good writer though. Then Charles
McCabe came along.
It was my theory--! say mine because this was my own style --
that a newspaper is built upon the written word. And it's not
built, basically, on motion pictures or on television scenes. We
were in competition by this time, pretty strongly, with television.
Therefore we had to stick to our own medium, which was the written
word. Therefore I thought the Chronicle should be the best or the
most lively or delightfully written daily newspaper that I could
publish.
You want to talk about some of the columnists, is that it?
I've gone from promotions to columns, but it's all part of the same
package. Everything was promotion, and the best of all Chronicle
promotions was the quality of the newspaper and its writing.
Riess: Well, in a PSA Magazine article you are quoted as saying when you
took over you saved the newspaper by "giving it back to its
creators," these people, these columnists."**
Newhall: Well, we got them, yes. It's true the Chronicle was saved by the
people who created it.
Riess: I'm interested in how they came to the Chronicle, and I'm interested
in the business end of it, how you syndicated these people, and what
the benefits to the paper were of that.
Newhall: Well, basically, they were all our own columnists. We had a few
syndicated columns, but few of the syndicated columns will become
popular. They normally don't pack the punch that a local guy will
that you're paying on your own payroll. For example, you can get a
syndicated columnist, a top man, for $25, $30, $40 a week. And
you'll pay your good columnists, you know, $1,000 or $2,000 a week,
depending. That's quite a difference.
Riess: Yes. Well, then did you sell these people to other papers?
*The UCLA Office of Oral History is conducting an oral history with
Terrence 0' Flaherty.
**"Newhall says he saved the paper by giving it back to its
creators: 'We decided that we were going to get every writing talent
we could, and we put together a remarkable group.'" PSA Magazine.
November 1982.
149
Newhall: Some. But we never made anything out of It.
syndicate fees were an extra bonus for them.
The columnist's
Count Marco
Riess: Tell me about the outrageous Count Marco.
Newhall: Count Marco. Well, in terms of women's pages (I'm using the first-
person singular pronoun a lot and I apologize for it, it's just
faster) I figured I was tired of them. Women's pages had all this
nonsense and stuff about God knows what, how to cook or how to do
this, that, or the other. But the one thing that women are
basically interested inactually the two thingsare either gossip
or sex. I figured in those old days no respectable American
newspaper had the gall to run a column for women telling them how to
get a guy into the sack. Now forgive my patois here --my vernacular
--but this is a fact.
Charlie wandered in one day with this fellow who had been a
hairdresser and who had worked a stint as a producer at KRON-TV.
His name was Mark Spinelli.* I thought, "Jesus, Charles, why are
you fooling around here in the editorial department?"
He said, "Well, Mark's got an idea. He says some of his
ancestors were counts or something." I looked at "the count" and I
said, "Well, that's good enough for me. Have you got the family coat
of arms?" Well, we talked a little bit about how as a hairdresser
he heard what women talked about in the permanent wave booths . I
said, "That's what we want. Let's get really down to the nitty-
gritty of this and not just carry stories about the bachelor's ball
or the spinster's milk fund drive or some damn thing like that." So
he said, well, he could do a column, he thought, that would be
stimulating.
I said, "Okay. Well now, what was your family coat of arms,
Your Excellency?" And Charlie--you know, he liked to get in on
things that were precisehe said, "Now look, this man has the
makings of a count." And Charlie and the Count began arguing about
whether there should be four spikes on the crest of a count's crown,
or five? Well, we finally settled on four or five or six. It
didn't matter much. You know, the spikes with the ball on top. And
I don't know, the Count said there was something, some kind of
animal on his coat of arms. I forget what kind of animal it was. So
*Henry Spinelli, in Warren Hinckle's If You Have a Lemon. Make
Lemonade . Putnam Books, 1973, pp. 21, 22.
150
we came up okay with the column title "Beauty and the Beast."
That's a pretty good title. So pretty soon he just became Count
Marco .
Then he started to do this column in which he really put women
down, in his way- -he didn't actually put down women, he just
startled everybody. There was more to Marco than just a put-on, in
a sense. Because women, you know, are really quite human. They
are. They're not made out of sugar and spice and everything nice,
you know the way all we little boys were brought up to think.
One of the Count's first columns was how a husband and wife
should get in the bathtub together. He said that's really the only
way to go. It establishes a whole new relationship. So he did one
about a bathtub built for two. And this caused a stink around town.
Time magazine picked it up and people suddenly wanted to subscribe
to Count Marco's column- -other papers --in Omaha and Niagara Falls
and such. And he wrote some columns about how a woman should get
out of a bathtub without looking like a cow, he said, or something.
It was weird. You've heard all these stories.
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: Well, the Count became a sensation in town. We hired him a Rolls-
Royce and he would go out to night clubs and the hotels. I tried to
watch his expense account. And they all called him "Count," "Your
Excellency," and they'd give him a front seat. The people were
dying for this. They wanted to be part of this myth.
The Count, as far as I was concerned, hit the big time when he
covered the Finch trial down south. This was the trial of a doctor
who was accused of killing his wife Big deal. He had a girlfriend,
and he killed his wife. Well, because he had a pretty good income
and so on, the final trial became one of these really top-drawer
murder cases, and all the papers from the East covered it.
Hearst sent out Dorothy Kilgallen, their big sob sister. This
is the kind of yellow journalism that the American people loved,
particularly (if we're going to discuss castes in America, the caste
system) the middle middle class and the lower middle class loved
this stuff. Here's a doctor, a lot of money, supposedly killed his
wife, crime of passion.
I said, "Okay, the Chronicle' s going to really top this whole
thing. If the American people want a circus instead of a serious
criminal trial, all right, the Chronicle will give them all three
rings."
So we sent the Count down to cover the murder case, though I
sent a reporter named Tom Mathews along to rewrite his stories. We
hired him, the Count, the biggest Rolls-Royce we could find in
151
Hollywood and he shoved up at the courtroom, you know, in a tail
coat and spats, and so on and so forth.
Well, the rest of the press, including Miss Kilgallen, geez,
they were just insulted to have this guy. Some people came out and
said, "The Chronicle's making a mockery of this. They think it's a
circus." Well, my point is, it was a circus the moment that the
other papers sent out Dorothy Kilgallen and the rest of the sob
sister crowd to cover it. You know, it was just the same old New
York Post journalism.
Well, the Count absolutely stole the show down there, whether
anyone liked it or not. Where every other paper was investigating
and talking about the testimony--! don't know, I can't even remember
if Finch was found guilty or not- -but this story made a big splash
at the time all the other papers were covering it with typical
courtroom cliches --about whether or not there were fingerprints on
the butler's collar or lipstick on the doctor's lapel or whatever.
But the Count made big headlines when he wrote, "The important
question is, 'does she or doesn't she?' Is the doctor's girl friend
really a blonde?"
Of course we made mockery out of it, but the whole trial was a
mockery. I'm sure that my good friend Ben Bagdikian would have some
comments to make , that we would dare make a mockery out of a trial .
But I promise you that American metropolitan journalism (and
television) is now--and always has been about 50 percent fact and 50
percent mockery. If the word "mockery" is too strong, then use the
term "stereotyped." Anyway, the Count managed to create quite a
rumpus. In a sense, as far as I was concerned, I was simply holding
up a mirror to the American public and to the American press. What
the hell, we were just doing this.
Riess: Was he rewritten in general?
Newhall: The Count was edited quite heavily. But the Count was a good guy.
He's still in town. He's put on too much weight now, and some
critics might say he is past his prime.
I'll tell you a serious story about him: he caught the eye of
a lot of these editors of papers in the Middle West and in the
eastern seaboard establishment, stuffy newspapers. This was "before
sex," before human copulation was the only subject under discussion
in the women's department of America as it is today, take my word
for it, and I'll hold forth on that tiresome subject later. But the
Count was kind of amusing. People were talking about him. So we
syndicated him, and I think twenty or thirty papers subscribed. Oh,
Beauty and the Beast was so innocuous really. And the Count was a
clean guy.
Riess: Well actually, going back to what men and women are talking about at
152
breakfast, this is a way for women now to start talking about sex
with their husbands.
Newhall: And it's all they're talking about, that's the problem. [looking
through newspaper] Where's the women's section? I don't even look
at it anymore because I'm sure they're going to find out whether
coitus interruptus is a good thing or not, you know. Let's just see
for the hell of it.
Riess: So that's not really your Chronicle.
Newhall: That sure isn't. You mean, to go into that graphic detail?
Riess: Yes. Well, yes, and I would say in the last twenty years that there
has been incredible regularity of pop psychology sort of
investigations .
Newhall: Oh yes, it's awful. It's all the same; there's nothing new about
it. And let's see what we can find: "The Anonymous Boys of
Summer." I don't know what that is. "Illness is Just a Thought
Away --Hypochondria.
"
"Here are the Colors that Flatter Your Skin."
This is all old stuff. "Half the Rape Victims are Teens." Well,
you know what I
'
m talking about .
Riess: I do.
Newhall: To me it's awful! I'm so tired of these women and men all moaning
about their sexual problems. I'm just sick of it.
Riess: Now two columnists, Ruthie Stein and Gerald Nachman, represent the
singles scene for men and for women on a regular basis.
Newhall: Oh really? I was in a restaurant last night and I was appalled.
(I'm wandering.) Karl and I went out and I said, "Let's go down to
this place called the California Cafe." It's where Victoria Station
used to be, down at the foot of Broadway. I drove in the parking
lot and I said, "My god, this is Yuppiesville.
"
Because here were
all these Japanese and German cars all lined up. I went in and
there were about five women to every man in there. They were all
sitting around, all these girls, you know, or women. I'm sure
they're junior executives in all these new buildings downtown and
all this stuff, and they're all career women. And there's not a man
in town for them. This is a whole different subject.
Riess: That's sad, isn't it?
Newhall: It is, oh it is. I'll talk about that later if you wish. Really,
it is. There is a commentary on San Francisco. This town is full
of totally frustrated, lonely women, because half the men in town
are homosexuals. And this is true, and I can prove it if you want
to argue or something.
153
Riess:
Newhall:
Oh, I don't doubt it's true,
editor of the paper now?
What would you do about it if you were
Riess:
Newhall :
Well, first of all I'd have to figure out, okay kids, what can we do
for you? What can we provide to make everyone happier or more
interested in some very basic nice things about our planet- our
world? Of course, I haven't got it figured out yet. There were
four of them at one table. And they were all well-dressed. They're
all getting pretty good salaries. I'm sure they're all driving
Mazda RXZs-2000Ys or whatever the hell they are, all that stuff.
They've got all the attributes of success but perhaps they lack the
one real condiment of life, which is happiness. But anyway they're
probably sort of happy.
Oh dear.
I'm sorry I got off on that subject. Where were we? Oh, the Count.
Okay. So these stuffy midwestern and eastern newspapers, they all
subscribed to his column. And there must have been quite a few,
maybe twenty newspapers. That was a good beginning.
Well, the Examiner decided they were going to shoot the
Chronicle down. So they got the word out that the Count had once
been picked up- -now I may have this a little wrong, and I don't want
to slander anybody- -but he had had a little record of some
homosexual deal. He was on the rap sheet in some police department
somewhere for something naughty, I promise you. I forget what it
was. A very minor infraction, whether it was, either pinching a
little boy on the ass or something like thator maybe even a girl.
The Examiner put out the word that "the Chronicle had a homosexual
for a columnist. The Count was a bad fellow." Thereupon every
paper cancelled the Count's column without running a single column.
Now today- -on the other hand- -if a guy wants to get a column
syndicated, he's got to be a homosexual! That's almost the truth of
the matter. San Francisco in that day, when the Count was starting
out, was just sort of the Grandma Moses of heterosexual sex. The
Chronicle was criticized for the Count's "pornography." Time
magazine published a story abut the vulgarity of it all. Every
paper without exception cancelled his column without even running
it. We ran it, of course, and we never had any problem with it at
all. And there was nothing wrong with the Count. He's a good guy.
Warren Hinckle
Riess: Was it Warren Hinckle who exposed him? He says he wrote a piece
154
about Count Marco in the University of San Francisco Foghorn.*
Newhall: I suppose so. I'll take Warren Hinckle's word for it. He was the
editor of the Foghorn at USF, or he wrote for them, yes.
Riess: But this guy, Spinelli was an itinerant hairdresser.
Newhall: Aren't we all itinerant hairdressers?
Riess: And then you hire Hinckle.
Newhall: Hinckle was a very good writer. I have no clear recall but I think
the reason was to prove to him that he was wrong about the
Chronicle. I'm sure he thought I wouldn't hire him. But he used to
denounce us .
Riess: So he was just kind of a "bad boy."
Newhall: No, well, San Francisco's full of these guys. He was a good Irish
Catholic, and he went to USF. And if you go to Jesuit School you've
got problems after a while, because the Jesuits tend to get things
complicated when they confuse "faith" with "reason." Sometimes they
seem to have trouble struggling with the normal human guilt
feelings .
In Hinckle's case, he was a very talented man. I loved the way
he wrote, because he wrote very well when he was roaring about the
Chronicle. Oh, he excoriated us! But I figured well, if he's our
bad boy or if he's our guy, fine. He was such a beautiful writer,
and I think that after a while he became a true Chronicle patriot.
Warren is a friend of mine. I've always liked him. And if he could
write, then I wanted him on the Chronicle. I'm sure what Hinckle
said about the Count factually was accurate. But it didn't matter.
But he thought it mattered.
Art Hoppe
Riess: How about Art Hoppe? When did he arrive?
Newhall: Well, Art was on the Chronicle as a copy boy. He was a San
Francisco boy- -Lowell High- -who went to Harvard and then started as
a copy boy on the Chronicle . He began writing stories for Abe
*Warren Hinckle, op cit.
155
Mellinkoff, on the city side, and he did very well. Let's see, we
needed a columnist, as I recall, and I think I asked him if he
wanted to do a column on sports. I was looking for people who could
write, no matter for which department. Writing is the newspaper's
major responsibilityafter getting a storywriting it well. You
see, AP and UPI have pretty well emasculated the written word.
Therefore I figure that newspapers have to retranslate news
reporting and fact gathering back into acceptable English. I asked
Hoppe if he wanted to write sports? No, he didn't want to write
sports, but he wanted to do something.
He and Bill German, who is now the executive editor, were
pretty good friends. As I recall, they got together and Bill helped
him shape his column. Art began doing a column for us and it just
started running. As I recall I wanted Hoppe to concentrate on San
Francisco city hall politics.
Riess: Was it always political commentary?
Newhall: It was supposed to be, but Art's column just grew and grew and grew.
You know, Art Hoppe, has his own inimitable brand- -his own unique
style. You might say he has patented the art of gentle satire --with
a bomb shell tucked inside it. There's a very fine line between
satire and burlesque and wryness and cynicism and sardonicism and
irony and all that. Art always had- -and I see that he still has- -a
marvelous capacity of stabbing the readers with a rapier and
wiggling it around--! mean, a rapier and not a broad sword. But Art
has such a mellow touch that he has always managed to anaesthetize
the readers before they feel the sting. Now, after 30 years or so
he still has a certain sort of a lovable boy quality about him, he
really does. He doesn't seem to be vicious even when he's
dreadfully vicious.
0*
Riess: You said somewhere how difficult it was to find good writers.
Newhall: Writers are very rare, I think.
Riess: They're not journalists then?
Newhall: No, no. Well, there have been, there are some great journalistic
writers. After all, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose
Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, there's a long line of them. I think some
of the greatest writers of the world have come out of newspapers.
But not every newspaperman is a good writer.
When I first went to work on the paper, you had reporters and
you had writers. You had a whole bank of old rewrite men, these old
guys with the green eyeshades on, you know, with the phone. The leg
man would go out and cover a murder and he'd phone it in, and the
156
rewrite man would write it. Now it tends to be a little more
esoteric. People insist on covering their own stories and writing
their own stories. And that's not always totally successful.
But out of every hundred people, there might be one good
writer, something like that. And by that I mean the reporter who
can sit down and take any subject and make you read it. The New
Yorker is very expert in that field. I forgot to mention that some
of the reading that we did when Paul Smith was there running the
Chronicle was The New Yorker. And that had a tremendous impact on
any newspaper reporter during my association with the Chronicle --The
New Yorker style. Incidentally, some of our guys went back there,
Kevin Wallace went back there, I think Bernie Taper did. They were
great writers, I think.
Newhall: Keeping Up with the Media, and TV
Riess: That's interesting. In fact, I was going to ask you what you read.
Newhall: By the time I had to be executive editor, there really wasn't too
much time left over. And you're pretty tired. I didn't read much;
I wouldn't read the paper all that much.
Riess: Did you read the New York Times?
Newhall: No, I never read the New York Times in my life. Oh, I'm
exaggerating. I would when I was in New York. And I have been
reading the Times now when it pops up. It's a wonderful paper in
many ways .
Riess: Did you read your competitor? Did you read the Examiner?
Newhall: No, I never read them. And I still don't, anywhere I am. I don't
care what they do. They're going to screw up. I don't mean to be
quite as snotty as I sound.
Riess: But you did read The New Yorker, you're saying.
Newhall: Yes, when I had a chance I would read The New Yorker, simply for the
pleasure of reading good writing, what I considered to be good
writing. And I read George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh--! think I've
mentioned this --and somebody else. I have always tried to keep up
on historical material. I've been going through Gibbon's Decline
and Fall recently- -there' s one of the world's great intellects and
stylists .
Riess: One of the books I looked for about newspaper editors and publishers
said their average age is 47, they're male, they read an average of
157
seven newspapers a day, they read Time. Life. Newsweek. Reader's
Digest, and maybe get around to reading eight books a year.
Newhall: Well, that does not fit my pattern. I probably read twenty books a
year, thirty books a year. I never read Time. Life. Newsweek, the
New York Times on any regular basis. I don't even read my own
pieces and I never read the competition. Now, I'm sorry I can't
explain that. I am exposed to words all day, every day.
These days I follow television very closely. By that I mean I
always try to catch one or two prime time TV news programs a day,
because as an editor of the written media, you have to cover the
news. And the news is made up of two things: the first is what is
actually happening in the world each day, the second is what the
television people show on their picture tubes.
About 85 percent of Americans- -I'm rattling these percentages
just off of my head, I don't know--but to 85 percent of the American
people news is what they see on television. You've got a half -hour
or hour's worth of TV news shows a day, and they cover about ten or
a dozen events, and after all, there are thousands or millions of
events every day. But the magic picture tube manages to condense
all these millions of events by condensing a dozen of the total into
about twenty seconds or a minute apiece . An editor has to know what
his readers are talking and thinking about as they sit around
watching the magic tube. That's why I watch television.
Riess: Then your paper is partly a corrective?
Newhall: Well, yes. But mainly I watch the TV news in order to find out what
people are interested in- -what they're looking at, what kind of
brain food they're getting from TV. They're interested in what
they've seen or heard to a certain extent, and not only something
that is new and novel once in a while. You know, today it's
Noriega, and Panama, or Nicaragua or Palestine. Yesterday it was
apartheid, it was an oil spill, or China or a burning American flag,
or abortion debates. The news comes and goes in faddish cycles.
Riess: Twenty years ago people didn't sit in front of the "Today Show" at
breakfast. Then they had only your newspaper.
Newhall: Do they sit there now as early as breakfast. I suppose so.
Riess: I wonder.
Newhall: I've never seen the "Today Show." (You know, of course, that on TV
the news is always packaged as the news "show," it's not the news
"program. ")
Riess: I wonder, if you think that has happened, then would you have a lot
of trouble getting them to read the Chronicle?
158
Newhall: Well, it's a very good question. I have never looked at anything
ever before about two in the afternoon. I don't function very
smoothly in the morning. My news day begins at about five o'clock
and ends at about eleven, in terms of TV. I don't even know what's
available in the morning. I know there are some great national folk
heroes and gurus and so on whose names everyone knows , these women
and men. There's somebody called Geraldo and there's somebody
called Vanna White and all this stuff. I don't even know who they
are. I say that with some embarrassment.
Lucius Beebe and the Territorial Enterprise
Riess: Tell me about Lucius Beebe.
Newhall: Well, I admired Lucius from afar for many years, because he was one
of a kind I first got to know him in the columns of The New Yorker .
and also from the columns he used to write in the Herald Tribune.
When I said I never read a paper- -a lot of people put things on
my desk to read. You know, they'll clip it out or something. But I
honestly never had the time to sit down and go through seven papers.
If any editor tells you he goes through seven papers a day, the son-
of-a-bitch isn't working for his own paper. And that's a fact.
And I know those guys. You know, if you become a member of the
ASNE, which is the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and they
have a national convention once a year- -you can always tell the
airheads from the fairly competent people. These muttonheads will
come in with a copy of their own newspaper in their pocket, and
they'll have it sent to them by carrier pigeon or by airmail or air
express every day they're there, so they can go through the
newspaper. Well, any newspaper editor who goes back to the
convention and bothers to read his own paper is crazy. Now I'm
sorry, but whenever I saw a guy doing that, I wouldn't even bother
to introduce myself. I would figure he's too tied up with his own
paper.
Anyway, I went away from your question.
Riess: Okay, Beebe.
Newhall: Lucius, okay. I admired Lucius. I read a definitive, as far as I
was concerned, definitive piece on him years ago in The New Yorker
and more somewhat later. He used to come out once in a while to San
Francisco, but I'd never met him. Lucius was a great poseur. He
had his own style. He was living a role. He had been fired from
both Harvard and Yale, and I felt that gave him his credentials. As
159
a matter of fact, rather better credentials than anyone I knew,
because he had more or less been able to withstand the stultifying
effect of the establishment.
He had worked for the New York Herald Tribune, had written a
lot of articles for Gourmet and that stuff. And The New Yorker did
a piece on him. He was squiring in that piece- -maybe you read it,
though. I would doubt it, it was a long time ago- -Mrs. Somebody-or-
other, Mrs. Rhinelander Stewart or something like that, to a play or
an opening in New York. And he had borrowed for the occasion a
diamond chrysanthemum or something from Cartier's or Tiffany's, I
forget which. Do you know the story of which I'm speaking?
Riess: No.
Newhall: And as a joke somebody purloined it during the night, and he had a
hell of a time getting it back. He finally got it back. But I
thought any guy who goes to those lengths --Lucius is a good writer,
he's a hell of a good writer, and I like Lucius, I admire him, I
would like to have patterned my skills after him. In great part, I
couldn't. He took second place to no man. He was smooth or elegant
on the outside, he could be tough, but on the inside he frequently
turned to jelly.
After he got tired of New York he came out to Nevada. He
bought this little paper, the Territorial Enterprise, up in Virginia
City. And he wrote editorials. I told you, the editorial page, I
think- -and I repeat myself--is the greatest and most important
section or department or item in any living newspaper. And
unfortunately, in 95 out of 100 newspapers it is turned over to
people who are either tired or have run their course as city
editors, and there is very little truly creative journalism in terms
of editorial writing in the country. But Lucius with his
Territorial Enterprise- -I used to get that paper faithfully every
week to read his editorials, because he gave people hell. And he
took nothing from anybody.
Ruth and I were having our twenty- fifth wedding anniversary and
decided to celebrate it in Reno. So we flew up to Reno, and on the
way up- -Dolly called and I asked her to get hold of some Mexican
mariachi musicians, two or three or four of them with guitars. I
said, "Send them on up. We need some music on our anniversary." We
brought a mariachi band up there with us. We were enjoying it. I
said, "Let's go up to Virginia City and see Lucius." This was
about, well, let's see, the twenty-fifth? We were married in '33,
so this was in 1958.
So we went up and Lucius and Chuck were there. Chuck Clegg was
a very dear friend of his. Lucius was there in all his finery. He
and Chuck came down to meet us in a Virginia City saloon. He had
gold nuggets, you know, from here to here, hanging around him from
160
his Adam's apple to his navel. He was a real rebel against, you
know, Back-Bay Boston and Beacon Street or whatever. Lucius had on
his high-heeled cowboy boots. Chuck had on high-heeled cowboy boots
with gold heels. They had beautiful gold, sort of pierced 18 carat
gold heels.
He told me a story. He said, "We were crossing the English
Channel. It was a party and King Carol of Rumania was on board with
his girlfriend, Magda Lupescu. She got seasick and went below, but
the King," he said, "stayed up. It was a rough crossing, but he
lasted out the night." Lucius said, "The last thing I remembered
before I passed out- -His Majesty looked over and he said to Chuck,
'Tell me, young man, where can I get some boots like that? You're
the only man in the world I've met who when he needs a shoeshine has
to send his boots to Tiffany's.'" [laughs] I don't know, that story
always stuck with me. I thought, well now, there you get right down
to salt-of -the-earth America- -sort of in reverse.
So we went up to see Lucius and Chuck. We had the mariachis
playing, and I said, "Lucius, you've got to come to work for the
paper someday. I've been watching your things. If you ever really
need a job or want to run away from Nevada, the way you did New
York , come on down .
"
So I went back. I used to write him a letter every now and
then, or see him or something. I picked up this paper one day- -the
weekly Territorial Enterprise came in and he'd done an editorial
about a couple of Baptists or Methodists or some kind of Protestant
missionaries, in Yeman or Oman, one of those Arabian countries. And
they had fallen out of favor. I think they'd been pushing their
Protestant doctrines somewhat too vigorously down there on the
desert. So the sultan or whatever the hell he was of Oman or Yemen
or something took them down to the marketplace and beheaded them.
There was a great hullabaloo over this for a little bit and
Lucius wrote this marvelous, absolutely hell -fire editorial saying,
"This is the best thing that ever happened. It will teach those
begging priests to keep their noses out of somebody else's
churchyard .
"
So I called him and I said, "Lucius, you've got to come to
work. Come on, you've got to!" So then he came to work for us and
wrote a column then, every week. I'm sure Lucius- -look, you can
believe in anything, some people who took him seriously, but Lucius
was just a great yarn-spinner. And he wrote these sort of
outrageous editorials. They really had a pretty good following,
appeared on the editorial page on Monday, as I recall, in the
Letters space.
I really liked Lucius. I could go on at great length about
him. But anyway, he was playing a role, and he played it very well.
161
I also, in getting Lucius- -at one point we had the Virginia
City camel races. I could talk about that some other time perhaps.*
Lucius was the starter.
He got into a fight with a Catholic priest up in Virginia City.
The Catholic priest wanted the house of ill fame moved because he
said it was too close to the church. So Lucius came out with
thundering editorials on a crusade not to move the whorehouse, but
to move the church. And they had a hell of a fight over that. And I
sent Charles McCabe up to cover him, because Charles was the closest
thing I had to Lucius on the paper at that time. No- -Charles wasn't
even writing a column for us then. But he was a good writer, he had
been around. And he went up to Virginia City and he did this series
on "The Priest and the Prostitutes." It was great.
Charles McCabe. and Keeping the Writers Happy
McCabe and Lucius
I or someone said,
Newhall: Then I got McCabe to start doing his column for us, and then Lucius
came down to work very shortly thereafter. They didn't get on too
well, Lucius and Charles McCabe. I think Lucius thought Charles was
using his style too much. I remember we had a big annual dinner of
some kind celebrating something spurious at Trader Vic's. All the
Chronicle columnists were there. We were always trying to keep the
columnists happy with a lot of wine and caviar and would sluice them
on a regular basis. You know, a little style,
were sitting at the bar there at Trader Vic's.
"Well, Lucius, there goes Charlie McCabe. How are you getting on?"
He said, "Oh, splendidly, splendidly. That is, if you can get along
with anyone who has syphilis of the brain." They didn't get on too
well, actually.
Riess: Was Lucius' one column a week supporting him?
Newhall: Well, I didn't pay Lucius all that much. Lucius was a man of some
serious means .
Riess: But McCabe?
Newhall: Well, yes. McCabe wrote five or six columns a week. Lucius wrote
only one. And at that time I think we probably paid Lucius about
$350 a week. But he didn't support himself writing for the
*See p. 199.
162
Chronicle. Lucius wrote for magazines and his family had some
money, quite a lot, I think.
Riess: The others? Count Marco?
Newhall: Well, we paid him enough to live on. I always let them have a
pretty good expense account. I would have a little trouble
sometimes getting it through Charlie.
Riess: That's interesting. Then did you rotate them in the week?
Newhall: Oh, most of them were daily.
Riess: They were daily?
Newhall: Oh, yes. Well look at Herb. He writes six days a week,
[tape interruption]
When we had all these writers and stuff, we had a lot of
parties. People would come through town, visiting Russians we had
to entertain, Russian journalists, a lot of visiting journalists you
would get in, sometimes sort of semi-celebrities. So we always had
these quite nice parties. I would get all of the old staff up there
at Trader Vic's or down at the Villa Taverna or somewhere. There
were some pretty good toots. And everybody I think enjoyed it.
They felt as if they sort of belonged somewhere and were
contributing, because they were the people who were making the
Chronicle. And our circulation was climbing all the time.
Riess: This distinction between columnists and reporters, was everyone
included in the party? Or were the columnists the elite.
Newhall: Oh, we always included a lot of columnists, editors, and some
reporters. There was actually quite a variety at the Chronicle
soirees.
George Draper Reports From Africa
Newhall: Some of our reporters could write like angels. Or do angels ever
get around to writing. George Draper and Art Hoppe--Hoppe was
doing a column but he also covered stuff in the news. I sent
Draper--! tried to cover the world in a strange way. UPI came
through with a story one day that the country of Zambia in the
emerging continent of Africa had entered the space race. Zambia, it
was reported, had in place a program where they had their own
astronaut, and they were training him in a large cauldron. They
would shoot him up into the air with a giant slingshot. And I said,
"Okay, you guys asked for this." I sent Hoppe down to cover
163
Zambia's entrance into the space race. Some of this stuff was a
little sardonic, you know what I mean. Oh, what the hell. And we
didn't dream it up. This was not a hoax.
So Hoppe went down there. And Lord, they had the Ministry of
Space. I don't know how the story started. It was a legitimate
wire story out of Africa. And maybe the guy was a drunk, the UPI
correspondent was drunk in a saloon? I'll never know. But the
Zambians had the space headquarters and this poor astronaut guy
[chuckles], they would shoot him down the hill in a barrel, a big
empty oil drum and he would rattle around. He had on a football
helmet. It was awful. It was hilarious.
Anyway, everybody was angry at me about that. I think Hoppe
has always felt terrible about it, that somehow we were not treating
our black associates with the proper respect. But those Zambians
asked for it if they put it on!
I sent George Draper, who was a very dear friend of mine and
was a marvelous, rollicking kind of 1928 writer- -he comes from a
very highly-placed New York family, married Nancy Draper who was
Nancy Guggenheim, I guess she was the heiress to one of the largest
fortunes in America, but they got divorced--! sent him over to
Zaire. This was early on. I said, "Look, what's going on in
Africa? There are all these strange things. Tell me what it's like
there. Forget all this crap that's coming in over the wires." He
managed to get up into the rain forest and interviewed somebody that
he described as the pygmy king- -or prince maybe-- who was
complaining about the lions or elephants or something. They weren't
eating well enough and the flesh wasn't good. It was a strange sort
of a thing. And the prince was not enthusiastic about his country's
new independent government.
Really, things were all kind of muddled up there. In fact, in
the fifties in Africa, oh Africa was having terrible problems. And
I was tired of hearing all these things about how a new world was
developing and democracy was rampant, you know. In some equatorial
African countries they would be tying guys up to stakes and shooting
them. I don't know if you followed what was going on there.
It was wild! Oh god, it was awful. That's one of the greatest
periods of history. Dictatorships, local kings, emperors, violence,
I never saw anything like it. Like Noriega, Papa Doc. All that
same bit. There was terrible, terrible repression in many African
countries- -and in many cases there still is.
Riess: And what was Draper supposed to be doing?
Newhall: I said, "Look, find out what's going on." He wrote about the
poverty and who was in control and how the armies were in control,
and so on and so forth. A lot of this had been skipped.
164
Riess: So It wasn't that he was going in to get the bizarre.
Newhall: Wait a moment, in those years Africa was bizarre. Well, he got some
bizarre stuff, but that's just a backdrop. The bizarre was the true
reality of the horrible repression that was taking place. And that
was tough to come by. Gee, in some of those countries these fellows
would get hold of the army, they would build themselves palaces.
Well, you saw what Idi Amin did finally in Uganda. And up in
Central African Empire this fellow Bokasa--Jean Bedel Bokasa I think
it was --set up an Empire based on Napoleon I- -I was fascinated with
that. But I wouldn't go down there. And I didn't send anyone down
to Emperor Bokasa' s unfortunate realm.
Later on I sent Draper over to the northeast horn of Africa.
We gave him some money and told him to buy a slave. I said, "Look,
we've got all this stuff about how UNESCO and United Nations has
cured all the world's ills. Will you please go over and buy a
slave. Go over there to Zanzibar or Ethiopia, somewhere, Dar-es-
Salaam, anywhere, and get yourself a slave. See if you can get a
pretty good-looking one, female. And we'll bring her up to the
United Nations in Manhattan there, and we'll manumit her. We'll get
her some gold-plated chains. You get her up there on the front
steps in Manhattan in the United Nations Plaza or Building. We'll
strike the chains off her to demonstrate how we're eradicating
slavery from the face of the earth.
Anyway, it was kind of weird. He couldn't get a slave. He
apparently drank all the travel money up, or slave money up, or
something, and never came back with one. He did quite an
interesting series of stories on the problems of Somaliland.
Riess: Manumit?
Newhall: That's the way you free a slave. You take a slave and you manumit
him. You give them their papers of freedom. Manumission; you give
them their freedom.
Newhall' s Rejection of Journalism's Cliches
Newhall: I told that story purposely to show you how, in a sense,
irresponsible I have been. All of this was pretty raw, some of it,
but was sort of an almost bitter rejection of the cliches that were
flying around the country. The United Nations -everything was
written in such a never-never way.
Riess: What did you expect from your story?
Newhall: Well, who knows. Readership of course, and we did get readership.
165
It was a kind of rebellion, you know. This world still needs some
of that. A little whiff of reality every now and then.
Riess: You weren't rebelling against the ownership of the paper.
Newhall: Oh no, no. I'm talking about rebelling against just the cliches of
newspaper publishing.
Riess: Yes. But did you push the limits as far as the ownership of the
Chronicle was concerned?
Newhall: Oh no, I think everybody went along with it all right. No. No, the
only trouble we ever had locally, internally, was the question of
what politicians were we going to endorse, maybe, or something like
that. There was always the drive to the right, to the conservative,
to the Republican. And it took some doing to get them past that.
Because we had to keep control of the town. And we could not
maintain the power if we continued to support every jackleg
Republican candidate who ran for office. After all San Francisco is
a Democratic city. But that's a whole different aspect of this that
I have been discussing, totally different.
Riess: And your columnists --did they take on the politics of the town?
Newhall: We were all independent mavericks.
Riess: Hoppe's political thing is national, not local. I can't think of
one of our opinion page columnists who was local.
Newhall: Oh, that's correct. I never could find in all these years what I
considered to be a top hot-shot local San Francisco columnist,
political columnist. I just couldn't.
Riess: So Herb Caen is the closest.
Newhall: Yes. And he is more than political. Some papers have been very
successful with political columnists. The job of good political
reporting can be very dangerous, in a sense, because a good
political columnist always has to walk the tightrope between joining
the establishment or reporting on it. In Washington right now so
many of these big shot journalists consider themselves part of the
establishment, part of the government. Like the attorneys, after
all, in a legal case, in a trial, are officers of the court.
And that's something--! don't have all that much respect for a
lot of these high-pressure, high-powered Washington correspondents,
I really don't. I don't mean on a personal basis, but I think they
get very colored. They tend to become part of the whole legend, the
political legend in Washington, the Beltway syndrome.
Riess: Were you saving some of these people for the Sunday pages?
166
Newhall: Oh, some of them were in Sunday. The Sunday paper was made up of
all the feature sections in addition to the daily news section. But
because it was Sunday and there wasn't all that much news on
Saturday, and Monday's a soft paper, the weekend news sections tend
to be a little bit soft. You put some features in there.
Riess: As executive editor was the Sunday paper also yours?
Newhall: Oh, yes.
Riess: So everything was your concern.
Newhall: Despite the title, everything including the color of the circulation
trucks and the copy in our Chronicle promotion advertising. I did
not run the advertising department, I didn't have the time or want
to bother. But everything was kind of joint. As I say, Charlie and
I would work out together the advertising rates and all this, at
least for the first few years. I didn't have much time for it after
that.
Riess: Critics like [Allan] Temko, [Thomas] Albright, [Alfred]
Frankenstein- -were they people you brought in and developed?
Newhall: Well, most of them had been there before. But they all kind of came
back on if they'd gone away, and they sort of blossomed in those
years. Whether or not I really was responsible, I can't say. But I
knew them all personally really quite well, and I liked them all.
There was a very nice relationship. They were given such a free
hand. I think they would probably all agree that they were
basically free to do whatever they could or wanted to do. They were
never edited, really, except told to do better or something. I
don' t know.
Temko was a marvelous writer. He's a very dear friend of mine,
and also a dear old friend is the one-eyed pirate, you know,
Hinckle. I saw Hinckle just the other night. I try to keep up with
them all. Templeton Peck, he was the head of the editorial page,
and he did as good a job as anyone could do under the circumstances.
Riess: Templeton Peck?
Newhall: Yes. He was the head of the editorial page.
Riess: How come I've never heard his name before?
Newhall: Well, you know, in the editorial page department, you're sort of a
little bit aside from the rest of them in a sense. And you see,
Temp never got a by-line in his life. He just wrote editorials.
You see, the guys in the floor show were the reporters, you know,
who went to Zanzibar or Zambia or wherever.
167
Riess: When did you write editorials? Certainly you must have.
Newhall: I wrote very few. Once in a while I'd write one, if I felt up to it
or had the urge .
Riess: Are you a fast writer?
Newhall: No.
Riess: A labored writer? How does it go?
Newhall: Maybe medium. I do much more writing now than I did then. And it
takes me a whole working day, more or less, to write a piece. It's
a labor. For me- -I'm not much of a writer. I'm sort of eclectic. I
copy one person or another or myself. Right now I'm busy rewriting
myself, you know, copying myself. That's what happens.
After a while you find yourself using the same phrase and the
same words, trying more or less to describe the same situation. The
situations haven't changed that much.
168
VII CHRONI CLE -
EXAMINER AND THE JOINT OPERATING AGREEMENT
[Interview 5: April 12, 1988]
The Idea. The Meetings##
Newhall: Before we get into any more about the paper, you may recall that the
last session we had I made some what I'm sure sounded like and were
probably quite arrogant remarks about academic journalism and Ben
Bagdikian. And I quoted from an article: I quoted a sentence in
which he said something about how bad the Chronicle was and that it
was too bad it's been so successful. And then there was the
sentence, "Unfortunately, however, Newhall was a genius."* I know
it sounded arrogant, and I meant it to be, somewhat, but it occurred
to me- -and I just want to be accurate- -Bagdikian may not have
written that. It might have been written by somebody else at about
the same time. There were two or three articles that came out- -all
written by people who are familiar in the Berkeley hills, about how
terrible the Chronicle was. These articles were all not
particularly laudatory. I think this piece I mentioned was by
Bagdikian.
But the point I was making- -and I'm sure it wasn't clear- -was
first of all I was trying to prove that Bagdikian is not a good
reporter because I'm not a genius. And secondly, I was a little bit
sore because he said "unfortunately" I was a genius. And that's all
I wanted to say. I'm really in pretty good spirits about it all,
but I didn't want to appear to be taking it all very seriously.
Riess: All right. Maybe you didn't deny the genius last time [laughs].
*"Scott Newhall... He had no faith in the readers' intelligence and
did not take journalism seriously. Unfortunately, he had talent.
He was the evil genius of fun and games." Ben Bagdikian, "The
Chronicle Chronicles," San Francisco Magazine. May 1982, p. 66.
169
Newhall ;
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Well, I know. I thought, "My god, she probably thinks that I was
only worried about the 'unfortunately.'" Because I'm no more of a
genius than he is. You know, we all clock in there somewhere around
51 percent or 49 percent worth of brain power.
Any other caveats?
Not really, I guess.
You'll have a chance to see it all in print, and you can make any
changes that you want then and there .
I think it would be good to start with the merger. It's a
major chunk of Chronicle history.
Who initiated it?
In the early middle of 1960s the Chronicle had just begun to make
some money. We had started out ten years before losing about a
million a year. (I'm using money as a measure merely because that's
tied in with the promotional success, the circulation, the content
of the paper.) The paper was being received more and more widely by
readers and paid for. In the early sixties we about broke even. We
had a couple of massive promotions and we passed the Examiner in
circulation. We were both running around 215,000-220,000 daily by
this time. The Examiner, which had been making two or three million
dollars a year, began to lose, and the Chronicle began to make a few
dollars, but nothing that mattered too much. So at that time this
question of merging the two newspapers- -I mean, people say "merger"
but joining them together- -in a joint production company had
occurred to a lot of people. It had been done in I think Tucson,
Arizona, Salt Lake City, and the Hawaiian Islands. (I believe the
Hawaiian Islands are now a state.) Anyway- -
Yes, it is. [laughter]
Okay ,
they are !
Things happen usually because of very personal relationships,
and it so happens that young Randy Hearst, Randolph Apperson Hearst,
one of the five sons of the old gentleman, is a great friend of
Charlie Thieriot, our publisher. They were both members of the
Burlingame Club and the P.U. [Pacific Union] and that sort of thing.
There's one thing only that all these loyal Hillsborough people do
as religiously as, say, the Pope celebrating Easter Mass in St.
Peter's Square. They all go duck hunting, starting with the first
day of duck season, which is normally in November, late October, in
the re s omet ime .
As I recall, Charlie and I had been discussing a joint San
Francisco newspaper operation quite a bit, and I believe Randy and
170
Charles when they went duck shooting up at either Charlie's club or
Randy's, which would be up around the Buttes in Marysville-- there
are a lot of rice fields up there where they go duck shooting- -they
got together in the same duck blind. And either Charles or Randy
began discussing the matter. It was sort of brought up between
them. I cannot be accurate on this. I think Randy may have brought
it up first, but it really doesn't matter. And they said, "Well, I
wonder if this would work out." Because neither paper was making
any real money despite the fact the papers were still quite
successful and popular, circulating well. So they decided to look
into it.
Well, from there it went into a lot of preliminary discussions.
Our lawyers were brought into it. We were not meeting together with
the Examiner yet. Charlie and I first had to decide what we wanted
and the Ex had to decide what they wanted.
Riess: So Charlie brought it back to you.
Newhall: Oh yes, the next day, sure! Oh, we were in constant touch about
everything. I keep underlining that. Everything that happened on
the paper, I think everything Charlie did, as I say including
advertising rates or anything else, anything I did including
sometimes a delayed report on sending somebody to Africa or someone
to Russia, we discussed it all. It was an absolutely joint effort.
Riess: So your lawyers were the next involved.
Newhall: Yes, because this is a very, very tricky business from the point of
view of law. The point of view of the non-competitive agreements,
that body of law in Washington called the Fair Trade Practices Act,
whatever it is. This is all very sensitive in the Anti-Trust world.
Anyway, there's a problem with competition.* We had to be sure
that we were clean in terms of Washington, because Charlie was
magnificent, in my opinion, in his concern for and care for the
corporate aspects of the newspaper. And remember the Chronicle
Publishing Company also owned a TV franchise, Channel 4-KRON TV, and
a television license is a privilege granted by all those nice people
in Washington, D.C.
We didn't want to do anything that was going to cause criticism
from the government. So we studied the Salt Lake City deal. (The
papers all pass around these different joint agreements that they've
made, the different papers have.) And we studied the Tucson
agreements. And I think there was one at that time in Honolulu.
As we went into it I felt very strongly, and so did Charles,
*Senate Anti -Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee
171
that the Chronicle would have to remain in the morning field or we
wouldn't make the deal, because obviously the morning field is the
important field in this city. I didn't care about Sunday. So we
were all set to trade off Hearst: we would remain the morning, they
would go to the afternoon, and they could have Sunday, because I
figured Sunday would look like a big banana to them, a big carrot on
the end of the stick. Charlie, however, was still set on Sunday.
He wasn't about to give it up.
The Cast. The Players
Newhall: So then we met, presumably in secret, in the Clift Hotel. I think
it was on the third floor somewhere. It was Charlie and I and
Sheldon Cooper, who represented Cooper, White & Cooper, the law firm
that handled the Chronicle business. (Sheldon Cooper's wife, for
the record, was a deYoung granddaughter. She was Pat Tobin, Connie
Tobin's oldest daughter.) Sheldon, Charlie and I, and then
sometimes the Chronicle's business manager, Lyle Johnson. And once
in while a specialist from the advertising department or from the
circulation department. But Charlie and I and Shel.
On the other side were Randy Hearst and Charles Gould,
sometimes young George Hearst who was working as publisher of the
Los Angeles Examiner then, another failing Hearst newspaper, this
time in the Los Angeles area. Then one or another of the old-time
Hearst corporate beautiful people, Dick Berlin or G.D. Markinson.
Riess: What does that mean, to be a Hearst "beautiful person?"
Newhall: Berlin I think was chairman of the board of the Hearst Corporation.
Markinson was either executive vice president or- -oh, these are
corporate jobs. But they came out to sit in on this: it was not just
the local Hearst guys, see. Randy was at that time publisher. Oh,
I think he had gone on to another title. Anyway, he had been
publisher of the Call-Bulletin and he became president of the Hearst
Foundation, I believe, and he also had some kind of a title that
sort of put him in charge of papers out here on the West Coast. But
anyway, Randy and Charlie Gould, who was a very nice man, publisher
of the Examiner and sort of completely at sea. He had come out from
the East Coast.
Charlie Gould was a very friendly kind of person. His paper
was in desperate trouble and I don't think he knew what to do about
it- -because he had some certain beliefs and ideas and ideals. Well,
he sent out Christmas cards that always had a kind of a poem, either
from the Apocrypha or from the Old Testament or something, I don't
know. He believed in things. So you could always sort of play him
--I'm wandering a little- -play him for a sucker if you had to.
172
But anyway, we sat down, and oh lord! These meetings up in the
Clift Hotel went on for- -my memory will be not good on this. It
seemed to me like a very, very long time. I think it must have been
over a period of six months or a year; it went on for a long time.
Riess: Was this on a detail level?
Newhall: Totally. With Charlie there, it is real detail. What we did, we
just sat and talked about principles and ideas and the concept
generally. Then the lawyers on each side would sit down and come up
with a rough agreement, a draft, trying to outline everything we
were trying to accomplish. In other words: Who would set the
advertising rates? How would the advertising rates be set?
Now this was crucial to the whole thing because advertising
rates and circulation practices are where you get into trouble with
these fellows in Washington in the anti- trust business. How do you
establish joint advertising rates? In other words, can you have a
joint cut rate for advertisers who go in both papers? Well, I
guess you can do that in a sense, because you start with a rate for
each newspaper. Then you see the old gimmick was, if you're just
going to publish in the Chronicle or you're just going to publish in
the Examiner, look, why don't you put your ads in both papers and
you can have the package deal for 10 or 20 percent less than the two
separate rates added up together. And this is where there's
trouble. There was a lot of detail work all the time because of
this kind of thing.
How are you going to circulate? Whose presses were we going
to use? What building were we going to use? It went on. Really,
it was interminable. Charlie and I drove around San Francisco
looking for sites for buildings or some place to put the joint
operation. In the end we ended up right back at Fifth and Mission.
The Examiner moved into headquarters right across the alley from us,
and we both used the old Chronicle press room and so on. But that
took us months. Charlie is a detail man. I've never seen anything
like it.
Riess: Was Gould a parallel kind of detail man?
Newhall: Well, no. Charlie Gould was a pleasant troubador- -more of a poet.
Charlie Thieriot more or less did all the thinking for everybody.
You know, there was this love -hate relationship. Personally we were
all friends. There were no two enemies. This was not Israel and
the Palestinians. Unh-unh. As I say, when you shoot ducks together
you're pretty friendly, on the whole.
Riess: So there were not a bunch of old antipathies?
Newhall: No. I was rude. One session I got mad and I was rude to Charlie
Gould which I always regretted. He had no real defense, you know.
173
I usually do not mean to be rude, but I was just sick and tired of
the Hearst people making all these, well, you know, "we've got this
fine paper here, we're in the saddle and so on." They were just
dying, they really were.
Money. Covering Losses
Riess: You said once, I guess a couple of interviews ago, that for a
newspaper making money really isn't such an issue.
Newhall: That's correct.
Riess: Because the value of a paper is power and--
Newhall: But there are publishers and there are- -well, finish your question.
Riess: Well, you know what I'm getting at. So money wasn't necessarily the
reason for the merger.
Newhall: Yes, it was. I will try to explain it, though, in line with what I
said earlier. There are publishers and there are publishers. The
Hearst Corporation is one of the large corporations in the United
States, and it is built on the basis of vast ranching interests:
it's built on the Homestake Gold Mine, digging the gold out of the
ground. The Hearst people also have a very large group of magazines
that are very successful. So the Hearst people make lots of money.
But they didn't make it either in Los Angeles or San Francisco with
the newspapers. It really didn't matter that they were losing
money; if they had been only businessmen they would have gotten rid
of these two West Coast papers years ago.
Now the Chronicle was at that time still about the only major
thing that the deYoung family owned, except for TV, which had helped
keep us alive when we were in such bad shape.* So it meant a lot to
Charlie that the Chronicle should be a productive newspaper, not
only in the world of the intellect but also in the world of finance.
So to answer your question again, about the same way, if the
newspapers were not newspapers, if they were not a unique business,
and if they did not mean what newspapers mean in terms of the
*In the seven years between 1958 and 1965 the Chronicle had lost
more than $3 million, while profits from KRON and other properties
had totalled $15 million. After the Joint Operating Agreement, in
1968 the parent company earned $4.7 million on $45 million revenues,
and the Chronicle was making money. San Francisco Magazine. Dec.
1987, p. 96.
174
community and social prestige and stature and all that, the Hearsts
would have long since disposed of their newspapers out here.
But because newspapers do mean so much in terms of status and
political power, the Hearsts were willing to take tremendous losses.
On the West Coast the Hearsts were losing by this time two, three,
four million dollars a year, or more I assume. I think the Los
Angeles paper is even in worse shape now, twenty years later. It
was twenty years ago we made the deal ,
'
68 .
Riess: Did the paper come out of this actually making a profit?
Newhall: Yes, a lot of money for a while, I think. But I left very shortly
thereafter so I'm honestly not privy to the figures. The Chronicle.
before we went into the merger, was probably making a million a
year, or maybe a little more. And I would assume- -and this is an
assumption- -that probably two or three years after the merger, for a
period of maybe ten years, they probably made six, seven, ten
million dollars a year or more. I really don't know. They might
have made a good deal .
Today- -now this is 1988, and we were talking about 1968 --the
printing company has grown, as things do in corporations. And the
printing company, I have been told, now has more chiefs than there
are Indians. They are being paid large salaries. These are the
printing company people now. You know, they have a general manager
and an assistant, and circulation divisions and advertising
divisions. They drive cars, probably provided for them. They
probably have parking privileges in the garage. I'm sure they have
expense accounts .
All during my tenure at the Chronicle we were leading
relatively spartan lives. I will say that when I did resign from
the Chronicle- -on the most amicable basis possible- -the only
severance I got at that time was a bill for parking my car in their
garage that I hadn't paid up for the last six months. I don't
particularly like what now have become golden parachutes for the
corporation executives and all that business. I've seen too much of
that corporate largesse since.
Riess: In fact, one of the results of the joint operating agreement was
that 800 people were let go according to something I read.
Newhall: I can't answer that. I really don't know.
Riess:
Newhall :
It seemed like a tremendous number of people.
The
Nobody was let go from anywhere on the Chronicle editorial,
cutbacks would have been in the advertising or production
departments- -which were the responsibility of the printing company.
Certainly nobody on our staff was let go. You know, people thought
175
Riess:
Newhall:
that, gee, once they got together they were going to fire the staff
and do this, that and the other. I'm talking about the editorial
staff now. No one on the Chronicle editorial staff lost his or her
job. In fact we soon hired some people.
I will find out where I read that.*
Well, I can neither deny it nor confirm it. I honestly don't know.
Cutting up the Territory
Newhall: From the day the joint operating agreement was signed I never once
walked through the door of the Chronicle into the printing company
domain. I didn't want any part of it, I didn't like the Examiner
next door, psychically, spiritually. I really didn't like it. The
Examiner moved in on the second floor of the Chronicle building
after the merger. The Chronicle staff was on the third floor. I'm
talking about editorial now; this was all editorial. Then the
Examiner built a building next door and we could go through to their
building . I know I did put up a memo that any Chronicle employee
found on the second floor would be subject for automatic dismissal.
I didn't want any part of the Examiner .
Riess: Why?
Newhall: Well, because we had our own paper to put out.
Riess : But why--
Newhall: Everybody was saying, "Oh, this is going to be the end of
journalism!" I was determined it would make no difference. I knew
also it was going to be competitive journalism. Look, we took care
of Hearst, put him out of business, and they're still out of
business. It's tragic what's happened to them spiritually from
their point of view.
This is very important, I think. Forget the economics of it,
all these people running around the area saying, "Oh, this is
terrible, San Francisco now has just one sort of paper and two hats
on it," and so on, and, "They're going to milk the town, they're
going to make money." As far as I was concerned, I think I have
stated very clearly I was in business to put Hearst out of business.
*"The Chronicle Clan," Part II, San Francisco Magazine. Dec. 1987,
p. 95.
176
One can say, well, I put him on intensive care with a bottle of
oxygen next to him. But to me the only truly important aspect of
this was the Examiner agreed to go onto the afternoon and left the
morning free therefore for the Chronicle. (Sunday is another kind
of story. They got together and they put out this bastard newspaper
that people call all kinds of names and so on. I didn't like it,
I'd just as soon let the Examiner have it. But Charlie is a good
man with the figures and he wanted to maintain a piece of the Sunday
paper. )
The final thing was ,
Chronicle in the morning , Examiner in the
afternoon, and then both papers participating in a Sunday newspaper
in which Hearst put out all the news, all the editorial part, except
for an editorial section that the Chronicle had with a feature
section, the entertainment section, pink, and This World, and I
don't know, maybe a little bit else, I forget what. But anyway,
just to keep the franchise, the Chronicle is still part of the
Sunday package. The important thing was the Chronicle would be in
the morning, the Examiner in the afternoon. And I was convinced
that this was the end of the Examiner.
Poor Randy, whom I really like- -I do, he's a gentleman- -sat
there across the table consoling himself, saying, "Well, I think we
could probably work this out. Now, if we go to the afternoon, let's
see, we ought to have about 275,000, 325,000, maybe 275,000
circulation, and the Chronicle will probably have about 325,000,
350,000." Well, I've always felt bad because I didn't say to Randy,
"Look, you're crazy!" But I wasn't going to, because he was just
committing suicide that way.
So it started out when the Chronicle went to the morning and
the Examiner went to the afternoon. The Chronicle. I think- -this is
easy to check through the ABC figures--! think the Chronicle
probably right away went up to 325,000 or 350,000, in there. And
the Examiner probably started out around 265,000, 250,000, 275,000
or something. But from there on the Chronicle went up and the
Examiner went down. And it's still going on today. So today the
Chronicle is about 600,000 daily in the morning and the Examiner is
about 140,000 daily in the afternoon. Now look at that tremendous
switch. The Examiner therefore is kind of a skeleton at the feast
and the Chronicle is doing beautifully.
Now a lot of the smart people around town are saying, "Gee, why
doesn't the Chronicle want to break this deal?" I have not
mentioned that the basic economic factor of the whole thing is --well
to begin with each paper pays its own editorial bills. But the
advertising and circulation costs of both papers are split 50-50.
Then after all expenses are paid- -advertising and circulation
expenses --the leftover profit is split half and half. You see in
the joint agreement system there is only a single advertising-
production-circulation staff for both papers --so these costs are
177
presumably much lower than with two competing production and
operation staffs. So the papers then have lower cost and more
profits.
Riess: That seems remarkable.
Newhall: Right. Nevertheless many people are now saying, "Gee, that's not
such a good deal for the Chronicle. Look what's happened. Here
they've got all the success, the Chronicle basically provides all
the advertising money, but the Examiner gets half the profit. The
Examiner should be out of business, or at least on its own."
That's not a good way to look at it from some points of view,
because the fact of the matter is , the Chronicle is really the
dominant newspaper in the area. And if it is intelligently handled
from now on, it probably can remain dominant until some smart
operator comes into town and buys out the Ex and comes back into the
morning field when the agreement ends. Nothing is permanent.
Riess: What would bring a newspaper down? If you were coming into town now
would you be tempted to buy the Examiner and give the Chronicle a
run for its money?
Newhall: No. I'd buy the Progress.
Riess: The San Francisco Progress. I've never even looked at it.
Newhall: It's the throwaway, just in San Francisco. But anyway, I don't even
know if it is even still being put out. I wouldn't bother with the
Examiner because there's too much severance involved. I mean, the
Examiner is putting up a very brave show, but they're in a lot of
trouble. But there's no sense my sitting around here sounding smart
or something about the present situation because I am not very well
informed on the matter. I do know that the thrust at the moment,
the momentum is still with the Chronicle.
Polls
Riess: After the merger why did circulation climb?
Newhall: Well, it climbed because I think I said earlier, the Examiner was
dying. The Examiner was dying. So it just continued to die. But
it went to the afternoon. San Francisco is a morning town.
Demographically--! haven't got into this, which I will --the
Chronicle was shooting for a certain readership, whether the
customers lived in the hills in Marin, Berkeley, or San Mateo. The
Examiner had nothing much to offer. Readers, American people, human
beings, are very sheep- like. And so circulation success for a given
178
Riess :
period of time will feed on itself, because if everybody else in the
room or in the home is reading the Chronicle, you have to read the
Chronicle, so you can talk to them. (I got into this a bit before.)
And that's what happened. People I think became embarrassed,
some of them, about reading the Examiner .
Now, today the Examiner
has to come up against the same fight that the Chronicle had back in
the fifties. It's just cyclical, and it's a repetition and so on.
When you talk about your readership and your demographics , did you
actually hire consultants to figure out who your target audience
was?
Newhall: Oh no, never. Never. I would never hire any bunch of experts to do
anything for us- -I never would even take a poll. Now, the Chronicle
used to do a lot of polling, and I notice they still do.
Riess: They do polling on your sex life.
Newhall: Well, or on the ball park, you know.
Riess: Oh yes.
Newhall: Okay. We used to poll stuff. But don't ever poll anybody, and I
say this advisedly, unless you know how the poll is going to turn
out or unless you want to actually--! would never manipulate an
honest survey- -but I repeat never run a poll (if the outcome is
important to you) unless you know how it's going to turn out,
because normally people don't know what they think. And I make that
statement very advisedly.
It doesn't matter what the people who are answering your poll
questions or your survey questions think. Because first of all
their answers to begin with are probably fifty percent just vague or
random. Most people answer what they think you want to hear or what
they think will make them sound good to the person who is asking the
question. I think some of the political polls, presidential polls,
they may have some of that worked out. But be careful of polls on
how you should run your newspaper.
I maintain the public doesn't know anything, basically, or very
little. As the P.T. Barnums of the world have suggested, the
American public doesn't know what's good for them. Or, as some
genius once said- -I think it was my old hero Henry Mencken- -"Nobody
ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
people." I've seen too many people fall into the clutches of
dictators because they thought that tyranny was what they wanted.
My whole life now, believe me, my whole professional life has
been dedicated to protecting the public insofar as I can from
domination by a dictatorial group or whatever of whom I did not
Riess:
179
approve. Now look, that's all silly what I'm saying, I'm aware of
that. But the American people --this sounds so terrible, but I'm
saying this because I guess I'd better be frank- -they 're their own
worst enemies .
Look at the last seven years that we've had in this country.
We're basically in 1988, and this is six, seven months before the
next election. Ronald Reagan's been in for seven-and-a-half years.
This country is basically at the point of extinction economically- -
and for my dough spiritually. I don't know what's going to happen.
The press has got the worst damn record for permitting all this to
happen. But there's no use my going into it now.
Good. Veil, that's a statement about the power of the press, no
question about it.
Newhall: Well, the non-exercise of sensible power.
One sentence to try to wrap this up: I feel that the
newspaper, the press, is the only insurance policy a people have in
a free society to keep them free. Now you can figure out that.
It's our business not to go along with the establishment, but to
always be the critic or to examine the establishment to be sure it
is not leading us down some path.
Divergent Views. Newhall Resigns////
Riess: Were there changes in the energy that went into the Chronicle after
you had made the merger?
Newhall: Well, we went into this joint agreement in about 1968, I believe. I
know I left in '71, three years later. I had felt basically there
were two problems. (Now I'm getting to sort of why I left. I guess
we're way ahead of it.) After the merger the Chronicle from my
point of view was secure financially, it was secure in circulation.
The Chronicle was a lot better paper than a lot of people think,
probably including yourself, I don't know, it doesn't matter. But
the Chronicle had one great weakness, the foreign news coverage.
And I will go along with any editorial critics of the Chronicle on
this score.
I wanted to start a foreign service, because I felt the
Chronicle was on the threshold of being a truly great recognized
newspaper. We had enjoyed a lot of fun and games to get the paper in
this position, but there we were. And I felt after the merger that
we would have enough financial energy that we could establish a
foreign service and get more foreign correspondents out and take
on some of the establishment papers around the country. Hell, we
180
could have done anything! But it wasn't to be. Charles was not
prepared and his family wasn't prepared, I guess, to let him spend a
lot of money establishing a foreign service and beefing up some of
our national coverage .
This is what young Otis Chandler did in the Los Angeles Times.
He put millions and millions of dollars into establishing that
newspaper as something to be conjured with. The Los Angeles Times
is a hell of a good newspaper. I think personally it's better than
the Washington Post or the New York Times, but admittedly I don't
see them enough so I can't measure them very realistically.
Riess: Charles Thieriot had pulled off this wonderful merger. Why didn't
the family allow him to run with it?
Newhall: I think they said, well gee, now let's see some of the results of
all this . I can only surmise this . I never was a member of the
board, I never met with the family on a corporate level. I was
strictly a working staff member.
Riess: You never shot duck with the boys?
Newhall: No, I never went for duck shooting that much, except when I was a
child. It's a child's game. It is. I loved it then.
Riess: Okay, you couldn't see how Charlie was with his family.
Newhall: No, and it wasn't up to me to tell them what to do with their money.
I couldn't do it anyway, and besides I was getting, I guess, bored.
Riess: In an interview in 1968 you said that you and Charlie and Gordon
Pates could go on and on and on forever, that it was such a super
working relationship. And yet you had earlier bought the Signal and
pretty soon you were going to be leaving.
Newhall: Well, I think I had fulfilled whatever mission or destiny I had in
San Francisco. I think I felt that way. I was terrified that I
would find myself in a position where I could not afford to leave
the Chronicle. And I think that's one of the reasons I left.
Because if I went on, if there was something more to do or if I made
more money at the paper, or something, I'd have probably felt that I
couldn't leave. And I felt also after observing the Chronicle that
entrepreneurial journalism was the only answer for an
entrepreneurial journalist, whatever that means. Anyway, I bought
this little paper because I knew the area down around Newhall and
Saugus was going to develop. I thought, "Well, there's something I
can leave to my children." I had nothing in the Chronicle I could
leave to my family, you see, in terms of an estate or a heritage.
Riess: That's a nice thought. Time Magazine. February 15, 1971--this is
about you and your departure- -says ,
"When the Chronicle and the
181
Examiner merged in September 1965--".
Newhall: 1965? I've always thought it was '68, I don't know why. My memory
is bad for dates, it is. And I would be the first to admit it.
Riess: [resuming quote from Time] --"much of Newhall 's competitive drive was
diverted into conflict with Publisher -Owner Charles deYoung
Thieriot."
Newhall: That's not very fair, really. Except in terms of, perhaps, the
vision I had for the paper and what he had. But there was never any
conflict. Charlie begged me to stay and I said, "Gee, look, I've
done everything I can." There was no problem there, at least as far
as I was concerned.
Riess: Conflict is probably a wrong choice of words on their part.
Newhall: A divergence of long-term views, maybe.
Riess: [resumes quote] "[Thieriot was] slowly shifting to the right, more
and more Newhall was in a buffer position between his young liberal
staff and the conservative publisher .. .The weary editor. .. left
because he was just plain fed up with ideological disputes with his
publisher.
"
Newhall: I think they've oversimplified it. Certainly there was some of this
involved, of course. For twenty years, after all, Charlie and I had
sat down and worked together. He came, as they say these days, from
a slightly different place than I did, in a sense.
Riess: And as people get a little older they tend to go back to their
"place.
"
Newhall: Well, you must remember, on Charlie's behalf, he had always been the
buffer between me and his family. I had been the buffer, to a
certain extent, between the staff and Charlie, because Charlie- -in
the way the American language is now used- -Charlie in a sense was
not a "people person," if you know what I mean. I don't like those
phrases, but anyway--.
Riess: And that seems to have been the role of Uncle George, too, the
buffer between Paul Smith and the family.
Newhall: Yes, this goes on and on. See, Smith was a very different cup of
tea from me .
Riess: Yes, and I didn't mean to get back to him.
Newhall: You remember Paul saw the Chronicle as his own newspaper. My
loyalty was to the Chronicle totally as an employee. Because in my
own area with my own family we had our own little sort of
182
entrepreneurial businesses going, and I knew exactly how the
deYoungs felt about their paper, and I respected it.
Riess: Yes. So you think that's an overstatement of Time magazine's?
Newhall: Well, that was all part of it. I think it was oversimplified,
however. But I was weary, I was tired, and the staff was --oh, I
don't know, I got sick at one point and I couldn't even go to the
hospital but what the phone was ringing or they were out there with
some kind of beef about the paper. And I was really tired.
Riess: As executive editor, people were bringing advertising questions to
you and advertising decisions?
Newhall: Sometimes. Charlie had deputized me to make decisions on almost
everything. And if it was a question that I would have to explain
to Charlie, I would. But as I keep saying, I can't underline this
enough, he was very loyal to me. Why he should let some guy who
some people considered a communist or anarchist ruin his paper is
beyond me- -but now I'm being a little supercilious. He was very
loyal. I'm very fond of him and I respect him for what he put into
that paper, and he got very little public recognition.
Riess: Maybe that is a little bit of the tone of these questions, but it's
not my assumption.
Newhall: Oh, no. No, I'm just trying to go on the record with it because
all the stories, even today, about the Chronicle . are about the
Thieriots and the deYoungs and how they're penny-pinching, and this
and that, and the staff which is the guts of the paper, you know, is
getting a bad shot at it. It's not quite right, it's not quite
fair.
Entrepreneurial Publishers
Riess: A publisher is cast into this role. The editor is the bright,
smart, upcoming thing, and the publisher is the stodginess thing
against which you work. It's just matters of degree.
Newhall: Generally speaking, the typical newspaperman, or woman, is
essentially a gossip, a very sentimental person, and they're going
to look usually for very simple explanations or answers to problems,
Therefore they do tend to think in terms like "the working press
versus the owners or the intellectuals versus the bankers." You
can't escape it.
Riess: You considered somewhere along there buying the Sacramento Union.
Did you and Charlie consider that together?
183
Newhall: Yes, oh sure.
Riess: Was that before the merger came up?
Newhall: Well, let me think. It was all about that time, I think. Things
were better for the Chronicle, and the TV station was doing very
well. The Sacramento Union came up--and I'm sure Charlie, too, he
was very interested in this. What happened of course was that some
suede shoe agent, some newspaper broker, came through and said,
"Hey, the Union's for sale, they've got nothing but problems, the
Bee's putting them out of business," this, that and the other. "You
can have it for"- -I forget, it wasn't much money, $700,000 or
$1,700,000 or $2,700,000, something. It wasn't much, except that,
as I keep saying [chuckles], this paper was losing a bundle! Why
would anybody pay a dime for it? But we were interested because
Sacramento was the state capital, and it was then becoming a
significant place, and that's a good platform, a good springboard
from which to push off your journalistic ideas.
The McClatchys now with the Bee I think have done a good job
and they're a very important outfit now. They really are. I don't
know if you saw the story about C.K. McClatchy, the present
publisher, giving the papers hell the other day. He sort of got off
a little half-cocked, but nevertheless he had a lot to say. Did you
see by any chance the piece?
Riess: No. What was it?
Newhall: If I can dig one up I'll send it to you. He just said, look, these
papers --this was about how the United States of America is now full
of entrepreneurial publishers who know nothing much about the
business but who are going around and buying all these little
papers. It's the latest fad in corporate journalism.
Riess: You mean, more than Rupert Murdock.
Newhall: Oh god look, the New York Times owns Santa Rosa, I think. And the
Chicago Tribune bought the News down in Los Angeles. Our paper, the
Signal. I sold to a guy in Savannah who's got twenty or thirty
little weekly papers. [Charles H. Morris, Morris Newspaper Corp.]
I'm sorry as hell I did it, but at the time it seemed all right.
Riess: So what does McClatchy think is happening?
Newhall: Oh, he just says these guys are buying the papers and they don't
know anything about newspapers, and they're just buying them and
they use them as milk cows. I don't know if he gets into that, but
it's the latest thing. These guys- -some of them have had some
newspaper experience, but they don't even call their newspapers
"newspapers." They are either "profit centers," they call them, or
"franchises." And there's no longer any independent journalism. So
184
Riess:
NewhalL :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
your publishers today- -see, in a sense they are simply wheeler-
dealers. A hotshot chain owner will come along, buy four or five or
ten papers, and he'll appoint publishers for each of them, and most
of these publishers will actually be glorified circulation managers
or advertising salesmen whom he just put there to make money. And
then the chain store newspaper owner starts telephoning his distant
publishers and tells them, "Send me the money, send me the money."
I think we are facing, if not the extinction, the
disintegration of the free press in America in great part, except
that most of these boomers with their papers don't have any idea at
all. And most of them let their editors put out anything as long as
it makes money. It's not like the old Hearst deal where he
controlled the editorial operation as well as the business side of
it. Even Gannett, a big chain operator, gives the local publisher
pretty free rein.
So out of that you've got a chance of good newspapers rising up.
Oh possibly. I think- -when you say "good newspapers," what does
that mean? Sometimes I don't know, and I mean that pretty much.
But I've always felt as long as you have lots of independent, or at
least, intellectually, spiritually, independent publishers or
editors, the whole body of the press gives the public a fair shot at
some kind of balanced view of our environment .
If you were reading more than one paper.
Oh yes, yes.
But people get locked into their papers. The whole body of the
country presumably can elect a president but they don't seem to be
able to do that.
Newhall: Yes, but of course, still, you do have your press services and then
you've got TV. Anybody can turn on four or five or ten TV things.
There is not always a totally parallel approach toward the news in
any of this stuff. Now papers --you 're not going to read five or six
papers. But down in our area the people who think or can influence
anything will look at three or four. But anyway, that's just a
theory.
Editorials Worth Writing
Editorial Staff
Newhall: [musing] If all the papers were edited as most journalism
185
departments think they should be edited, think of how dull and one-
track our American journalism would be. I hadn't thought of that.
I'll use that the next time I get in an argument, [laughs]
Riess: One of the little books I was reading said that- -this is back to the
theme of the editorial, the editor and the publisher- -that most
editorials are so weak because the editorial writers have to kind of
second-guess what the editor thinks, and the editor has to second-
guess what the publisher thinks. Last week you were critical of the
look of the Chronicle editorial page, but back in the good days
there --
Newhall: The old days.
Riess : The good old days .
Newhall: Don't say good, come on, just the old days.
Riess: Back in the old days [chuckles], did you have a staff of editorial
writers? Did they have free rein? (And free rein apparently is not
a good thing, because that means that they might censor themselves
Newhall: Did you want to talk about the production of editorials in the
paper? Might as well.
To me even then the guts of any newspaper was its editorial
page. And why, therefore, were the editorials written by older,
perhaps more tired colleagues, who were dutifully punching out
stuff, trying, as you suggested, to live up to the measure of the
publisher, to not rock any boats or anything? Among the first
people in 1952 that we let out of the Chronicle were three or four
of the poor guys that had been sitting around writing editorials for
so many years. It was painful and difficult. They had been writing
them for, you know, Warren G. Harding, literally. (Paul Smith, by
the way, this was exactly what he wanted to do, but he was hung up
with all these old guys, too.) I had to relieve the editor of the
editorial page of his duties which was a very, very difficult thing
to do. I got him to write a column. He was a very fine man, far
more intelligent than I was or ever will be. That was Royce Brier.
Templeton Peck, Al Hyman, basically were the two who stayed on
in 1952. And Ralph Craib, a local fellow, was there, part-time
later, and Vince Mahoney, who was subsequently killed in a crash in
India, wrote editorials. There were three editorial writers, and
they were very liberal Republicans or Democrats. One of the great
efforts I had was to convince Charlie that what was good for the
Chronicle was an editorial policy that was fashioned in our present
century, and that we should be tough enough to provide the San
Francisco Bay Area with some editorial leadership or some laughs or
some entertainment or something.
186
Most editorial pages in a paper are eminently forgettable- -they
are like granola. I mean, they're terrible! The world of ideas in
which we live, and comments on some of the realities of life, can be
the most fascinating things in the world. I'd write editorials for
the Signal and I apologize for saying "I" in this case, but I think
they were probably easily the most widely read things the paper's
ever had.
The Captive Audience
Newhall: So the editorial production in the Chronicle centered around this
editorial meeting every morning at 10 o'clock in the office next to
mine. I would attend almost religiously. And we would just sit
around and gas and talk and make jokes and say, yeah, what is it we
want to say? What are we going to do here? and so on. We went
through some very difficult times: Vietnam was the toughest. And in
discussing things we talked a great deal about the San Francisco
local scene, too.
One of our earliest editorial skyrockets in those "olden days"
was on the decadence of the cuisine at the Palace Hotel after the
Sheraton people had bought it from Mrs . Johnson who was a member of
San Francisco's old Sharon family. The Palace Hotel had one of the
great menus in San Francisco. I used to eat down there two or three
times a week, you know, a nice table. The new Sheraton management
began cutting back on the pheasant under glass and that kind of
thing and getting more into the bacon burger a la Embarcadero and
other culinary garbage. And Al Hyman wrote a piece on the
gastronomic disaster of the Palace. Al's effort is one of the most
superlative editorials I've ever read. He said that the Sheraton
people are now serving all their gourmet dishes with "a little sprig
of parsimony." [laughter] It was a beautiful thing.
At these editorial conferences we would talk very frankly, you
know. We just enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I guess I had a chance
for a captive audience. I wrote very few editorials. Once in a
while I would sit down and write one if I felt strongly and that
Charlie might object to, you know- -because I didn't want necessarily
to put their head on the block. And we tried to make the editorials
interesting. We would champion topless bars in San Francisco. You
see, Hearst had been building his circulation on this blue-collar,
sort of Roman Catholic doctrinaire ideology, what they call
"respectability." And San Francisco was becoming a non-respectable
city, take my word for it.
I remember one editorial- -and this was when our fight was
really wanning up with the Ex. Charlie Gould was putting big ads in
187
"respectable or not." But then we editorially at some point told
the police to lay off closing up the topless restaurants, bars,
simply because it was something to do. I believe in being very
permissive, you know, as long aswhat is the expression- -they
"don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."
So the Examiner came out with a thundering editorial- -and the
minute they began to mention the Chronicle they were in trouble-
about how the Chronicle was indecent. That was it, decency. "A
decent newspaper for decent people." Well, you know, with something
like this, you've got a guy at your mercy. I wrote one editorial
about this. And one sentence--! may not phrase this quite
correctly- -"The trouble with San Francisco is not that it has too
many topless bars, but that it has too many topless newspapers."
Jesus Christ, that drove Gould up the wall. One sentence. And then
we went on about Vietnam or something, I don't remember.
Vietnam
Newhall: But I did try very hard, and this is personal, to make the editorial
page in a sense either outrageous or unpredictable, readable
certainly, and underneath all this we had a very serious mission and
covered the big things. The Chronicle was I think the first so-
called "metropolitan paper" that came out fairly strongly against
Vietnam. And this was early. Your friends in the Times and the
Washington Post, they were all braying about the communists or the
domino theory and all this crap. And I still shake my head at the
journalistic establishment that will go along with this kind of
stuff. We have it today in Central America, this funny thing about
Afghanistan and Israel and all this. These papers, they have no
guts. They don't come out and talk about the real world and our
genuinely serious problems.
Riess: Well, maybe their columnists are doing it.
Newhall: Oh, listen, yes there are a lot of good columnists. But the papers
themselves and their editorials, they're normally flat- -once in a
while they'll come out with a good one, really they will.
I'm being a little impatient. But back to Vietnam. In those
days everybody went along on this Vietnam thing. And I cannot
understand why, even as I sit here today talking to you. But they
did. The person who finally put an end, believe it or not, to
Vietnam in this country were the Hearst newspapers. And of course
they were the last people in the world to come out against it.
188
When the tapes- -oh, oh, I goofed, I started to talk here about
Watergate, I got Vietnam and Watergate mixed up, I'm sorry. I'll go
back, because I'll get into Watergate later. But I think Hearst did
come around finally on Vietnam and said, look, this is no go. And
the minute they- -it wasn't that they have the influence, it was that
I think some of the people in the State Department with horror
realized how deep and how wide public resentment had become.
You know, the students in the colleges and all that, who did
all the objecting and so on, they were very significant. But in the
end only an establishment force can really knock off an
establishment crime. It's a funny thing. I used to sit there
holding my head sometimes and I would see all these kids with the
long hair, jumping up and down and protesting and objecting and
making a nuisance of themselves. I said, oh my god- -we discussed
this a little last timewe've got the wrong people on our side.
You know, students and intellectuals always frighten most American
politicians-- .
How are we going to get a handle on this? But that's the way
America is and it's a wonderful place.
Anyway .
I wanted us to say something about the editorials . I know I
did a couple on this business of blacks and whites, the problem of
minorities. It was not all that easy then. And schools, I remember
a piece on black kids in schools. I don't know if it was about
busing or not. I think they had to bus here for a while, I can't
remember. And we used to come out very strongly for integration.
Joseph McCarthy
Riess: How about the fifties? You had McCarthy and HUAC and hosing people
down the city hall steps.
Newhall: The McCarthy thing was the most terrible thing, really, that ever
came along. What these people and the American people permitted to
happen, it was unforgivable!
Riess: And this is an obvious one for the press to take on.
Newhall: Yes, right. And I don't know any of the press who were really going
at it hard against McCarthy. We certainly probably wanted to cool
it, but not as much as we should, on a personal basis. I know Ruth
went over and interviewed J. Robert Oppenheimer and we gave that a
big play. We did all kinds of things to try to cool it off a little.
I can't remember if we did anything about the Rosenbergs, you know,
189
Riess:
those people back in Pennsylvania who were executed on some silly
business. [Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1951.]
I know how I felt, but I can't remember all the words at the
time. A lot of it would depend on how such influence or prestige I
had at the moment. I was not the executive editor then. I do
remember when McCarthy died years later, when I was editor, they
were starting to think about an editorial on this dismal subject.
And I did say, "Now look, McCarthy was a son-of-a-bitch while he was
alive and I don't want to see any shit" (excuse these words) "in
this paper about how "after all, whether you agreed with him or not,
Joe McCarthy was a good American. The hell he was a good American.
He was an asshole" --forgive me.
Yes.
Newhall: We did a piece--! think I might have written it- -in which we wrote
that "McCarthy is sometimes excused as an 'American symbol,' he
stood for his brand of Americanism. But that is nonsense, he is a
sorry symbol and he will sink into the ocean and he will never leave
a ripple and he will never rise again. It's the end of a bad man."
I forget how I worded it. But I don't like this business of
forgiving someone just because he happens to have passed on to
another state.
Endorsements --Jack Shelley for Mayor
Riess: Is it true that when November came around, election time came
around, that the Chronicle started getting quite Republican?
Newhall: Yes, usually- -or it used to. It was the easy thing to do. I can be
fairly specific about it. The Chronicle had always automatically
endorsed Republican candidates. There were supposedly a California
axis between the L.A. Times and the Chronicle and supposedly both of
us would always endorse the Republicans. Charlie and I discussed
this. I said, "Look, we've got to go for some Democrats. It's a
Democratic city, and it's a democratic world, or it should be. What
can we do?" And I'm trying to think how we finally broke through.
Jack Shelley, a former bakery wagon driver union off icial--I'd
known him slightly, he went back to Congress for a long time, a very
nice guy, I liked him. He was a local San Francisco guy, a typical
Irishman. You know, he didn't have long hair or anything like
that. He was a fine old guy. He came back and ran for mayor. I
couldn't get Charlie to endorse him, and he should have because
Shelley was going to win anyway. I said, "Look, Charlie, the guy's
190
going to win. How about it?" But no, no, they didn't want to. So
okay.
So Jack came by and I wrote out nine questions for him. I
said, "If you can answer 'yes' to all of these questions, you're
going to get the best coverage you've ever had in this paper." I
said, "We're not going to endorse you, but don't worry about it."
And the questions were very simple. I know one of them was, "Will
you agree to support the policy of knocking down the Embarcadero
freeway?" That was one of them. "If you're elected will you make a
house-by-house survey of everything in San Francisco and designate
officially those structures that should remain landmarks?" Anyway,
those were just things I thought were good for San Francisco,
nothing to do with politics at all. He said, "Yes, that's fine."
Anyway, he was elected and he became actually very close to the
Chronicle. And editorially at that time the Chronicle was basically
right down the line of the conservative Democrat or a very liberal
Republican kind of thing. You know, we never went really left-wing.
Now some of my closest friends politically were George Moscone, Phil
Burton, (not John so much, I didn't know him), Leo McCarthy, and so
forth. They're all Democrats. Because there aren't any serious
Republican politicians in this town, basically. Poor old Harold
Dobbs . He ran for mayor and we worked hard trying to have him beat
out somebody, I forget whom. Christopher was our first mayor, he
was a good man. Anyway, Shelley won.
Riess: But Charlie wouldn't actually endorse him.
Newhall: Shelley didn't run for a second term or I'm sure we would have
endorsed him the second time. We did not endorse Phil Burton,
though we were personally very close, and Phil was always obviously
going to win. He went to Congress. We had a very good
relationship .
Lack of Investigative Political Reporting*
Riess: A way to look at the Chronicle critically in retrospect is that none
of the Chronicle political writers has written a book about
California history or politics or national politics such as the
Post's Hedrick Smith who has just done Power Game. There were just
no great political writers out here.
*from Tape lla.
191
Newhall: That's a very astute observation. I think the most fascinating area
on a newspaper, any newspaper- -in San Francisco, anyway- -would be a
city hall beat. And we never really had somebody who related to the
city hall the way Herb does the rest of San Francisco. We never had
that. I couldn't find it. People are hard to come by. We had to
make sports columnists out of general news writers and things like
that, and steal off the desk to write columns. I just couldn't find
a great local city hall or political writer.
Sacramento had been dominated in the Chronicle's coverage by a
very fine old gentleman called Earl Behrens, "Squire" Behrens, who
carried the California Republican party on his back the way that
Atlas holds up the earth. I have a great admiration for him, I knew
him well, but he was an old- line guy. The politicians generally
speaking, certainly from northern California, would go to him for
advice. He would sit up there in the Senator Hotel in Sacramento
and hold court, kind of. He covered for the Chronicle but he was
not a so-called sort of hard-hitting, reforming investigative
reporter or anything of the sort. He went along and kept everybody
in line. No, we did not have that kind of coverage, at the city
hall.
They're doing better now, I think, Larry Leibert's doing a
political column and I think we have somebody in Washington now.
Years ago Paul Smith had hired a couple of young men to cover
Washington. But I'm just sorry to admit I didn't have a chance to
do it. As I think I mentioned, when we had the money and the energy
to expand and cover the planet with Chronicle talent, it wasn't
really in the cards. The world could have been the Chronicle' s
oyster. I think our horizons were unlimited. But I'd been through
a pretty strenuous twenty years and I thought we had come along a
good part of the journey, and it was time to wander off into the
sunset.
Scott Newhall and Baby Scott,
uary 1914.
Chronicle photographer, after
hit by a disgruntled subject, 1935.
First picture of Scott Newhall to appear
in the Chronicle, age three, Marin Golf
and Country Club.
Scott Newhall, 1985.
Scott Newhall, on the right. At the Webb School
"smoke shack," 1931.
Scott Newhall at home in The Mansion.
Photograph by Mark Hanauer
for California Business, July 1989.
Scott Newhall, at the San Francisco Opera, "with all the
pretty girls."
Scott Newhall, fifty-two years later, by the side of the pool
in Piru with different pretty girls, 1987.
Scott and Ruth Newhall set sail in 1935
on the Mermaid.
On the road, in August 1954, [captioned] "The King and the Jeep
reached the end of the GREAT TREK. The Desert rats had dicovered
the exact spot where Padre Escalante crossed the Colorado River in
1776. This was a tremendous question that the entire world had
been waiting to be answered. But, strangely enough, no one has as
yet asked it." Left to right: Penny, Jon, Scott, Ruth, Tony, Skip.
Top Left: Paul Smith, 1946.
Top Right: Scott Newhall , Correspondent, World War II, 1943.
Botton: This World staff, George Draper, George deCarvalho, Ruth Newhall, and
Scott Newhall. August 1944.
Scott Newhall with Dave
Nelson on Kearny Street,
San Francisco, 1950.
J
I
"
' '
Billy and Bill Bartz , Harry Dring, Dolly Rhee, and Scott Newhall at "the
chutes" (loading point for Chronicle trucks on Fifth Street, alongside
Chronicle building) .
Photographs by Karl Kortum
1
Top Left: Scott and Ruth Newhall and Charles and Barbara Thieriot,
1958.
Top Right: Ruth and Scott Newhall at debutante cotillion, 1955.
Bottom: Jonathan Daniels, left, Scott Newhall, and Lee Hills,
Pulitizer judging, New York, 1959.
'frfU^
1
^v-
"Scott and Ruth created a home, garden, and shops in an abandoned rock
quarry at the top of the Berkeley hills." [Karl Kortum]
"A busy Saturday at the Newhall shops, //I Hill Road, Berkeley. Denise
McCluggage, Kenny Glasgow, Scott." [Karl Kortum]
Photographs by Karl Kortum
Left to right: Penny, Jon, Skip, and Tony Newhall .
Left to right: Barbara Taylor, Scott Newhall, Audrey
Waterman. A night at the Newhall 's Berkeley home, 1951.
Photographs by Frank Rioci,
Top: Champagne, the day the Chronicle passed the Examiner in circulation,
August 1960. Scott Newhall and Charles Thieriot, surrounded by Abe
Mellinkoff, Templeton Peck, Dave Perlman, and behind Newhall, Bill German.
Photograph damaged by fire.
Bottom: Herb Caen, Charles McCabe, Sheriff Matt Carberry , and Count Marco,
August 1961.
>
_.<*,-.
^5ti
Scott and Ruth Newhall with their grand prize-winning 1930 Packard
Pebble Beach, 1961. William H. Crocker on the right.
Scott Newhall and "Silver Dollar," Half Moon Bay dragstrip, 1964.
Dolly Rhee, Yvonne d'Angers, the Persian Lamb, Scott Newhall,
and presentation dragster, 1966.
Left: At the ship scrapping
yard, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Scott Newhall discusses
rehabilitation of the
Eppleton Hall with Bill
Bartz. 1969.
Below: Chief mate Karl
Kortum and skipper Scott
Newhall on the bridge of
the paddle tug Eppleton
Hall. They steamed the
antique vessel half way
around the world, from
Newcastle-upon-Tyne on
the North Sea to San
Francisco. 1969.
Photograph by Karl Kortwn
Photograph by Sarah Kortum
Newhall and Earl Mines at Newhall for Mayor headquarters, 1971.
Photographs by Savah Kortwn
~..?*5
>'V
-^jk*v
li-'K.S-
m :>^ T-i
-"-J
1
^ i
_/
" *
'A
HE DESIGN of the Piru mansion is attri-
I ed to the architectural team of Samuel and
eph Gather Newsom, the most renowned
1
--Victorian architects in California. It is a
'
ical Newsom rendering of the Queen Anne
1
torian style.
HE HOUSE WAS BUILT between 1886 and
'
3 by David C. Cook, who grew up in Illinois
=
1
founded a company bearing his name to
( ilish religious books and Sunday school
1
>ers a company which still is in business as
Cook Publishing Co. of Elgin, Ohio. His
1th failed when he kwas a little past 40.
king a favorable climate, he selected Ventu-
Bounty, then beyond the end ofrail lines, and
'
chased the Mexican land grant known as
Rancho Temescal, which included the
^sent town of Piru and several miles of
utary canyons. He laid out the town, built a
:
el, the Methodist church down on the
:
ner, and, finally, the mansion.
R. COOK was a devout Methodist, and set
to create both a profitable fruit ranch and a
f ' Garden of Eden. Conforming to fruits
'nioned in the Bible, he planted dates,
! pes, pomegranates, figs, apricots, and
1
es. The olives and pomegranates have
ine native" and now grow thickly in the town
'I on the hills around the house.
THE RAILROAD was completed about the
time the house was under construction, which
allowed for doors, windows, lumber, and tile to
be shipped in, as well as for dried fruit to be sent
to market.
THE MANSION was equipped with gas, since
there were natural gas wells on the ranch, but it
had no electricity or running water. The small
circular structure uphill from the main house
is the three-hole outhouse, which was used
until the turn of the century when Mr. Cook, his
health restored, departed for the East and left
the mansion to his son. His son introduced two
bathrooms, one upstairs and one down, and the
Warring family, who bought the house in 1912,
added a third bath in the 1940s.
THE PRESENT OWNERS, Mr. and Mrs. Scott
Newhall, bought the mansion from the Warring
estate in 1968. They went slowly about install
ing wainscoting, papering, and finally were
modernizing the kitchen and painting the
exterior in 1980-81. In February 1981 a spark
from a painter's torch apparently escaped
under the eaves to the attic, and the mansion
burned to the ground. By the time the debris (86
dumpsters full of remains) was carted away,
nothing remained but the floor tile, the stone
work, the lower two-thirds of the tower, and
two chimneys.
GUIDED BY PHOTOGRAPHS contributed
many visitors to the mansion, and by the exp
knowledge of people who had helped maint:
and restore it over the years, the Newht
began reconstruction.
COMPLETION of the rebuilt mansion to
two and one-half years. The materials, inch
ing all-redwood exterior siding, the stain
glass, the tile patterns in the floors, and t
carved wood of the original have been faithf
ly reproduced. Thanks to skilled and imagii
tive artisans, some additional design elemei
(like the library ceiling) have been added. O
of the additions is the bird, carved fri
redwood, atop the small tower on the wi
front, where before the fire was an ejgg-shap
finial. The bird is a sympolic phoenix risi
from the ashes.
WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS, the furniture
antique, as are the chandeliers. The design
the kitchen is new, as are the bathrooms o
for each bedroom. The fire made it possible
install modern heating and air conditioning,
that the owners were able to combine the b
of Victorian with the best of modern livin
192
VIII CHRONICLE PROMOTIONS
The Idea Behind the Promotions^/
Riess: You said that you had some things on your mind for this interview.
I think that probably some of them were the promotions .
Newhall: Well, we've talked about when we took over in '52 Charlie and I sat
down and tried to figure out how much money we had, how we were
going to promote the paper. I've jotted down some of the stories or
series that we ran, which perhaps might not be described as great
journalism. But these efforts had a tremendous response --and these
promotions were tied in somehow with stories that we ran, just to
get people talking. They did no harm, although they may not have
contributed seriously to the knowledge of mankind.
You know I mentioned earlier, and some people I don't think
agree with me particularly, that most newspaper readers and most
Americans particularly are basically fourteen years old, and they're
living in fairyland and they believe in fairy tales. They like to
dig for treasure .
They love every fallen woman to turn out to be a
princess and so on, and every frog I guess to be a prince. There
are certain human situations that I think the Americans really want
to believe in. And so as our growth started we treated our good
readers to the Fat Venus and the Persian Lamb.
Riess: I'm glad you're willing to talk about the promotions. I guess I
thought you would be tired of it.
Newhall: I'm delighted to talk about them because some people have an idea
that a promotion is necessarily hokum. In other words, the
promotion and some essence of truth do not go hand- in-hand, that
you're asking somebody to come inside the tent and see the bearded
lady but you put a false beard on her before they come in. Well,
that's not right. Our bearded ladies had real beards. If you have
to put the whiskers on her, forget it, in my opinion.
As I keep saying, most people, no matter their age, living in
193
America anyway, are living in this wonderful world where anything
wonderful can happen. You know, your ship is going to come in one
day or a long- lost uncle is going to die and leave you a lot of
money. Virtue is its own reward. The poor girl is going to marry
the rich man and live happily ever after. Look how popular the
California lottery is. It's the end of the American rainbow.
But people also have their ideas of what is proper and what is
improper. They are titillated by what is not respectable. But they
usually don't like to admit it.
Some of the Chronicle's early promotions, like the Emperor
Norton Treasure Hunt, was just a straight thing to get people
together as San Franciscans having a good time and packing their
picnic lunches and taking their families out to dig for treasure,
and so on. They enjoyed it, but that was about all there was to it.
Dr. Miller and the Naked Animals
Newhall: The naked animals. The naked animals is a little bit like the
coffee except the coffee's more legitimate. One of the early
columnists that we took on when we got going at the Chronicle was a
fellow called Dr. Miller, who wrote a column about animals.
I figured there are lots of pet lovers . There are lots of
animal lovers, and people are really freaky about animals. Did you
see the story in the paper this morning in the Chronicle, this is
1988, about you're not allowed to have cats in Marin County because
they would endanger the field mice in the boondocks next door?
Well, just think about that for a while.
Down in Newhall, our way, there's something called the three-
spined unarmored stickleback. It's a fish, the most ordinary damned
fish you ever saw, about two inches long, but it's an endangered
species. And whenever things get too quiet down Newhall way at the
Signal, we just start mentioning the stickleback and how some
developer is bulldozing garbage too close to a stickleback pond, and
the whole community goes up in arms to protect these miserable
little fish. They're not even good eating. But you know how people
are now. We're going to save every last animal, not matter how
horrid it is.
Anyway, getting back to naked animals. Dr. Miller started his
very successful pet column, and he's a very bona fide veterinarian.
And we were going up to the P.U. Club for lunch one day. I used to
take all these fellows out as much as I could, and I liked to keep
in touch with them. He said, "You know, there's a funny guy in town
here, he's going around preaching that animals ought to have clothes
194
on. It's called the Society for Indecency to Animals." My ears
pricked up then and there and I said, "Well, who is he?" He said,
"I'll tell him to come in and see you."
Well, this fellow came in. Allen Abel was the name he used.
And he said he was a representative of C. or G. Clifford Prout (I
forget all these names) , who was the nephew of a very rich eccentric
St. Louis or Kansas City millionaire. He stated that rich Mr. Prout
left his money to put clothes on animals because he had been of the
impression that animals were modest, and that they had gone through
life mortified because people could come along, drive along the
road, and they'd see a herd of cows grazing there in the pasture.
He said, "This is indecent. It's terrible. We have no feeling for
the cows. Now why do you think these cows always have their heads
down when you drive by them? Because they's embarrassed!"
[chuckles]
So I got George Draper to interview Allen Abel. Now look, for
the record, obviously animal nudity does not sound to anyone,
including me, as being a particularly substantial comment on the
mores of the American people. But it is such an outrageous concept
and so shocking a notion that anybody could go around seriously
saying that animals are embarrassed because they're naked- -of
course, most of my fellow San Franciscans are going to be shocked
that a paper would come along and run such a story with a seemingly
straight face. They're sure that Father O'Flannigan or whoever in
the local church would say, "Why no, this is ridiculous." They just
couldn't accept this concept as being sort of semi-serious. It's
the kind of notion that gets good sound, salt-of -the-earth people
upset. They have to run to church or a saloon in order go to get
rid of all this inner turmoil.
So we interviewed Mr. Prout. Allen Abel got hold of someone he
called Clifford Prout. I got George Draper to take him out to the
Fleishhacker Zoo and to talk about the nudity of the various
animals. We took pictures of them out there, either the chimps or
the African foxes or something, I don't know. But none of them had
clothes on. Prout and Abel had some literature about bloomers for
the elephants or whatever, and you know, shorts and brassieres for
the cows and all that business. [laughter] And as I say, this is
not really stop-press news, but we ran it and we didn't say anything
except that Prout and his Indecency Society declared San Francisco
to be an animal nudity disaster area. This is what the fellow said.
I didn't want to check him out too closely.
Riess: Where did you run it? Front page?
Newhall: I think so. I hope so.
Riess: I mean, that's where you would put it?
195
Newhall: Either put it there or don't. I mean, for god's sake, you don't run
it inside, which is what ninety percent of your editors would do.
But you see the point exactly.
Riess: Yes, right.
Newhall: And so everybody, Jesus Christ, said what the hell is the Chronicle
doing now?! It was quite a gimmick. Prout came to town and we
eventually found out who he was. He's a very able guy, actually, he
was a very able scriptwriter in Hollywood. But I didn't pursue it
too much. I think the Examiner tried to do an expose on it.
[laughter] But anyway, it didn't matter. The guy, he's with Woody
Allen.
Anyway, while Abel was first in the office, and while I was
talking with him, Dolly went outside and got Abe Mellinkoff ,
the
city editor, to phone Kansas City and check out Prout. The results
were inconclusive. Just for the hell of it, I wanted to scare Abel
a little. But at the moment I couldn't find out if Prout, the so-
called uncle, had lived there.
Anyway, we all got to be very good friends. As a matter of
fact, we got Abel to write a column for the Chronicle later on. It
was called "Professor Bunkerhill" or something like that. He still
is around, and he is still in the business of practical jokes out of
New York.
Riess: So you had lots of letters to the editor and you published them?
Newhall: Oh, a lot of outraged letters. Some people thought it was great.
As I say, I'm not going to defend it as journalism, except it got
people talking about the paper and I don't think it did them any
harm. And besides that, I think it's good therapy once in a while
to shock people. I can't defend it any more vigorously than that,
except I thought it was amusing and enjoyable. And, of course, it
occurs to me at the moment, there are still a lot of nude animals
still running around loose.
Riess: Did you cook these promotions up when things were dull? They start
out as a kind of laugh that you're having in the office with
Charlie?
Newhall: Sure, sometimes. Sometimes you have to play them straight. You
know, we played that straight. We never did say that any of this
was true or anything else. We just said, "This is what they've
said." Some people say it's Hollywood. And the Examiner, they go
crazy because they were always trying to expose us as fakes.
Well, what are you going to expose? People were having a
laugh? I don't know. But anyway, the Indency to Animals people did
declare us to be a disaster area, particularly the Fleishhacker Zoo.
196
[laughter] You know, there were a lot of angles on it. And these
kids outside, the reporters who would cover the stuff, they went
along. They wrote wonderful stories, some of them, beautifully
done, I think.
Fat Venus
Newhall: Another one. Women and beauty and sex, they're all kind of tied in,
you know, the old fairy tale idea, and there's one story that's
always sold- -and of course these will go back to Biblical times, but
I can't pull them all out- -and that is the ugly duckling legend.
(I'm just sort of pulling out the concepts.) So what is an ugly
duckling? Well, this town is full of women who are grossly fat.
And a wonderful story is the metamorphosis of this fat woman, and I
mean gross, into a ravishing beauty, into a beautiful svelte
princess who gets the choice of whatever she wants.
So I got Count Marco to pick up about seven or eight or nine
very, very obese women. And we established the Fat Venus contest,
with drawings of a very overweight Venus de Milo as our trademark.
The count took the seven or eight contestants out to dinner,
and we had pictures of him surrounded by these mountains of feminine
flesh at their "last feast." He took them over to Banducci's. (We
had to promote Enrico Banducci to promote a free meal for them.
That's the coffee house down there on Broadway.)
The count finally picked the girl he was going to use, and he
was going to put her on his very own special diet, he was going to
dress her, he was going to counsel her, he was going to follow her
through a glorious metamorphosis, from this fat embryo stage to the
slim, beautiful butterfly.
Now, I'm telling this story very frankly because it will give
people a chance to think of what kind of an insensitive person was
more or less involved with the Chronicle at that time. We got right
up against deadline and Marco came storming in, tearing his hair,
saying, "My god, I've got to turn in my Fat Venus column here right
away and I have to include her first week's diet, the first day of
the diet. Where is it?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said,
"Well, I don't have any diet."
So I groaned, "Well, give me a copy of Vogue magazine," I said.
So he came running back with that. I looked through and sure
enough, there was something about black coffee and melba toast and a
little gruel and this, that, and the other. I said, "Well, this
won't kill the girl. Let's use this for tomorrow's diet." I wrote
it all out on a piece of paper for him. So that was Count Marco's
197
Diet for the Fat Venus.
The Fat Venus became a long and fascinating journalistic
experience. We would run her picture about once a week. We always
played the Fat Venus with the gross Venus de Milo trademark in the
women's section. I mean, it might have started out on page one, I
don't know. The count would have her lunching at some glossy hotel
or bistro, or going down to see some fashion show there, wherever it
was. And it was very stylish. I sort of lost track, because it was
all going along slowly- -it takes time for any girl to shuck off 100
or 120 pounds. The Fat Venus ran as a feature in the women's
section. We wrote about two or three times a week how she was
slimming down. She started out at 240 or 250 pounds, something like
that.
Well, I came up for air about five or six or seven months later
because I suddenly realized there had not been much recent word on
her progress. So I called him, "Hey, Count, what's happened here
with this Fat Venus? What's your girl doing?" And there was a long
silence. He said, "She's been cheating." I said, "What do you
mean?" He said, "She's not thin enough yet." I said, "I don't
care. You get some pictures. We've got to run something to let the
public know that this is a straight shot." (And this was straight.
I was convinced that by now we'd have this gorgeous creature to
display. )
It turns out she had gone down to about 180 or 190 or
something, and then unfortunately she got herself looking good
enough so a boyfriend came into the picture. I said, "You get some
clothes on her and you get a picture." Marco came in two or three
days later and he had a picture of Mary Ann, whatever her name was,
leaning up against a eucalyptus tree with the Palace of Fine Arts in
the background. She looked pretty hefty, but at least she looked
like a woman. It was all right. And she was done up quite nicely,
her hair and so on. So I said, "All right, we'll run the picture of
her." I found out later that they had taken this dress, this
clothing, and they had literally nailed her to the tree in order to
pull her stuff in like this. And there she was nailed together to
the tree like this with most of her lard behind her! [laughter]
Then it went on a little longer and I said, "Okay, how's it
going now?" He said, "Just terrible. She's cheating again." I
said, "Okay, look, we've got to go public with this. I can't have a
catastrophe, because Charlie's getting a little impatient here.
Look, put a private eye on her, and let me know what happened." So
sure enough he put a private detective on her, and I think I still
have the private detective's report.
"7:00 P.M. Subject was seen leaving her home and getting
into a 1957 Chevrolet driven by unidentified man. Followed
trail of subject and driver to Blair's Ice Cream Store...
198
Subject entered ice cream store and was seen to order and
consume a chocolate hot fudge sundae... Subject and escort
left Blair's Ice Cream Parlor and started north on
Alemany." Next time: "My car suffered a flat tire. Lost
contact with subject," and so on.
That was the end of the private eye, but we knew what was going on.
So I told the count, "Okay, we've got to clean this up
somehow." So we got the count all cranked up and we ran a huge
story about "The Fat Venus Mary Ann has been cheating. What shall
we do with her? Shall the Fat Venus be given another chance or is
her crime inexcusable?" Really hundreds of people wrote in saying,
"Give her another chance! Give her another chance."
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess :
Newhall:
We did indeed give Mary Ann another chance, and she still did
not perform properly. So I said, "Okay, you've got to do
something." There's this spa somewhere in Sonoma County, Boyes
Springs, I think it was probably. We took her up there and I said,
"Okay, lock her in a room. Leave somebody up there and lock her in
that room and you don't let her out for about a month." And by
golly, they kept her up there --passed her food to her through the
door on a tray- -and they finally sweated her down.
Was Mary Ann willing, or ultimately was she a victim in all of this?
Victim? Listen, this was the best thing that ever happened to her,
come on. She got her weight down and down, and we took her down to
Hollywood and she had a screen test. I don't know what she did with
it. And she came back. I don't know if she ever married this
fellow or not, but I heard that about six months later she was back
up to 225 pounds. But I'm sure it was the time of her life. I
can't see that it did her any harm at all. All of a sudden she
became somebody and she had a lot of publicity. She was an awfully
nice girl, she really was.
guess .
But she wasn't able to handle it, I
The story about the princess marrying the page didn't work out
too well that time, but it had fantastic appeal. People really
wanted her to get her shot and get her second chance. Oh, and I'd
forgotten, we provided her with a psychiatric counselor the whole
time, by the way. She was a doctor, dietary specialist.
Yes, well that makes sense.
Oh no, I wasn't feeding her the croissants or pretzels and Vogue's
black coffee all the time. She formed a very serious attachment
with this nice woman. That cost us a little money, you know, but it
was fun. I think she probably had a pretty good time, I don't know.
You might not agree with me as a woman, I don't know. Incidentally,
the idea behind the Fat Venus was just to get people talking about
199
Mary Ann or the Chronicle, whichever you want, sort of "life in San
Francisco." [See Appendices for the story's conclusion.]
Virginia City Camel Races
Newhall: The Territorial Enterprise, which was Lucius Beebe's weekly
newspaper in Virgina City- -every year they would announce the annual
camel races. There would be all this advance publicity on it, about
how camel entries were coming in from all over the desert area.
Stories that camels were being sent north from Indio, and maybe
Nevada, or Texas, or maybe a shipment from Arabia. I saw this
publicity starting up every year, so I said, "Okay, they want a
camel race, they'll have a camel race."
We called Bob Richards, who was then managing editor of the
Territorial Enterprise, and we said, "Now look, you'd better go
along with this, because you're going to be ass-deep in camels
pretty soon." We played it up, absolutely straight, in the sports
department and out in front, too: "The annual camel races in
Virginia City were coming up, the Chronicle was co- sponsoring it
with the Territorial Enterprise. All entries will be welcome."
Larry Wade, I think, was then the promotion editor of the
Chronicle. I said, "Dear Larry, please go get us some camels." He
was always a very good, loyal young man. He said, "Okay." So he
went out to Fleishhacker Zoo. Carey Baldwin was then the director
of the zoo. He said, "Sure, you can have whatever we've got."
We loaded these camels --he had two of them- -into a truck. That
was grand news, and we had pictures of them. We got Billy Pearson,
a jockey by profession, who had starred on national radio or TV as
an art expert, and John Huston, the great movie director, as
jockeys. We had all the proper publicity ahead of time, and
persuaded, urged and beat the gong for San Franciscans to come up
and enjoy this grand old sport, this typical historic sport of
Virginia City. And sure enough, a couple of entries announced they
were coming up from Indio. You know, they've got some camels down
there among the date palms and so on.
On the day of the camel race we all went up to Reno; we got a
plane and went up there. Lucius was the official starter. John
Huston was riding one camel, Billy Pearson the other, and everybody
was decked out. There must have been twenty or thirty thousand
people who showed up in this town, you know, because camel races
aren't all that frequent. (Incidentally, ever since that time
they've held camel races in Virginia City every year.)
The day we went up Larry said, "Oh, by the way, I forgot to
200
tell you, Carey Baldwin said that these animals have never been
ridden." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, Carey told me
you can train them." He said, "Get a two-by-four and if they don't
do right, hit them." I said, "All right, we'll see what we can do."
They put big badminton nets around the camels. They were one-hump
animals, whatever those are, dromedaries or whatever, I forget,
anyway, they had single humps. And the riders got on. There were
four camels in all, I think, two from Indio. The race course was
straight down the main street of Virginia City.
Riess: The badminton net is just to get some purchase on them?
Newhall: Yes, like a saddle. You strap the badminton nets around them so the
jockeys could grab a lot of places, you see. Because a camel's not
exactly like a polo pony.
Lucius shot off this big pearl -handled Colt 45 of his and off
the animals went down the street. We had pictures going the whole
time and everything. Billy Pearson's camel took a turn. He, the
camel not Billy, apparently panicked at something, and he went
galloping into the Catholic church right there on the street where
Lucius had all the fights with the padre. It was on a Sunday. I
don't know if there was a mass going on at the time. Billy got the
camel out but in the process knocked an old gentleman under the
bumper of a car parked near the church. All the miserable beasts
finished the race. Some of them kept going, they wouldn't stop. I
never saw the camels again, but I'm sure they got them back.
I was a little bit worried that this might have caused some
trouble, because the camels had bumped people; there was a crowd and
they pushed them around a little. Well, the most welcome letter I
ever got about the races --this is why I knew the old man had been
pushed down under the car- -was from this woman whose father, she
said, had been at the camel races. I said, "Oh my god, here come
the lawyers .
"
She wrote, "I wanted to write you because my father, who is
eighty- five and is fairly frail, was pushed aside or run over by
this steed, but managed to roll under the bumper. He wanted me to
tell you that this was the most glorious day of his life, he'll
remember it as long as he lives, and we want to thank the
Chronicle. "
I tell you, that was the most relief I've ever felt
about anything.
Anyway, that was the camel race. It was just sort of an off-
the-cuff deal. But it was good spirit and everybody would get into
it. You know, we would come up with a promotion idea, discuss it,
and then it would all sort of take place, don't ask me how.
Riess: Did the Examiner cover your stories? When you started something
like this, then did they have to deal with it?
201
Nevhall: In some cases, possibly.
to-Breakers race.
The Chronicle .
you know, covers the Bay-
Riess: Yes. On the camel race the Examiner's sports writer would go to
Virginia City?
Newhall: Oh well, they would have tried to debunk it. They probably had
somebody there to see if we killed somebody, really. I really can't
answer that question, I don't know. But their whole attitude at the
time was knock down everything the Chronicle does.
The Persian Lamb##
Newhall: Yvonne d'Angers had started out in North Beach on a stage in a
topless bar called Backstage, or Off Broadway, something like that.
And as I think I mentioned earlier, there had been this thing about
the Chronicle being "indecent," and the Examiner was always
championing the "respectable" people. And of course they were
losing circulation, slowing up the whole time, because everybody
wanted to be indecent or at least to read what was currently going
in San Francisco, the Babylon of the Pacific.
She was not exactly a French girl, Yvonne. She was a Persian
girl--I guess it was called Iran by then, I'm not sure--who had come
over here. She had a couple of brothers in school or something.
She was a very, very pretty girl, she really was, I think,
beautiful. Then she got herself doctored up with a lot of silicone
or something and turned herself into a blonde. But for some reason
or other her passport was not in order, and the immigration
department wished to deport her.
What a wonderful chance this was to champion a poor wronged
girl. I realized that it was a terrible thing, a mortal sin, to
misuse this charming young lady who was about to be deported from
the United States ,
where we protect so many unsanitary refugees or
illegal aliens. "How can they do this?" The Chronicle will be the
champions of this gorgeous creature and rescue her from our rotten,
dictatorial bureaucratic government.
So we decided that Yvonne was the Persian Lamb . We ran
pictures of her- -she chained herself at one point to the Golden Gate
Bridge saying, "I can't leave this country," in tears, you know. I
never will forget, incidentally, the name of the immigration
commissioner here in San Francisco at that time was Fullilove,
believe it or not, Mr. Fullilove.
We sent our lamb back to Washington to interest Phil Burton in
202
the case. We ran a steady series of this curvilinear orphan posing
at all the historic American landmarks -- the Capitol steps, the White
House, the Lincoln Memorial. On the steps of the Capitol we
organized two or three substantial press conferences. We just kept
pushing the Persian Lamb around, playing it for what it was worth- -
you know, it was not all that big a promotion, it was just typical- -
and we did succeed in keeping her here in America the Beautiful.
It had a happy ending. She married Voss Boreta, who was the
owner of her original topless bar, and she became a matron. I think
she had children. She's living in Marin County, out in Fairfax now,
I think. But we were always very good buddies. She was a very nice
girl, she really was. I liked her.
Riess: You could have used something like this as a way to focus on
America's immigration policies and made heavy water of it. Did you
do that?
Newhall: Well, underneath it all I was personally serious and disturbed. It
was ridiculous that the immigration department would take a girl who
is making some money, helping send her brothers through school, and
deport her when they casually permit thousands of insanitary people
to float around the country. They don't extradite them. But
anyway, that was all.
Riess: You didn't focus that much on the issues.
Newhall: Well, it was the overriding, the leitmotif of all the pictures and
stories.
Aneuillan Liberation
Riess: What's the Anguilla story?
Newhall: Anguilla is a little island in the Caribbean. It's about a mile and
a half wide, and about eight, ten miles long. It's right there in
the curve where the Leeward Islands turn into the Windward Islands,
right near St. Martin. Anguilla was a former British crown colony.
Then when all the upset came and the British Empire began to
dissolve and freedom and dignity returned to mankind, Anguilla was
associated with St. Kitts and Nevis, another two islands, as a self-
governing Caribbean state, associated with Great Britain.
There was a lot of unrest among the natives, there always is
down there in the Caribbean. I don't know how well you know it.
Have you been down there?
Riess: No.
203
Newhall: The Caribbean crowd are something mind-boggling. St. Kitts was run
by a fellow called Bradshaw. He was the sort of president- for- life
of this Anguilla-Nevis-St. Kitts triple arrangement. This is what
happens in all these countries. It's never one man-one vote. It's
a million men-one vote. And the Anguillans were getting the dirty
end of the shaft, as they say in the trade, because every now and
then some money would come through from Britain or the British
foreign office or colonial office or whatever it is now,
commonwealth office, I guess. So much money for Nevis, so much for
St. Kitts, so much for Anguilla. Well, Bradshaw got his hands on
all the money. He took the Anguilla money and spent it on Anguilla
all right, except he did it by building a new big concrete wharf in
St. Kitts and putting a big sign over it, "Anguilla Landing." And
that was Anguilla' s share.
Anyway, they had a lot of problems. Anguilla is full of the
descendants of a whole lot of slaves who- -I don't know if they were
ever freed, I think their masters just left and there they are, so I
guess they're free. Anyway, they have about ten different names on
the island, the Hodges, the Gumbs ,
the Websters, the Adamses, and so
on, and there they are. They catch a few lobsters and that's it.
It is a miserable place. It's got two or three beaches, but there
are no trees on the island, they've all been long since cut away, or
burned off or something. There never were very many. Anguilla was
just a rocky, inhospitable outcropping. But today it is
materializing as a resort island with nice beaches and some
comfortable hotels- -or at least so the advertisements say.
Well, the revolution started with a beauty contest in Anguilla
in 1967, and the winner turned out to be a ringer from St. Kitts,
not an Anguillan girl at all. The contest ended up with a shooting,
and somebody was killed, one person was, I think, and the Anguillans
declared their independence from St. Kitts and Nevis. They got up a
militia, you know, a rag- tag affair.
I read this in a wire story. There was some casual coverage of
the rebellion. It was all very legitimate foreign news. The
British navy got interested. (I had recently seen "The Mouse That
Roared," the Peter Sellers movies of a very tiny little nation that
was declaring war on the rest of the world or had an H-bomb or
something.) This must have been in '67, things were kind of quiet
then, I had a vacation coming up, so I asked George Draper, a
Chronicle reporter and an old friend of mine, to join me on a safari
to Anguilla and see what the action was. And we could drum up some
front-line coverage of the revolution.
All outside communication with Anguilla supposedly had been cut
off. We landed at St. Martin, which is a neighboring island, part
of it owned by the Dutch and part by the French. The governor of
the Dutch part just happened to be in the airport when he saw two
204
American reporters arrive. There was a plane outside that
apparently had been chartered by the Anguillans , to fly some of
their people back. (There had been a number of inter -Caribbean
conferences about the independence of Anguilla. It was a legitimate
interesting story, you know, correspondents were trying to get in.)
There was one vacant seat on the plane. I said to George, "You get
over there; you're going to cover it. I'm not." As the plane took
off the governor came storming in waving his walking stick in hand
saying, "No more flights to Anguilla."
So I went down to a little hotel, and the next morning I went
over to the French half of the island and I persuaded a local
boatman with an outboard motorboat to run me over to Anguilla.
Crossing that lousy strait, I'll tell you, in this boat was a
miserable experience. I had a white linen suit on, like a Victorian
planter. Well, the suit got greasy from the bilges, it was one hell
of a mess. The northeast trade winds made the crossing very rough.
This crossing was very similar to a rough, uncomfortable voyage from
Long Beach to Catalina Island in a cockle shell.
I landed in Anguilla and was welcomed, in a manner of speaking,
by some derelict guerrillas toting pistols and worn out carbines,
bummed a ride in a truck down to the Valley, as they called it.
There was nothing on that island, mind you, but a few trees and nice
beaches ,
lots of rocks and the wind and a couple of churches . There
are a few houses along in a row there in the biggest town.
I met George at the airport, which was pretty much the center
of information on the island. The landing strip was interesting.
The Anguillans had covered the strip with these old oil drums so
that "enemy aircraft" could not land and take over their island.
They were expecting an invasion!
We covered the rebellion of Anguilla in a series of stories.
We taped most of it. I was very interested in it. I really was.
It's not every day people are fighting for liberty and so on. At
the island we were living at Mrs. Lloyd's boarding house. Mrs.
Lloyd was a motherly matron but the cuisine at her lodging house was
spartan, tuna sandwiches- -we ate tuna sandwiches or tuna salad for
five days, lunch and dinner, and sometimes for breakfast.
One day in walked Professor Kohr, Leopold Kohr. He was an
academic character whom Howard Gossage had dredged up. The good
professor, a mild little man, was currently ensconced at Puerto Rico
University where he was teaching the virtues of "smallness" as a
social alternative. He's over in Wales somewhere now.
Kohr preached a sociological doctrine in which small is good:
small is beautiful and the world, you know, is too big now and we
have to break it down into small units. He had been fascinated with
Anguilla because here was an island of about the area of San
205
Francisco if you stretched it out, maybe a little bigger.
I should make the story brief. Oh, but at one point after a
couple of days on Anguilla we thought the provisional president,
Peter Adams, had been kidnapped. We grabbed a plane and finally
found him in the air in another plane over St. Martin and got him
back. It was interesting!
Howard Gossage, the San Francisco advertising man- -I think I
mentioned him earlier in another respect- -was intrigued by the
Anguilla revolution. After George and I returned to San Francisco I
got together with Howard and Dr. Gerry Feigen and planned to spring
Anguilla from St. Kitts and get them back into their old status as a
crown colony of Her Majesty the Queen, which is what they wanted.
The Anguillans felt that they would be supported better by Britain
than by Bradshaw. Oh lord, it was very complex. (A whole book,
Under a Caribbean Sun, has been written by some Englishman who
started giving us a hard time.)
In order to get things rolling, we brought the Anguillan
government- -the bankers and president and vice-president and foreign
minister- -to San Francisco. The foreign minister actually was an
American citizen who had a fuel oil company in Perth Amboy, New
Jersey, but he declared himself to be the foreign minister of
Anguilla. They all flew into San Francisco. We borrowed the
mayor's car. We designed flags for Anguilla and put the flags on
the car and had press conferences in town. It all makes no sense,
but anyway, it was intriguing. This was sort of half Chronicle and
half me. The Chronicle covered it straight.
I didn't use the Chronicle in this, really. Some people might
think so. But I was honestly interested in it in a personal way.
I've always been interested in coins. And we were going to try to
save Anguilla, because they had been cut off from all funds, and
there was a British navy gunboat supposedly lurking offshore. (I
don't think it was really there at all.) The Anguillans had the
militia out and the padre, the local Anglican clergyman, had
spyglasses and smoke signals. It would have been a beautiful movie.
Take my word for it. But they needed money.
Riess : So what happened?
Newhall: I was interested in coins. I said, "I will provide your coinage."
And I almost lost my shirt. I got 11,600 silver dollar-sized coins,
mostly from Latin America, and some from I think Yemen or Oman or
something, and I counters tamped them. I had them struck here. I
obtained some "ANGUILLA DOLLAR" dies, and ran the trial strikes with
the dies in the machine shop in the basement of the Chronicle .
because there were some hydraulic presses down there. The coins
were stamped "Anguilla Liberty Dollar." This is not all exactly
journalistic, but anyway, it was sort of part of the act, 11,600
206
Anguilla silver dollars. I have it all written down somewhere.
Then I sent Larry Wade, the Chronicle' s promotion manager, down
to the Caribbean with suitcases full of these dollars. They're
heavy, boy. They're all silver. This was just when silver was
going out of circulation. You see, silver coinage went out in '64
and this was about '
67 . And the idea was that the Anguillans would
take these Liberty Dollars and put them into circulation. They
would reimburse me for my cost and keep for their government
everything they could collect above the original cost. Coin
collectors will collect anything. Commemorative coins, which are
usually circulated and sold at prices above their silver value, have
been a big business in the Caribbean area for centuries.
Well, the Anguillan government officials began fighting among
themselves and they all began thinking that somehow we were cheating
them. They tried to steal all the money from Larry Wade. At one
point I got a suitcase with ten thousand one-dollar bills and sent
it down to Anguilla in order to loosen things up around the place.
The members of the provisional government began confiscating that.
It was a wild time. Anyway, I did mint all the Anguilla Liberty
Dollars, and I sent them down.
The New York Times got on to this . Remember ,
the Chronicle was
not any part of this latest Anguilla activity. This was a free
enterprise, charitable effort by Howard Gossage and his group, "the
San Francisco Group," as the Times called it. The Times was
convinced we were trying to do something to take advantage of
Anguilla. It was a very strange thing.
In the end, I gave the Anguillans about two or three thousand
of these silver coins, so I wound up with about eight or nine
thousand dollar- sized coins that were worth at that time I guess
five or six dollars apiece. I finally was able to sell them for
what cost I had in them. Then I washed my hands of the whole thing.
This could have been a great story but unfortunately it seemed to
get out of hand.
The Anguillans are famous mariners. They have fast schooners.
We were going to sail them up to New York. They wanted to get into
the United Nations- -see, that's a pretty good deal --so we wanted to
sail them up to New York and tie up their schooner in the East River
there, and then their foreign ministers and ministers of justice,
and the president of Anguilla would try to join the United Nations.
It would be pretty good copy. However, they never did come to New
York, the British took them back in 1971, and I guess that's where
they are today. The Anguilla revolution never exactly jelled as the
perfect news story. It was just too complicated.
We covered it straight in the paper. I was pretty sensitive,
and because of my own personal interest in this particular matter I
207
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall ;
Riess:
Newhall;
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
really didn't want to hit it too hard. If I hadn't been involved, I
would have really given it a much larger play in the paper.
Did you write any of the stories yourself?
No, I don't think so.
Did you file some stories as F. Scott Valencia?
F. Scott Valencia, as a by-line?
Where did you use
From Brazil, for the Newhall Signal, not for the Chronicle. Ruth
and I went down to Peru to pick up our son Tony who had been two
years in the Peace Corps. We came home across the Andes and down
the Amazon. I just wrote some color stories I think for the Signal .
This had totally nothing to do with the Chronicle at all.
Did Anguilla have a fairy tale ending?
Well the Anguillans got away from St. Kitts and regained their
colonial status, which is what they wanted. However the Anguilla
story gave the Bay Guardian a reason for attacking the Chronicle .
They tried to make this into a big Chronicle plot. I mean really,
it was very murky.
Because of a conflict of interest?
Well, just because of the Chronicle . or because of me. You know,
Bruce Brugman has to make a buck, and he always has to have an enemy
or a villain. And he was always taking off against the Chronicle.
He treated this, I think personally, very unfairly, saying that
Anguilla was a Chronicle plot, because I made these coins, some of
them down in the basement there. He couldn't follow it.
[chuckles] It does sound complicated.
It is an interesting story. Ruth took voluminous tapes on the whole
thing from everybody who was involved. And it was very involved.
It would have made, I think, a fascinating and a great movie, but it
didn't jell, and it was not essentially a Chronicle project. I'm
sure Charlie would have disowned it and so would I have, as editor
of the Chronicle .
except in terms of what the Anguillans were doing.
The Last Man on Earth
Newhall: Okay. Then what else is there? "The Last Man on Earth" was a big
one. Now I don't know how much time you've got there.
208
Riess: Well, I've got eight minutes.
Newhall: Maybe you can do it in eight minutes.
Riess: I've got more tape.
Newhall: Oh. Well, this was the biggest single promotion perhaps
journalistically that the Chronicle ever undertook, at least in my
period there. Certainly from a journalistic standpoint there's been
more attention paid to it nationally, professionally, than any other
promotion, with the possible exception of the coffee thing, which
fascinates the national magazines.
Riess: I don't understand why people get outraged, frankly. Why there's
this sort of moral indignation about these promotions kind of
surprises me.
Newhall: You must remember, the one thing that will bug the profession, the
journalistic establishment, if they don't approve of you, the one
thing that really drives them up the wall is success. On the other
hand, if the paper had not done these things and if we had not
promoted ourselves, and had started just to sort of slowly slip
downhill or under the surface, they would all have said, "Gee, the
Chronicle was a grand paper. Isn't it too bad they couldn't make
it?" or something like that, I promise you.
Riess: Okay, I see what the other side of it is, yes.
The Fantasy
Riess: Now, how did you cook up "The Last Man On Earth?"
Newhall: And that was "cooked up," all right. I have always felt, in line
again with my feelings about the aspiration and interest of the
average person, that the greatest basic adventure story is the Swiss
Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe legend. There's something that
any young man, and I suppose young woman, too, who read the stuff
could never forget. The idea of the desert island and human
survival .
Riess: And as you pointed out newspapers had sponsored the trips to the
Pole.
Newhall: Oh yes, papers had done that kind of thing. Those were adventure
stories. But Robinson Crusoe was a story of man's survival and the
footprint in the sand and building the house and so on.
I had always felt that a great promotion, or if you will, a
209
great stunt--! don't know what you want to call it- -or experiment,
would be to see if modern man could survive in the wilderness. And
I talked about this for two or three years to some of my colleagues ,
fellow editors. Stanleigh Arnold, who was the Sunday editor of the
Chronicle, came in one day and said, "You talked about this deal of
sending somebody out in the wilderness with some twine and a knife
maybe and nothing else. Bud Boyd"--the Chronicle' s fish and game
editor --"says he'd love to do this." I said, "You mean you think he
could go out there and survive? Okay."
I talked to Bud about it and I laid it on him hard. I told him
his adventure would have to be factual and have to be straight. I'm
saying this because I want this in the record because it's been so
badly misreported. I promise you, no editor in his right mind would
purposefully mislead a reader. Misinformation will surely come back
to haunt you, believe me, as you will see.
So Bud said, "Yes," he'd do it. Then he said, "My wife and
children want to come, too." I said, "That's not the idea, Bud. Do
you think they can last?"
We were going to put Bud out in the wilderness somewhere in
California with nobody around. He was going to survive with the
basic few items he had with him. What he would do, he would
establish with a ranger somewhere a location, a hollow tree stump or
log, and would leave a record- -a daily diary- -of how he was doing
this, and the ranger would come and pick it up and bring it down to
headquarters and phone it in to us. And it had to be a secret place
where- -we couldn't divulge where the messages were to be hidden or
obviously somebody would come in and try to spoil it.
The title we came up with was "The Last Man On Earth." The
idea was that we would assume for the purpose of this experiment or
this adventure that the big bombs had exploded and that Boyd was up
above in the hills and all the poison was down below and he was
surviving.
Riess: Right, it's like the George Stewart novel, Earth Abides.
Newhall: Maybe he wrote it before or after, I don't know. But that was the
idea. It was, again, just Robinson Crusoe out there to see if he
could feed himself, clothe himself, protect himself and so on and
survive for I think four weeks or maybe five .
So it was a big deal. We had our own feature syndicate by this
time, and we outlined it, we had promotion brochures, and about
twenty or thirty papers across the country went for it. It is a
fascinating story.
Riess: How do you sell a story?
210
Newhall: We send them a brochure and a synopsis of the idea so they can see
what we are talking about. And then, "Do you want to sign up for
the release?" And we signed up a lot. All the middle western
papers, of course, went for it, and I think some of the eastern
ones.
The Launch
Newhall: So we fixed on a place that Boyd was going to make this experiment,
on a lake up in the Siskiyou or Trinity Alps, up there by Yreka up
above Red Bluff and Dunsmuir. It's about a day by pack animal up to
the isolated lake.
Well, Bud insisted he wanted to bring his wife and his kids,
and he had a little kid, a daughter, and another daughter who was
having an unhappy love affair, so she didn't go. We hired this old
DC -3 to get him up there one day. And oh, there was all the bugle -
blowing and the advance stories, "Can he make it or can't he?" And
we designed a standing headline that was supposed to run every day
with the Last Man's daily diary.
On the way up there, just before we took off, Bud said, "Oh, I
forgot something." He went somewhere and he came back on board the
plane and Larry Wade or I saw that he was carrying with him- -I
forget what, I guess it was an ax. We said, "Hey Bud, you can't use
this . This is not part of the deal .
"
In other words ,
this was
absolutely straight.
We flew to Scott Valley with Bud and his family. From there we
could drive to a ranch house where we hired some horses to pack them
in- -no canned food supplies, no nothing. There were about ten of us
in the party.
At the ranch house they served all of this fried chicken at
lunch. I told Bud, "You and your family had better load up on this
food because that's all you're going to get for a while."
He had a pencil or pen with him, and papers, and they had
established a place where the guy who owned this sort of dude ranch
up there would go in every day at a certain hour to pick up Bud's
daily diary every two days or something [laughing]. On the way up a
bear came breaking out of the brush and galloped across the front of
the truck we were in, and I think it scared them all to death.
Oh, and in the party that flew up to Scott Valley we had with
us a priest from a church down here on Army Street. He was one of
three impartial observers. It's important in a sense who they were.
They flew up with us, and they watched Bud and his family go into
211
Riess:
Newhall :
the brush.*
Well, obviously in publishing Bud's stories there was going to
be a time lag. We couldn't print by 6 o'clock at night what Bud was
doing up there on the mountain at 5:00 or 6:00 that same day. We
figured there had to be about a seven- day time lag between the daily
diary entry and its publication on the Chronicle' s front page.
Bud's story would come down the hill, the ranger would pick it up
and either phone it in or send it to the paper. We started out "Day
1, Day 2, Day 3" and so forth. There was to be no dateline on the
stories because we just couldn't do it. And everybody knew that.
And besides, we had to send the daily diary to all our newspaper
syndicate customers so that they could publish them the same day we
did.
The first day's story told about how the Boyd's had to find a
place to sleep, and had to start eating frogs, and how they
sharpened sticks to stab the frogs, and this, that and the other.
You had removed the ax?
Oh yes, absolutely, I grabbed it. I will take lie detector tests.
From our point of view this was an absolutely straight shot. I
thought it was fascinating, and I wasn't sure Bud could make it,
particularly with his family along. (I should have absolutely
refused permission for the family to go, as you will see.)
The Rumpus
Newhall: Along around the time we were just about to start running the
series, there was a Concours d' Elegance, or a meeting of the Classic
Car Club, down south. I used to restore classic cars as a hobby,
kind of, and I was down there showing this car, an old 1931 Packard
roadster. On the way back Ruth and I stopped at Paso Robles at the
Paso Robles Inn. And there was a message waiting for me, "Call the
office." Bud had been up in the bush about a week; in other words,
the Chronicle was in the process of publishing the Last Man series,
the first or second day, and there was Stanleigh Arnold on the other
end of the phone saying, "My god, I've got the worst news. Bud's out
of the bush."
*[For the record the three "official impartial observers" were:
California's Attorney General Stanley Mosk; Rear Admiral A.G. Cook,
Civil Defense Chief of San Francisco; and Reverend Francis J. Ford,
O.F.M., Air Force Reserve chaplain. The flight to Scott Valley took
place on July 10, 1960--S.N.]
212
M
Newhall: I said, "Oh god, what is the trouble?"
He said, "Well, he can't make it."
I said, "Well, where is he?"
He said, "He's up there at the ranch."
I said, "Okay, can he get to a phone?" Here the series was
just starting and we had this marvelous successful thing going, and
it was great. We had received about a week's worth of stories, and
they were really very interesting and very good. Finally I got Bud
on the phone and there he was, beaten, I said, "Bud, you promised.
What is going on? Bud, this is history." Anyway, I just talked to
him for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and I said, "Bud, you've
got to go back up there and don't give me a lot of trouble on this.
The reputation of the Chronicle is at stake on this," and so on and
so forth.
"Well, okay, I'll do it." So apparently he started back up
again. The next day the Examiner started playing front-page
stories: "'The Last Man on Earth' Hoax: The Chronicle is doing this,
the Chronicle is doing that." Every one of our syndicate clients
who were getting the stories heard about it. They all cancelled and
everybody, including the wire services, began playing the story as
if the Chronicle was trying to hoax everybody. The Examiner
reported with a hullabaloo that Bud had gone up there and was living
on a patio somewhere, you know, with a Bloody Mary in one hand and a
shotgun in the other, I don't know.
Well, in fact Bud had come down. He went up again and--. I'm
a little fuzzy, then he came down again or something, but by this
time we had all of his stories, less than two weeks worth. I just
don't remember exactly the day that the Examiner story broke. We
had about eight or nine stories, and indeed Bud had failed and had
come down. We were running the diary faithfully, Day 1, Day 2, Day
3, Day 4, and so on. I think the Examiner started its "expose" on
about Day 3 or 4.
The "Examiner"
Newhall: What happened was --and the Examiner had a hell of a good story- -they
put Ed Montgomery, their ace investigating police reporter on Bud's
trail. He figured out where Bud was, somehow, and had gone up and
found the remnants of the Boyd camp, and he found tin cans and stuff
like that. Of course this was all news to me. It was horrible. It
213
was horrible. In the meantime Bud had come down and we had got him
to Stanley's home in Mill Valley.
I said, "Stanley, get him out of town. Take him down to a
motel somewhere and lock him up . Just keep him incommunicado .
"
I
was just trying to straighten this thing out, I was trying to
protect the stories that were going out. And the stories still were
telling the truth, and in the proper sequence we reported that the
Last Man wasn't going to make it. It got very complex. They got
Bud down to a motel near Carmel or Monterey and really holed him up
there because, of course, gee, the national press or the news
magazines and the Examiner were on the hunt for him.
As I said, Ed Montgomery went up after Bud had left, and with a
little trowel or shovel he began going through the cesspool that the
Boyd family had left behind them to find out what kind of food
they'd been eating. The full Last Man saga is a totally fascinating
story, really. I can recreate it, or someone can recreate it if
they just go back and take a look at the way the stories were
published in the Chronicle and in the Examiner.
At that time of course I felt a little bit like this poor guy
with a one-man band because I had the national magazines on us. Our
syndicate customers were all cancelling, the Examiner was charging
us with hoax. I called up our lawyers--! didn't talk to Charlie or
anybody at that moment, we didn't need a lot of conversation just
then, we needed action. At an early point I called our attorneys
and said, "Look, will you file about a ten-million-dollar slander or
libel suit against the Examiner for publishing the fact that we were
perpetrating a fraud or a hoax. The Chronicle is in fact honest.
You've got to counter all this stuff." So we came out with a big
headline, "Chronicle Sues Examiner For Libel." It was one of those
things . And it made a hell of a rumpus . There was some national
exposure on it.
Ed Montgomery did in fact find that Bud had not been living
necessarily on toads or lizards or on goose grass or whatever grows
up there in the hills. His wife, I think, had suffered some kind of
colliwobbles ,
and the Boyd party did in fact come down out of the
hills a week or so after the start, maybe even earlier. I wish I
could remember it a little more clearly, but it was all published in
the Chronicle. And I talked to Bud when I got back to San
Francisco. I said, "Bud, you've got to tell me the truth. You have
put this paper in a terrible position, just terrible. You've got to
tell me the truth. What did happen?"
He had written in one of his diary stories about how, golly,
what really saved him, they found hanging from the limb of a tree a
cache of food and supplies that had been left behind by a hunter- -he
said. And in the cache he said they found some food, you know, and
all that stuff. Bud was lying in his teeth- -to me. And he told me
214
that on the way out he passed a group of horsemen and Bud said,
"Good luck fellows, it's pretty tough up there." Well, he was
trying to convince me that somebody else might have left the tin
cans in the privy in his camp. I guess, I don't know.
He never told me the truth. I never knew- -I don't know to this
day really exactly what went on, because Bud never levelled with me.
As far as I was concerned that was the end of my association with
Bud. The Chronicle and the Examiner settled their differences when
the Examiner did in fact publish a retraction saying that the
Chronicle had covered this story "according to the finest traditions
of journalism," and so we withdrew our suit.
I think this story was legitimate. It was fascinating enough
that it caused this rumpus. I don't know that Bud would have
survived a real pop gun blast, let alone an atom bomb from the way
he operated up there.
The Real Success Story
Newhall: Now the most fascinating aspect of the Last Man saga is this --and
it's almost an historic part of this whole interviewing that's going
on with me now. On the third day of "The Last Man on Earth" the
Chronicle passed the Examiner in circulation and we've been ahead of
the Examiner ever since. And this was the end of the Examiner. Bud
Boyd and "The Last Man on Earth" were an historic promotion. I'm
sorry it turned out in the mess that it did, but it was lot of fun
while it was going on, even so, you know, it kept you busy.
But I have always been sensitive to the fact that many people,
and mostly these sort of professional managing editors and executive
editors around the country, were convinced that we, the Chronicle.
were trying to hoax the people. It was Bud who was hoaxing us!
Riess: I used that word "hoax" with you once before and I realized you were
sensitive to it.
Newhall: Yes, that's why.
Riess: So what did you do? Did you fire Bud?
Newhall: No, he just sort of passed out of the picture. I think he began
taking money or something for publicity in his woodsman's column.
And he got down to Central America and some travel promoters used
him as a front, you know, the Bud Boyd Nature Camp or Hunting Camp
in Costa Rica, some kind of a promotion. He may have left the
Chronicle. I'm not quite sure. I never would fire him because that
would have been too much of a mess. He discredited himself
215
thoroughly. We never publicly called Bud a liar. We just let the
thing die. Eventually Bud died down there in Central America of a
coronary, and that was the end of Bud. I have never seen a human
being morally collapse the way he did. This was a terrible thing.
Riess: I think your heart was in this survival exercise because you had
already gone through it a couple of times in your life in some way.
Newhall: Well, one could do it, but when we were in Mexico there had been
other people within a day's ride or something. Well, look, I do
think someone could have survived up there. But for Bud to bring
his wife and kids, it was ridiculous. I had very bad judgment to
allow that. But I think otherwise he probably wouldn't have gone.
I don't know, it was a great disappointment, because I didn't want
to tarnish--. But this is part of the reason people will talk about
how the Chronicle is such a shameless sort of newspaper. We get a
lot of that, or used to, and I guess they still do.
Anyway, we did pass the Examiner then and we just continued to
climb. That was the Examiner' s summit or peak and they declined
basically ever since.
Riess: I can see how they were powerless, although Ed Montgomery apparently
did very well on that.
Newhall: Yes, he did a terrific job. And I tell you, personally I would
never have gotten my hands in there and dug under their privy with a
little spade.
Riess: After somebody like Ed Montgomery does a great job like that, did
you ever hire them away?
Newhall: Oh, we hired a lot of their people. Let's see, who did we hire?
Herb Caen, of course, came back, but he had been ours originally.
Yes, two or three young men came over. Michael Grieg, he was a
reporter. Harry Jupiter in sports. Some of their reporters. But
they didn't have anybody at a higher level we were interested in, I
don't think.
One last comment. On the Bud Boyd story, some people would
say, "You're an editor, and when it failed you should have published
it as a news story." I said, "Why? Look, you read Dick Tracy in
the paper every day, but the editors don't publish the conclusion of
each episode ahead of time. You publish it day by day and then the
end inevitably happens on schedule." I couldn't understand what
they were all so upset about. I really can't still.
They were frightened because they knew that Bud had failed. We
didn't say, "The last man fails" before we'd published the whole
story, which I think is a very interesting story. I just don't
understand it. We never said it was news, we just said, "We're
216
going to tell you the story." And we did, including all the
trouble.
Riess: You were saying that the reason for doing the promotions --the end
result is what?
Newhall: Naked animals, Anguilla, Fat Venuses, camel races, Persian lambs,
all that stuff is a way to build attention and readership in the
paper. But it has nothing to do with the real thrust of journalism.
No paper can be a force for good or bad if it has no readers,
if it has no currency, if it is not read and appreciated and heard.
By some of these offbeat techniques the Chronicle was able to
attract the attention of not only some sophisticated readers --who
were not always necessarily totally in a laudatory frame of mind- -
but also a lot of credulous, regular, average people.
I suppose every editor if he's worth anything has to have some
kind of a mission. Every editor is a messiah no matter what they
say. Some messiahs want you to follow their path and other
messiahs--it's closer to my own attitude --simply set up a situation
so the readers or the people can make up their minds or discover for
themselves that there is more than one answer to everything, that's
all. It's a little bit of spinoff from the University of California
philosophy department.
217
IX THE CHRONICLE AND THE COMMUNITY
Newhall: The morale at the paper was great after the first couple of years.
It was very difficult to get away from the old sort of Paul Smith
golden age, but pretty soon people began having a good time because
we had a lot of fun. We had parties all the time for different
people and editors and things. When we passed the Examiner-- .
Years before I had promised the staff the biggest champagne party in
history. We had a huge champagne party. (Despite the party we were
able to publish the next day's paper.) I said, "Is there anything
you want? What can I do for all of you?"
They were complaining about the men's room being a mess, they
had an old-fashioned trough for the wash basins in there and stuff.
So we had gold-plated swans and dolphins put on all the spouts.
That seemed to make everybody happy. [laughter]
The Police Department
Riess: Perhaps a subject to tackle would be the paper's responsibility to
the San Francisco political scene.
Newhall: Well, perhaps we can set the stage for this area of the Chronicle's
involvement in political and social environmental action in San
Francisco. The stage on which I appeared, the San Francisco
newspaper stage, was one in which the city politically, morally,
socially, was basically dominated by the Examiner. The good old Ex
owned, body and soul, the police department and the mayor's office.
Now you cannot begin to exercise your own influence and power until
you either liberate the mayor and the police department, or take
control of them.
So my absolute, and I knew at the time, first responsibility in
terms of San Francisco newspapering was to knock off the Examiner' s
influence and control of the mechanics of government. And it was
not only the police department, all the different divisions, the
218
commissions and so on. It was so bad that the Chronicle couldn't
even cover a crime story and beat the Examiner at it because the
Examiner- -Bill Wren was the managing editor then- -had such a line
into the police department and the mayor's office that the cops on
the beat handling a crime story would often phone the Examiner.
Under those circumstances the Ex would have the story before our
Chronicle people could even get on the scene. It was a tremendous
imbalance .
To set about correcting that imbalance so that one could
destroy the power of the Examiner or whatever, we had to elect our
own mayor, or at least provide the city with a free mayor, a
reasonably independent and honest mayor. And through that we could
straighten out the police department. I felt that we had to
supplant the Examiner as the basic Number One influence on the
political life, social life of San Francisco. Now that's where it
began.
Riess: These power bases that the Examiner had, had to do with old Irish
Catholic ties, or what?
Newhall: Partially they were into the archbishop's office. I'm not a
Catholic at all myself, but you hear me talk quite a bit about the
church one way or another. You know when we sent Bud Boyd into the
bush we got a priest- -we wanted an honest witness to watch Bud going
into the wilderness and so on. (After all the Examiner' s "hoax"
rumpus I think the priest may have been as a matter of fact
defrocked or burned at the stake by the Holy See because he went
along on this . )
There's a great Irish Catholic influence historically in San
Francisco, and it's not particularly bad or good, you know, it's
just there. Although the owners of the Chronicle . the deYoung
family, are good practicing Catholics and very active in this, the
Hearsts--they were just sort of atheists, or agnostics or apostates,
god knows what. But the Chronicle, the deYoung family, never played
along with or seemed to take any orders from the archbishop's
office. They figured, I think, the archbishop was working for them,
they weren't working for him.
Riess: Well, what is it that makes for this old boy network between the
Examiner and the police department?
Newhall: I think most of the Examiner readers were probably Catholics and
Hearst was playing along to that.
Riess: So it is that.
Newhall: Oh yes, I think it's just- -you can't really get that into a computer
exactly, but you see the "decency," the "respectability" I have
been talking about, it all comes from that middle class, blue
219
collar, lunch box Catholic morality. The Protestant moralities,
they've got their problems, too.
Riess: Who was the Chronicle's first candidate then?
Newhall: Well, all right, the first thing that I- -forgive me for saying "I"
all the time, but anyway I had basically all the responsibility for
the whole editorial thing, let alone any other part of the paper- -
the first thing, step by step, was to bust up the police
department's chummy relationship with the Examiner. Forget the
mayor for a moment. So I got Charlie Raudebaugh, who had been an
old Examiner man, to do a series of stories on the Blue Gang, which
is what the old police department was called. The Blue Gang was
basically run by Irishmen and so on, and was supporting the
Examiner .
Raudebaugh did a series of stories and it started a
turmoil.
The whole point of it was that the San Francisco police
officers were on the take, uneducated, and so on and so forth. They
were in great part a bunch of convivial tosspots, sort of. He
started his police series of stories with the old story- -it's
apocryphal I guess, been used everywhere --of the San Francisco cop
who found a dead horse at the corner of Guerrero and 14th Street and
he had to drag the animal up the block to Church Street because he
didn't know how to spell "Guerrero." It went from there downhill
all the way. About how the San Francisco cops were amiable boozers.
I don't know, you'd have to read it. I can't even remember it all,
but it was very effective.
The Mayor's Office. George Christopher
Newhall: Then Charlie and I talked it over and I said, "Charlie, we've got to
get a mayor." Elmer Robinson had been mayor of San Francisco for a
long time. He was a Mason- -there's a strong Masonic strain, too, in
San Francisco. Elmer was involved to a certain extent with the
Woodlawn Cemetery- -although that's supposedly non- sectarian, it's
sort of Masonic in spirit- -along with Leo Halley, who was one of the
old boy supervisors.
We knew George Christopher, a popular supervisor, was going to
run. I said, "Look, we've got to be first, we've got to endorse a
good man. He's got to be honest, he's got to play it down the
middle. We can't ask him just to work for us. That's no way to go.
If we let him be honest then he's going to work for us, because
honest people work for us. They don't work for the Examiner."
Charlie agreed, and this was about eighteen months before the
election. This was early. So we got George to come in and talk
220
about it. All we pitched him was, "Look George, we're going to go
for you, we're going to really get you in there. We think you're
going to win anyway. The only thing we want to know is, will you be
absolutely independent when you're in the mayor's office, and not
favor anybody?" And this was a fact. You couldn't say, "Look, we
want you to be our boy." That would be up to him to decide. But
anyway, he said, "Sure, that's fine with me." And we came out and
really pushed him when it came time to endorse.
And as far as I'm concerned, I think George was the greatest
mayor this city's ever had, I really do. He was down the other day
at a little dedication in the southern part of the state that I had
to preside at. He had to speak along with some others. He got up
and for some reason or other he began talking about San Francisco
and the Chronicle. It had nothing to do with the affair that we
were attending.
He said, "I want to tell you something about that city." He
said, "The first day I was in the office the police chief appeared
in my office. He said, 'Now, Mr. Mayor, where do you want me to
bring the envelope?' And I said, 'What envelope?' And he said,
'Well, the envelope with the money in it.'" (This is George
Christopher speaking.) It had been the practice in San Francisco in
the old days ,
the bag man would come in with the money from off the
beats, or people who wanted favors, this, that, and the other.
George said, "I told him to get out of my office and never to
come back, and I changed the police chief, and there's never been
anything like that while I was in the office." Now he had no reason
to say all this at this southern California occasion of which I'm
speaking a year ago. But I believe him totally. People have their
friends and so on, but he was an honest man.
Anyway, George did become mayor, and from then on after the
police had been shaken up by George, more people and politicians
began coming to the Chronicle to discuss what problems they may have
had, and fewer to the Examiner . because the Examiner began changing
their publishers and their editors. They were in so much trouble.
Environmental Advocacy
Newhall: The Chronicle then, from that point, participated in or led the way
in some of the environmental planning or decisions or fights that
went on. After we published a series of interesting and
controversial episodes about the California water plan, the
freeways, the state withholding tax, we managed to get into the
pants, in a sense, of the governor. The Governor was Pat Brown
after a while. Goodie Knight was governor at first, I think, in
221
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess :
Newhall :
'53. He had taken over when Earl Warren had gone on to the Supreme
Court .
At the Chronicle we were so early on in this business of the
environment that I sort of sit and shake my head over these kids
today who figure, gee, they're the first ones on board that know
what a precious environment we have, and so on and so forth. We
really, I think, did plow, at least in terms of newspapering and
journalism, some pretty early trails along the road to a better
environment .
Riess: Yes, you had very good environmental writers, too:
Dale Champion, Harold Gilliam.
Michael Harris,
Newhall: BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] was another big one, too.
Yes, Dale Champion, Michael Harris, Allan Temko, some of the
stories they did were magnificent! Temko alone made the Catholics
redesign and redo their new cathedral here in town. It was a
horrible thing they had originally designed. And building the
bridge down in the South Bay--.
You consider the architecture to be the environment, I take it?
When I'm talking about the environment I think of things like bay
fill and so on. You're talking about the visual environment.
It's all part of the same. Oh lord, yes.
These people that I mentioned, Michael Harris, Dale Champion, Harold
Gilliam, did they start out being environmental writers?
I think it all developed. Harold Gilliam had come to work on This
World. I think, writing news stories. On his own then he went out
and began doing stories on places, you know, nature stories on
Tomales Bay, or here and there. He just had this affinity for it.
He began doing more and more reporting like this and would get his
stuff published with us or in magazines, or finally in books I
believe. Harold plowed his own field there, and he did beautifully.
Would you say that one of your strengths was allowing people to plow
their own fields?
Certainly, I tried to find people who had these many, many gifts.
And they were marvelous people. I would try to channel them. As I
say, I would try to get somebody to write about the environment or
about the freeways or about the water plan or about BART, because
this was all so exciting to San Francisco. And also about topless
bars and about crime, about prostitution, you name it. It's all
part of the city.
222
Chronicle Writers
The Editor's Job
Riess: You said somewhere that the important thing is that people "write
beautifully," and I've got that in quotes. How did you get them to
write "beautifully?"
Newhall: Well, the whole role of an editor --and I think you'll think I'm
going around the barn on this- -an editor is a vastly misunderstood
animal- -he is, or he should be, an unsung hero. In the Sunday news
magazine This World my title and function was editor. You have a
number of guys and women, during the war particularly, writing. The
successful editor, the sensible, sensitive, successful editor, is
the editor who can take anybody's copy and process it with their
knowledge and understanding-- that' s necessary- -so that the end
product expresses even better what they were trying to say. And a
day later they will be convinced that they have written every word
of it and it hasn't been touched.
Now this is a challenge for any editor. You take some of these
people who are sensitive or prima donnas, you might call them, and a
lot of them don't like to be edited. When you can have them come
back for more and they feel that everything they've written has come
from their own pen, which it has spiritually, but you've perhaps
sharpened it a little here or done this or that--.
Editing is not simply a business of cutting up a story or
tramping on it. What I call editing is the process of stimulating
or otherwise encouraging your writers --who are already great, in
this case- -to write their greatest, that's all. The editor never
gets the by-lines, he never gets any glory, he sits there. But all
these wonderful people produce. And after a while they're all in
their own mold and you don't even bother to look at their copy.
Like Herb Caen, he isn't edited really, in terms of actual
slicing here and there. I'd try to persuade him to recast or amend
some items. The idea of editing any successful publication is to
develop writers who can produce, who do not need editing or who do
not need discipline. But I've always tried to encourage them, to
excite them.
Training New Journalists
Riess: Did you hire a lot of people right out of journalism school?
223
Newhall: Very seldom. None for ten or fifteen years, because we didn't have
the time or the money to put into them, to develop them.
Riess: It's like architecture school or other professional schools, you
come out of journalism school and you need to learn to write?
Newhall: There are at least two answers to this question. In this little
paper I have in the south, for example, we cannot pay decent
salaries. And so there's a tendency to get people out of journalism
school. But it takes you six months or a year to knock the
journalism- -now I don't want to be nasty about it, because I don't
mean it that way- -but kids learn a certain routine in a journalism
school, and there are some practical aspects of living that are not
necessarily as they appear in the books. You know, the students
learn a certain writing style, so it's tough for us down there. And
it takes about six months or a year before you decide whether or not
they can make it, and then by that time the cub reporters have
learned enough so they go somewhere else for twice the salary. Time
after time after time. I'm speaking now of a small paper.
The Chronicle, we had just very little money to spread around.
I'm not defending this as being a good approach, but I felt we did
not have time or money to put much energy into training anybody or
developing anyone. We had to take people who were more skillful and
who could respond more quickly to the challenge of it all.
Riess: So did you end up hiring people away from other papers?
Some of the Best
Newhall: Oh yes, Michael Grieg we got from the Examiner. Warren Hinckle, I
got him from the Foghorn out there at the University of San
Francisco. He was a good writer. He despised the Chronicle, he
held us in the greatest contempt when he was, you know, plugging
away there on the Foghorn, but he came around. He's a bigger and
better freebooter than the lot of us now. He's the best, but he
does need an editor. And then we have some of our copy boys who
have come along.
I tried to hire Tom Wolfe to do something for the Chronicle.
but he was riding high on his way already. I tried to hire Jessica
Mitford, I tried to get her to write sports for us, but she didn't
want to go along with the gag. She's a pretty good writer. I
didn't care where they came from or what they thought if I felt that
they could indeed write some stories that would have a certain charm
and fascination about them.
Riess: Were Dave Perlman and Milt Silverman both science writers when you
224
got them?
Newhall: Milt was. He had a bad heart. He had been with the Chronicle for
quite a while. As a matter of fact I'd gone out with him on a
couple of stories, just for the hell of it, because of some of the
interesting stuff he was covering. Dave had come to the Chronicle
before the war, I believe, straight out of Columbia, along with Bill
German. Steve Fisher was a third Chronicle -Columbian. And they
developed in the Chronicle . Like Harold Gilliam, I think Dave just
sort of went off on his own or got interested in science and was
assigned it. You see, sometimes you assign good smart people to a
certain beat and they'll either develop it into something, or not.
There's no rule for any of this, really, from my point of view.
Riess: What about Jim Benet?
Newhall: Jim was an old schoolmate of mine from the Tamalpais School for
Boys . He came to work for us when Paul was there .
Riess : He did education?
Newhall: Was that it? He married Janie Gugel, I know that. Where is he now?
He's not working for us now, is he?
Riess: I think he went on into television at the time of the strike.
Newhall: Oh yes. Jim was kind of wandering around, in a sense. He was
trying to find, I think, what he really wanted. He had had, oddly
enough, a couple of minor political problems, and we had to
straighten that out for him. Jim was a good, smart boy. Some of
these kids would come to work--I say "kids," I'm sorry- -they'd come
to work, and some of them were a little doctrinaire. We would try
to get them to relax and enjoy it all.
Managing Editors
Riess: You said that somebody who doesn't get much credit was Gordon Pates,
the managing editor.
Newhall: Yes, sure, Gordon kept all the animals in line. He got the paper
out. He came to us straight out of Washington University and went
to work on This World magazine when I was editor of the World. Then
he followed me as editor of the World. Then when I became Sunday
editor and left that, he became Sunday editor. Then when I got this
last job I got him to serve as managing editor.
There was a problem, and I might as well mention it. The
Chronicle was owned by the deYoungs ,
and historically the deYoungs
225
had enjoyed a comfortable conservative Republican orientation.
Well, among all the bright young men on the Chronicle were a lot of
guys who had gone along with the Popular Front, a kind of left wing
phase, and who were really pretty liberal. They were wired in with
the longshoremen and that whole liberal scene in San Francisco.
When I had the responsibility for the paper as a whole, more or
less ,
I had to somehow try to build up a staff of people who were
apolitical or at least who were not dedicated along one line or
another in terms of politics or ideological thought. I was
interested in good reporters, not "conservatives" or "liberals."
And I did have a problem with- -possibly my closest personal friend
on the paper was Larry Fanning, who had been managing editor. We
had been very close and very supportive and so on. But Larry was
constantly, I think, sometimes confusing doctrine with journalism.
It was just an upsetting kind of factor, and I finally had to part
with him. It was a very painful thing. He went on to the Chicago
Sun-Times and we continued our personal friendship, but it was
difficult. That was when I put Gordon Pates in as managing editor
to replace him, because Gordon didn't care what any reporter was
like, just as long as he could be as accurate as possible about his
coverage. You know. Dogma did not fit in with Gordon.
Japanese -American Relocationtf#
[Interview 6: April 18, 1988]
Newhall: You were asking about the days when the Japanese -Americans here in
the West Coast were relocated. We were speaking of restitution for
Japanese who were interned. The old people certainly should receive
restitution, because so much of their property was either sold at
fire sale prices or simply deteriorated. And here was a vast, vast
miscarriage of American justice in that thing. I went and visited a
couple of the relocation camps during the war. See, a lot of my
friends were up there.
Riess: How had they come to be your friends?
Newhall: Oh, from Cal and around. But why I did it is because it was so
unjust and so improper at the time, and believe me I knew it. It
was obviously a violation of the whole American constitutional
system. You know, there were an awful lot of people who were hurt
--there's this oversimplification of everything. They say, gee, the
American people --the white American people --wanted the Japanese to
go into camps. Well, maybe they did. They also wanted the Germans
and Italians put in camps, but it's pretty hard to separate the
Germans and Italians out from the rest of us mongrel American
Caucasians. This Japanese relocation was just a local thing on the
226
West Coast, the Western Sea Frontier, whatever you call it.
It was General deWitt who ordered it. I went to see him and I
went to see the FBI . I asked the FBI , "Why are you locking these
people up?" They said, "Well, the army says we've got to." I said,
"Okay, I've one question. Is there anybody, does the FBI have a
problem with any human being of Japanese ancestry, anyone of them of
whom you have any doubts, any known sabotage, any question?"
"No, we're not involved in this," he said. "Anybody who we
have any worry about is either under surveillance or has been taken
care of long ago." So the whole thing was a put-on. It was obvious
then, but nobody had the guts to come out and acknowledge it,
particularly Franklin Roosevelt. There's the man who was
responsible for allowing it to happen.
Riess: Were you reporting on this for the paper?
Newhall: Oh, sort of. I wrote a couple of pieces, but I just felt very badly
about it.
Riess: Do you think that your pieces brought it more to the attention of
people? Was there a response to the pieces?
Newhall: Oh, no, nobody cared.
But you'd go up there to one of these camps on the backside of
the Sierra Nevada mountains and you'd see all these people's
automobiles rusting outside. They lost their cars, they lost their
homes. It was terrible. I don't know, I just feel so badly that
now it's sort of simplified down to, well, the Japanese and
Japanese -Americans were put in there and everybody else was willing
to allow it. This was a military, Army decision. And Roosevelt
went along with it, and he never should have, he had no reason to do
it. I don't know why I'm waxing so--. In the Hawaiian Islands they
couldn't lock up the Issei and Nisei because they'd have to lock up
most of the people in the Islands. It was terrible.
I can never forget it and nobody should ever be able to excuse
it. The Japanese -Americans have every right to feel as bitter as
they do. There were a couple of suits by Japanese -Americans who had
suffered this indignity. One girl back in Montana or somewhere, the
day after V-J Day, the court decided the detention was indeed
unconstitutional. Well, it was unconstitutional from Day One, not
just starting with V-J Day.
This had, I think, more to do with my basically cynical
attitude toward our democratic government than anything else that
ever happened. This was a total violation of the American "dream,"
or anything else you want to call it. It was improper, it was
terrible, and I have no respect, basically, for our government
227
decisions that have been made since that day.
Riess: Well, that's worth saying something about. Were you a voice crying
in the wilderness?
Newhall: I suppose so. But I couldn't cry out enough. I was then editor of
the World and very shortly thereafter I went over to England.
What started me on it was a story that appeared in the
Chronicle. Why I felt so sensitive about it was that among my
closest friends from Cal were the Obata family. He [Chiuro Obata]
was a professor in the art department. His son Kimio was in my
class along with Bud Neuhaus--of German descent. And then Mine
Okubo was also in the art department. She had won an art
scholarship to Europe and came rushing back when we went to war--
just in time to be shipped off to camp.
An article appeared in the Chronicle . over which I had no say.
(As I say, I was then editor of the Sunday news magazine, This
World.) This article was about how the Japanese -Americans, whether
or not they were citizens, whether or not they were Nisei, were all
here because the Emperor of Japan had decreed that the Japanese
emigrants who went to this country should reproduce and develop
American citizens in this country. Presumably these new Americans
of Japanese ancestry would have sentiments emotionally tied in with
Imperial Japan and that they could function as a kind of fifth
column in time of war.
This bunkum was an old myth put about by the McClatchy papers ,
really, in Sacramento. The McClatchy papers at that time were not
quite as prominent as they are now. But they did represent a voice
of the California farmer, particularly in the Central Valley, where
there had been historic Oriental prejudice because of the
competition between the immigrating Oriental farmers and the older
more established Anglo farmers. The older middle western Central
Valley farmers were bitterly disposed toward the prosperity that the
Oriental farm families were achieving because of their work ethic.
I can't say much more than that about it, but this enraged me.
I talked to Bill Chandler who was then the managing editor. He had
ordered me to put this story into This World. I went up to Bill and
said, "Hey, what are we running this story for?" He said, "Well,
you know," or something like that. I don't know exactly what he
told me, but I was still so dissatisfied I went down and talked to
Chester Rowell, who still had the title of editor of the Chronicle.
though he sat in a little office on the second floor. This would
have to be in early 1942. Rowell understood, and he talked about
the problem with McClatchy and the rural attitudes and this, that,
and the other.
I said, "Well, I just have to go on record with this that I
228
think it's outrageous, it's un-American," and so on and so forth. I
was really upset, because it was wrong. I don't usually use the
word "wrong," but this was wrong.
So then I began talking to the army and the FBI and I went out
and visited the Tule Lake and Manzanar camps for about a week in
each place and hung around. You know, they call them now
"internment camps" or "concentration camps" or something. These
camps were, in point of fact, perfectly decent. They were run by
mostly Indian service people; it was a very paternal, kind of
benevolent thing. But the indignity of families being locked up in
almost cardboard encampments, cardboard quonset huts, something like
that! I wrote a story about that tour.
A lot of people don't realize it, but the security forces, the
camp police, were mobilized from the inmates- -if you want to call
them inmates- -the Japanese -Americans. In Manzanar the security was
basically totally lax. Nobody really cared, but these poor people
had nowhere to go. See, these camps were basically right up against
the east side of the Sierra. Some young man would go over the fence
and head for the mountains .
Maybe they wanted to go home or
something. Nobody ever bothered to chase them or report them that I
know of. The superintendent simply said, "They'll be back in a week
or two. They're going to get cold up there camping alongside the
stream and they'll come back." And they did.
Riess: So you went really as an observer out of your own interest, but you
wrote a few stories about it?
Newhall: Yes, just an account. It really struck me how American everyone
really was, and it seemed so pitiful. I think very shortly
thereafter I went off to the war, so-called. But I will never
forget it. I talked to all the army PR guys and the FBI and the
police. It was so unnecessary and it came right down to two
personalities, as far as I could see. One was General John deWitt,
who was the commanding officer of what used to be the Ninth Army
Corps. John L. deWitt, I think it was. And Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The fact that Roosevelt would allow this to take place- -you
see, I had a great respect for him, although I think I never voted
for him- -the fact that he would allow this to take place horrified
me, because this was not constitutional. I don't care what any
stupid lower court or judge said at the time. I'm sure anybody can
see and appreciate this now. But then it was a very different
world.
Anyway, I'm sorry I got into that.
229
The University of California at Berkeley Beat
Riess: Ruth had the Berkeley beat. Did she pick up on the Free Speech
Movement, or were there other reporters covering Berkeley in the
early sixties?
Newhall: By the sixties when the Free Speech Movement came along, she had
left the paper and was no longer reporting. She was there during
the Loyalty Oath, around 1950, in the McCarthy era, which was quite
an important thing.
Riess: In the fifties, there was really probably nothing to cover in terms
of movements .
Newhall: There was the regular police beat and all that. But there was a lot
to cover in Berkeley in the 1950s scientifically, with the Radiation
Lab and the development of nuclear investigation and nuclear
development up at the Cyclotron, all that stuff. That was the big
story out of Berkeley then, the science.
Riess: And there were science reporters.
Newhall: Oh yes, but Ruth would be on top of it, really. We used to
entertain them, Seaborg and that handsome young man who came up with
the dinosaur extinction theory recently.
Riess: Alvarez.
Newhall: Yes, Luis Alvarez. See, they all lived near us. All our kids were
in nursery school together. So she was pretty much posted on a lot
of that stuff. In some respects I think the coverage of a lot of
things in Berkeley- -this is previous to the collapse of Berkeley as
a social and cultural institution- -the coverage was very good in the
Chronicle . I would hardly bother to cover it anymore.
Ruth had access to so many of the faculty members- -not so many,
but a few. She knew them well and they had mutual confidence. She
could cover it pretty easily, you know, it's not like hiring some
little kid to come in and start off as an intern over there, saying,
"Where's Wheeler Hall?" or "Where's Sather Gate?"
Riess: Where did she write from? Home?
Newhall: Oh no, no, there was a press room down at the Berkeley police
station. You float around. You come into your desk, you read the
papers, you see somebody or you hear something or get a tip, or
somebody in the paper over in San Francisco gets a lead and they
say, "Hey, what about this?" or something. You see, the news has to
originate somewhere. She knew old Dr. Birge, Professor [Raymond T.]
Birge and "Earthquake Andy" Lawson. It was a regular sort of beat,
230
just to drop around and say hello. And these guys are hustling
their stories, too, you'd better believe it.
Riess: You mean the University's information office?
Newhall: Professors. Most of them are not shrinking violets.
Charles Camp, he was one of the greatest guys they ever had at
the University. He was a very close personal friend of ours. He's
the paleontologist, used to come up with the bones of one or another
ape man here and there or Ichthyosaur. We used to go out digging
with him in the desert.
If you have a good beat reporter he is probably going to know
as much about some new development as the University press office
is, and probably earlier. Now I can't describe how, it's just the
nature of the animal. Let's take Dave Perlman. I cannot give you
chapter and verse on this, but he would have, I'm sure, a very good
personal working relationship with all the key people at the
University in the area of the sciences and so on, and they would see
each other at parties or occasions, functions, happenings, whatever
you call it. He'll say, "Well, how are you coming with this work on
the--" such-and-such a virus or something like that. And there's a
good chance that he may get what some people would call a leak, say,
or an early discussion on the matter, and will be after it. It can
develop from there in a number of different ways .
Free Speech Debate
Riess: When did you and Ruth and the Chronicle get the first inkling of
student unrest?
Newhall: Well, if there's unrest you're going to hear about it pretty fast,
aren't you, from the police?
Riess: From the police?
Newhall: Well, if there's any serious unrest, yes. But there's always been
unrest at Berkeley. You want to get into the student unrest or Free
Speech Movement? Let me say this, because maybe it will help
straighten it out. The Free Speech Movement was only a stranger,
more active example or episode of student turmoil than there had
been for the last few decades. But to me it was always very
unimportant and just a nuisance and was bad for the University. I
don't consider it a major factor in the sociological development of
the educational system on the West Coast.
But we did have to cover all these people running around along
231
Telegraph Avenue there. Then it turned Into the so-called Filthy
Speech Movement, which was I thought a bore. I don't know how to
sort it all out. This was the sixties.
Riess: You don't think that that was an important step in students gaining
power?
Newhall: What student power? What power have the students ever really had?
I don't want to get into too sharp a debate about this.
Riess: Mob power.
Newhall: Yes, to a certain extent. But the only thing I think of where they
had really true power is in a negative kind of way, and a very
tragic way. I think the killings at Kent State finally did attract
the attention of the great middle class to the fact that, "My
goodness, there is something wrong here." But a student rumpus in
Berkeley--! may be getting around and off the side- -the student
rumpus in Berkeley on the streets of Telegraph Avenue or at Sather
Gate is pretty much just a nuisance to most of the public. I do not
consider it as being a very powerful thing.
Riess: Well, if it brings out the police and tear gas and the National
Guard- -
Newhall: Well, that's because the police aren't very smart sometimes.
Riess: But there do seem to be power issues once you get guns out.
Newhall: Well, is a disturbance of the peace a power issue?
Riess: This is really a kind of cuckoo discussion because I'm here to find
out from you.
Newhall: No, but honestly, I'm trying to answer you. As an editor I did not
consider generally--! wouldn't cover the student demonstrations,
protests, whatever you want to call it, as anything more than a
demonstration or a protest, and maybe try to find out what these
kids are talking about, you know, as you would a riot at Giant
Stadium because the Giants lost a game or something. Now I'm
exaggerating, honestly. I'm sure that to anyone who was in
Berkeley, those were great days of important turmoil- -that it all
mattered and went somewhere. But where did it go?
Riess: Did the seriousness of all this take you by surprise?
Newhall: See, now there's where we depart. You come in with the premise that
it was serious .
Riess: Ultimately it became serious.
232
Newhall: In what way? --except at Kent State.
Riess: Gosh.
Newhall: I know, this is shocking to you, I'm sure.
Riess: I know, it is shocking to me, because I remember helicopters
overhead and people running in the streets and headlines every day.
Newhall: Were there headlines every day? I really have no recollection of
it. Oh, I know we covered it. We had a lot of pictures. There was
tear gas. I had to lay a suit on the chief of police of Oakland for
using mace, because it hit some of our photographers at one time.
But I don't think that was a student uprising.
I'm not being very sensible or reasonable on it perhaps. It
was certainly serious in that the Berkeley manifestations would have
been one among many public protests against the government policy.
And it probably came along- -when did it start in your recollection?
I really don't remember. Early sixties?
Riess: Well, the Free Speech was 1964. I came here in the fifties from a
campus where nobody did anything. So it is true that I was just
absolutely wowed by such a live community as Berkeley was then.
Newhall: Yes. Well now, you must remember, I was in Berkeley from about '32
to '36 or '37 on the campus. And there were student protest
meetings every day down at Sather Gate, screaming about something.
So this was more of the same, but perhaps on a somewhat more lush
level .
I think it was just fine that they protested. But I think I
mentioned earlier, from my point of view as a newspaper editor, I
was in complete sympathy with what these people said they were
trying to achieve, what they were after, but I considered them more
or less a nuisance in an attempt to trying to achieve the reforms
which they said they wanted. Every time you get a student protest
you have more problems in Congress with the right-wing congressman
from the Middle West, or out here in Orange County or somewhere. So
you take a step backwards, almost, because the wrong people are
protesting for the right thing. Now do you follow what I'm trying
to say there?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: And it's still the case. The minute the guys with all the beards
and everything else get out protesting something, now I know we're
going to have--. And I'm usually totally in sympathy with them,
what they want. But that's not always the best way to achieve it.
And I do not think-well, I don't know. I can't say much more.
233
I'm not trying to sound too cool or too surgical about the
whole thing, too clinical, but I think some of the--. See, you have
a Free Speech Movement, swell. Let me try to describe it this way.
That's a fine thing. People can understand that. You need free
speech in any decent, reasonable, democratic society of popular
government. I've fought for free speech all my life. But when that
turns into a dirty speech movement in which they're down there
protesting and sitting in the steps crying out, "Fuck you, fuck you,
fuck you," all day long, it vitiates I think the power of what it is
they are trying to achieve. Now I don't know if you follow me on
that, but it's a problem.
Riess: Yes, I certainly can follow that.
Newhall: Because the great number of people among whom the Chronicle is
circulating are immediately turned off when you get obscenity rather
than a rather serious demand for the rights of young people,
students, or the citizen to speak up and protest the government
program.
Riess: So you would write an editorial to that effect.
Newhall: I can't remember, I can't remember. We probably normally would have
written an editorial, certainly, and I probably could find them,
saying, "These students are correct,
pay attention. '
Now let's get with it, let's
Vietnam 1964
Newhall: I think most of this comes from Vietnam. Vietnam didn't really get
underway until about '64. When did the Free Speech Movement get
going?
Riess: In September 1964. Johnson sent troops in 1965 to Vietnam.
Newhall: Yes, okay, Vietnam, that's what we're talking about really. And
this is the student manifestation of the antagonism toward the
Vietnam War. And there were lots of other people who were
unfriendly to it, but the student protest and demonstrations did
underline it, there's no question about it. The Chronicle . I
promise you, was against Vietnam. As far as I was concerned, I sort
of had it out with Charlie on that subject, and the Chronicle was
against it from 1964 on. In '63 Kennedy was killed [Nov. 22, 1963],
so it was about '63 that the Chronicle got on it, because I
remember- -when did these Buddhist monks burn themselves up in public
down there in Saigon do you remember?
Riess: No. Gosh, I remember that picture.
234
Newhall: Okay. Uell now, any human being who has any sensitivity whatsoever,
he would open the paper and see this poor, young, underfed Buddhist
monk burning himself --you say to yourself, "There's something
wrong" --which I did say. Well, I know at that time, it was probably
'62 or '63, that's when it got bad. This was in the era right after
the French had got out. And this was kind of a big fight between
the Buddhist native culture and this overlay of Roman Catholicism,
which is very strong in Vietnam. I don't know how much you follow
Vietnam. And so you take a look at that and you figure something's
wrong.
I remember turning to Ruth, and I can't remember if at that
moment she was working on the Chronicle or not. I said "Look, will
you do me a favor? Will you go back over the history of Indochina?
And let's get this straight." When was Diem assassinated? [Nov. 1,
1963.] That was under Kennedy. So that would have been about '63.
It was all terrible there. This is where it was all going.
Ruth went through pretty much the whole history of Indochina
and we just came out with a total concept that this was a rotten
thing that the United States was on, that we were playing along with
the Archbishop or with that outfit in Rome, the Vatican, to a
certain extent. And we'd have to do something to try to calm it
down. Because, again, when people are burning themselves in protest
and so on and so forth, there's something wrong.
It was obvious that this Vietnam thing was no good and
inevitably it was going to damage our country. This more or less
prevailed in terms of our editorial attitude. Certainly it
influenced our news coverage of Southeast Asia.
By the way, on the subject of the Chronicle '
s attitude toward
and coverage of Vietnam--! don't think I have mentioned that in a
kind of final attempt to provide some fair coverage of the Vietnam
mess we sent Felix Greene over to put together some stories out of
North Vietnam- -from Hanoi. I don't know whether or not you remember
Felix, but he was an old time supposedly left- leaning journalist. A
little flaky maybe but a well-known liberal. He was a brother of
Graham Greene, the widely admired novelist. Well, Felix did indeed
get us some stuff out of Hanoi, although this was considered taboo
by my old friends of the establishment crowd. And I was very
pleased we could do this. I cannot recall exactly when this was,
but I imagine it was during the days when Jane Fonda was having such
a hard time because of her ties with North Vietnam.
I've got off the students a little bit, but then the students
came along and the whole country caught fire. And they did! It was
very important, the part the students did play as a group, as again
culminating in this horrible Kent State thing [May 4, 1970]. The
country caught fire and then we went through these horrible years of
Vietnam and Johnson and then Nixon.
235
Covering the Free Spirits
Riess: Then how about the hippies in San Francisco?
Newhall: Well, that's a slightly different story from the student protests.
Even I will give the student protests a few marks above that. We
went along with it.
Riess: But how that was all reported, the Haight-Ashbury, and "love-ins"
and so on, must have been influenced by the Chronicle' s attitude.
Newhall: The hippies I think we covered in pretty much an objective, almost
affectionate or permissive way. Certainly my own attitude and
involvement in this- -I've always been one to rebel, or not rebel, to
examine the establishment, the current mode of thought--! thought
this country needed a good shaking up.
Then you get the next phase, the homosexual revolution or
whatever you want to call it. San Francisco has been a little bit
in the forefront of all this, the hippies and AIDS and all these
things. I don't know what response you're looking for, what you
want me to say now, what you want me to discuss.
Riess: I am interested in the role taken by the daily paper in a city where
so many trend stories break.
Newhall: A lot of these stories break in San Francisco because --again, I
think we discussed it earlier- -traditionally San Francisco has been
a very wide-open, permissive city. So many of these if you want to
call them free souls or kooks or whatever you want to call them- -
come out here because they can express themselves, and find a lot of
fellow free souls or freaky friends. In all of history, San
Francisco has been one of the greatest free rides that has
incorporated itself as a city.
Editorially, I have always felt that everyone should be free to
express himself without any particular restraint as long as he
doesn't bother the neighbors. Or, as they say, you can do it in the
streets as long as you don't frighten the horses.
I*
Newhall: Well, after a while all the free souls came out here and they were
given so much free rein that things got a little out of hand, to the
point of boredom. I'm not sure that all this early San Francisco
permissiveness and the freedom of the American youth or the American
people from the shackles of traditions has all been to the good.
But I've always respected anyone's idea to express himself in any
way he wishes so long as it does not seem so unbalanced as to be a
danger to so-called Society with a capital S.
236
'Mirroring" Society
Riess: You just reported it, you weren't making judgments about it.
Newhall: Not really. I didn't want to be antagonistic, or unsympathetic,
because so many people I knew were involved in it, and I thought
they had a right to their soap box, just as Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon after him had a right to their soap box.
Riess: I think you were quoted, maybe in the Berkeley Barb, as saying, "The
Chronicle's policy is to keep the establishment anesthetized so they
won't feel the pain as we stick in the needle and give them a
transfusion." But a lot of people would say that you were the
establishment .
Newhall: Well, I know it, but the people who say we were the establishment
are not very sophisticated.
Riess: So you were the enlightened opposition.
Newhall: Well again, we weren't shooting for- -I don't know, if you're going
to divide our society into sort of two camps, we weren't shooting
for either one. We were trying to establish an environment in which
both could operate and put forth their own arguments, their own
sentiments. We were, after all, a newspaper. I've been speaking
very much in a sense today of being a partisan, a protagonist and
all this. But our function as a newspaper in a sense was to try to
mirror what the people, what society, what the establishment or non-
establishment are doing.
I just know that all the major metropolitan papers in the
United States of America more or less go down the same trail, hand-
in-hand- -and an example is Vietnam. Don't let any of these high-
powered editors do anything except apologize for the way they went
along with Vietnam.
I forget how I started this sentence, or what I was going to
say, but- -oh yes, I feel if all the major newspapers, or most of
them, the big, heavy, traditional papers are going along one road,
there is something wrong. That was basically the Chronicle' s
attitude, unspoken, unwritten, unmentioned. And it is one reason
why, among these major papers and, in a sense, academic enclaves in
schools and so on, the Chronicle has always been considered more or
less a maverick, unpredictable and probably untrustworthy- -and in
the end unworthy. But anyway, that is the genesis of a lot of it.
Riess: San Francisco, you said a few minutes ago, is a maverick community,
and the newspaper I guess is mirroring this.
Newhall: That's right, because I love San Francisco, and was brought up in
237
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
San Francisco. To me it is still the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
No, well maybe not still, but until ten years ago it was the Kingdom
of Heaven on earth. I thought it was a good city, if the word
"good" can be used in such a- -it was a fair city to its citizens.
People had a chance to go about their miserable, personal business
without being bothered. Now unfortunately there are all these
pressures on from all these traditional establishment groups out
here which include labor unions, chamber of commerce, the students,
the filthy speech people, the homosexuals, the yuppies, the flower
children. You know, they're trying to mold everybody else in San
Francisco into their own pattern.
I'm speaking of this now just as if I were functioning on the
Chronicle as an editor.
What do you mean? Rather than what?
Well, I don't know. But this was my role as a newspaper editor.
Yes, but you were true to yourself.
Oh yes, sure. I mean, I think so, yes. I tried to be.
The University, a Force for Democracy
Riess: You were a Berkeley Fellow, which is a very fine thing to be.
Newhall: I think so. They made a mistake in granting me that distinction,
but anyway, I have always been honored by it. They should have made
Ruth a Berkeley Fellow--! tried to tell that to Jim Hart one time--
and not me. But anyway.
Riess: Along with some of the other Fellows you spoke at Sather Gate to
appeal for an end to violence on May 23, 1969.
Newhall: Yes, I got it going. I felt that the different organisms of the
University were hurting their own University. We were discussing
this a little earlier. I thought the students were overdoing it,
getting out of hand, that they were hurting the University. Whether
or not I agreed with them, with these people who were making these
rather serious protests or noisy protests, they were holding the
University up to either contempt or ridicule, scorn or obloquy or
something like that. And that was not good for the University if
Cal was going to maintain its position as the premiere, or one of
the premiere, intellectual influences in the United States of
America.
Riess: So this is a way in which you're a conservative at heart.
238
Newhall: I guess that's conservative, I don't know.
Riess: Well, holding onto the institutions.
Newhall: Well, I've said earlier, certainly when we were discussing Cal, I
owe to the University of California one way or another, generally
speaking, my whole intellectual, spiritual attitude toward the world
and enjoyment of life. I'm not saying I learned anything, but I
absorbed a lot of things there. And to me the University of
California, along with some others, including Michigan maybe, and I
suppose Harvard, and to a certain extent Yale, you know the crowd,
Stanford in kind of a parvenu way- -I think the University of
California is one of the truly great forces for democracy and for
the perpetuation of the concept of the dignity of the individual
that functions in the United States.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Riess: The Bay Guardian--! read somewhere that it was begun with the
support of a wealthy San Francisco heir to a shipping fortune. Who
might that have been?
Newhall: Bill Roth, maybe. It sounds like a cliche description of Bill Roth.
His mother, you know, was Lurline Matson.
An "heir to a wealthy San Francisco shipping company" can only
be one of the Roths or one of the Dollars . I imagine probably it
was Bill Roth, but that's totally a guess.
.
Riess: Bruce Brugmann--did you know him personally before?
Newhall: No.
Riess: I wondered if in some way he was an idealist and an admirable
fellow.
Newhall: You'll hear all kinds of things about him.
Riess: From you?
Newhall: No, no. From everybody.
Riess: Well, I'd like to hear things about him from you. Was he someone
who under ordinary circumstances you would have embraced?
Newhall: No, he's not bright enough.
239
[pause]
Newhall: I didn't mean to stop the conversation with that. And I want to be
quite fair to Bruce. From my point of view- -let me know, did you
want me to talk about Bruce a little bit?
Riess: I'd like to hear about the Bay Guardian and Bruce Brugmann.
Newhall: All right. Bruce came out and started the Bay Guardian [1966]. He
rattled the tambourine and blew the bugle and sounded the gun for
reform and this, that, and the other- -for fighting the
establishment, the Chronicle and the Examiner and everybody else,
"the PG&E and so on are all in bed together," and this stuff. It's
the old, old gag that everybody comes up with when they're going to
start a San Francisco paper and become the champion of the people.
Brugmann left Minnesota or Wisconsin or wherever it was
[University of Nebraska]--! want to be very fair, I have been told
that he left there under some kind of a cloud which I think upon
examination will not prove to be quite as serious as some people
would like it to be.* I forget what it was, cribbing papers or
plagiarizing or something, you know, a little deal, not significant.
And he came out here and he made this big rumpus, you know, hocus-
pocus about setting up his Bay Guardian. And this was going to
rattle the cup, blow the whistle and so on, on the rotten
establishment in San Francisco.
And the problem with Brugmann is he never put out a very good
paper. All the professional newspaper people I've ever talked to or
who have talked to me about it- -I never paid any attention to the
Guardian. I doubt that I read one copy in my life, maybe two. I
read where he covered a story I was involved with. Bruce tends to
oversimplify things, to look for villains and to set them up like in
the shooting gallery. He creates the villains and then he shoots
them down, sort of like that. And he did not have the respect of
much of any newspaperman- -I'm sorry to put this down, but I said I
would be frank. So my opinion was he did not have the respect of
his peers in San Francisco or California.
It's the one paper in town, I think, that either threw out the
*"At the University of Nebraska, where he edited the student
newspaper during the McCarthy era, Brugmann found himself defending
in print several liberal professors under fire from the American
Legion and the Farm Bureau as suspected communists. He barely
survived several attempts to have him expelled from the university
for what he wrote." p. 177, The New Muckrakers .
by Leonard Downie,
Jr. The New Republic Book Co., Inc. 1976.
240
Guild or got in a fight with it. He wouldn't in the end allow
unionism or didn't pay a union wage. He said, well, gee look, I'm
the muckraker here and I shouldn't have to pay my staff as much as
anybody else does, and so on. Bruce was suffering from a kind of
dichotomy, you know.
All I'm saying in general is, I think it's better to have
something like the Bay Guardian, even with Bruce Brugmann in control
of it, than not have it. It never bothered me. As I say, I never
read the thing.
Riess: Municipalizing PG&E, was that a story that he created?
Newhall: Well, you realize, that story had been raised by every newspaper in
San Francisco starting in the twenties. It's probably the oldest
story that has ever been covered, I mean really. I think probably
the Chronicle tried to blow it down or something at one time,
although I may be wrong. But it was widely known. Oh, it's the
granddaddy of all reforming cliches, this particular story. And in
my term as an editor or a reporter on the Chronicle . no newspaperman
ever came to me and said, "Gee, here's a great story, let's do
something on it," because it had all been done.
And the city I suppose still continues to buy its power in this
sort of strange arrangement, and their water--! don't know, they got
the water I guess themselves, but it was the power deal with PG&E.
And I notice this all coming up again now. It comes up again and
again- -every fifteen or twenty years. I don't think any San
Franciscan gives a damn where his power or water comes from, as long
as it's not coming out of his pocket. Well now, Bruce and his
people for example would say, it is coming out of your pocket
because they're charging too much for it because of this ungodly and
devilish alliance.
Riess: By his raising these questions did he have a positive effect on the
news?
Newhall: Well, I guess the question if I could translate it- -did the fact
that he was publisher possibly improve the quality of coverage of
the other papers? Is that what you have in mind?
Riess: Yes, sure, that's a fine question, yes. [laughs]
Newhall: I think so. As I said earlier, I think the city is net ahead having
a paper like the Guardian- -however . I'm sorry it's not a better
paper- -in existence. Because I do think a little loud-mouth
criticism tends to keep some publishers a tiny bit more honest than
they might otherwise be. I have no objection to it at all.
I have serious doubts about good old Bruce' s, I don't know,
techniques or something. Because he covered one or two stories I've
241
been involved in, and I think he was very, very unprofessional about
it, I really do. Some people have described him as a fake sort of
reformer, a fake muckraker. Who's he in it for? The people, the
Guardian, or for Bruce Brugmann? I don't know. But he's more
complex than just that, too. He's out there to prove something.
Riess: One of his Bay Guardian stories had to do with real estate
development in San Francisco, charging that the Chronicle didn't
come out strongly against it.
Newhall: When was this?
Riess: In the sixties. Because there was such extensive real estate
holding on the part of the Chronicle -
Examiner .
*
Newhall: I was not aware of it at that time, and I'm astonished. Because if
any newspaper ever came out on behalf of keeping some sanity and
attractiveness in the environment, including your real estate
development and building, not only private housing but public works,
it was the Chronicle. I think we had a magnificent record on that.
I don't quite understand it.
Riess: Well, that was one of his campaigns apparently.
Newhall: Do you remember what areas were involved? Is it downtown he's
talking about? I really am puzzled.
Riess: He also tackled the joint operating agreement and won $500,000
apparently.
Newhall: I don't know why they paid him off. Really, I don't. But I think
they figured it was just going to cost too much to keep fighting and
fighting and fighting it, so they paid him off, I believe, and then
he could keep his paper afloat for a while . Did you want me to
speak about that in some greater detail? Because I left about then.
Riess: I thought maybe it was mixed in with Charles Thieriot's having to go
to the anti- trust and monopoly subcommittee. Beginning in 1967 the
joint operating agreement had to be defended.
*"In the book (The Ultimate Highrise. which grew out of a Sept. 1971
Bay Guardian "investigative reporting supplement") Brugmann accused
much of the rest of the media in the San Francisco area of a
conspiracy of silence about the threat he believed developers posed
to the traditional city scale and lifestyle of San Francisco. He
blamed this on the involvement of several media firms in real estate
in the San Francisco Area: . .
.KRON/Chronicle- Examiner have extensive
real estate holdings..." p. 180, The New Muckrakers. op cit.
242
Newhall: I think the joint agreement was executed in 1968. That's correct,
but I thought this other one was after I left. I mean, wasn't it in
the seventies that he got his payment?*
Riess: I'll check that.
Newhall: I think so. Anyway, there was a lot of antagonism, of course,
toward the joint operating agreement. I know I had to appear before
some commissioner here in town. I did not get into it later on
because Charlie was handling it. I had to appear in one case, but
I'm sure they found in our favor that time. There were so many
attacks on this score against the joint operating agreement, I
honestly cannot separate them out in my mind, in my recollection. I
do know that Bruce was the recipient of a settlement which I thought
was baronial. On what basis, I don't know, why it was settled that
way. I think that for better or for worse the joint operating
agreement has somehow withstood the impact of time. And I say, for
better or for worse.
Incidentally, on the subject of Mr. Brugmann. On one occasion
while he was in full cry after the Chronicle and me in 1969 or early
'70, Brugmann came out with a story about I had been picked up by
the San Francisco police for being drunk and disorderly or otherwise
a vagrant. And one of the local San Francisco radio stations --it
might have been KSFO, but I don't think so- -picked up the item and
put it in a local news program. I think I'm a little fuzzy about
this matter because at the time it happened I was in the middle of
the Atlantic Ocean on board the Eppleton Hall paddling away on our
six-month voyage to San Francisco.
But Ruth got mad and wanted to sue. Now you must remember that
Brugmann is "libel proof"--that is, he has no money and therefore
there's no use trying to squeeze any blood out of this particular
newspaper turnip. But the radio station was a more responsible and
civiled target. So Ruth had our lawyers bug the station a little
bit, and they did want to settle this beef without any serious
tumult.
Well, I had perfectly friendly feelings with the radio guys.
* M
Brugmann filed suit against the Chronicle in 1970 and continued to
snipe at the SuperChron (as he called the two joint daily
newspapers) even after he had settled out of court for $500,000
cash." (San Francisco Magazine. December 1987, p. 95.) "The
attention of the nation's journalists began to focus on the expected
trial in the summer of 1975... but Brugmann surprised everyone. .
.by
settling out of court. For $500,000..." (op cit. p. 181.)
243
so in the end we made to settle the whole business if they would
provide Dolly- -my eternal secretary- -with a first class round- trip
air accommodation and a fancy grand tour of the great cities of
Europe .
So, as you can see, Bruce Brugmann actually does spread a
little sunshine in the lives of his non-readers.
Riess: The Bay Guardian is still coming out, too.
Newhall: You know, one reason I spoke a little bit acerbicly perhaps about
him is, he is also a member of the California Newspaper Publishers
Association. And Bruce and I have always got on all right. He
feels kind of helpless to really nail me to the wall, because I try
to be fleet-footed about some of this stuff. You can call him a
gadfly in the CNPA, the California Newspaper Publishers Association,
but mostly he's described just as a damn nuisance, because he's
almost always sort of "one against the multitude." Perhaps to a
greater degree than many of us in this business he always just
simply assumes the side of the significant- -or insignificant- -
minority. I don't know, but there is a question of professional
respect or integrity involved from time to time. I don't like to say
too much about it because it will simply be, I suppose someday,
interpreted as my personal antagonism. I don't really react to
Bruce at all, one way or another.
Responding to a Critique of the Chronicle
Riess: I should think that the Chronicle presented a very difficult target
to him. I've got another quote here that calls the Chronicle the
"only above ground underground paper in the United States."*
Newhall: That was Robert Sheer, wasn't it? I think I read it somewhere?
You know, you left this little booklet with me, The Anatomy of
Newspapers in San Francisco, by Rivers and Rubin. I thought
personally it was very fair and very well done. I have no
particular fault to find with it except in the conclusion, which I
*0ne Chronicle executive has called it 'the only above ground
underground paper in the United States...'" p. 29, A Region's
Press: Anatomy of Newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, by
William L. Rivers and David M. Rubin, Institute of Governmental
Studies, UC Berkeley, 1971. (Note: The above quote sounds like me!
--S.N.)
244
thought I might mention that I disagreed with rather markedly.
Rivers --in one of these big antitrust cases he either appeared
as an expert for the defense or the prosecution, whatever you call
it. That was pre-computer days, and somebody needed him with a
slide rule to find out how, in arithmetical terms, the different
papers had played up the foreign news. He measured and charted the
news coverage of various newspapers. I can't remember if he was
hired by the Chronicle or by the other side, I really can't. But I
thought he did quite a creditable job. And I'm specifically saying
this in order to illustrate that I do not feel any particular
antagonism or anything else toward him.
This Anatomy of Newspapers book by Rivers and Rubin, I thought
generally speaking that they were very fair in their criticism. At
least I respected their comments, their observations. I disagreed
perhaps quantitatively, but they were fair. Basically it came right
down to saying, "The Chronicle is really a successful paper and
isn't it too bad?" Now that's about what they said.
When they get to the conclusion of their study they say, "We
must await the coming of a publisher whose first purpose is quality,
whose vision is sharp enough to recognize it" --they want a new
publisher in San Francisco- -"and who works for high profits only
because they enable him to provide a more significant public
service." Well, I can't disagree with a word they say there. But
this is pretty obvious stuff.
They said, "Most Bay Area newspapers must take the second step
of disentangling themselves from local establishments ... this means,
of course, that the founding fathers envisioned the press as a check
upon government." Well, I tried to say that fifty times, fifty
different ways in our discussions here, and I agree completely with
what they feel is the problem and the responsibility of publishing a
newspaper.
Then they say, "How well does Bay Area journalism perform the
task? To answer the question, one need only look at the destruction
of the local environment, the pollution of everything from air to
human relationships, and the timidity of the press in failing to
expose the contaminators .
"
Well, I can only call the attention of
anyone who comes after us to go back through the Chronicle and take
a look at the record of the Chronicle in terms of the environment,
pollutants, architecture, city planning, freeways, the contamination
of our whole culture. And I think the Chronicle has really a pretty
good record. I agree with them, these are the basic important
things .
They say, "Not only is the press the sole knowledgeable
adversary to government, but also it is the primary source of
245
contemporary information," which again is a truism with which I
completely agree and have tried to live by.
I'm trying apparently to justify myself. I don't feel any
particular need to, but I think these fellows are perfectly smart
and reasonable. "It is especially important that the Bay Area press
recognize its responsibility," "Speaking truth to power," and so
on. Well, that's about all I had to say. I just think that they
perhaps gave the Chronicle somewhat lower marks than we deserved in
trying to achieve these aims, which are absolutely worthy aims and I
think any decent newspaperman will agree with these principles and
priorities.
Fighting Pollution and Ugliness
Riess: If you are a check upon government, and a check upon environmental
polluters, all you can do as a newspaper is just report it? You
can't go any further than that?
Newhall: Well, it depends. We certainly went a lot further. You can report
it with a certain flair, or underline it, or to a greater or lesser
degree you can call it to the attention of the public. We tried so
hard. One of our greatest, if you want to call them promotions or
anything else, crusades- -and I did not get into ones that they would
call good- -was the crusade to clean up the Roman Catholic cathedral.
They were going to build this silly, sort of cliche of a church
somewhere out there in Franklin and Geary or wherever it is. Allan
Temko alone came up with such a powerful blast at it on our front
pages that they built I think, if not the best cathedral, certainly
one of the greatest architectural institutions here in the city. It
is great.
And we did the same thing- -these are specifics- -with the San
Mateo Bay Bridge. The state engineers had planned an old cantilever
bridge such as you might find at Carquinez Strait, or early
Victorian England, and because of Temko' s and the Chronicle's front
page tub-thumping and yelling and screaming, they built quite a nice
pre-stressed concrete bridge down there, considering.
Then in the truly great fights we had, one of them of course
was with Sacramento. The Chronicle was locked in battle perpetually
over the water development, the state water plan, funneling the
water south to southern California.
We had a bloody battle with Governor Pat Brown over the state
withholding taxes, which is a somewhat more bizarre crusade perhaps,
but we lost the battle. I happen to feel terribly strongly that
246
state income withholding taxes were a drug, just a powerful
financial narcotic. The minute the worker's, the employee's pay
check is checked off, and the tax prepaid to the state government,
the awareness of the community and the burden of taxes lessens to
such a degree that the state or federal government can increase
their taxes in a painless way politically. I hope that this is
clear, what I am trying to say. I felt terribly strongly, I think
from the day that Roosevelt put through the withholding tax on a
federal level and now California on the state level- -under, I
believe, Pat Brown- -that taxing, and consequently the irresponsible
spending of public monies, has got out of hand, and very, very
badly. So we fought that.
And then we fought very hard against the state government of
Pat Brown on the freeways in San Francisco. And finally as far as I
am concerned, the Chronicle almost alone stopped at least a
furtherance of the freeway down around the waterfront. We
absolutely shot down a freeway through Golden Gate Park.
These are just minor little things, perhaps, but oh, we fought
so hard to try to hold back on much of the development down at the
foot of Telegraph Hill. In a sense there's been a great deal of
development since then in that area, but the buildings are now much
lower because of our fighting. It also has been in somewhat better
taste than it would have been. We were very instrumental in putting
through the forty- foot height limitation along the waterfront, the
buildings right on the waterfront.
I don't know how familiar you are with some of these planning
procedures, and this is self-serving perhaps, but I'll give you an
example of the public and the Chronicle, or the press. At one
point, oh, you know, I imagine in the middle sixties or late
sixties, the television stations needed a larger transmitting tower.
They had planned to put up on the top of Twin Peaks a very large,
tall tower. I was very interested in this because I felt it was
going to be an eyesore. This huge mind-boggling tower, was going to
be a danger. And why put up this huge skeletal tower?
So, and this is typical of the way the Chronicle operated in
its environmental crusade, I had them send reporters out to ask the
Twin Peaks neighbors up there, "What about this? Do you want a
tower here?" We tried to get a couple of "spontaneous" neighborhood
groups up there to come out fighting against the tower- -you know, it
is an old San Francisco custom for two or three or four people to
appear on the scene or to march into an editor's office, and claim
they represent 500,000 citizens and are speaking for half the world,
and so forth. But in the case of the Twin Peaks TV tower, nobody
gave a damn up there! And so the big television tower is up there
on Twin Peaks today.
Riess : In other words , you encouraged them to organize .
247
Newhall: I said "Look, you're going to have this tower here!" And we ran a
rendering of the tower in the paper. There was nothing clandestine
about it. But "Oh, you know." [mimicking bored tone of voice] And
these are the people, supposedly the movers and shakers. You know,
California Tomorrow or California Now or SPUR, all this crowd. They
were disinterested, so what happened? They got the tower there and
they've been screaming and shrieking and stamping their feet ever
since.
So the good old Chronicle, we sort of operated this way for ten
or fifteen years. And I think we achieved some very nice things. A
few touristy overdone things have sneaked in. One of them is Pier
39.
Riess: The other tower that was controversial was the Transamerica Building
[1971].
Newhall: The Transamerica Building- -by the time the public and these groups
of movers and shakers caught up with it, they began to protest the
Transamerica Building just because it was tall. A lot of people are
suffering under the delusion that "big" is always "bad. "
There was
not a damn thing wrong with the Transamerica Building. But not
everyone agreed. So as far as I was concerned, I don't think
anybody at the Chronicle ever came out against it much. I don't
think Herb Caen likes it yet. But that building is a significant
landmark that is of advantage I think both aesthetically and
financially to the city. Together with the cable cars and Golden
Gate Bridge, it's the single most significant landmark in the city.
Now I just got into that because not all high building is bad
and not all low building is good, you know. So if you're going to
edit a paper that's going to go after these things you have to
establish yourself as some kind of self -anointed Lorenzo de Medici
and decide what is good for the people.
Riess: And then if the people aren't thankful enough or are just dreadfully
stupid and small-minded about it, then you just become quite cynical
after a while .
Newhall: Well, to a certain extent. I am oversimplifying it, but I think
I've said right along, it's better to somehow subliminally persuade
the public to endorse something with enthusiasm rather than come out
and confront them with it at the moment; it's better to get them
ready for it. You know, you've got to get a little Spanish fly into
their coffee or something if they want to make love. I don't know
how else to put it.
248
Advertisers
Riess: You used promotions as a way of amusing people into awareness.
Newhall: Sure. We had to fight for so many things. Macy's moved into town
and the first thing they did was come out and buy up the newspapers,
as far as I'm concerned- -not the Chronicle, and we lost their
advertising for a while on account of Macy's wanted to get rid of
the old O'Farrell branch of the California Street Cable Railway
Company .
There used to be a cable car system going right down past
Macy's from the Russian Hill, Nob Hill area. And these damn fools
from New York came out here. Well, they didn't want this rattle
trap of old cable car coming up in front of the store. I think it's
the best conceivable promotion they could have had. But we fought
against it, and the Examiner, of course --this was in early days --the
Examiner as part of their approach to San Francisco journalism
wanted Macy's advertising more than they wanted the cable cars. I'm
oversimplifying it, but the need of advertisements or hunger for
advertising was certainly an inducement in their attitude to come
out and try to force the mayor to get rid of cable cars and they
were successful.
Riess:
Newhall :
I didn't realize that advertisers were so sensitive,
advertisers for your stance on Vietnam?
Did you lose
Not really. Not really. You know, an advertiser, if he's a good
merchant, he uses his advertising essentially to sell his product.
And any merchant who advertises and pays say $100 for an
advertisement and doesn't get $101 in net income back is a fool.
Because that's why he's buying the space. And in the end it's the
dollar that matters. The Chronicle ads, because of the Chronicle's
continued progress, began to make a profit for the advertiser.
Oh, we were despised. I think some cases, probably some ads
were killed. But it would have been minor. It never bothered me,
and Charlie never- -it never really came up, because Paul Smith had
fought this out.
Just as an aside, it's kind of interesting, at one point when
Paul was involved in the Salinas lettuce strike- -he was then the
young revolutionary in town- -Sherman & Clay, the old music store,
canceled their advertising in the Chronicle . The Chronicle needed
that Sherman & Clay advertising badly. The only edge the Chronicle
had, as I recall at that time in San Francisco, in terms of
advertising lineage, was that we led in advertising lineage "in shoe
stores north of Market Street," and that's all. So when Sherman &
Clay called up to cancel, Paul Smith- -he's a tougher guy in a sense
than I was, and Helen Cameron was in the business at that moment of
249
negotiating the purchase of about a $15,000 Steinway grand piano,
and Paul called up and talked to her, and she canceled her order for
the piano. So pretty soon the advertising came back. So, to be
sardonic, there is a wonderful, important, significant chapter of
San Francisco journalism.
Riess: [laughs] When advertisers chose not to advertise in the Chronicle
after the joint operating agreement, would they go ahead and
advertise in the Examiner, making some kind of stand, even though
it was not to their advantage?
Newhall: Have they tried it? I honestly don't know.
Riess: They could have, couldn't they?
Newhall: Oh, you can go in either paper. See, that was the touchstone, that
was the key of all these suits.
Riess: But it was a better deal if you were in both.
Newhall: Right. But one must always realize that the agreement would have
been totally invalid and illegal if you had to force any advertising
anywhere. That would have been out of the question.
Riess: But people might choose to make this statement.
Newhall: Well, in a practical way you could always cancel one out or not go
in the other. But you didn't save yourself much money. So it was
pretty much as you say, a statement and nothing else.
A Dianne Feinstein Story
Riess: Did you turn down any class of advertising, any kind of advertising?
Newhall: I hope not. Dianne Feinstein came in once. She pasted up a lot of
ads for X- rated theaters in San Francisco. She was then a young,
gung-ho supervisor, during about the late '50s or early '60s. And
she came in and said, "Do you realize--?" We went into Charlie's
office to talk about it. I said, "Oh, let's talk to Mr. Thieriot
about this." She said, "Do you realize how dirty these ads are?
This is a terrible thing in this city." She pulled out her little
packet of paste-up ads and she said, "Now, do you see these ads with
the chains around it in the borders instead of regular rules for
borders? These chains mean they're homosexual ads. They're vulgar
and filthy. See these borders? [The decorated borders around the
ads.] This means--" I don't know, maybe they had animals in them,
whatever .
250
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Charlie listened to it for a short while and he said, "Well,
are you suggesting that we refuse the advertising of these theaters
on the ground that they're pornographic or obscene, although the
police are not closing them up because they're illegal?" She said,
"Well, yes." He said, "Well, we don't agree," and he picked up--it
was awful [chuckles] --he picked up her handful of advertising copies
she had all pasted up and threw it in the wastepaper basket. He
said, "Now, Madame Supervisor, do you have anything else you want to
discuss?" Oh, she was really crushed.
I will always applaud Charlie for what he did, but I will say,
I felt so bad that I followed her out and I caught her before she
left the building. Or I called her at her office. I said, "Look,
Dianne, please forgive us. We all have our little styles of
rejecting advertising. Please forgive us. We love you and will
probably endorse you as long as you breathe."
It was a very informal kind of relationship we had with all
these politicians and people.
Neat to think of you and Charlie working together in quite that way.
That's funny. You probably gave him a lot of backbone.
I was surprised. Frankly, I was surprised he did it in such a
forthright way. I would have talked around it all and said, "Well,
you know we'll think about it, Dianne, but you know, homosexuals
have their rights." Now believe me, this was before the big, wide-
open homosexual rebellion or whatever you want to call it. Because
lately there has never been a greater superficial friend of the
homosexual community than good old Dianne. This was the girl, you
have to remember, who three or four years earlier had been screaming
about their ads because they had chains around the pelvis or
something.
In fact you could have used this bit of information about her.
Oh, I guess. It would never have occurred to me.
The California Water Plan
Riess: Where did you stand on the California water plan?
Newhall: We were violently opposed to it.
Riess: Why?
Newhall: Because I think northern California water belongs to northern
California. See, we were always arguing to break California into
251
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
two separate states, Northern California and Southern California,
wanted no part of that kind of Sodom and Gomorrah down there in
southern California.
Even though you had those southern California connections ,
you
didn't feel divided?
Well, how could I let any of my personal affairs interfere with my
function as an editor of a northern California paper?
I don' t know.
And
That's a rhetorical question. But I had nothing to do with it.
besides that, I think our little family southern California
interests had plenty of water. Anybody who starts ranching or
farming without a solid basic water right is crazy. I mean, nobody
was dying of thirst, unfortunately, in southern California. So why
should we send the water that we might need if people decided that
San Francisco is what they want. I'm very parochial, believe me.
And I still think, as I've said, San Francisco is God's chosen place
on earth, although it's being dirtied up at the moment by some of
his lesser creatures.
That was a bitter struggle, by the way. And we won it for a
while. But then the second or third time around the state
legislature voted for it. And the state water bonds were passed.
As a last resort we were going to organize- -for whatever it's worth,
might as well put it in- -we were going to organize a people's march
on the canal ,
the canal that carries the water south to Los Angeles ,
and have everybody in San Francisco empty his bladder into the
canal . But for some reason or another we never did quite achieve
it. But we still may.
The City's Conscience
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Okay. Speaking of the environmental issues, in 1962 ABAC was formed
and various other alphabet groups.
Yes.
Were you directly involved in any of this?
You want to know how it worked? I'll tell you. The Chronicle
became- -after we had straightened out the police department and the
mayor's office and elected a few supervisors, we had a fairly
significant influence, our own sphere of influence. Now you would
have little things, local groups of movers and shakers, that the
Chamber of Commerce would put up, like SPUR or ABAC or that stuff.
252
Riess:
Newhall:
They would be made up of respectable, public -spirited citizens
around San Francisco, for the purpose of either protecting the bay
or selling it off to the Crocker Bank or something, I don't know.
They'd be there. But as I saw it- -I will apologize ahead of time,
because I'm trying to tell this succinctly, and again, forgive me if
I use the personal first person pronoun, I--.
For a number of years many of San Francisco's decisions and
policy decisions were basically, I think, influenced or colored by
the Chronicle. The Chronicle's endorsement was really quite
significant. And the supervisors, many of them, were very
responsive. I kept in touch with all of them on a personal as well
as a political or professional basis. It's a small town, like I
said. I called up Dianne to say, "Look, I'm sorry about having your
trash thrown away," whatever. And there were some complacent
supervisors then. They were good, stern, sound San Francisco
material from north and south of Mission or Market Street. You
didn't get any of these kooks like- -I don't know, I don't want to
slander anybody, I really don't. But you know, you get poor little
Carol Ruth Silver, is that her name? You know the present gang of
intellectual cats and dogs- -these middle -married, limousine -liberal
matrons and homosexual proconsuls- -the kind of stuff who have ideas
of their own. It's dangerous for a city.
[laughter]
It is. Well, in those days we had Bill Blake and Peter Tamaris and
the Greeks supervisors and the Irish supervisors and I think there
were probably two or three Jews in there and the Italians--! think
old Mr. Ertola, Judge Jack Ertola's father. We were all pretty good
friends. Everybody got along. And so- -this is hard to explain,
because again, it is totally personal, it totally will run against
the grain of people who have great confidence in democracy and so
on. But the city ran pretty much as almost a feudal state. For
example, we could discuss matters with some of these supervisors and
perhaps on a close, informal basis. And if they were not committed
spiritually or intellectually or financially elsewhere, they would
listen to an exposition of the merits of some of these civic
problems- -at least as they were perceived by the Chronicle.
The Architectural Environment
Newhall: And we began it by first of all sort of pushing a little persuasive
power around on such matters as when the Johnson family hotel- -Mrs.
Johnson finally sold the Palace Hotel to the Sheraton people and
they put a big sign up on the roof of their hotel saying "Sheraton-
Palace." This to me was the beginning of the end of old San
Francisco, again. The Palace Hotel was part of the fabric of San
253
Francisco history, and to have some carpetbaggers like the Sheratons
come into this town and put up this ghastly sign--. Oops, sorry,
I'm off! That came later.
The Southern Pacific put up this great big SP sign on top of
their Market Street building. I don't think you were here then.
This became the biggest fight we got into. We sent photographers up
to the top of Nob Hill by the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont to show
how the Southern Pacific sign with the huge SP letters on it blocked
the beautiful bay view of all those nice people up on Nob Hill. We
came out I think with an editorial suggesting they enter into
negotiations with the Sheraton- Palace and send their sign over to
the Palace Hotel, the S-P there, because that was a much lower
profile of the hotel's building.
Well, the first time we pushed these poor SP people around,
they were not accustomed to it. So pretty soon both the Sheraton
people and the Southern Pacific- -the Southern Pacific has always
hated us or me or whatever- -but they began to listen. And SP
finally did take down their sign. And after that, local activists
and figureheads would a lot of times come by ahead of time.
Now at this point the Chronicle was doing a lot of stories on
environmental problems. Temko was probably writing then, and Mike
Harris- -you know, the BART story is another big one. We really were
fighting against building BART.
All of a sudden the community was beginning to catch up with
the peril to its environment because of some big high buildings that
were going up with not much let or hindrance and so on. And as the
Chronicle continued to make a rumpus about hit-or-miss development,
a lot of people had a tendency to come by and chat about their plans
to see what the Chronicle was going to say about it. And they did
that because if we didn't like it, the developers thought they would
be in trouble. The supervisors were pretty much responsive to the
Chronicle --to certain representations that we made. Some builders'
plans tended to fail if the Chronicle sounded off in a negative way,
or made any serious waves .
There was a system- -all this sounds so cut-and-dried now- -I had
a very good friend who is an active lobbyist in San Francisco.
(And, by the way, there is somebody, if you could get him on tape
you would hear a most amazing picture of San Francisco politics.)
Riess: Who is that?
Newhall: Dave Nelson. It would be fascinating. I'll talk to you about it
sometime.
Dave had worked for the Chronicle for years. He knew the City
Hall inside out. He knew every supervisor and mayor. He was kind
254
of a communicator, a liaison man. Didn't work for us then. But he
had worked for us in the past and he had been one of Paul Smith's
secretaries for a while. Nelson had his own office. But when
various promoters or builders would drop by the Chronicle for
guidance --and these people included John Portman, the Atlanta
architect and developer, and the Rockefeller crowd, and the Bank of
America, and the Crockers ,
and a lot more- -I would say, "Look, if
you want to present your plans and you want to get your project
through you might find it easier to talk to Dave or somebody like
him who can present your plans in such a way that perhaps your
project will be accepted."
Embarcadero Center
Riess: What's a for instance on this?
Newhall: You want an example?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
All right, the Rockefeller development including the Hyatt Regency
Hotel down on the waterfront. You know those hotels, that big
Rockefeller block, three or four buildings? Well, they came in to
City Hall to get their permits and the supervisors threw them out.
You mean the whole Embarcadero Center?
Yes, the whole Embarcadero thing, those huge buildings the
Rockefellers put up. They came to town with their plans and they
had it kind of drawn up and the supervisors said no, you're not
going to do it. Because there had been so much talking, including
on the part of the Chronicle, about the overbuilding of downtown San
I can give you chapter and verse on this one . I saw
,
we would talk about them in editorial conference. No
Francisco,
their plans.
secrets, no under the table, but we would talk about them.
I'm sorry, I've got to go back one more step. It all started
with the development, the Golden Gateway project that was put up by
--oh, I don't know--Petrini or somebody, whoever did it. [Perini
Corporation]
Wurster, Bernardi, & Emmons [and DeMars and Reay] were the
architects [for the Golden Gateway residential development, 1961-
1963]. Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill won the competition for design
and development, 1959.]
Oh, well, whoever. And we had some objection to that because we
thought there was a certain amount of "sameness" to the design, or I
255
did, anyway, have some reservations about the whole thing. Anyway,
the Golden Gateway went up, and there it is. It's okay. Not too
bad, not too bad.
Incidentally, the Golden Gateway was such a big, garish example
of wholesale design, and was so overpowering in downtown Old San
Francisco, it started me thinking about the whole problem of urban
rebuilding and how it was going to impact our fair city. Anyway, we
did an editorial expressing some doubt about the "sameness" and the
"lack of variation" in that particular architecture. And this
really got me started on- -or plunged me deeper- -into my Lorenzo de
Medici phase.
But the supervisors or the Planning Commission threw out the
Rockefellers, because here they were, a big, fat, juicy New York
target for the supervisors. I thought about it: this project meant
some billions of dollars invested in San Francisco. I had met the
Rockefeller architect, John Portman, briefly. He came in. Dave
might have brought him in, I don't remember. And the Rockefeller
people went up to City Hall and they were thrown out. So I thought
about it, and the next evening- -Portman was in Atlanta by that time
--I picked up the phone and called him up.
I said, "Hey, John, have you given up hope? Are you going to
pull out of San Francisco?" He said, "Oh, we can't handle that.
Look, we're going to forget it." I said, "Now look John, don't give
up. What can be good for this city can also be good for you. Are
you willing to modify your designs to a certain extent that perhaps
make it more attractive or a little less boxlike, because San
Francisco wants you and wants Mr. Rockefeller's money. Don't give
up the ship .
"
I got hold of Dave again. I said, "Now look, let's see what we
can do. Let's talk to Portman and find out what they would come up
with again." Their buildings I think were all one block, they
weren't cut apart. It was a real Chinese wall in the beginning. It
ended up that they did come up with some designs or variations that
we were willing to go along with. And the word got out that the
Chronicle would not oppose or criticize the supervisors for
approving the new version of the Rockefeller development. Well the
Rockefeller project went ahead. I'm not saying it is the greatest,
but I don't think it's the worst.
Riess: It's one of the greatest.
Newhall: Well, it was considerably revised from the first plan,
about three buildings and this hotel, as I recall.
Riess: Embarcadero One, Two, Three.
Newhall: That's it, yes.
There are
256
Riess: They's slim, they're remarkably elegant.
Newhall: They're better. They weren't that good originally. And that is
exactly the way it happened- -at least from where I sat.
Bank of America World Headquarters Building
Newhall: Now another one that's possibly even more illustrative of the
Chronicle's influence: the Bank of America, which has always been
our home town bank, which I've always been very fond of, they've
done banking for the family and so on and so forth, they had plans
for this big building downtown as their world headquarters.
It so happens in the block where they were going to put their
world headquarters, there was a little dead-end alley. And they
couldn't build their building on that block as long as the alley
belonged to the city. It would have to be sold to them. They went
to the Board of Supervisors, or the Planning Commission, whichever
--anyway, it ends up at the board- -and asked, please, would the city
quitclaim this alley? The bank would then buy it from the city.
But the city people said, no.
So I heard about that. The Bank of America people, for reasons
best known to themselves, sent a little delegation into the office
to talk about it. I was in sort of this Lorenzo mood again. I
said, "Okay look, this is going to be your world headquarters?" Oh,
yes," they said. I said, "Okay, would you be willing to make a
trade?" (This is when all the fighting about the environment was
going on.)
"Would you be willing to do this? Write a letter from the
chief executive office of the Bank of America expressing your
interest in the San Francisco cityscape, that you intend to build
the most beautiful building in the world, to bring luster to this
city. And write this letter in a way that will be approved ahead of
time. In this way your letter can serve as either a crutch or a
weapon for the supervisors in the future when they are handling
cases of this nature. Would you put down on paper your interest in
the San Francisco cityscape? And in return for the right to buy
your little alleyway there, are you willing to agree to some
architectural review of what you're going to do?" And they said,
yes indeed, they would.
They wrote a letter to the board, I believe it was, maybe the
Planning Commission. I forget how it went in that case. But they
sent it to us first for editing. And indeed, their petition went
through and they did build their building. And the building is
257
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess :
there today. Again, you can like it or not like it.
pretty good, but it's a big baby, it's kind of dark.
It seems like a small thing that you asked them to do?
such a significant thing?
I think it's
Why was that
I think that the Bank of America was San Francisco's most
significant, well-known sort of financial trademark institution- -
certainly in the West Coast- -maybe in the world. And I felt if we
could get a financial institution, which had a great big heart of
black stone as you will see down at the plaza there --anyway, if we
could get the Bank of America, as the premier institutional
financial structure in America, to go on record as admitting or
accepting or even urging that aesthetic considerations be made a
significant part of the approval or disapproval of a structure, that
this would have struck a great blow for beauty. It's as simple as
that. They sent the letter, and you might--! don't think I have a
copy of it, I'm not sure, but it might be interesting to dredge it
out, it must be there somewhere. To me, that was a hell of a step
ahead for protecting the cityscape.
And it has been quoted in accepting and rejecting buildings since?
I don't know. I would doubt it. But I thought it might be useful.
You see, the bank stated in their letter that they were all for
beauty and wished to conform to the spirit of San Francisco- -it's
quite a letter --they wanted to fit in, and not just build another
architectural pile. Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting. *
All this is very interesting. Are you saying about Portman and
Rockefeller that they already sensed that the city would shoot them
down?
Newhall: They had already been turned down.
Riess: They had initially gone to the Planning Commission, or to the
supervisors?
Newhall: Well, either one or both. I forget how it worked.
Riess: And they had been turned down because the commissioners or
supervisors knew that in turn the people, spurred on by the
Chronicle, would reject the plan.
Newhall: That's the idea. Exactly. We unfortunately in the past had called
the dogs out, so we had to keep politicians under control. It was
difficult sometimes. Because it's all very well to have a beautiful
city, but you also have to have a city that can support itself, too,
and to lose Rockefeller would have been horrid.
* This letter is included in the Appendices.
258
Other Schemes
Newhall: Now I must add that the Lorenzo the Great game can be a bit tricky
sometimes. Sometimes after they have feasted too long on cityscape
design the readers and the public can get out of hand. Then they
start rioting in the streets and then nobody can build anything!
The beauty of San Francisco has been that it has been built in
spurts, here and there. There is perhaps too much highrise here.
But for a while anything that was highrise like the pyramid tower of
Transamerica was a target of the half -educated mob. They begin
shooting down everything. Well, now that doesn't make sense either.
Riess: Alvin Duskin, that was a name.
Newhall: Oh, there was a guy. He was a problem. He ran for supervisor or
something, but he always wanted to shoot down everything, didn't he?
Riess: Yes, that's right.
Newhall: I'd forgotten that.
Riess: Dress manufacturer.
Newhall: I think he was the haberdasher who had a couple of good-looking
professional models or something. They were tenants of ours over in
Berkeley.
Riess: Were you involved with Ghirardelli Square?
Newhall: Oh, Karl Kortum was behind that, but of course the Chronicle was,
too. Karl, you see, was a very dear friend of Dave's. This is all
incestuous, and Karl was always pushing something along, because
Karl has pretty remarkable taste until he overdoes it. Oh, I knew
Bill Roth, and the Maritime Museum. It's all tied in. It's hard to
unscramble it.
For a while not much ever happened in town that the Chronicle
didn't okay. That's a fact. And then it got a little out of hand
and so on.
Riess: I think that's very interesting about the Bank of America and
Embarcadero Center. Are there any other projects that come to mind?
Levi Plaza and Vaillaincourt Fountain
Newhall: Oh, I'm sure there are many, because we were sort of with it all the
259
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
time. We fought, fought, fought to keep the Seawall Warehouse from
being destroyed- -that was an old warehouse down underneath the cliff
at Telegraph Hill. But the boomers they tore it down. It was in
what is now the Levi- Strauss Plaza area. And Levi- Strauss has done
a pretty darned good job, considering, I think. It could have been
so awful. And you see, much of our early pressure, publicity and
hullabaloo did result in much more sensible planning. Karl Kortum
was very, very active in inserting a little sanity into the Levi
Strauss plaza project.
Now we lost some of these environmental fights. I'll tell you
one we lost is that stupid Vaillaincourt Fountain at the bottom of
Market Street there. That's the damnedest thing I ever saw.
We got him all
You'd seen the plans for that?
Oh sure, we had Temko prancing around the town,
fired up and we couldn't knock it off.
Why did you lose it, do you think?
We had quite a lot of resistance to some of these projects because
there was a lot of federal redevelopment money running around.
Justin Herman, he was redevelopment director or commissioner or
whatever. And I don't think he was too keen on the Chronicle. The
Vaillaincourt Fountain- -you know the one I'm talking about?
Yes, I certainly do.
Temko described it better than anyone else. No, Karl Kortum did.
"It was laid by a large dog with a square rectum," he wrote. But
anyway--. It was not worthy of San Francisco. I wanted to bring
the Vicar of Brav. or at least the remains of the Vicar, back to San
Francisco. This is a skeleton of an old sailing ship that came into
the bay before '49 or before '50. The Vicar is in the Falkland
Islands, rotting in the decrepitude. We could bring it up from
Falklands and throw away the silly Vaillaincourt fountain. The
Vicar was a real '49er ship.
I have always felt this old sailing ship was an important San
Francisco relic. If we could bring the Vicar back to San Francisco
it could be set into place at the foot of Market Street. It would
function something like a shrine to our early history- -like the
cathedral in Coventry in England which was left in ruins, a very
moving memorial of the Second World War German bombings of England.
Black. Female, and Homosexual Reporters^/
Riess: When did you hire your first black reporter?
260
Newhall: I have no recollection of ever having a black reporter on the
Chronicle. Sorry. Incidentally, we had a brilliant black reporter
on our paper down south.
Riess: That didn't come up when black power issues came up?
Newhall: Oh, it would have come up. I really have no recollection. I mean,
there was never anybody saying, "You can't have one." Jesus Christ,
I was hiring black reporters down at the Signal when I was still on
the Chronicle.
But one aspect of that perhaps you'll be interested in, there
were no female reporters on the Chronicle with the exception of
Carolyn Anspacher until after she left, again with the exception of
Ruth. Carolyn would permit Ruth on the staff. Abe Mellinkoff
would not hire a woman, and it wasn't because the editors didn't
want women on the staff, it was because Carolyn wouldn't stand for
it.
Riess: Why?
Newhall: Oh, she was a bitch. I love her. I've known her ever since the day
I walked into the paper and she gave me a big kiss, and we were
buddies ever after. But no woman could get along with her. And if
you wanted Carolyn you couldn't hire anybody else.
Riess: She wasn't doing woman's page though, was she?
Newhall: Oh, there were lots of women on the women's page, sure. Oh no, I'm
talking about reporters. Now I must confess, there may have been a
black reporter somewhere. I honestly have no recollection of one.
Do they have any now?
Riess: I don't know.
Newhall: I don't either. I'm sure they do. I'm sure they've made all kinds
of a point about this so-called minority business.
This is off the subject a little bit, but I don't think we had
any oriental reporters or Asian- -whichever you prefer to call them
--at that time. I'm talking now about news reporters, outside.
There were almost solid women in the women's section, although we
had a man in charge for a while. He had to protect himself by
buying a plaid jacket and loud neckties and such. But anyway, we
started the Question Man column early on. This was back in the
fifties still, I think. And so what happens? After a couple of
months the Chronicle's Question Man was picked up by the vice squad
in the men's room of Macy's, trying to get into the pants of a
customer there in one of the toilet closets. So here the Examiner
was about to go on a story that the Chronicle Question Man- -and I'm
quoting now- -is a roaring "faggot."
261
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
I'll never forget, I had to call this poor guy in. He was a
nice man. Nobody knew anything about this or cared. This was
early. But we all agreed that he could not represent the Chronicle
publicly any longer, because--! have already talked about the
problem with Count Marco and everything. I don't really remember
too clearly the fellow's name, but anyway I talked with him and he
decided no, his future was not in San Francisco journalism. Now
think how different that is from today. And I just brought this up
because you asked about a black. Well, here's a homosexual.
I think every paper, particularly in self-conscious San
Francisco, certainly has women and blacks and Asians, you know, the
house reporters, and then some of them are probably the best on the
staff now. I have no idea. By the way, we had a lot of homosexuals
on the Chronicle all the time, all the years. Of course, they were
the best writers, but it was all a closet kind of deal.
And you didn't know it, or did you?
Oh, in some cases, I knew it, sure.
my best friends, actually.
Some of them were --still are--
What are you saying about plaid jackets? What does that mean?
Oh, I just mean he wore loud clothes, you know. He had to make
himself into some kind of a figure, a character, in order to
withstand all these assertive women who were taking over. That's
all I meant by that. He came to work with a bow tie one day, a
plaid jacket, and was growing a goatee or something. Oh, my god--
you know, he had just been a guy before.
I think that now there's a feeling that you need a black person to
cover a black story.
That's the worst thing you can do, but a lot of people felt that.
Of course sometimes it's the smartest thing you can do if you're out
to get the subjects to talk, the subjects involved in the story.
But this is a very peculiar subject: why should any editor hire a
woman to cover a woman's story, a man to cover a man's story, a
black to cover a black's story? Do you need a homosexual to cover a
homosexual's story.
Well, you need often an Indian to talk to an Indian, so I thought
maybe generalizing from that--.
That is correct. Oh, if you can get the people to talk better, then
fine.
Riess: That's what I mean.
262
Newhall: But not in a stereotyped fashion. If I was a black person and when
I made news all I ever got was a black reporter I might be sore.
Riess: Oh no, I mean, you know, when you're going into a ghetto that you
send a "brother" in or whatever.
Newhall: It helps. Sure, that would help.
"Dear Abbv"
Riess: Speaking of the women's page, tell me about getting Dear Abby.
Newhall: Dear Abby. I mentioned earlier, I believe, that I had to come to a
parting of the ways with Larry Fanning because of just sort of
overriding, perhaps psychic differences in terms of approach to the
news. We were always, and have been until the day he died, very
good friends . But he went to Chicago . He later bought a paper and
died in Anchorage, Alaska.
Larry was very popular among a lot of syndicate salesmen
because they dealt with him for years. They would come out, you
know, selling Mutt and Jeff, or Ann Landers in this case, and Jack
Anderson or Bob Allen, and whatever was available in the way of
syndicated columnists. I guess a couple of the syndicate salesmen
were very loyal or friendly to Larry. So when Larry left some of
them thought, well, this is no way for Newhall or the Chronicle to
behave. So they decided to punish us. This would have been the
Chicago Times Syndicate, whoever was handling Ann Landers.
So Harry Baker, the salesman's name was, took Ann Landers away
from the Chronicle. We'd been using Ann's advice to the lovelorn--!
mean, to me an advice column, a horoscope column, or a palm-reading
column- -an editor feels like it is fine to put one in your paper for
the credulous people or the lonely people or the housewives who have
a problem or two. But I mean I am basically indifferent to this
kind of stuff. They have nothing whatever to do with journalism,
they are simple amusement or possibly solace. But features like
this are good for promotion and circulation, like naked animals.
Now believe me, Ann Landers is no more important to the human race
than is a story on naked animals.
Hold on!--I think the statement I just made is unfair and
incorrect and could be demolished in a debate. But so be it, let it
stand. Anyway, they [Chicago Sun-Times 1 took Ann Landers away from
us, and that apparently was going to hurt us a little bit. So we
fooled around. They took away George Lichty, too. Lichty used to
do a cartoon called "Grin and Bear It."
263
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Did Ann Landers end up in the Examiner?
In the Call-Bulletin. I think, which is Hearst also,
gone to the Ex when the Call folded. I don't know.
But okay ,
she was gone .
It may have
Yes, gone, and supposedly that was going to put the Chronicle out of
business, you know, that kind of a deal. Well, Stan Arnold came in
one day and he said, "Hey, this babe" --no, he didn't say "babe,"
Stan was always too much of a gentleman. He said, "This young woman
just walked in." (I think he said that.) "I think she could do a
good advice column." I said, "Do you think that we are ready to
manufacture our own lonely hearts adviser?"
"She's pretty good-looking", he said, "and she's wearing a mink
coat that reaches from her shoulders down to the heels of the woman
next to her. She wants to do an advice column." I said, "What
makes you think she can do it?" He said, "Oh, I'm pretty sure she
can do it. She brought in some samples." I said, "Well, okay,
we'll take a look. But why her?" He said, "Well, she's the twin
sister of Ann Landers." I said, "Oh."
So she came in. And Abby is no shrinking violet, you know.
She had all the mousey humility of a kind of a hungry panther. But
anyway, she came in, she was all gung-ho to go. She said, "I can
write this stuff." We got her to do some samples, and then Stan
Arnold sort of straightened them out and I edited perhaps the first
few. They were just samples. And Gordon looked them over.
The most important thing- -by the way, this is the true,
unadorned, unvarnished story of the birth of Dear Abby, like the
birth of Venus in the clam shell, you know- -the most important thing
about any syndicate or any feature that you're going to start is the
title. You need a title people can remember and talk about.
Because it's the first thing people see. She wanted to call it, I
think, Mary Jones. I said, "Look, forget it. You can't. That's
terrible .
"
I'll think up a name, we'll talk about it next time you
come in. "
Well, to my way of thinking the only way to get anybody to read
those columns- -Abby' s columns were originally sort of slick and
naughty, you might say, frank- -was get a puritanical name to begin
with, like Chastity or Prudence or something like that, and then you
come up with a second name with some class. The name that came out
was Van Buren. I said, "That's a good name. People will remember
that. Now what do we get for a first name?" I was probably talking
with Dolly about it, or maybe Stan Arnold or our promotions manager.
I said, "Here, give me a dictionary of names." and I went through
them. There was A-b, Abigail, "Perfect. We'll go for Abigail.
Abigail Van Buren, Dear Abby. It works fine." "Oh, great!"
264
Well, Dear Abby fought this and she fought it hard. I still
have in my files a telegram saying, "Mary Jones okay but Dear Abby,
never." But that's the way the name got in and the column started.
And you know, she was an ambitious young lady. I liked her fine.
She had her own style. She's a smart girl like her sister. And she
made her stuff readable. That's all that matters.
Riess: And they were real letters?
Newhall: In the end, yes. But at the beginning, for the first two weeks or
so, you've got to fake them up because to start with there aren't
any letters coming in for Dear Abby. But she got real letters,
believe me, within oh, maybe a week or two.
Then Abby wanted to be syndicated. Usually we can't pay our
columnists too much, so I said, "Okay, but we want to retain the
rights, not only to your column, but to the title of your column in
perpetuity in California north of a line east and west running
through Monterey," I believe, something like that. Well, she really
squawked and kicked and yelled. But I think that deal still stands.
I've got the document somewhere. You know, we're good friends, but
Abby now goes around the country with this spurious story about how
she thought up the name. She says, well she had a second cousin
five generations back who was related to President Van Buren, and
some crap like that. But this came right out of our own office.
Her column- -to give you an idea of the sincerity and
seriousness with which I approach something like that- -is right in
the line with horoscopes, you know. My god!
Riess: Well, she's very moral.
Newhall: Oh, they are, basically.
Riess: Always handing out good advice from the American Cancer Society and
this and that.
Newhall: That's right. Well, she's careful to cover her tracks. She's
always got a rabbi in one pocket and a Roman Catholic priest in
another- -and despite the wise cracks, her column is supportive and
helpful to people in need. She wouldn't tolerate it, nor would we
have tolerated or published anything that would hurt or damage or
jeopardize anyone.
In the beginning, I told Stanley, "Now look, this is going to
be a local column. Her value to us is that she's writing here from
San Francisco." None of this stuff about Mary Blowhard or something
from Missouri. (These columnists love to show how big they are:
they want readers to think their letters come from all over the
country.) I said, "The letters we print must come within our
265
circulation area." In the beginning Abby's letters would be
datelined from Vallejo and San Rafael and San Mateo, this, that, and
the other. I said, "Now, no matter where they write from, you've
got to remember this: first, anything goes in any letter except for
incest or bestiality and outright profanity. But if we do happen to
get into incest or bestiality, such a letter must be datelined
Oakland." And that's the way we left it. So if you back and read
Abby's early columns you see all the dirty letters came from
Oakland. That was just for laughs.
After about a few months, maybe six months or so, Abby got some
pretty good syndicate offers. So she went off to the syndicates and
now her letters are worldwide, you know. And the column, as far as
I am concerned, is not terribly exciting.
Oh, by the way, just for the record, Dear Abby was born Pauline
Esther Friedman and her close friends call her Popo. She is also
Mrs. Morton Phillips. Ann Landers was born Esther Pauline Friedman
and her friends call her Eppie. Eppie was married to (and divorced
from) Jules Lederer.
Newhall's View of the Bay Area
Riess : Were you always ragging on Oakland?
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Oh, but it's easy. That's all. One has to adopt a certain overview
of the world, or a role. And I was simply playing a role for all
these years, and the role was that San Francisco should be an
independent city-state or an independent nation, and that everything
else is trash. And that was about it, you know.
So what was your role in the independent city-state then?
king?
Are you
Well, I once told them on Channel 4 when I lost the mayor's race,
which was a horrible affair, that I would come back some day not as
mayor but as king. But, you know, I think I was overstating it. I
have this profound, believe me, profound admiration and respect for
every ratty little part of San Francisco. This is Camelot. And the
Camelot legend is why so many people buy and read the Chronicle to
this day, because they all feel that by reading the Chronicle they
can participate in Camelot. The whole thing's a fantasy, in a
sense.
I might mention, because it sort of ties in here, the
circulation aims of the Chronicle. The Chronicle is aimed at a
circulation area not in a linear geographic area around the San
Francisco Bay, but in a demographical and topographical way. This
266
paper basically, when I was there, was edited for people living--!
think I mentioned it in passing once- -between about 150 feet up to
about 2,000 feet in altitude, on the grounds that the upper middle
class or middle middle class and the upper class all live above 100
feet in altitude, above sea level. I don't know where you live.
Riess: I live below that.
Newhall: Do you? Where do you live?
Riess: I live on The Alameda in north Berkeley.
Newhall: Well hell, that's over 250 feet, I think.
Riess: I'm not at all sure about that.
Newhall: Well, it's close.
Riess: In other words, you were not writing it for Albany.
Newhall: Well, certainly for a good part of Albany --certainly for The
Alameda, I mean really. I think you're higher than you think you
are.
Riess: Well, thank you.
Newhall: Yes. I mean, in altitude. I know our place was about 1,200 or
1,800 feet. I can't remember which.
Riess: Really ? I'll have to get a topo of Berkeley.
Newhall: Take a look and see what your altitude is. And that cut through
Sausalito and the hills and everywhere. The Examiner tends to
appeal to the mud flats--. But anyway, go ahead.
Resignation. 1971
Riess: You resigned in 1971. The reasons I think we've more or less
covered.
Newhall: Yes. I really felt I'd done everything I could. And I was really
tired, I was really tired, because the stress had been considerable.
I had a heart attack, you know, in the middle of all this, and I had
to go to the hospital.
Riess: When?
Newhall: 1959. And I had to go to the hospital for a while and then I was
267
supposed to lie down an hour after lunch every day in the office if
I went to the office, which I did, and to rest and get away from the
pressure. But Charlie would always come in after lunch and pull up
a chair next to the couch where I was lying down, so things just
sort of continued the way they were, bless his heart. He was very
loyal. Charlie was a character. But I had got ulcers. I was
really a mess. I started to do some more drinking and gave it up
quick, because that was horrible.
I will never forget, for the last year I had trouble with this
good leg. I had to go to the hospital and have a very painful
operation. And I was nervous about it because I didn't want to lose
the second leg at all. The phone rang and a dissident group, or a
group of young Turks, insisted on coming out and discussing
Chronicle problems about two or three days after the operation.
Hell, I was full of dope, just lying there like a turnip. And I
thought, "Oh, I've had it! I haven't got the energy any longer."
So I just finally quit.
Oh, and the other- -maybe I mentioned this earlier. I was
always worried the day was going to come when I would be too
dependent on my income from the Chronicle to be able to quit. I
thought I'd better quit now while I can hack it, and I just quit. I
looked for a parachute job, as general editor or something of San
Francisco Magazine, which was a very frustrating, involved kind of
thing. It was not very satisfactory, nor was I able to do too much.
I think I spent too much money for John Vietor, who was the
publisher at the time. I had made a deal with him in writing that
for one year we could spend x dollars. But all of a sudden I think
he found out he couldn't come up with that or something. And I
quit.
Newhall's Mayoral Race
Newhall: I had to do something, so I ran for mayor. And that was a disaster,
at least a political disaster. But I had a very good time at it, in
a sense.
Riess: Because you weren't all set then to move to southern California?
Newhall: No. I didn't want to go to southern California, really. But
anyway, I lost the mayor's race, worse than Hinckle did the last
time. Well, maybe not, Hinckle didn't do very well either.
I'll never forget Bill Roth- -after I had lost the mayor's race
Bill Roth decided he wanted to run for governor of California. We
went up and had lunch together at the PU Club and he said, "Look,
Scott, you've had some experience in politics when you ran for
mayor. Did you enjoy it?'
lot of money.
"
268
I said, "No, not really. It cost me
(I would take no donations of any sort. I just can't be
beholden to anyone. I don't know how our politicians can go around
asking you to come to a dinner party and pay money. What the hell's
the matter with them? But anyway, that's political life in
America. )
Bill Roth said, "Well, do you think I ought to run for
governor?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, why not?" I said,
"Because you won't win, it's going to cost you a lot of money." He
said, "I don't know." So the damn fool ran for governor and he lost
that worse than I lost the mayorship!
Riess: I'm sure you had lots of backers, but you didn't allow them to give
you contributions?
Newhall: Oh, no, I wouldn't take a penny. How can you take anything from a
guy, and then when he comes in and asks you if you'll okay tearing
down some historical landmark somewhere, say no?
Riess: But don't you think that once people put money behind you then you
might have had more of a campaign?
Newhall: I don't think so. While I was out campaigning I said everything I
thought, more or less as I'm saying it here. And very few people
like to vote for anyone in public office who is either an
independent or wants to go his own way. They won't stand for it.
Look at these guys right now today, with Bush and Jesse Jackson.
It's disgraceful the way they're behaving and sniveling around. And
they would take money from anybody.
Riess: How did you feel about Alioto?
Newhall: He was smart, he was a good guy- -at least in all my relations with
him.
Riess: So it's not as if it was a campaign based on saving San Francisco
from the worst fate?
Newhall: Oh, from a pragmatic standpoint I didn't have that much of a beef
with Joe.
This is the story of how I got involved. It comes back to your
old friend Karl Kortum again. I was sitting around there on my
hands, unhappy at San Francisco Magazine. He said, "Hey, why don't
you run for mayor? The only guy running is Joe Alioto. He's not
going to win because he's very unpopular in some quarters"- -which
was true, he had spent most of his terms sitting in a witness chair
in one or another lawsuit; this guy was in a lot of trouble- -"and
269
nobody else is going to run."
So I filed and put together a little money to run a campaign.
The next thing that happened is good old Dianne. (And she had
announced publicly that she was not going to run.) She suddenly
held a press conference and said she was going to run and I called
her, I said, "Jesus, why don't you wait 'til next time, Dianne? You
come in here and nobody's going to win except Joe." No, she wanted
to run for mayor. And I knew she was not going to make it. I knew
I wasn't going to by this time. But you don't have the guts to pull
out, really, because you've got people who've volunteered their help
and stuff.
The next thing is Harold Dobbs comes into the race. Now Harold
had run for mayor once or twice before. We had endorsed him and
backed him strongly at one point on the Chronicle. And it's a long,
involved story, but I have been told, and I have no reason to
disbelieve it, that a fellow called Ed Reinecke who became the
lieutenant governor at one time and a chairman of the California
Republican party- -Ed had a beef with the Signal and with me
personally because we blew the whistle on him on nonsense he was
doing in Washington, D.C. as a congressman--! was given to
understand that Reinecke told Dobbs to go ahead and run because he
wanted to be sure and keep me out of it. Well, what the hell, I
didn't have a chance anyway. So the race ended up with Alioto,
Dobbs and good old Dianne .
Dobbs and Dianne split the Jewish vote, and Joe came in Number
One. I don't think he had a majority. But anyway, then Dianne and
Dobbs came in. Someone had around 30,000 or 40,000 or something. I
had only 12,000 or 13,000. So I figured it cost me about $10 or
$12.50 a vote. And that was the worst deal I ever got into.
Riess: What was your platform?
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall;
One, that San Francisco had to cut out any discriminatory
segregation policies towards blacks. That was pretty important in
those days. I had written it all out in position statements. I was
very liberal, basically, you know, I talked about all the
architectural, environmental problems. Oh, wanted to raise money
one way or another for San Francisco. I had no strings attached,
independence forever. I kidded everybody around. I ran some kind
of funny ads in the paper.
But that's what I was going to ask you, whether you did it
seriously?
I campaigned hard. I did, I think, a lot more than Hinckle ever
did. My god, every day I was going around three, four, five places.
But I didn't tell people what they wanted to hear. I said, "Of
course, we're going to have to raise taxes. Of course we're going
270
to have to do this. Don't listen to this nonsense,
don't want to hear it and they won't vote for it.
But people
But believe me, I'm not overstating it when I say if you want
to run for office successfully don't ever tell the American voter
what you really think. Don't ever tell anybody. When you are
making political speeches tell them what you think they want to
hear, and that's all. You'll get very few votes by telling the
truth.
Taking the Vows, as Editor
Newhall: During these conversations I have always been embarrassed to say, "I
did this... I did that... I did the other things." For better or for
worse I have been slipping in the vernacular of the first person
singular because that's sort of the way I saw it and the way it went
from where I sat.
Paul Smith, as an example- -Paul Smith always had to play his
part in the center front of the stage, and his unfortunate problems
left a scar on my professional, and I suppose my personal, soul. As
far as I was concerned, the Chronicle was always going to be in the
center of the stage and I was merely the center stage hand. I was a
kind of elusive working stiff.
If the Chronicle was a success, then the staff should get the
credit. If the Chronicle got in trouble, then I was resigned to
taking the blame; the credit should go elsewhere. Any blame I was
delighted to have attached to me, because I figured, well, I can
handle that .
The first thing a serious editor should do is to realize he is
not participating in a popularity contest. And he must take a vow
to not unreasonably favor his friends, and never fear his foes.
Riess: "Will I be able to keep my friends?" Did you lose a lot of friends?
Newhall: No, not many that I can remember. Long ago, the day I accepted the
job as executive editor, I felt that, like a priest takes a vow of
celibacy, I had to make a vow that my own personal social life was
of no consideration in terms of my responsibility as an editor, and
I figured that my friends must suffer along with me- -mostly suffer,
rather than reap rewards. And there have been many examples.
The most difficult thing I ever had to do was to make sure the
Chronicle ran a prominent story on the suicide of the son of my dear
friend Charles Camp. I mentioned Charles earlier in this
conversation. His youngest son, Roddy, had suffered a terrible
271
injury, actually while being a guest at a party at my house. His
back had been broken in an automobile accident as he was leaving the
party. Roddy had been confined to a wheelchair and then later on
committed suicide, and of course this just chewed up Charles
terribly. But I talked to Charles about the suicide and explained
that it was news, and of public interest. And Charles just said,
"Well, if this will benefit any other child, please do everything
you think is proper." Roddy after the accident had grown a long
beard and had become hooked on narcotics. It was a kind of horrible
"hippie" suicide.
In another case of journalistic celibacy, my own son Jon down
at the Signal- -he was editor then of the Signal --was picked up by
the sheriff for growing marijuana. We played this story right across
the top of the front page. As an editor I could not suppress news
about my family. I just happen to be another person where my family
affairs were concerned.
Unfortunately I have known many editors and publishers who will
show a lot of consideration to their peers or their friends and keep
embarrassing or painful stories about them out of the paper, which
is the most childish, ridiculous thing you can do. I've never done
that in my life, nor been inclined to it.
272
X SAVING SAN FRANCISCO, AND OTHER THINGS
[Interview 7: May 3, 1988 ]##
The United States Mint Building
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
I know from our last interview that you had an impact on the San
Francisco skyline by making the Embarcadero Center buildings
possible. Are there any other untold behind the scenes stories?
Well, I don't know. Some would probably occur to me. I know we
lost the fight on the Seawall Warehouse . I may have even mentioned
that. That's been torn down. It was at the foot of Telegraph Hill.
And that's what then became the Levi-Strauss Plaza,
about the Vaillaincourt Fountain.
And we talked
I forgot about that. I see they've turned the water off now with
the current rationing. That's not much of a loss.
But I've mentioned quite a few things. I've mentioned Allan
Temko and his impact on the cathedral and the San Mateo Bridge .
That's right. I know that there are three "savings" that are very
important that you were involved with. One was the old United
States Mint. Would you tell the story for me?
This was quite early on, for me I mean, back in the middle -f ifties .
There was a big move on, particularly by the Call-Bulletin, to get
rid of the mint, demolish the mint for some reason or other. I
think they probably wanted to put up either a hotel or a something-
or-other. The mint, of course, is right across Mission Street from
the Chronicle. It was a nice old federal building, and at that time
San Francisco was being demolished, stone by stone, granite block by
granite block.
Well, I liked all this old stuff. I'm just a collector at
heart, or a junkie. Among other things, I used to like bronze
273
doorknobs. There were some very handsome doorknobs in a lot of
these government buildings, and I remember I had a set of doorknobs
from the Hall of Justice before that went, and a big key, too- -a key
to one of the cells, a huge lock arrangement. This was the Hall of
Justice downtown on Kearny and Washington, right across from
Portsmouth Square. It was sort of like the Medici Palace in
Florence. It was one of the first grand old San Francisco municipal
temples to go. The development pirates were in on the deal and they
wanted to put up a hotel, a Holiday Inn. This noble hostelry is
still there.*
In order to get a permit to build the Holiday Inn, the
developers had to get some of the local Chinatown honchos to go
along, so they put out the word that they were really building a
Chinese cultural center. Well, Allan Temko got onto it. The
"Chinese cultural center" actually was nothing but sort of a
mezzanine in a Holiday Inn. The rest of it is a Holiday Inn hotel.
But they did go ahead with it, and they managed to tear down
this great old Hall of Justice building. Believe me, it was very
handsome. It was truly, almost stone for stone, copied after one of
the Florentine palaces. I liked it, of course, because my first day
at work or second day at work as a cameraman in 1935 I had to go
down there in the mornings for the police beat, to cover the courts
as a photographer.
Riess: The mint had not functioned as a mint since 1937.
Newhall: No, they built the new mint up on the hill there by where San
Francisco State University used to be, off of Market and Waller, up
in there somewhere. The old mint was sort of empty, except during
the war and right after the war I believe they had some Interior
Department offices, federal offices there. The city was willing to
tear it down because it was no longer a mint, but I just didn't want
to see it go because my window looked right out at it across the
street and of course I've always liked money, real silver coin.
I've always been involved with coins. I used to make coins, pour
silver bars or gold bars or whatever.
Riess: Where? You could do it at home?
Newhall: Oh, yes, certainly I knew how to pour silver and gold bars. I went
up through the mint one time quite early on and watched them pour
*Chinese Cultural and Trade Center and Holiday Inn, 1971, "a hotel
with token culture in the base." Woodbridge, 1973.
274
some silver and gold ingots. You know, five-ounce silver bars or
ten-ounce gold bars --gold is twice as heavy as silver. It's a
fascinating business. If one realizes that the basis of all commerce
and cultural concourse is money, mostly the precious metals, one
becomes fascinated with it. Of course for the moment the computers
of the world have tended to make twenty dollar gold pieces obsolete.
I hated to see the old mint go. So we just started for the
hell of it a campaign, a crusade, covering it one way or another,
getting important people to speak out on it, so-called important
people. And the Call would come out with an editorial saying "tear
down the mint." We'd cry, "Save the mint." "Protect the mint."
And in the end we won out.
Jack Shelley was still a congressman then. (I think I
discussed him earlier. He later became mayor of San Francisco.)
And he made a deal , in a sense ,
that once he got his new federal
building built- -this grand edifice is now in place over on Golden
Gate and Larkin, I believe it is --Shelley said, "Okay," he'd find
the funds to keep the mint and fix it up. He wanted the new federal
building first as a kind of monument to his period in congress.
That was fine with us, and that's the way it worked out in the end.
But the old mint is still there, and it's a museum now. There was
nothing terribly exciting about it to the public perhaps.
Landmarks Preservation
Riess: Was Shelley mayor when the Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board was
formed in 1967? That seems kind of late in San Francisco history to
discover this notion of landmarks. Were you involved with that?
Newhall: When did Shelley go in? Do you know offhand?
Riess: Shelley went in in 1963.
Newhall: It was that late, okay. He succeeded Christopher.
And I think earlier I had said that I had not been able to get
the Chronicle to come right out and support Shelley. I liked him
because I knew him personally. I think he was quite a good man. I
liked him very much. Charlie Raudebaugh, who had been an old
Chronicle reporter- -he was the one who wrote the articles about the
Blue Gang, the San Francisco Police, that sort of put the Examiner
on the defensive --Raudebaugh took a leave and handled Shelley's
campaign. And they came in together.
I had a long talk with Jack then. I remember very well I
dictated to Dolly Rhee, my secretary, a series of about six or seven
275
questions. I said, "Jack, look, it's not in the books for us to
endorse an old Democratic warhorse like you in the editorial
columns. But if you'll read this memorandum, it's about five or six
or seven questions, and if you can answer yes to all of them we'll
sure give you just the best possible play that we can." I think I
may have mentioned this earlier.
Riess: Yes, you did.
Newhall: The list included, establishing a commission to study block by block
every structure in San Francisco, to designate those which would be
considered of historical or esthetic importance to the city of San
Francisco. That was one. One of them was adopting a policy to
knock down the freeway, and not to extend the freeways. Oh lord,
they're all along that line.
Riess : Was the idea of landmarks preservation in the air at the time?
Newhall: Probably. We'd been pushing hard for it. But I'm not sure that the
city itself had taken a position on it. You see, you had these
little sort of ancillary semi-public groups like SPUR and maybe the
Downtown Association fighting on one side to knock down everything- -
and the Chamber of Commerce trying to knock down everything, because
they wanted to cover the city with Hilton Hotels, basically. I'm
exaggerating a little, but not much,
battle over all these years.
And we were fighting a lonely
Templeton Peck, I don't know if I talked about him, he was head
of our editorial page and was very active in keeping in touch with
people who might try to save San Francisco for something more than
an extra dollar on the hotel tax. There was another fight. Anyway.
Embarcadero Freeway
Newhall: George Christopher had been a good mayor. I talked about him.
George is still around and I still admire him. He's, I think, about
as honest a man as we've ever had in the City Hall. But George
presided over the erection of the Embarcadero Freeway. (I'm jumping
around, I appreciate that, but I'm going back to the Embarcadero
Freeway because this was early in our preservation efforts ,
as I
recall now.) I had felt very strongly, and we so editorialized at
great length, "For god's sake, put the Embarcadero Freeway
underground." "Don't put it above the ground, because," we said, "an
elevated freeway around the waterfront will simply be a chastity
belt around the city and nobody will be around to rape San Francisco
anymore, like the tourists."
And George felt he owed us some sort of allegiance because we'd
276
been very supportive. So he got a citizen's committee, and Nate
Owings was the spokesman. That was of Skidmore, Owings, and
Merrill, who had put up some buildings in San Francisco. I think
they had designed the American President Line Building and the
Zellerbach Building and some of those that were really quite nice.
Allan Temko was in full cry by this time and the Chronicle was
banging away at the proposed freeway.
Well, we had some meetings in George Christopher's office--!
haven't thought of this for a long time, but it was fairly
interesting. The mayor agreed, "If you can persuade us that it is
financially viable to put this freeway underground, if we can do it
financially, we will certainly consider it and probably undertake
that." Because we had to handle the state freeway people too, I
think the Division of Highways. I think Barney Booker was the chief
engineer for the State of California.
s
So there was a series of meetings. I remember the last one- -I
was going to say it was in the Ferry Building, but I forget, it may
have even been in the mayor's office. Booker had come up --this is
the chief engineer, and of course an engineer wants to build no
matter what. He wants, you know, dollar for dollar and all that.
He was a dull fellow but he was a very good engineer. And he made
his presentation, why they had to put the freeway overground.
Owings was speaking for all the people in the white hats ;
he
was the spokesman for the heroes. Here he was, this brilliant
architect and critic, fighting for the angels. He got up and made a
big pitch for putting it underground. You'll laugh at the figures,
because I will not have them accurately, but they'll be close.
Owings stated that for an added cost of two or three or four million
dollars more we could put the Embarcadero Freeway underground. Now
two or three or four million dollars today is nothing, I mean it is
absolutely nothing.
Everybody was just delighted with all this. We thought, and
the mayor thought, maybe we could do it. Except that at this point
Booker got up in front of the group, in the front of the audience,
and he turned to Nate Owings and he said, "Well, I have just one
question. Have you figured in the cost of the relocation of the
present utility lines in an underground freeway?"
There was this long silence, and Owings said, "No."
And then Booker said, "Well, do you think it would be fair to
say this would cost six to nine million dollars more?" which was
quite a lot of money then, and Owings said, "Yes, I guess that's
reasonable." And that was the end. Over a lousy nine million
dollars or something.
I still think today that Embarcadero Freeway is the worst
277
blight that San Francisco's ever suffered. And I've always taken
the position the freeway was going to come down. I know I gave some
interviews to BBC about that. We never quite made it, however. The
freeway is still there, but at least we stopped it at Broadway.
That was an end to that freeway after that. The original planned
Embarcadero Freeway was designed to go all the way around San
Francisco- -from Mission Creek, past the Ferry Building, Telegraph
Hill, past Ghirardelli Square, over the Marina, past the yacht
harbors and Crissy Field and hook up with Golden Gate Bridge.
Now I have to go back one more step while I'm thinking back on
the reason I got interested in the freeways and the physical impact
of these terrible things on this most beautiful, precious gemstone
of a city. I was worried about this Embarcadero Freeway and Karl
Kortum had been nudging me. Karl, you know all about him. He came
in, he said, "I have some pictures I want to show you." He had a
series of pictures of the waterfront freeway in Seattle. And they
were the most terrible, damning, damaging ugly pictures that one can
look at. The photos were made on a rainy day and the cement was
stained and all that. That freeway turned that part of Seattle into
an instant slum. They were horrendous, these photographs of the
Seattle freeway.
So we ran them in the Chronicle in the editorial page right
across the top. And I forget who did the piece that went with it.
Either I did it or Temko or Templeton Peck, I don't know. And that,
I think, probably started off the city's awareness, the Chronicle's
interest and push in terms of the encroaching environmental blight.
And from then on it spread out to buildings ,
to bridges ,
to private
structures, to signs over the buildings in the air, to the decor of
Market Street and all sorts of things. It sort of went from there
up to Twin Peaks, the big Twin Peaks antenna, which we could not
stop. And I guess it's still going on. People are still fighting
about too much highrise and so on in San Francisco. It's a very
complex and involved fight still.
Tourist Town
Riess: And it sounds like you are ambivalent about the picture of San
Francisco as a tourist paradise, and that really is its major income
at this point. If you're setting it up to be a beautiful city for
tourists and yet are revolted at the number of hotels--.
Newhall: Well, San Francisco pre-1950, I guess- -not much began really in San
Francisco until five or ten years after the war, and then it began
to go, and then it finally exploded. But you know beauty, of
course, is a very arbitrary thing. I guess no two esthetes are
going to agree completely on what is good and what is bad and what
278
do the tourists want. I think the tourist trade in the city is the
only thing that's kept the city alive, frankly. Some people might
disagree with me.
We were the so-called financial center of California, or of the
West, the Wall Street of the West. We were the tourist center of
California, except for the sort of Hollywood affair. And we needed
the tourists badly. So we couldn't turn this into another early
Pittsburgh. (I don't say present-day Pittsburgh, because they've
cleaned up their act very nicely back there on the whole.) Or
another sort of slummy industrial Boston or something like that.
But what does a tourist come for? In New York, the greatest
tourist attractions, of course, are the tall buildings, I would
think, except for maybe the theater, something like that, the
cultural side of it. Certainly not Grant's tomb or the Bronx Zoo,
necessarily.
Riess: Well, it's not the waterfront of New York, even though New York is
surrounded by water.
Newhall: The Hudson and the East River are not that much for the normal
tourists. It's not thought of as important. But here this used to
be a seaport. San Francisco is, or was, the most beautiful port or
harbor in the world. Of course, San Franciscans now, today, in
1988 , I doubt that fifty percent of them have even seen the water
and realize that it essentially was a port. I really mean that,
quite almost seriously. There are vast groups within our city here
who do not relate to San Francisco as a maritime city at all. Of
course, we aren't very big in terms of physical trade and commerce
anymore. All the maritime business has gone to Oakland.
Anyway, our waterfront used to be the most wonderful thing in
the world. I think I mentioned that early on. There was nothing
like it, my experience as a child on the old San Francisco
waterfront. Now it's a sort of a laugh with the tour ships and an
occasional navy ship coming in and out and that's it.
Riess: But you're saying that highrises are one of the attractions of some
cities?
Newhall: Yes, well, I was going to get into it. I do not want to appear
contradictory. I think highrises in their place, and if they're
well-designed, are fantastic, they're magnificent. To me one of the
most beautiful sights in the world is flying into San Francisco in
the winter when the air is clear and you see this city rising up
like a fairyland through the clouds. It's just breathtaking in its
beauty. The highrises of San Francisco may be getting a little out
of hand, all right, but it's very closely grouped, it's clumped.
And I think, properly handled, towers just can be magnificent. I do
think it's overdone a little here and there.
279
We mentioned earlier some of the buildings, the Bank of
America, how they came up with a big highrise. I think the
Transamerica Pyramid- -hell, in one building those people have been
able to come up with a San Francisco symbol equal to the cable cars
or the Golden Gate Bridge.
Riess: So you accept the idea that San Francisco really is basically a
tourist town.
Newhall: San Francisco has no reason for being a city. I think I said it all
earlier. It's a state of mind, it's a legend, it's a fantasy. I
mean, San Francisco, in terms of a city, is Disneyland now. It is
not a working seaport anymore. It is not a coffee mill town. It's
only partially the Wall Street of the West now. But people live
here because they all like to live in the Land of Oz. When I say
"they all," I mean a lot of these new people who've come into San
Francisco and who are living within a mile or two of the highrise
downtown clusters. I don't think most of them have ever been out
beyond Twin Peaks or the Richmond or the Western Addition or
anything .
The Waterfront
Riess: The tourists just hang out along the edges too.
Newhall: Yes, they've come to see this Potemkin village that in great part
was a stage set masterminded by Karl Kortum.
Riess: Well, that's the educational part of it. Then there's Pier 39.
Newhall: Karl was a deadly enemy of Pier 39. But he lost.
Outside our window now, there's the Balclutha. They just moved
it over last week.
Riess: Yes. How come?
Newhall: Well, that's where Karl wants it. There's been a big fight, but he
won. And the National Park people have gone along with that, and so
there's the Balclutha. I don't know what they're going to do about
the box office. Here we are sitting here at this window in the
Fontana Apartments and we can look out at the Balclutha. this three-
masted sailing ship which has always been a tourist attraction. The
old ship is now tied up at the end of the Hyde Street Pier, and I
don't think that the public can get out there as easily as they did
when it was tied up just below Fisherman's Wharf.
Riess: Is that the intention, to force the public to take a look at the
280
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
whole maritime history?
They're going to sort of develop a new pattern for people who want
to see that aspect of the waterfront, I suppose- -I'm not an expert
on this at all.
An expert on the Maritime Museum, the founding of it.
Well, I don't know what an expert is.
How Karl Kortum Operates
Riess: Well, you're probably an expert on how Karl Kortum gets things done.
Is this quote correct, that "in 1949 a Petaluma rancher named Karl
Kortum came into your Chronicle offices and--"?
Newhall: That's the legend, and it's true, yes.
Riess: So Karl didn't have a base down here in 1949?
Newhall: No, no. He had been on board- -look, it's all written down. I mean,
there's the Kortum version of the history of San Francisco and it
has to do with the fact that he's always loved ships. He had
shipped on an old square-rigged sailing ship.
[telephone interruption]
Karl Kortum was the son of some sort of fairly active
Democratic party farmer up in Petaluma. He came down to enlist the
Chronicle in the fight against the freeway that was going to go
through his family's chicken farm when they could have put it down
below the hillside ranch in a marsh, which the highway engineers
finally did. Karl won that one, because the Chronicle got on it
pretty hard.
Karl was caught up in the glory of these big sailing ships,
which we were all crazy about as kids. I remember we used to see
them off Bolinas running under full sail from Bristol Bay in Alaska,
the Star ships. We used to try to row out to them. My brother Hall
was the same way. He and Karl happened to ship out together in
World War II as crewmen on the Kaiulani . a three-masted bark. And
Karl and my brother and some other kids from California, locally- -
those who are still alive- -are still buddying around together.
Karl, through my brother, felt he knew me, and that's the way
he came in to see me at the Chronicle . because my brother had told
him I was also very hung up on ships. The old Star of Finland- -the
Kaiulani was the name that the Star of Finland sailed under just
281
before our entry into World War II --they sailed out, and while they
were at sea we got into the war. They ended up in South Africa. My
brother left there in Durban and Karl went on to Tasmania and Sydney
with the ship and then stayed out in the Pacific for much of the
war. My brother came home; he was torpedoed near Bermuda and spent
a week in an open life boat- -and so on and so forth.
Riess: This wasn't a working vessel, was it?
Newhall :
Oh, yes. The Kaiulani was indeed a working vessel.
Riess: It really was?
Newhall: Oh, yes. You see, any hull at the beginning of the war was worth
its weight in silver, if not gold. They threw a load of lumber onto
her and sent her out to go around to South Africa. That's where
they dumped a lot of their load, I believe. Why they would ship it
there, I don't know. But anyway, there was all this salt water in
Karl's blood and in my brother's blood and in my blood and others.
Karl came in to call on me on that basis, I guess, the night of
the election of 1948 --this was early now- -when Harry Truman was
running against our good friend Tom Dewey, a dull, pompous, boring
little man. Everybody as you may recall, although you're not that
old, I guess, figured Dewey was going to walk in there to the White
House with no trouble at all. But, of course, Harry Truman won,
much to the discomfiture of the crazy TV or radio personality,
Kaltenborn. Do you remember that?
Riess: H.V. Kaltenborn, yes.
Newhall: We were listening to Kaltenborn there and Karl came in about in the
middle of the Dewey disaster and asked me, or the Chronicle . "Please
save Ely Hill," his goddamned chicken ranch in Petaluma. Truman
just won hands down. Well, it was a funny evening for Karl, because
I think I was probably the only guy on the Chronicle who had bet on
Truman. I liked him and I was pretty sure he was going to win, so I
bet what then for me was quite a lot of money on a Truman victory.
All the Chronicle owners, publishers, and their social friends
had come by to celebrate at last a return to a good sound Republican
administration following four terms of Roosevelt madness and
insanity, you know. And my god, as the votes for Truman kept piling
up, all the beautiful Republican people floated out so quietly and
left, you know, when the returns really came in. Karl thought it
was a bad night to really push anything, so he left his papers with
me and went back to Petaluma. But from there on we helped Karl out
and started working on the environmental problems and the freeways
in Petaluma and it all ended up down here in the waterfront freeway
and the rise of the Maritime Museum on the shores of San Francisco
Bay here at the foot of Hyde Street at Aquatic Park.
282
Riess :
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess :
Newhall:
He must have stayed very close to you during that period.
Oh, we've been very close friends ever since.
I've read that you personally supervised wiring the Balclutha?
Oh, sure. Look, Karl and I were very close personal friends. I
enjoyed doing all kinds of things. I did quite a lot of work on the
Maritime Museum, their exhibits and all the politics. Dave Nelson
was in on it. I've mentioned him. He had been a Chronicle
reporter. He became sort of a lobbyist and a public relations giant
around town. There's a lot of stuff on record about all these
relationships, and they're reasonably accurate. They have a certain
flavor perhaps still of Petaluma, but nevertheles ,
they were
reasonably accurate.
Karl really did function because of his ability to manipulate
me and/or David or the Chronicle or people. He had a very important
impact, I think, on the growth of the awareness of San Francisco's,
the importance to San Francisco of its natural and perhaps man-made
beauties. It sort of all went on from there.
Yes, well, aren't we talking about someone who's saved this
waterfront area?
I think he did. I think he deserves all the credit. [Karl Kortum,
in reading the manuscript, noted that his wife Jean participated in
the waterfront battles. See Appendices.]
Karl, he's sort of --well, you can see him as being in some
other life a captain of industry, a munitions factory in
Czechoslovakia or Germany or something. He's kind of Teutonic, a
disciplinarian of sorts. He wants to discipline people into being
undisciplined, I suppose. He has this picture in his mind of how
the waterfront should look. He is able to bankrupt people by the
sheer force of his vision. Somehow he can persuade bored and rich
people to put their money up in the most preposterous Robin Hood,
Nottingham Forest kind of deals, affairs. And people will go broke.
Case in point is the Eppleton Hall. I take it?
Oh, that's one, it sure is.
#1
Newhall: Look, when it comes to saving or preserving maritime treasure, Karl
Kortum is a pirate [laughing]. Karl has told me he would steal--!
don't think he'd murder- -he will steal, rob, cozen money out of
people to achieve his aims. And as much as I love him, he has
283
achieve his aims. And as much as I love him, he has absolutely no
sense of responsibility or no sense of guilt for literally
bankrupting people.
San Francisco Maritime Museum
Riess: So once he got this notion, he gave up the chicken farming?
Newhall: Yes. He had this vision of a living maritime exhibit and museum
down here in the Aquatic Park at the foot of Hyde.
Dave Nelson, Karl, and I worked very closely together. I
participated then very actively. We had Hubert Buel, one of the
Chronicle's artists and a good friend of mine, a Bohemian Club
member and so on, draw up a sketch of the dream Karl had of this
waterfront, with these piers that curve around the Aquatic Park
lagoon at which we're looking right now. Hubert drew those up in
the early fifties, I think very early fifties And it's interesting
that today the scene is so close to what that sketch in the early
fifties looked like that it's almost breathtaking, it's shocking.
We called it Project X and we got the three or four papers to come
along on it, at least not to block it. We didn't want the Maritime
Museum to be killed in an inter-newspaper battle.
Riess: How did you arrange something like that?
Newhall: At that time I was still Sunday editor, so it was probably about '50
or '51. Paul Smith was still our executive editor, and I wrote him
some memos and he said, "Okay, go along, do what you can."
I got Clarence Linder, who was the publisher of the Examiner.
and Randolph Heearst at the Call- Bullet in. and whoever was the
publisher of the News at that time. It was probably Joe Cauthorn.
And I even got old fearless Will Chapin, W.W. Chapin, the editor of
the Argonaut. We all went to lunch up at the Bohemian Club in a
private room. All the papers were represented. I said, "Look, we
don't want a maritime museum for the Chronicle . Let's just have
this for a community deal. If you don't like it, at least don't
knock it, don't fight it." And they said okay. They were very nice
about it.
Dave and Karl were basically the pair of plotters then. Elmer
Robinson was still mayor at that time. They were able to go in and
get Elmer Robinson to say, "Okay, we'll sort of support it as long
as it doesn't call for any city money." And we said, "No, we're not
284
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess :
Newhall:
going to cost you any money." Well, in the end the city did pay
half of Karl's salary, but the city's cost was always minimal. The
museum was financed almost entirely by volunteer money and volunteer
labor.
But it was a pretty interesting story, actually. Karl was
broke then, he was just getting married. Some girl came in and
wanted a job on the Chronicle and I sent her down to see if she
wanted to help get the museum started. See, the city owned the
Aquatic Park building right here, and that was the center for the
museum. They were out begging, borrowing and stealing things and
getting ship artifacts and all that. So Jeannie went down as a sort
of a volunteer secretary in the top little office where Karl still
is.
They got married, and they had a baby, and the baby used to go
down there and live in a basket, I remember that. Karl had nowhere
to live, so Alma Spreckels ,
this old doll who was, you know, a nice
woman, strange in a way, she had this quite big Italianate mansion
out toward Pacific Heights. The chauffeur's quarters in the
Spreckels palace were down below between Washington and Jackson. So
Alma let Karl and Jeannie- -I think they were married then- -live in
the basement where the chauffeur's quarters were.
I remember one of my fondest memories of the whole thing was we
had a stag party and we had dirty films, what now are called X-
rated movies, in Alma's basement. I guess if she knew what was
going on she would have died- -possibly have joined the party- -but
anyway, we were not raided. That was a very, very bad offense at
that time .
Alma had put a lot of money into this. Karl would get these
angels, and as soon s they were out of money he would discard them.
And I don't mind saying that, because I don't think he'd deny it.
He didn't put them on a board, he didn't make a board out of all
these people?
No, he didn't want Alma to bother him. As I say, Karl ran this
thing very much as you would expect Chancellor von Bismarck to run a
museum. Karl is still dedicated and he's still fighting the world.
How was it funded then? Privately, mostly?
Yes. Alma put up some money and we all did what little we could.
You know, nobody had much money then. But we got the Balclutha. we
were able to borrow money. There was a board we sort of put
together, a hand-picked board of the museum, about eleven or twenty-
one board members. And they were people around town. I think one
of the Hellmans from the Wells Fargo Bank was on the board. Don
Watson and Eddie Harms, John Gushing-- these were all guys in the
285
maritime community with the steamship companies. We all jointly
signed a note for $20,000. I think there were twenty of us. Gee,
that was a lot of money then. And that was enough money for us to
buy the ship. Karl and Dave went on and finally made a deal to buy
the Balclutha.
Then we had a big drive around town- -when I say, "we," this was
the board of the Maritime Museum. There was publicity for this
because the city had endorsed the idea and the four papers would run
stories. We got volunteer workers from the unions and from the
maritime industry to put up stuff, and do shipyard work free, and so
on and so forth. We restored the Balclutha and got her on display
[1955]. Then we lived off the box office at the Balclutha for
years. It was always from hand to mouth.
Finally, after many years and all these other adventures, the
then board of trustees of the museum turned over the project to the
National Park Service. This was Karl's doing again. Burton had put
up his bill for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Karl
wanted to get his fleet of old ships up to the federal trough. And
only one person on the board voted to not give it to the government,
and that was I. I didn't like it. I said, "Karl, you're going to
get lost. You think you've got trouble with your board of
directors. Wait until you get in there with the federal government.
You're just going to be another one of these brown shirt, Smokey the
Bear deals .
"
Riess: Yes, and he felt that way too, didn't he?
Newhall: Well, he denied it at first and plunged ahead into the National Park
Service. And man, he has had the most horrible life ever since on
account of it. I just pulled out basically because--. It always
happens that way. Karl does not tend to listen too much at times.
Sometimes he does. So now the last ten years of the Maritime Museum
has been nothing but horrible pushing and hauling and shoving
between Karl and the poor fellows of the National Park Department.
The National Park Service doesn't take to having prima donnas.
Riess: To having Bismarck working under them!
Newhall: That's right. It was tough on both sides, and too long a battle to
go into in any depth about. But Karl came out on top in 1989.
Riess: The Maritime Museum building was here before?
Newhall: The Maritime Museum building was built in the 1930s. It's decorated
with murals, you know, I think by Hilaire Hiler. It was one of
those WPA projects, and I think it's a marvelous one. It sort of
looks like a cross between a wedding cake and the navigating bridge
of the Matsonia or the Lurline . I don't know exactly what it is.
And Karl's office is right up in that little blockhouse on the top.
286
The Eppleton Hall
Riess: Bringing the Eppleton Hall to San Francisco, was that his idea
first, or your idea?
Newhall: The Eppleton Hall started when Karl and I went out to dinner. We
still go out to dinner once a month or so.
Riess: Does something start every time you go out to dinner?
Newhall: God forbid! But he had a copy of Sea Breezes, which is a very
respectable, reputable shipping, seafaring magazine, mostly for
sailing people. And there was a little story about the Old
Trafford. which is the Reliant under another name, the last of the
paddle-wheel towboats from up there on the North Sea, Sunder land or
Newcastle. The story told how the Reliant was being bought by the
museum at Greenwich-on-the-Thames in London. And it had a picture
of it. It looked very much like the little paddle-boat that was
used by David Niven in Around the World in Eighty Days, or sixty
days, whatever that was. And it appealed to me.
Karl said, "This is terrible. They're going to chop this thing
up. That's not good museum work at all." He said, or I said,
"Well, let's go over and get it and bring it back."
Well, it's a very involved story, what happened after that. I
told all about it in a book I wrote. [The Eppleton-Hall . Howell-
North Books, 1971. ]
Riess: But you weren't dragged into that.
Newhall: Oh no, look, I said, man, that's for me. Here I will be Captain
Bligh or Captain Ahab or whatever on board this towboat and we'll
bring it over. Because I figured nobody could bring a hundred- foot
paddle steamer over anymore. So we went off and did it. Everybody
said, you know, we never could make it. So I guess that's why we
did it, I don't know. But I covered it as exhaustively as I could
in a few hundred pages in that book.
Collecting Automobiles
Riess: You've also succumbed to an urge to collect old cars, haven't you?
Newhall: Since a child I've always been a collector. And I can't explain
that. When I was a child on Bolinas Beach I used to walk up and
down the beach like a beachcomber when I was probably seven or
eight. And the first thing I collected as I recall were whiskey
287
bottles, those glass half -pint bottles, because these were the days
of Prohibition and a lot of bootlegging and rum- running was done off
the coast here. I think they used to throw the stuff overboard and
it would wash in. Some of them would be half full of whiskey and I
would throw it out. I hadn't learned yet what fine stuff it was.
As a child I know I used to collect those things on the beach.
I hadn't thought about that until recently, as a matter of fact. I
had quite a huge hoard. My mother went crazy. She made me put them
downstairs. I just put them in a bin sort of underneath in the
dirt. I think maybe somebody went down and broke them all or
something, I don't know. But anyway, I used to collect them.
And then I do remember I collected cigar bands. I used to roam
the sidewalks and the gutters of San Rafael and look for cigar
bands. Cigar bands then were very common; lots of people smoked
cigars. I remember El Roi Tan and wonderful old Cuban names and so
on. I used to paste them up in books the way people had stamp
collections. I don't know what became of my priceless collection of
cigar bands, White Owls. Anyway, I could have called off at one
time twenty or thirty or a hundred of them.
Then I collected coins, and of course postage stamps. My
father and uncle used to collect postage stamps and I remember
towards the end when things had gone bad and everyone had lost most
of their money my father and my Uncle Edwin would sit up at night
trading postage stamps. They had rather elaborate collections. I
finally sold my postage stamp collection.
Then the next thing I really got into, I guess it was coins and
cars. I've always loved automobiles. I am not by any means a
genius in the area of the internal combustion engine, but
nevertheless I loved them. They just have played such an important
part in my life, all my life. I remember in San Rafael you had to
wait till you were fourteen until you could get a driver's license.
But you didn't need a license to drive a motorcycle. I think the
first internal combustion machine I ever had- -well, no, we had the
motor wheels, Smith Motor Wheels, or Briggs and Stratton wheels, we
used to call them buckboards .
They were little sort of carts on
slats. Then they'd have a fifth wheel behind, a wheel with a motor
to push the contraption along the road. I don't know if you've ever
seen one or not.
Riess: No.
Newhall: You could lift up the motor wheel and take it off the ground, then
you wouldn't go. They're like outboards , very similar to outboards.
The same people make all these little gasoline engines. We used to
go all over town in those when we were young, ten years old maybe.
Then I bought a couple of motorcycles. I remember I bought one
288
for $11. I had a problem with my mother about that. I hadn't got a
license yet. I guess I was about twelve then. Later I bought a
Cleveland automobile for $35.
Riess: You had your own money?
Newhall: Well, I had $35. I guess I saved it or something. I didn't have
all that much money, I really didn't. But my mother made me take it
back. I remember one of our house boys had bought a Barley-
Davidson, a little one. And he drove it up to the house, a Filipino
house boy. And he skidded on the gravel and skinned up his knee. I
remember he kicked the brand-new little Harley -Davidson. He said to
it, "I'm never going to ride you again!"
I said, "Well, gee, what are you going to do with it?" Pablo,
his name was. He said, "You can have it. Here, give me $5 and you
can have it." Hell, it was worth probably $100 or $200!
Riess: That's just like the story of the horse, isn't it?
Newhall: Exactly the way I got my first good motorcycle,
parents took that away from me.
And of course , my
Then I went down and bought the $11 motorcycle and I was on my
way out to the Marin Golf and Country Club or the Yacht Club out
there in San Rafael, and the connecting rod went through the crank
case, so I left it there. But our chauffeur, he gave me a buck for
that one. It was an old single-speed four-cylinder Henderson motor
bike.
It just sort of grew from there. My father and mother gave me
some Model-A Fords. I was fourteen, I had a license then. Then
when Ruth and I were married we started out- -you know, we were broke
then- -we started out with Model-T Fords. They were old by this
time. This was about '33 and '34. The Model T's went out of
business in '27. We paid $12.50 for our first car together, a
Model-T roadster. But it had no top. So then when the winter came
we turned that in for $10 and then for another $5 we got a Model-T
roadster with a top on it. Now, these things were a mess. I mean,
they were worth about $15.
From there on up we've had, I'm sure, hundreds and hundreds of
cars. Because I've always loved to work on them. My father- -my
brother Aimer was a great mechanic, an engineer. He became an
engineer at MIT.
289
Restoring Automobiles
Riess: But at some point you stopped trading them and started just
collecting them?
Newhall: Well, I collected them in order to restore them. Some people
collect them for some reason or other, just to have them. And we
all have that collecting instinct in us to a certain extent. That's
what I do with silver coins or American colonial furniture or
Georgian silver, I guess.
When you're young and the world comes to an end financially,
and the era of Rudolph Valentino ends, and everybody sort of goes
broke, you remember watching those big sixteen-cylinder Cadillac
convertibles come by and the Rolls-Royces with Fay Wray or Bebe
Daniels in them. You see the beautiful people in beautiful cars
come by, and you think, "Gee, wouldn't that be wonderful?" Well,
during World War II cars that were old and ate a lot of gasoline
were a drug on the market. And I remember I got a Locomobile and a
friend of mine had an Isotta-Fraschini . This was before so-called
"classic cars" became so expensive, and you could get an old Packard
limousine for seventy- five bucks.
Riess: What was that other name?
Newhall: Isotta-Fraschini. It's an Italian car, I think maybe Italian,
Spanish, something like that. In another case there was the
Hispano- Suiza. Zoe Akins, a famous writer and Hollywood celebrity,
was an aunt of somebody who had married a cousin of mine. She was a
Hollywood character and she had a big Hispano-Suiza town car. It
ended up on a Pasadena car lot for $75. I got Remsen Bird, who was
the president of Occidental College down there, I said, "Hey, Uncle
Birdie, go out and get this car!" So he went running out there to
the car lot but it had been sold, unfortunately, to a college
fraternity house. I never did get that one.
So then I got interested- -and how did I really start working on
them? I had a pretty good shop. I was working at the Chronicle all
this time. (I'm jumping way ahead. I won't spend too much time on
this car business.) But this was abut 1953. I remember I had just
bought a brand new couple of Lincoln Capris--they were the 1953
model then. And I drove into this old ship chandler's shop down by
the San Francisco waterfront. The old guy behind the counter looked
at my fancy new Capri and said, "Well, I've got a Lincoln, but it's
older than that." I said, "What is it?" He said, "Oh, it's a 1931
Lincoln sedan, a wonderful car. But I can't drive it anymore. I've
got a bad heart. I want to get rid of it. I'll sell it to you." I
said, "Well, I can't afford it." He said, "Look, you can have it
for $100."
290
I said, "Look, I'll buy anything for $100!" I didn't really
have $100 then, but anyway I went out and got this old Lincoln.
There underneath a regular little house out in the Sunset, it was
parked on flat tires, in his basement. I pumped up the tires- -Ruth
came out with me --put a new battery in it, fired it up, and she
drove off. This was in about '53 and I doubt if he'd driven that
thing for ten or fifteen years. So this episode started me in again
on some of these big old cars. This old Lincoln was in good shape.
I got it painted and did some of the work and had it upholstered.
And there was a con rod, a connecting rod burned out on it. But I
was able to have the bearing reground in place, in situ.
Packard Super- 8, and Successors
Newhall: Then somehow I got interested in the Concours d' elegance at Pebble
Beach. They accepted my car to show it. I don't think I won
anything that year with the old Lincoln, but I went down. And I had
a lot of fun with it. A Pebble Beach weekend is a fine way to pass
some time if you've got a lot of headaches back in the office.
From then on people knew I was sort of interested in cars and
they'd come and tell me about one old car or another. A fellow in
the Chronicle came in, one of our reporters, and said, "Hey, this
old Chinese guy's got a Packard up on Sacramento Street in San
Francisco in his garage and he wants to get rid of it." And I said,
"Look, I'm not interested. I've got this darn Lincoln here and I'm
having enough problems with that." He said, "Well, go take a look."
So I went up, and there was this thing kind of in pieces. But
it was a big old Packard roadster Super-8, 1930. All the parts were
there. Now, the car was a mess, I mean, a wreck. But this Chinese
guy said, "You can have it." I said, "Well, why? What do you
mean?" He said, "I don't know. It was here when I bought the
house." And I said "Well, why don't you tell somebody?" He said,
"I don't want to get involved with any authorities." Well, I think
he may have been fresh off the boat. I don't know, he probably was
illegal. I really don't know. I said, "I can't do that. I don't
want it," and I really didn't. He said, "Please." So I said, "Well
look, I'll give you $75 if you want." He said, "Fine."
But then I didn't want to get it out on the street until I got
the car legal. So Dolly went down and talked to some guys in the
DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and they said, "Well now,
something like this car with no pink slip, you have to advertise it,
and you have to tack a sign on the door of the garage where it is
because this gives people a chance to come by and bid on it." Dolly
said, "Okay, that's fine." And she started out. And he said, "Just
a minute, miss." She said, "Yes." He said, "You'd better read the
291
code about this." And she said, "Why?" He said, "Well, the code
doesn't say which side of the door you have to tack the notice on."
[laughter] That was all. So we tacked the sign on the inside of
the door- -you know, for ten days or something.
We towed it away and got it fired up down at the Chronicle
garage and I got it home. And it was an absolutely gorgeous car, in
its way. I think it had quite a lot of style, rumble seat and all
that. I got it home to Berkeley, and I decided I would restore it.
I was working hard on it. I would get up in the morning about 6:00
and I would work on this car. I did all the body work, everything
except the chromium and the leather, the interior upholstery.
Halfway through it I had a heart attack. I remember that.
That's when I had a little coronary. When I got home and got back
from the hospital six weeks later, I slowly went back on that
Packard. I did the whole thing myself, the paint- -everything but
the upholstery and the chrome.
Riess: Just from the manual?
Newhall: Yes, you can get manuals. It was pretty accurate all right. We did
the mechanical work on it and restored it and painted it and so on
and so forth.
I got it down to Pebble Beach to show, and for some reason or
other one of the most exciting moments in my life was when I won the
grand prize. Absolute total grand prize of the whole Pebble Beach
show, which was a great honor for me.
From that point on I used to try to buy cars. I never bought a
car for more than $1,200 and that was an old Rolls-Royce. This was
quite early on. You know they're very big and stylish now. I'll
get into that. But I had this beautiful Rolls Regent convertible
coupe, 1929. There was a 1929 dual-cowl Stutz, the big one. And a
big old 1932 Chrysler Custom Imperial Le Baron I found in a yard
down in Los Angeles. That's a very desirable car. These were all
touring cars or convertible sports cars, but great big huge so-
called classic cars. I had a 1929 front wheel drive-L'29 Cord
convertible that I paid $350 for. And the McFarland I got from Bill
Harrah, a big town car. I never saw one like it.
Riess: Yes, I wondered if you by that time were buddies with him?
Newhall: Yes, we were pretty good buddies. He sold me the car for what he
paid for it, which was $500. It was the most elaborate, big tank of
a star car. He bought it off the Warner Brothers' lot. You know,
one of these old town cars that the stars were driven in to movie
premiers and that kind of thing. I think it belonged to Bebe
Daniels or someone like that. I sold the McFarland back to Harrah
for whatever I put in. I think I bought probably $1,000 or $2,000
292
worth of parts for it and then sold it back.
Riess: Is he the kind of guy who also works on things himself, or did he
always have it done?
Newhall: Not so much himself. But he was very knowledgeable, he really was
knowledgeable. I don't know how good a mechanic he was, but he knew
cars. I liked him, I always did. He was a very honest man. He'd
been an alcoholic but he cut that out. So he went into cars the
same way I did.
I know one year Bill Harrah and Jack Nethercutt- -he' s a very
rich guy who has this cosmetic company, Merle Norman cosmetics, a
big company down in Los Angeles up there in Sylmar--he and I and
Bill ended up at the Indianapolis Memorial Day race one year. We
were there together. And every one of us was a reformed drunk.
I'll never forget that. Nobody was drinking. And of course in
Indianapolis in those days on Sundays and holidays Indiana was a dry
state, you couldn't get a drink. But Nethercutt said he was going
to drink a little beer. So he hired a limousine, I didn't know
where the hell he got it, to get us to the races and back. As it
turned out, it belonged to the local mortician there. It was the
fancy car for the chief mourners at a funeral. The fellow was
selling beer in his back kitchen. [laughs] I don't know, it's an
involved story.
But anyway, we had a lot of fun with these cars. People have
their hobbies. Some people I guess collect movie star dresses, some
people collect coins, which I did for a long time. So I had all
these cars. I gradually sold them all out because it was turning
from a hobby into a money business and I didn't want any part of it.
Riess: Because they had such an increasing value?
Newhall: Yes, they did. And you see, people who did not know anything about
cars were beginning to buy them purely for status, the way somebody
now gets himself a big fancy Mercedes or BMW or Aston-Martin or some
Lagonda--! guess they don't make Lagondas anymore.
Mercedes Benz##
Newhall: The last car that I really fixed up, and it broke my back, was a big
old Mercedes Benz from Germany. I bought it from the estate of
Charlie Crocker, one of the Crocker family here in town, down in
Pebble Beach. I paid $1,000 for it. It was a one-of-a-kind, a
custom-made car for the Paris Automobile Exposition in 1935. It was
a very fancy, four- seat convertible, I guess coupe, but it had four
seats anyway. Convertible Victoria, or something. Very fancy, very
293
custom-made. It took me three years to restore that. I hired Tony,
my son, and each one of those three years I hired somebody over the
summer just to clean it up and so on. And Ruth did a lot of work on
that car.
Riess: Really? She'd get in there?
Newhall: Oh, yes, she did. She painted a good part of it. It was quite a
car. It was unusual. It was a big lumbering truck, super -charged,
very fancy, with the big chrome pipes coming out. These were my
childhood dreams coming back to roost.
We fixed the Mercedes up. I remember I did a job on that.
Nobody will ever know how much of that is genuine and how much of it
is fake, because this car was custom-made, one of a kind, and you
could do anything you wanted with it. And I actually had cast and
made the hardware, the hinges and the handles and the stuff like
that, because I didn't like what the French bodymakers had put on it
originally. These cars, believe it or not, when they make one for
display at something like the Paris Exposition, a custom car, they
are all a mock-up almost. Some of these show cars are not all that
well-made because they are built in a hurry. I said no, I've got to
do this better. It had a French body on it by Saoutchik. It was
pretty much an art deco design. I said it's got to be more
Teutonic .
We ran it down to Pebble Beach for the show, and it took first
in the class all right, but it didn't take first in the show and it
should have. It was one of the two finalists. I was so
disappointed. They gave the grand prize to a nice right out-of-the-
shop old SS Mercedes or Jag, a speedster, kind of. And the
Saoutchik Mercedes was far more unusual, far more elegant. It was a
much bigger job. But it didn't win the show, it won the class.
I sold the Mercedes that night to a friend of mine. And I had
sold the Packard to another friend, too. Because once you fix up
these cars, if you can't use them enough, they're going to
deteriorate, they're just going to rust. They're going to get
rotten. So I would sell them literally for really less money than I
had in them. I think I sold the Packard for $7,500, or maybe
$8,500. I sold this Mercedes --the reason I mention prices, you'll
see why- -I sold the Mercedes for I think it was $11,000 or $12,000.
And I'm sure I must have had $20,00 anyway in it. But I sold them
to friends of mine.
Well, the last time not my old Mercedes but a stock Mercedes of
that year changed hands, in that condition, it brought about
$600,000 at auction. That's a few months ago. So you can see
what's happened. And it's taken all the fun out of it. That thing
I sold, I'm sure if I just went and put it on the auction, it would
probably bring a million dollars, I really do. Classic cars are
294
very stylish, they are big money now. It was very unusual, very.
Oh, and my friend young Charlie Crocker is sick that the family
didn't keep his father's car. I'm sorry I can't give it back to
him.
Chrysler 300D
Newhall: Let me finish off this thing about the cars, just very briefly. I
subscribe every now and then to some auto publications, the
advertisements ,
class ads in the papers . And about twenty years ago
I had a nice car, two or three of them one time, as a matter of
fact. They were Chrysler 300Ds or 300Cs --1957-58. I always loved
them because they were big, fast and powerful. And about a year and
a half ago I saw one advertised. Well, it was a basket case. They
wanted $2,000 for it. And that's the Chrysler with the huge fins
like this, big fins, the biggest fins of the lot.
I bought it, had the fellow bring it home down south there in a
trailer. I thought, boy, I've got one more restoration in me. It
took me about a year-and-a-half because I sort of got sick in
between, but I restored this Chrysler. So now that's what I drive
around, that Chrysler. I can't think of anything more vulgar than a
Chrysler 300D, but it was a very snappy car in its day.
Now those cars of the fifties- -I've usually been ahead of my
time in this stuff --are becoming very big. They're bringing prices.
People are leaving signs on them: "I will buy your car." The
Japanese are really going in big for these American cars with the
fins. You see, after all, that car's thirty years old.
Riess: They want to take them back to Japan?
Newhall: Yes, people go around and buy them. These darned cars- -I could
probably get $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 for it now if I wanted to,
because it's all cleaned up. And it cost me quite a bit to do it,
you know, on upholstery alone. Cars are an amazing part of the
human race today. They still are. Can you imagine these Japanese
guys, this tall, getting in a car a hundred feet long. I tell you,
it's something.
Anyway, I still have that car, and I still go around, and I
hope it will run for a while. I bought two more just the other day
for parts. So that's the end of my story with the cars.
Riess: What color is the one you have?
Newhall: I wouldn't go for a stock color. You're supposed to be a purist,
you know, but I figure that the factory doesn't know everything.
295
Perhaps my taste is just as good as Mr. lacocca's ancestors. This
one is a very dark gunmetal gray, sort of a two -tone dark gunmetal
gray. And the purists insist upon restoring their cars exactly the
way the factory did. Oh, they hate people to violate sanctity. I
just look at them and say, "Come on, this is the way it should have
been done .
"
The Fun Of It All
With that Mercedes I was telling you about, I had made a gold
St. Christopher embedded in a beautiful green jade box frame for the
dash panel. The gear shift on it is a beautiful piece of jade. I
mean, that Mercedes is really gussied up. It was never done that
way. And in my machine shop I made all the parts and accessories
and the stuff up in the engine compartment. The generator cover was
all turned and chromed. And I designed and turned these pots for
the lubrication and brake fluids ,
and I turned those and I machined
them all. (As I say, I've got a pretty good shop.) And then I had
them all engraved "made by Zeiss" or "by the Kruppwerke." Nobody
will know where the truth ends and the fiction begins.
Riess: Is the person who owns it privy to all of the fiction?
Newhall: I don't think he'd understand it. The man to whom I sold it at
first is a good friend of mine, but he sold it to another collector.
The last time it sold, it sold for about a quarter of a million. I
met the latest owner, but he knows nothing about cars, nothing, and
he's just letting it sit there, deteriorate. He's crazy.
Riess: You drove your cars as well as showing them?
Newhall: All of them, after restoring them. I remember the Packard, the year
it won the grand prize Tony was driving it home for me from Pebble
Beach and it caught fire. The engine went up and it destroyed the
hood. But I was able to fix it up again.
The cars, we used to tour in them once in a while. It was
great fun because some of the fellows were just great, they really
were, and they still are, some of them. But now the amounts of
money involved in these winning cars, at Pebble Beach for example,
it's incomprehensible. They sold this big Bugatti Royale--of
course, there are only six in the world, the Bugatti Royales--the
latest one sold I think for four-and-a-half million dollars or
something like that. And it's the lousiest car that's ever been
built. You can't really run it on the road, it doesn't have decent
steering or anything. But the guy's gotta have it! You know,
you've got all this Arab money, you've got all this Japanese money,
and so on.
296
Anyway, one day I had a little old beautiful six-cylinder
Packard roadster. I got it here in San Francisco from the widow of
a bootlegger. She was kind of bonkers by this time, and I paid her
$371 or something for it. She went into tears when I towed it out.
But it was a very sound car. (When I talk about these cars, this
means anything from a skeleton up to a finished car.) I was going
to restore that one because it was a little Packard, and I think it
would have done very well against some of the big elaborate cars if
I had really done a good restoration job on it, really made it shine
like a true gem. But I was down by this time in Piru and Newhall.
We were working on the Signal. I was working on the Chronicle, we
were trying to restore the house in Piru, and I had too much to do.
So I called, Dolly actually, called Bill Harrah and said, "Hey,
do you want this little Packard?" And she described it on the
phone. I threw in a couple of race engines I had for our dragsters.
(I had been drag racing all this time, too.) But anyway, for $7,500
I sold him this little Packard, and it was worth it, it was a
bargain. And I took the $7,500 and I went down to Rodeo Drive in
Beverly Hills. My friend David Orgell has a big silver shop down
there, and I gave him the $7,500 for a big Paul Storr candelabrum,
which is a very fancy piece of Georgian silver. And I suppose
that's when I went from cars into Georgian silver.
To finish off. As I say, there are so many cars I have been
involved with. But the fun of it- -like the cigar bands or the
arrowheads ,
and I forgot to mention the arrowheads ,
but anyway the
cigar bands and the whiskey bottles--is to find them. It's so
exciting to find a little $300 Packard roadster, or a $75 Lincoln,
or a $1,000 Rolls-Royce, in a barn or a junkyard or somewhere. I
just enjoy it.
Riess: It wasn't the value.
Newhall: No, it's the fun of finding it. I don't care what it is you
collect. You know, for years Ruth and I would go out every weekend
to the Humboldt Sink up in Nevada looking for arrowheads, just for
the fun of finding them. We'd find eight or ten each trip,
sometimes many more. We ended up with quite a collection, which
also disappeared in the fire at the Piru mansion. But there is
something beautiful about real Indian arrowheads, something
exciting, and all the history. The University of California, as a
matter of fact, has a paper on the collection we had, somewhere.
Bob Heizer in the anthropology department put it together.
297
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Collecting Coins
Then I got into Georgian silver, and the coins. We used to travel
quite a bit and I used to like to have a reason to travel. So
whenever I go traveling now I do go to the silver shops just for the
hell of it.
I used to go to coin shops looking for Mexican coins. I was
basically interested only in one type of Mexican coin. It was the
most common, ordinary coin, in a sense, ever minted in Mexico. It
was the eight real piece with the Liberty cap on one side and the
eagle on the other --it was the size of an American silver dollar.
This coin was called "a dollar Mex" and you could get them for fifty
cents apiece. A Mexican dollar, same silver, better silver, cost
you fifty cents. This was one type. And I'll show you one before
you go.
I think I got together eventually from here and there and
watching the auctions and the dealers- -you know, you meet all kinds
of people in all this- -I probably had easily the best collection of
this particular type of coin in the world. I finally filled in all
the holes, the entire list, by date and mint marks. I had them all
but two.
You see, from 1824 to 1908, basically, these eight real Mexican
dollars were turned out at eleven different mints in Mexico. So you
have all these date years and all these mints . You see what I mean?
Oh, fun, yes!
I love Mexico, and some of the mints were in the most delightful
places, and some of them are horrid. In Mexico, Ruth and I had many
experiences in which these particular coins were involved. They had
stopped making them in 1908, about, but the people out in the rural
countryside of Mexico where we used to ride would still use these
old silver pesos for their real exchange. We ran into some of these
in memorable circumstances, when we were hungry and so on. So I
just somehow got interested in them because I could buy them cheaply
in the beginning.
When I say the beginning, up to about 1965 I could buy them for
less than a dollar apiece. I'd just keep watching the dates and so
on. But then pretty soon you get into the rare ones, and the last
--oh, I was paying five, six, seven, ten thousand dollars apiece for
them in the end. I felt that was a little bit heavy. I finally
really completed it, with two exceptions, and then I sold them all
to a dealer I had done a lot of business with.
Riess: At a profit, surely.
298
Newhall: I don't think so, but not at a loss. I won't say a profit because I
paid an awful lot for them. But the fun I got out of it, you can't
repay that.
Then when I finished and sold them all , along came another
dealer and he talked me into buying one of the two coins I didn't
have. There are only two of this particular mint and vintage known,
one of each date known in the world. I've still got one of them. I
can't sell it. I said, "Well, I'll buy it if you want." I didn't
have enough money for it, but I bought it anyway. And I just sort
of laughed. I sold the whole collection for what I had in them,
honestly, maybe a few thousand dollars more or a few thousand
dollars less, I just don't know. I never did tabulate it. I didn't
care. I knew about what it was worth.
Riess: What are coin collectors like?
Newhall: Coin people are a strange lot. But I think the flakiest lot of all
collectors are those people who collect dolls. I am not really in
with that, but I heard a story about it just the other day. There's
apparently an emotional content to collecting dolls that one can't
believe. Now why I'm mentioning dolls, I don't know, but I was
fascinated.
But coin collecting people, for example, sometimes tend to be a
rather squirrelly, more miserly group of citizens. They come from
basically a very different cut of society. King Farouk of Egypt was
a coin collector, and maybe Queen Elizabeth and some very rich
Americans used to collect coins. But the run-of-the-show coin
collectors and dealers frequently just sit around and trade their
coins, or save them. They can be a very squirrelly lot. They go
around looking for very valuable coins that for a dollar or two they
can buy from a tray with a lot of assorted coins on it. They tend
to be--I don't want to use the word "miserly" - -there is a funny
acquisitive instinct about them. They will just as soon tell the
truth as not about where some coin came from, what it's worth or
what it is or so on. Coins have a very fascinating history.
You do have a group of coin collectors who are very wealthy and
who are still acquisitive; they're still collectors, but they're
different from the great mass who are there, you know, huddled over
a whole bunch of coins in a case. They have these shows and so on,
exhibitions every now and then. They're very different.
I ran into Amon Carter, Jr., one of those Texans ,
and he has a
lot of money- -his father I think owned the old Fort Worth Star
Telegram. Young Amon, who just died, he used to collect more or
less the same type Mexican coins that I did. He was one, and there
were two or three others that sort of you'd get on with. They had
some very fancy ones. King Farouk was probably the world's best-
known coin collector, and he's probably one of the world's most
299
undesirable benchmates, I don't know.
Riess: Can you call yourself a numismatist? Or is that a more scholarly
term?
Newhall: Well, it's a longer name for a coin collector. They all have the
same urge I think, and I cannot describe it. Coins are tied in with
life and death. A coin is a very emotional thing. I absolutely
love them. Oh, I still have hundreds, but not in this Mexican
collection.
Riess: And in a way you probably could say what anyone will assume from all
of this, that it is the history that you love.
Newhall: I learned my geography from stamp collecting, literally. The world
has changed now, Montenegro is no longer here, nor Bosnia nor
Herzegovina. But it's the way you learn things. From coin
collecting I've met people from all over the world. And in cars,
too, particularly if you're back and forth across the continent. I
think part of it has just been for the sheer social pleasure of
meeting people and consorting with them.
I have hundreds of coins still, but only a few of them are very
valuable. Most of them are based on Latin America and this country
and the British colonial world, because this is my fantasy. I don't
know, I can't explain it. I love Latin America, I love the British
colonial thing, and I refuse to let it go, which is why I feel that
we shall have to return someday to the British raj and the white
man's burden. But at the moment I cannot see this as a very
practical concept.
Irrawaddv Steam Navigation Company
Riess: In the meantime you send out greeting cards reminding us of
Christmas in Burma and a shipping company down on the Irrawaddy
river.
Newhall: Well, all right, all right, you nailed me there, you're right.
That's my life. And people will say "Hey what about this? What is
this Christmas card all about?"
"Well it's an old family company, you know." Actually for
many, many years Ruth and I have sent out Christmas cards to all our
friends. These greetings are always complete with various exotic
illustrations. The Christmas greeting is always composed as a kind
of annual report on the ancient or contemporary status of some
nebulous, venerable family enterprise called the Irrawaddy Steam
Navigation Company.
300
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
The Irrawaddy?
Yes. You know, there's always an Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company
somewhere, isn't there?
You're quoting yourself. That's exactly what you said to another
interviewer who asked you about that.
That was John Luce's interview,
July-August 1968] .
I think. [San Francisco Magazine.
Yes. That's an awfully question- for-question answer.
I'm afraid the Irrawaddy steam company has gained a certain amount
of notoriety among our friends, particularly around Christmas time.
Every so often a friend will come up and he'll say, "Gee, what about
this Christmas card? Is there really such a steamship company?"
Well, to my horror I did discover, a few years ago, there actually
used to be something called the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. And
they published a book about their experiences on the Irrawaddy, and
it is difficult for some people to tell them apart. So that has
made the saga of our own Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company a most
elaborate and even more mysterious affair. I'm sorry, but it's very
confusing.
You mean the fiction and the fact?
Yes, fiction and fact. I'm not even sure. You know, there have
always been old river boats on the Irrawaddy. But I won't say
there's any fiction with any of it. How much of life is fiction? I
don't know. But I promise no one can cleave fact from fiction in
the end. How much of George Washington is fact? How much of
Washington is fiction? Where do fiction and fact separate in the
cases of Cleopatra and Anthony, the siege of Troy and the Wooden
Horse? How did Moses part the Red Sea? Was Ronald Reagan an
American president or a Hollywood actor? I mean, in terms of the
psyches of the American people. I don't know.
Fiction and Fact and Playing Roles
Riess: Well, then, people can turn that around and ask how much of the
Chronicle was fact and how much of it was fiction.
Newhall: I will accept any appraisal on that. How much of Reagan is fact and
how much is fiction? How much of the USSR is fact and how much is
fiction? How much of Afghanistan is fact and how much is fiction?
Perhaps if you can explain to me today why the American people will
sit passively by and pour billions of dollars into Afghanistan and
301
then scream about pouring a few million dollars into somewhere in
Latin America, I can't understand it.
I've never heard a person I know or have ever encountered who
has ever brought up Afghanistan, or the problems of Afghanistan,
ever in my presence. How many people at dinner parties start
talking around about those poor damn miserable Afghani people? They
don't even know who those poor damn people in Afghanistan are! I
don't know why we're pouring so much into it. I'm really sort of
asking you the question.
I guess we don't want to get onto that, but if I were the
editor of the Chronicle today I'd send somebody over there and tell
him to find out what the hell's going on. What are the bulk of the
people doing and eating, how they are living, and what they are
saying to each other in the privacy of their homes, or hotels, or on
the street corner.
Riess: When you were collecting coins was it always known that you were the
Newhall who was editor of the Chronicle? Or were you just any coin
collector? Did you let people know who you were?
Newhall: Oh, not really. It was all informal and personal. Of course, if I
wrote any collectors or dealers a letter, my name and title were on
the letterhead. I may not have mentioned this earlier, but there
was no identification on my office door, no name or title. But when
people came in to see me, I presumed that by the time they came
through the blank glass door they knew my name and what my job was.
I used to have a safe in the office, and I would play with my
coins when people came in to see me, and I would try to keep some
guests off balance. I would pull out a sack of coins and go through
them or something. They'd think, "Oh, this damn fool isn't paying
any attention to what I'm saying." I was listening to them, all
right.
I was going to mention to you that in the early years I had to
play a role in that office. It was a difficult time. I told you
about how we had to fire people and people were mad, and nobody knew
what was going to happen at the Chronicle . I felt it would be a
good idea to throw everybody off guard or confound them, so I did
have these coins and I would fool around with them when people came
in to see me, and if I felt like it. But also I built in my shop
back home in Berkeley a tree out of brass and copper tubing and
black iron pipe and set it in a big copper kettle. I had a nice
green Amazonian parrot in the tree and he would sit there, you know,
and either cackle or defecate sometimes or something.
When somebody comes to call and sell you a bill of goods and
some damn parrot is standing there about ready to nip their finger
off, it does keep them a little bit on edge, you know, on their
302
toes. And sometimes they forget about their problems for a while.
Then I put a big brass cannon in the office, mounted on the wall.
It was a beautiful cannon. It is called a Lantaka, from about the
sixteenth century, from Southeast Asia gun boats. And I made the
mount for it. Carolyn Anspacher came running in one day- -this was
when the staff was giving me a bad time. "Oh my god," she said,
"that's the loveliest thing I've ever seen!" And she began stroking
this long brass cannon. I made some remark, from a Freudian
standpoint, and I'll tell you, I never had any more trouble with
Carolyn from then on. But anyway, that's just a little aside.
Minting Coins
Riess: Where's the office safe these days?
Newhall: I've got a couple of them here in this apartment now, right in the
room next door, the little ones. Which safe do you mean? These
were little decorative safes. I had eight or ten of them sprinkled
around. I think there are a lot of safes in Dolly's basement still.
But you know, safes are a beautiful decorative item if they're the
proper type of safe.
I've always been fascinated with the genre, the hardware, the
accoutrements of mints. I used to have presses, I used to have a
nice hydraulic press. I've got quite a machine shop in the cellar,
you know, with hydraulic presses. I can mint my own stuff any time
I want to. And anything I mint is just as good as anything the
United States of America mints, in terms of its intrinsic value,
take my word for it.
I got some of my coin minting ideas from Spreckels. Which
Spreckels was it? Glaus? One of the Spreckels family. You know,
they did a lot of business in sugar down in the Hawaiian Islands.
And Spreckels made a deal with King David Kalakaua to mint for him
--my figures will probably be off --a million Hawaiian silver
dollars .
Riess:
Newhall :
Have you ever seen a Hawaiian dollar?
No.
Well, these Hawaiian dollars are exactly the same size as our
American silver dollars, and they're made about the same way, and I
think the Hawaiian coins were minted here in San Francisco. I'm not
quite sure. But Glaus Spreckels arranged it all. I think he
arranged the manufacture of a million silver dollars with the king's
face on the obverse- -it could have been ten million. A million
dollars in hard silver money was a lot of money then in a place like
303
Che Hawaiian Islands.
Spreckels made the deal to sell the dollars to the king at a
price of one dollar, American, apiece. So to begin with Spreckels
made a good profit on the coins alone. He approximately doubled his
money. In those days silver was selling for about forty cents an
ounce, and there was about an ounce of silver in each dollar. So
Spreckels made about fifty cents profit from each coin.
In addition, the king issued Spreckels a million dollars or ten
million dollars worth of royal Hawaiian bonds, which I think were
later paid off. I can't remember.
So I thought, if Spreckels can do this, why can't anybody do
this? That is the way I got into that Anguilla thing, you know.
It's perfectly legitimate. People have funny ideas about the
sanctity of so-called government coins. Spreckels 's coins and my
coins are just as sound as the British pound, and a hell of a lot
sounder than the recent Susan B. Anthony dollars put out by the
idiotic U.S. Treasury Department.
Oh, just as a matter of general interest, there's something I
think not many people realize: Chiang Kai-shek, when he left China
in '48 or '49, needed some money. (I believe this was the time in
which this was done. It might have been done earlier.) Chiang
signed a purchase order for twenty million silver dollar-sized
coins--! do not remember the exact number, but I could find out for
you in a couple of minutes. He ordered twenty million Mexican
silver pesos with the date 1908 on them. The date stamped on the
coins said 1908, but these coins for Chiang Kai-shek were actually
minted in 1948 --that's right, they were made in 1948 but had the
date 1908 stamped on them. And they were Mexican silver pesos. And
where were those fake Mexican coins minted? Right here in the San
Francisco United States Mint.
Why should anybody have any faith in anything if a Chinese guy
can order the United States Mint to punch out fake Mexican pesos?
And nobody, not even Chiang Kai-shek or the director of the American
mint, goes to jail. So that's why I do not have all these worries
about being picked up for counterfeiting.
Riess: And where did Spreckels do it?
Newhall: I think they were probably minted here in San Francisco. They look
like it, the coins themselves. I'll show you one before you go; I
think I have some around. They bring $100, $200, $300 now, good
ones .
Maybe even more .
304
Drag Racine
Riess: How old were you when you were drag racing?
Newhall: Well, let's see, the kids were about eighteen, so I would have been
fifty, fifty-five, I guess. You know, drag racers--! don't know if
you've ever seen them, they're these little things like sling shots,
you know, with a guy sitting back here and all this engine and
wiring up ahead of him. The whole idea is to run a quarter of a
mile from a standing start. So what you do is you take an engine,
you beef it up, and you get a rear end, a long projectile like this
with a couple of little bicycle wheels up front and boom! Off you
go-
Well, drag racing got to be pretty big and now it's sort of
mostly a professionalized sport. But it started out with the hot
rods the kids made. I got interested in it while I was restoring
cars and so on, because working with engines you like to see how
much horsepower you can get out of so many pounds of iron. So we
would go drag racing.
I bought from the Fulmer Brothers here in town a little
dragster, a"rail," they had been racing, for $700 I think, engine
and all. Our kids were interested in it, so we used to go around to
Lodi and Vacaville and Fremont and in the south to the San Fernando
or the Palmdale strip on Sundays and Saturdays. We'd get up early
and we'd put the trailer with the dragster on it and haul it out to
the tracks. It was just fun, like showing at the concours.
Riess: They were racing, or you were racing?
Newhall: They would drive it. See, I couldn't drive because I've got a bad
right leg and it's hard for me to drive a car like that.
Riess: You didn't worry about their getting hurt?
Newhall: No. The ones we had, it was only a D class and they do only about
--120 I think was the best run we ever made. Going 120 miles an
hour in a quarter of a mile takes about ten or eleven seconds. You
wouldn't believe what they'll do now, I mean the big ones. Ooh boy.
Even then they were fast, they'd do 180. But now they'll run a
quarter of a mile from a standing start in five seconds. That's
five seconds and he's a quarter of a mile down the road and he's
doing about 280. Now that's pretty fast and pretty strong. I never
got into that because that's dangerous.
Riess: It sounds dangerous. Are they edging other people out, or are they
just in their own slots?
Newhall: Normally they're two-by-two, doubled. You have your own slot. If
305
you go over across the dividing line, you're disqualified, boom,
like that. No, no, it's not a feud--it's only speed, acceleration.
It has nothing to do with cornering or anything, it's just straight.
You have parachutes to stop you at the end. Because 280 miles an
hour in a car is pretty fast and you've got to stop before the end
of the track. They have crashes but there are very, very few
fatalities. You're all strapped in with bars and all this.
Laurel Hill and Cypress Lawn Cemeteriestftf
Riess: Where does your involvement with Laurel Hill Cemetery and the
Cypress Lawn Cemetery Association fit into things. You're a
trustee?
Newhall: Why would I be involved with a cemetery, is that what you're saying?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: Well, my uncle and my grandfather were. My great-grandfather was
one of the founders of Laurel Hill I think. And it has always
seemed to me one of the responsibilities of a citizen to provide a
little pro bono publico effort toward establishing a dignified
disposal service for the earthly remains of one's friends and
family. What do you do with your dead normally? Throw them out in
the lawn or put them on a bonfire or what? I don't know.
Riess: Well, let somebody else worry about it.
Newhall: Why somebody else? Laurel Hill was an old San Francisco cemetery.
My grandfather, I know, and my great-grandfather were on the board.
That cemetery took care of a lot of people who were out here. Then
the city grew up around Laurel Hill to the point where the
graveyards were legislated out of town.
In the meantime, a group of San Franciscans and people from
down the Peninsula got together to establish Cypress Lawn. Some of
them I think went in it for the money. There was a Cypress Abbey
Company started which bought the land. What they did was basically
make a deal with a group of San Franciscans to run the cemetery,
which is a totally non-profit deal from the point of view of the
people running the cemetery. Then the Cypress Abbey land would be
available to be purchased by Cypress Lawn at I'm sure a profitable
figure for the Cypress Abbey Company. The people in Cypress Abbey
were not on the Cypress Lawn board. We at Cypress Lawn were just
acting, I guess, as some kind of continuity, caretakers or
something, to take care of the remains of a lot of people.
Riess: Why is it pro bono publico? Is this a place that anyone can afford
306
to end up in, or not?
Newhall: Cypress Lawn? Well, the gravesites at Cypress Lawn are not exactly
free, but the residents of our cemetery run from the Bonanza kings
to the homeless. As of today there are a tremendous number of
Chinese buried out there. They will soon be the majority.
All these cemeteries when they moved away from San Francisco,
out there on Laurel Hill, went down to Colma. That is outside the
city limits of San Francisco and it became sort of the cemetery
center of the whole area and the Peninsula. And now, of course,
it's becoming automobile row. Markets and things are moving in
there. I don't know how long the cemeteries are going to last down
there .
Cypress Lawn basically used to be no more expensive than
anywhere. You could go in there for $200 or $300, something like
that. It wasn't much in a way. The whole business of death and
disposal is a very complex one. I am not qualified to talk about it
too much, I'm really not, because of course the washers of the dead,
the morticians --that's where the money goes, basically, to your
undertaking parlors. This is disjointed, the way I'm speaking now,
but the undertaking parlors used to sort of scratch the back of the
cemeteries or vice versa. The mortician could be very choosy as to
where they were going to send their customers --shunt their bodies
off one place or another. I'm using these terms casually.
Cypress Lawn has a large endowment fund. When I say "large,"
it's enough just about to keep the grounds up, the grass green, and
so on. And the endowment fund grows because there's a lot of
investment. Half our responsibility is the endowment care fund, the
other half is the operating budget, the cemetery operation part of
it. You try to make enough money to take care of the service and
the burials and cremations and so on.
In Cypress Lawn now, and perhaps some of the other cemeteries,
we are just about full up. Right now we're going through a very
involved series of studies and discussions to try to decide what
we're going to do. Are we going to expand, try to find some
property nearby so we'll have room for new customers? Are we going
to perhaps go out and buy a satellite area down the Peninsula,
across the way, in Alameda or Contra Costa county or something?
(One of the reasons I came up this week, I had to talk with a little
committee about it.) Or do we want to just pull in our horns?
You see, we are a perpetual care cemetery, so we are absolutely
liable and responsible to keep those grounds up, and its not in as
good condition as I would like right now. We have pledged and taken
money from the people who have sent their deceased and beloved
relatives to us, and we must maintain the grounds perpetually, for
all time. There is a problem as to whether or not from our
307
endowment care fund, which we have now set aside, there is enough
money to actually keep it all going. I suppose there will be
somehow.
Riess: What a huge responsibility.
Newhall: Oh, in a sense. It's sort of automatic, too.
Everything that- -what's her name?
Riess: Jessica [Mitford] .
Newhall: Jessica. She's a smart girl. I think I mentioned I tried to hire
her to write sports for the Chronicle once. Everything she says
about the death ritual is basically, I think, quite accurate. I
think some of her conclusions--! don't remember it now too well, but
some of the conclusions might not be totally correct. Some of the
rationale may be wrong.
It's a funny business, because most of the cemeteries, or a
great many of them, are non-profit. At least some of them are. But
then there is an overlay of people who are trying to make a buck out
of it. And that's why you will see that at the moment among
enterprises like the Neptune Society and the different do-it-
yourself disposal entrepreneurs ,
the prices are becoming
competitive. Well, oddly enough at Cypress Lawn we're bumping our
prices way up, because we don't have enough space any more. But
there is still plenty of this melancholy business. Most people
insist on thinking, well, their daddy's in Cypress Lawn, or
something like that, because Cypress is a very historic place and a
lot of the old families are indeed interred there.
Riess: Did they take the markers from Laurel Hill?
Newhall: Well, the people who were in Laurel Hill had the choice of bringing
their own markers or having new ones made. Or, if they couldn't
locate the survivors the remains at Laurel were placed in a common
crypt on a mound with a large general marker at the crest. I think
this was in the teens.
Riess: 1934.
Newhall: Oh, was it that late?
Riess: The evacuation of the Laurel Hill graves were in 1934.
Newhall: Almost all the old families brought their own monuments down. I
know our monuments, Newhall family, are down there now, and we just
add new ones in the plot when we pass into history. Such a move was
done basically at the cost of the families, I believe.
308
Riess:
Newhall:
There are a lot of generations of Newhalls there, my great-
great-grandfather and my great-grandfather, my grandfather and their
families, my father, my mother and my daughter. There are about six
or seven generations down there, which for California is a pretty
good go. The Cypress Lawn Board was just something I was asked if I
would do and I said yes. If you want to be impractical about it, to
be on the board of the Cypress Lawn Cemetery is described as the
most exclusive club in town, not by me but by some of my colleagues.
So far we have all been white, male, Protestant, and a member of the
Pacific Union Club.
This is to be on the board, not to be in the ground.
Not to be in the ground, no, to be on the board. You know it's a
gag, but nevertheless it's true. I mean, all of the people running
Cypress Lawn, the trustees, you know, they all sort of went to
school together, or their fathers did, and knew each other and so on
and so forth.
Riess: Is there a crematorium also?
Newhall: Yes. Yes, we do provide a crematorium service for a lot of people,
I mean for a lot of other cemeteries, too. But we do not have a
mortuary. We're not an embalming business.
Riess: But isn't cremating the solution to the space problem?
Newhall: I don't know. Really, I'm disinterested in getting into that. It's
simply because I figure everyone has his own choice. I could make
a- -I personally, if I had to dispose of people, I would build a huge
induction coil and just put the deceased into a thin plastic casket,
shove them in, and pull the switch, and you'd have them reduced down
to some real powder. The cremated remains of your loved one --as
cremations go today- -do not necessarily resemble a pot of Johnson
baby talcum powder. But, you know, we all have our own ideas.
Riess: You don't have a bias one way or the other about what is done?
Newhall: Oh lord, no. They've got fellows down there that are buried with
their motorcycles. One of the Hell's Angels is down there. They
want to put a motorcycle there, that's their choice.
Riess: What are you like when you get around with these Pacific Union CLub
friends? Do you get much more buttoned up?
Newhall: Oh, no. Lord, look, we were all kids together. I do this, but it's
not my nature, I don't like it particularly. I mean, who wants to
be in the cemetery business, for goodness sake? But somebody's
going to have to wash the dishes, aren't they?
Riess: You've described it as extremely exclusive.
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
309
Remember, I said this is a joke.
What about women and blacks?
Oh, god. We'll bury women and blacks, sure. If that's what you
mean. Anytime you want. I would just love it if the women would
come down there, or the blacks, and say, "We want representation on
the board of Cypress Lawn." Now, come on. Who cares?
Maybe it's the backdoor into the Pacific Union Club.
No, it's probably the way to get out of it. 1 probably shouldn't
have said this. Look, I just meant it casually. We have to find
some reason for being there at Cypress Lawn. We're paid a very
small fee, and it costs me three times the fee just to come up in
the airplane, stay here, and go back, in order for me to attend the
meeting. I mean, there's no money in it for anybody that we're
involved with. Please, I don't know if I made that clear. And I
don't go around saying, "Hey, look at me, I'm a member of the
Cemetery Board," for god's sake,
frankly very casual about it.
I don't usually get into it. I'm
As I say, anybody who comes--. Somebody came by the other day,
some old couple, the husband died, the widow wanted to have a nice
monument for him. I won't tell you how much she spent on it. She
had to build it. But it ran more than six figures. The whole thing
is totally preposterous, totally. She's got her own niche in there
now, her dogs are in there, she's just waiting to die.
sits in there, waiting to join her husband.
She goes and
Now what are you going to do? You can' t do any more for her
than try to make her happy, can you? What is the difference if a
woman, let's say, pays $200 to sprinkle her husband's ashes, or $50?
You know, the Neptune Society, you talk about your harpies and your
sharpies, those guys weren't even scattering the ashes. Did you
know that?
Yes ,
I read about that .
These swell fellows in the brave new world. But I started to say
that if this poor rich widow wants to spend many thousands and
thousands and thousands of dollars on her husband's remains, what's
the difference if she does it this way with a little granite around
him, or if a very poor person spends just the same percentage of her
worldly estate sending him out to the ocean? What's the difference?
If she had commissioned a sculpture by Saint-Gaudens ,
or someone
like that, then we could all go down and admire it.
Newhall: She didn't, but I wish she had. The burial practices, the disposal
310
practices of us humans, are fascinating. They are. I don't
criticize them, I don't praise them, they're just fascinating. So
what have we got? On the south border of Cypress Lawn there's a
marker there. It says "Charlie deYoung, 18 -whatever to 18 -whatever,
San Francisco pioneer," something like that. He's on our side, the
Cypress Lawn side, right next to the fence.
On the other side of the fence what does it say, on Holy Cross?
"Michael deYoung, deceased." Well, Mike made it into the Catholic
Church before he died, so he's in Holy Cross. But I guess he didn't
want to be separated from Charlie, so Charlie's right within ten or
fifteen feet of him but he's on our side, the Protestant side, you
see. Charles was either--! don't know whether he was a Jew or a
Protestant or what in terms of his faith, I just don't know, but
he's not in Holy Cross. That always amused me. One ground has I
guess been hallowed by one group, and another by another.
Exploratorium: Frank Oppenheimer and Walter S. Johnson
Riess: How did Frank Oppenheimer become interested in the idea of turning
the Palace of Fine Arts into the Exploratorium? And when did you
get involved in that?
Newhall: Well, Frank is a very unusual man. I knew him very slightly during
World War II. He and his brother were accused of running around
with the communist party line people here in town, and so on and so
forth. J. Robert Oppenheimer was I think personally one of the
great martyrs of modern America. I could go into that at great
length. Anyway, Frank had been under a cloud over the years. He
was considered a security risk during the war. He had been down at
Los Alamos working on the atom bomb . The FBI was always lurking
around the corner or something like that.
Frank finally ended up running a ranch in Colorado . He was a
very brilliant physicist. (This is Frank we're talking about.) Of
course, he was in the shadow of his brother. Frank became head of
the Colorado Cattleman's Association and he had to go back to
Washington to lobby for federal farm support or something like that.
Frank said the congressmen couldn't understand why this pinko was
coming back trying to lobby for supports for cattle feed.
I had known him just slightly, really before my relationship
with him and the Exploratorium. This must have been in the middle
sixties, something like that. He came in one day for some reason or
other to ask me, "Gee, what can we do about this?" He outlined a
little bit about his idea for a science museum. Somebody might have
suggested he come in or he just came in.
311
I liked Frank. I didn't really know him then at all, but he
was such a sweet guy. And he had run into a lot of quicksand trying
to find support to get space for the museum. Again, like Karl, this
whole thing was all Frank's idea. I think then he had his eye on
the Palace of Fine Arts. And he said, "Gee, I can't get anybody to
really come along." So I said, "Look, do you want to talk to the
mayor?"
Alioto had just gone in. I called up and asked if he'd talk to
Frank. I think I might have written a note or something. I think I
turned it over to Dave Nelson. Dave used to do a lot of message
carrying around town. He would make some things work. So Frank
went and saw the mayor, and he apparently was well -received after he
had been rebuffed a few times . Now I am fuzzy about some of this ,
because I had never thought I was reallv too much involved in it at
all. But I think perhaps just the fact that I persuaded him or
suggested he go see the mayor, maybe he got a little better hearing.
At this point I think I should cover a couple of points about
Walter S. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was one of these--! didn't know him
at all much, really, but his was a fairly strange San Francisco
business success story. He lived out there somewhere on the other
side of the hills, Orinda or Pleasanton.
Johnson's press agent, his PR flak, was Dorothy Kay. Her
maiden name was Kay. I really loved her dearly. Al Kay had been a
Chronicle employee and this sister of his was a charming girl. They
came from a San Francisco family, their father made shoes. I think
the original name was Kachinsky, something like that. Ted Friend
was her husband. He had written a night club column for the New
York Journal . I believe, or perhaps Post. He and Dorothy came out
and took on the Alturas paper up in northern California. They
wanted to become country publishers and of course this was a
disaster- -it was awful.
The Friends came down here. Dorothy was a good operator and
she was a good public relations person. Johnson was one of her
clients. He had been putting up money for the Palace of Fine Arts
restoration. (That was a long story on its own.) Therefore if
Frank Oppenheimer wanted to get some of this Palace of Fine Arts
space for his museum he was going to have to get Johnson's okay,
kind of. Spiritually Johnson was involved in it.
I can't remember this too well. I know I went out one time to
see Johnson. But then I got Ruth interested in it. I said, "You
follow up on this thing. I can't do all this." So she got involved
with Frank in this, and she kept plugging away on it. She is much
closer to it and much more knowledgeable about what we all did. I
don't think I ever became a trustee because I thought I shouldn't.
Riess: Well, you are a trustee of the Palace of Arts and Sciences.
312
Newhall: Oh, is that it?
Riess: Yes, that's what its official name became. In Who's Who it says
"Museum of Arts and Sciences," but that must mean Palace of Fine
Arts.
Newhall: Maybe. Oh, don't believe anything in Who's Who.
that anyway.
I make up half of
Riess:
Newhall:
But anyway, Ruth and I got a little bit involved. First we
were trying to get together a board of trustees --that's the most
important thing you have to do in setting up a cultural public
institution like this- -trying to get a few names whom people don't
know but respect by reputation, then get a few people who will work.
I know we helped them get together some, and I think Palmer Fuller
was one of them- -he was a good friend of mine- -and a few of the San
Francisco guys, you know, more of the WASPs up there at the P.U.
Club and that kind of thing. I think maybe either Dave Packard or
Bill Hewlett- -I'm not even sure about that.
Anyway, the thing just finally did get going. What Dave Nelson
has done in many cases is he goes around selling the Chronicle' s
"ass." I use that word purposely. He'll say, "If you guys will go
along, you know you'll get good press." He's just a wheeler-dealer.
They'll get entre to the Chronicle or other things?
Oh, sort of, I guess. I never was involved in a deal for selling
this, a real quid pro quo, unless I thought that quid was of value
to the community. And I do not remember the specifics in this.
I did talk with Frank a great deal about the selling of the
Exploratorium idea to the public. By that I mean, what is it going
to have, how are we going to package it for publicity? and such. We
got to be quite good friends during all this, but Ruth was really
more active in that than I. And I am not qualified, as I sit here,
to tell you very much about it, except that Frank had a helluva good
idea. I hope it will continue, and I have no idea what shape it's
in now.
I think Frank was an absolutely unique, marvelous person. He
was tremendous from my point of view. He was very knowledgeable.
He had the rare gift for being able to relate ideas to the real
world, the practical presentation of a scientific concept.
Newhall: Frank was very, very generous in making some public recognition of
what Ruth and I had done to get the Exploratorium off the deck. And
I think it was basically totally unmerited, I really do. I was
313
always very touched by his loyalty. Both Ruth and I did in one way
do what we could to really get it going. But Frank did the whole
thing himself. I mean nobody else deserves, as far as I'm
concerned, any serious credit. He raised money better than anybody
I know, better than I ever could. Frank was a genius at that.
But I started to say, I was in a rage about something. And
that was, the minute Frank died- -you know, they set up this annual
banquet or annual dinner, give an award, and the guest of honor
makes an address and a speech, and there have been some great
speakers at the annual Exploratorium banquet. Well, the last one I
went to- -I don't think it was this year's, it was probably the year
before, after Frank had died- -in their infinite wisdom the board saw
fit to get as speaker Bobby Inman, I think his name was, Robert
Inman, who had been either CIA or a national security advisor or
some damn thing involved in either Vietnam or I don't know what.
And I was so goddamned mad about that that Ruth and I, we just- -I
wouldn't send them a nickel the next year. I'm saying this for the
tape. I was shocked that they would so politicize the
Exploratorium, that they would get some Washington member of the CIA
establishment as the belle of the annual Exploratorium ball.
Frank's widow boycotted the banquet. She never did go to that
last dinner. You know, we usually go and buy a table and make a
little contribution and so on, but that's when I was angry. And I
hope that this is not an indication that they're just going to go
down in the pockets of some of the well-heeled corporate backers.
The Exploratorium should be above and beyond politics. There's
nothing like it in the world that I've ever seen.
Riess: Did you encourage Johnson in his undertaking in the first place?
Newhall: Oh yes, we went over to see him.
Riess: This "we," now this is the Chronicle?
Newhall: Ruth and I.
Riess: I mean in the days when the Palace of Fine Arts was either going to
fall or be saved.
Newhall: Yes. Oh, we'd give them all kinds of publicity. I was starting to
talk about Dorothy Friend. She was a good friend and I thought it
was a wonderful thing that they were working on. You know,
publicity, just the act of perfectly honest, honorable publicity, is
one of the greatest motivations or incentives there can be to
anybody in the community who's contributing something. It's the
only recognition they get, really.
Riess: Where did he get his money?
314
Newhall: He was quite rich. He gave a few millions or something, but he was
never accepted as part of the old San Francisco established
financial structure. I cannot tell you where he got his money.
It was important, apparently, that we go over so that he would
feel that he was being admired and respected, you know, by some of
us and so on. He was a nice man. As I recall, I think in the
middle of it he got into a messy domestic situation where his wife
charged that he'd been beating her with an ivory- tipped whip or some
damn thing. I must qualify that and say I do not know for sure, but
I believe there was a little sadomasochism or something involved in
a divorce. But I repeat, I may be wrong.
He put up the real money to restore it. I don't think he put
up all of it by any means ,
but I do know he gave what was then
considered a large funding. The city was going to tear down the
Palace of Fine Arts. It was a plaster palace, you know, and it was
crumbling away, and Walter Johnson gave two million dollars to save
it. Maybe he gave more money later on. I presume in the end it was
three or four million dollars. Do you remember? I really don't.
That's a big building. Oh, it's huge. They had tennis courts
there, you know, for a while and so on.
Riess: I was surprised it wasn't more roundly supported by everyone.
Newhall: I haven't seen the people of San Francisco support anything that
they haven't been screwed into supporting- -or something. I think
it's a disgrace. You know, it was hard to get money for the
Maritime Museum. We never did. I don't know if the library gets
any money now. Every now and then they'll get some widow and she'll
put up a big chunk of money for, you know, like Davies Symphony Hall
or something like that. They're fine people, but it's usually
individual. It's the publicity, the public recognition, that
usually does it. And Johnson came along and basically was the angel
for the Palace of Fine Arts, and I guess Mrs. Davies, God bless her
--I don't know her- -put up all this money for the symphony hall.
There have always been a few people, but I've never seen the general
public support a damn thing here .
Riess: That's interesting, because you said earlier that most of San
Francisco doesn't even know what San Francisco is all about.
Newhall: That's right.
Riess: They're living someplace where they don't even see the bay. So how
can that change? I mean, you were very interested down in southern
California in using that paper to make people much more aware.
Newhall: That's what we were doing up here. As I say, you can give them
publicity, but that'll only appeal to the people who really do it, I
mean, who put up the money. You try, you know, to get a group, a
315
board of trustees and so on, and you try to give them publicity and
put together a couple of social functions. But it takes lot of
doing. Public community just doesn't flow like the mighty
Mississippi.
Riess: Well, it's obvious from the social pages that it's always the same
four hundred, or two hundred people.
Newhall: The same group has been behind everything, basically, yes. And it's
amazing, in those times when I was more active you would go to four
or five people in town. You've met some. You've met Lurline Roth.
She'd give something. Alma Spreckels and the deYoung girls, Phyllis
deYoung, who's still alive.
The corporations and the foundations are where the money comes
from now. I'm not well up on it, but you know, you get your United
Crusade or whatever they call it now, things like that, and the
corporations go along with their regular corporate gifts, but that's
pretty generalized. Once in a while a steamship company, you get
them to spring a few thousand dollars for something with a maritime
flavor. I know Frank, he got some very nice grants from some of the
foundations for the Exploratorium. I'm not sure, I think Hewlett-
Packard probably gave some. I think our own little family
foundation gives them a few thousand dollars every year. But it all
comes back to the same sort of people in the end.
315a
H. G. NEWHALL w. MATO NKWHAI.I. Gao. A NIWHALI.
President Vice-President Secretary
1.0* Angeles, Cal San Frncico, Cal. Sn Frmncico, Cal.
THE NEWHALL
OWNKR.S AMD MANAGERS OP
Rancho San Francisco -
48,611 Acres
Los Angelea and Venturm Counties
Rancho El Suey
- - -
48,834 Acres
Santa Barbara and San Louii Obiipo Counties
Rancho Todos Santos - -
6,987 Acres
Santa Barbara County
Rancho El Piojo
- - -
13,000 Acres
Monterey County
Rancho San Miguelito
- -
22,464 Acres
Monterey County
Rancho Santa Rita
-
2,695 Acres
Monterey County
Lands in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Fresno Counties
Offers the selection of Large and Small Tract* on the above
Properties at Moderate Prices and on Liberal Terms
GENERAL OFFICE
309 Sansome Street - San Francisco
Los Angeles Office, California Bank Building
9*.
316
XI ONE FAMILY TRIBAL GROUP, OBSERVED
[Interview 8: February 16, 1989 ]//#
Henry Mayo Newhall
Newhall: I ought to go through and do our family genealogy for you some time,
but you can see it written down elsewhere. We had a family dinner
two nights ago, one reason I came up. Ruth couldn't make it. We
have a little Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation, and the members of the
board, who are now all quite young, except for two or three of us,
got together for dinner at the home of a cousin of mine who has
just finished his home in the Chinese taste. It looks something
like the Brighton Pavilion, if you've ever been there, in England.
Riess: Is that here in San Francisco?
Newhall: Yes. There's a story somebody should write. Is this on?
Riess: Yes, it's on.
Newhall: Someone should do a story, really, on the Newhall family, and by
that I mean a rather more personalized take of what one family
tribal group is like, that was part of the rise of Anglo culture in
San Francisco starting with 1849 or 1850. It's the most fascinating
social group I've ever been connected with. I've never seen a bunch
of people who have quite as many foibles--! don't want to get off on
that now, but that's a story that somehow somebody ought to put
together sometime.
Riess: I've done some research on Newhall Land and Farming, and because for
a long time it was family-owned there was little publicly known
about the business. But now the stock is available. And the
company is into very different things. How has the family business
changed over the years?
Newhall: Well, let me start this way. I think I have been privileged to have
lived through a very interesting, constantly changing time, in which
317
California changed from a feudal, Anglo-Saxon frontier into what is
now an intercontinental, international kind of helter-skelterwell,
I shouldn't mix my metaphors too much- -melting pot. I was born into
a land, Marin County, where there was a caste system- structure way
of life.
California probably had as many people in it when I was born,
and was brought up as a child, as there are in our Fifth District of
Los Angeles County now, a couple of million people. I really don't
know, I think San Francisco had probably 500,000, and that was
probably about half of the state. I wouldn't be surprised. But my
figures may be way off.
Riess: Did your family welcome change?
Newhall: Some of them. But many members of our family are still trying to
live in the past, I think. We all are [laughs]. This is a little
esoteric, some of these answers, because you will find that most of
them who have any remnants of economic privilege left to them are
building houses of their own, and they're different, their houses.
You will see the house that Ruth and I are living in. It has been
newly rebuilt, but it was originally constructed a hundred years
ago, and there are very few like it. It was not our family's house,
however. It belonged to our neighbor on the ranch next door. I
just bought it about twenty years ago.
Riess: And the other members of your family are also seeking to preserve
something?
Newhall: They buy houses, and they collect things. The dinner we went to the
other night was given by young David Hill, who is a second cousin of
mine, or son of a second cousin of mine. As I say, there's no use
trying to go back in the genealogy; you can get the genealogy out of
one of the family books.
But when Henry Mayo Newhall came out here in 1849--. He got
sick in Panama, got the next boat north, and arrived here in town in
1850. He came out with the argonauts to dig for gold, which he
didn't find, but he became an auctioneer. He was an auctioneer, and
a pretty fast talker. I don't think he was very well educated, in
terms of the formal educational system, because we can't find
anything he ever wrote. As a matter of fact, the family is at this
moment arranging to have a book written about him, and some of the
more sensitive members of our family are now discouraged. Dr. Rolle
down in Occidental is putting together a book on the life and times
of Henry Mayo Newhall. Andrew Rolle, his name is.
One of my cousins, Peter McBean, didn't think that Dr. Rolle 's
findings were interesting enough, in a cultural way. [laughs] He
didn't think his family- -he wanted to give the project up, but I
think there's going to be a book about Henry Mayo Newhall and what
318
he did out here . What Henry Mayo Newhall did out here was very
significant in terms of the development of San Francisco. He went
into the auction business with another great-grandfather of mine,
whose name was Aimer Ives Hall. Aimer Halls' granddaughter married
Henry Mayo Newhall 's grandson. And my father Aimer Newhall was the
result of that. And that's where I come from. Fanny Hall Newhall
died in childbirth when my father was born.
Back to 1850--. Aimer Hall had the auction house, and Henry
Mayo Newhall joined him. He was a great auctioneer. Maybe that's
where some of us get a little flair for promotion from, I don't
know. Then Henry Mayo Newhall got interested in a lot of local San
Francisco projects. He was really active, I think, in the
beginnings of the Bank of California, though I'm a little fuzzy
about that. And he imported a minister- -no, he didn't, the minister
just arrived in town- -Dr. William Anderson Scott, whose
granddaughter married my father, and that's where I come from on my
mother's side. Dr. Scott was a Presbyterian clergyman, had come
from Andrew Jackson's place. He was a chaplain of the Hermitage,
which I believe was Jackson's place back there in Tennessee.
Henry Mayo Newhall felt that religion was good for the people,
better than opium, I suppose. So he supported Dr. Scott, and he
started the San Francisco Theological Seminary. Did I go into this
before?
Riess: I don't want you to repeat yourself, either. I guess what the
thread was--
Newhall: Well, the thread was what Henry Newhall did. He backed a lot of
things. He got into the railroad business and started the San
Francisco to San Jose Railroad, which he eventually sold out to
Southern Pacific. This tied in with his land acquisitions in 1870.
The Californios, the Mexican families that had owned these
large Mexican and Spanish land grants, were going broke because of
the drought. The cattle were dying of starvation in the hills, and
Henry Mayo Newhall, after making some real estate money and
constructing some buildings and things here in San Francisco, bought
about five or six of these large Mexican land-grant ranches. The
larger ones were nearly 50,000 acres, or 75 square miles, which is
half again as large as San Francisco. He bought the spreads for
what sounds like nothing- -two to five dollars an acre. But that was
a lot of money then. It would be ridiculous now.
Some of the ranches have been disposed of. I know we sold the
San Miguelito, the family did; it became part of Hearst's place down
at San Simeon, and part of it and another ranch became Camp Hunter
Liggett during the Second World War. The ranches were spread all
along the Coast Range, all the way down to the one that we call the
Newhall Ranch, which is at Valencia, or Newhall, just north of Los
319
Angeles. The original Spanish name for the Newhall Ranch was Rancho
San Francisco. And that was the main operating base for what became
our family ranching enterprise. (Ruth's book, The Newhall Ranch.
covers this whole thing.) [See citation following.]
Some senior member of the family was always in the south, to
look after the southern ranches and orchards. And another carried
on with the import -export business here in town. That was H.M.
Newhall Co. Some of my great-uncles lived high on the California
hog. One built great hunting lodges; one built a French palace; one
a Georgian mansion; and my grandfather built here in San Francisco
what is probably the largest Cape Cod cottage in California, if not
the world.
The Next Generation, and Atholl McBean
Riess: They became well-educated in the next generation, didn't they?
Newhall: Yes. The second generation- -by that, I mean my grandparents'
generation- -pretty much I think began mostly going to Yale, or at
least the most stylish set of ivy covered walls they could get into.
And down through my generation, until we went broke, they'd ship us
all off to an eastern prep school, or at least a West Coast version
of Harrow or Eton. I remember my father finally helped start a prep
school at San Rafael--! don't mean he started it, I mean he
contributed to it, along with a lot of other San Franciscans- -the
Tamalpais School for Boys in about 1926 or '27.
My father had gone to Mount Tamalpais Military Academy. There
may still be a military academy over there, I don't remember. But
they wanted us to attend a proper prep school, and that's when I
began to hate school. I didn't want to leave the military school; I
loved it there. I admired the big boys, the seniors in our school
so much. From then on, I was with a bunch of little punks that had
problems. We were all "problem children." That was the F. Scott
Fitzgerald generation, and they were these latchkey kids, except
instead of latchkeys they had governesses at home who took care of
them.
Riess: It worked perfectly well in England.
Newhall: I think it's just great. I think what they have now- -today in 1989
--where all these mothers are trying to work and take care of their
kids at the same time, and driving themselves crazy, it is not
working much better.
Riess: Well, it's interesting that you're talking about a kind of
California elite, but basically they're just ranchers and farmers.
320
Newhall: Oh, here in California we're a kind of comfortable petite bourgeoise
with maybe a little gilt around the edges. I mean, look at the
homes that were built in San Francisco. The chic San Franciscans
would go to Europe on tour, and they'd buy up every fancy spurious
antique they could find. Some of them bought French counts for
their girl children. Out of that came this San Francisco-
Burlingame-Hillsborough-Marin County society.
Riess: Burlingame was one thing, but living in Newhall, what was the life
there?
Newhall: I never lived in Newhall until recently. It was just a small rural
farm town. I visited the ranch sometimes in the summers.
Riess: You're just an Anglo Californio.
Newhall: Yes. At the Rancho San Francisco, if somebody came by, if they
dropped in, either announced or unannounced, to eat, dine, spend the
night, or whatever, there was a faint echo of old colonial
California about it. It was about an hour or two drive out of Los
Angeles. We used to pile in the cars and go down there on the ranch
for a week or two during the summers .
These were working ranches. They started out with cattle, and
in the bad years my grandfather harvested--! suppose you would call
it that- -some of the native oak trees. Other people might say he
chopped down a lot of oak trees.*
Riess: So there was a little short-sightedness there?
Newhall: But there were a lot of oak trees. They're trying to protect them
now with all these fancy- -what do they call them? environmentalist
ordinances and that kind of thing.
Riess: Well, given this kind of background, it seems to me that your
decision in the 1960s to go down and to buy the Signal and run a
newspaper there is more complicated than just establishing- -
Newhall: A little paper somewhere. Sure it was. I can tell that very
*"...the company had to look for other sources of money. The
Giambastiani Fuel and Feed Company of Los Angeles called attention
to an asset that had been overlooked: the magnificent stand of
several thousand oak trees in the parklike upper valley. From
October 1910 through 1912 the woodsmen spared no trees, which were
bought at $1 a cord and reduced to charcoal for the bakeries of Los
Angeles." The Newhall Ranch, by Ruth Waldo Newhall, Huntington
Library, 1958, p. 78.
321
briefly. The Newhall Land and Farming Company and the sister
company called the White Investment Company had gone on hard times
in the Depression. A man called Atholl McBean, who had married
Margaret Newhall, a cousin of my father's, was another of those
California-San Francisco tycoons, from the Gladding -McBean Tile
Company. He became chairman of the board.
The Newhall Land and Farming Company, based on land and imports
and exports, had enjoyed a great prosperity in a sense following
World War I. My grandparents' generation were living like Balkan
princes, or like British dukes. They had their comforts, take my
word for it. They were living by liquidating the land, although
they didn't look at it that way. They were selling off capital,
they were living way beyond the income. This was happening in
almost every single San Francisco family during that period.
When the Depression came along, the San Francisco and Los
Angeles people went belly-up. All these kids who were going to
school learned that there were problems at home, and a lot of them
had to face the fact that if they were going to go to college at
all, it would be some public college, like the University of
California or Marin Junior College. We changed our sights. I
remember I had been accepted with no problem at all, even though I
had bounced around many prep schools, at Yale and Stanford. I had
never thought of Cal before. Anyway, I ended up at U.C. and that
was the best of all worlds.
I'm trying to get back. Oh, yes, Atholl McBean. This is where
I wandered off. The Newhall Companies went bust, and they owed the
banks, particularly Bank of California, quite a bit of money. My
father lost all his shares of stock in the company. (The bank held
the stock as collateral for loans he had taken out. Atholl McBean
came along and bought my father's shares for his own son, for my
cousin Peter.)
During the early Depression Atholl took over running the
companies, and the company's only real serious asset at that time
was what was formally entitled the Rancho San Francisco, the Newhall
Ranch, which is north of Los Angelses. It was about fifty thousand
acres, and it ran from a couple of miles inside the Ventura County
line, eastward to the heart of the Santa Clara River valley, to
where it opens out into what is Newhall, Valencia, and so on now.
And its main business was running cattle. There was quite a lot of
cattle on the ranges, and orange groves, citrus orchards, had been
planted. We'd gone down there, as I say, as kids, and we loved it.
Well, Atholl had been head of the Gladding-McBean Tile Company,
and he was a very active man in San Francisco's hierarchy of
business, a tycoon, one might say. He was a very large and
domineering man who frightened a good many people. He was
convinced, and I suppose he still is- -wherever he may be- -that
322
anybody with the name Newhall was a moron. There was some ill
feeling among the four or five branches of the family that this was
not a very cousinly attitude.
The Legacy of Uncle Walter
Newhall: I had lost all of my father's interest in any share of the farming
company; I thought, I would never enjoy any part of the family
legacy. But there were a few shares with my name on them in an
ancient trust fund that would be distributed on the death of Mrs.
Nellie Harlow, a great-aunt who had married my great-uncle Walter
back about 1890.
Riess : She had no children?
Newhall: No, she had no children. I would get a few shares. I would inherit
one -third of a thirteenth of a fifth, you figure that out.
So. And I was married and working at the Chronicle . and I was
interested in the family. That was the way I felt secure, I
suppose, to be able to identify myself as belonging to something
that was a family. And there was terrible fighting, and the family
was splitting apart, and the reason I'm going into this is that Mrs.
Harlow died- -she was the woman whose death signaled the distribution
of the Walter Newhall trust. I never told this story?
Riess: No. Her name was Harlow?
Newhall: Nellie Harlow. She was the widow of Walter Newhall, and she
remarried a fellow called Harlow. When he died she lived as a widow
in a hotel room here in Los Angeles, in a plush hotel. I never met
her.
They were about to distribute this legacy in which there were
these very few shares for me. Many people in the family had been
quarreling with Atholl. They thought they had more rights to
certain shares of the trust. Some people had died, and how was the
legacy going to be split up, by families, or by remainder men? And
so on. I knew that if this argument got into the hands of the
lawyers, I would be wiped out, because the lawyers would eat up the
whole thing. It didn't amount to all that much money, in my case
anyway. But it was the only legacy I could see ahead.
So I sat down and wrote to every living adult member of the
family that I knew. Most of them were in San Francisco, except for
one group in Europe and another in New York! I wrote, "Look. We
have among us this wonderful legacy. Why are we going to fragment
it or fracture ourselves by fighting? Instead of going to court,
323
why don't we just have this whole thing arbitrated, and just let an
arbitrator settle it for a fee, and let's all agree to abide by his
decision." There were two pending suits, and there's no point going
into it, it's horribly complex. For arbitrators I submitted a list
of the names of five very prominent San Francisco attorneys I had
got from an attorney friend of mine.
By golly, every single one of them- -I was young, maybe twenty-
eight or -nine --every one of them responded and said, "Okay." And
they agreed. It worked out so that our branch- -my father's branch
--of the family as a whole got slightly less. And that was fine
with me. We didn't get quite as much, and another branch got a
little more. And that was fine.
Well, Atholl got interested in it. I suppose he thought he had
finally found a Newhall who had a shadow of brain power. I am
quoting now, his words. He said, "Look, I'm getting kind of old.
Will you please just sort of watch after this, see if you can keep
people here from destroying themselves?" Because there were always
threats of all kinds of lawsuits among the family members. Either
the attorneys, the counsel, or the accountants who were handling
various estates and things, sort of had control of some of these
cousins. So I spent a lot of my time and energy keeping everybody
in the family in touch with each other and interested in what was
going on.
Pat Calhoun--0il and New Money
Newhall: At about that time, and this is in the late thirties now, a remote
cousin on my mother's side of the family, Pat Calhoun his name was
--. I may have told you about this. He came out from the deep
south. He had gone bankrupt. He was living with his grandchildren,
a couple of whom had married the daughters of Arthur W. Foster in
San Rafael.
a
Newhall: Arthur W. Foster was sort of a one- or two -generation success story.
He had come out from Ireland. He had married my mother's aunt,
Louisiana Scott, who was the daughter of William Anderson Scott, the
Presbyterian clergyman I mentioned. (It's all kind of small, you
know, these relations, it's an incestuous affair.) Old Pat Calhoun
was broke. He had come west from South Carolina. He was a cheerful
old gentleman, looked something like a retired Santa Glaus, dressed
in civilian clothes. Incidentally, this was the same Pat Calhoun
who a generation earlier had been a big promoter in San Francisco,
mixed up in the street car system and involved in the City Hall
scandals surrounding Mayor Eugene Schmitz.
324
He came out, and he said, "I can't take charity from my six
children who are out here" --two of whom were married to Fosters. He
said, "I'm going to leave them each a million dollars." And that's
exactly what he said, because it was at a Christmas gathering up at
Hopland, which was one of the Foster estates up north near Ukiah.
Ruth and I were there. We were broke and didn't have anything to
give anybody for Christmas, so we- -well, old Pat was sort of an oil
entrepreneur, so we gave him for Christmas a "thousand-barrel well."
I'll never forget that.
Ruth wrote a poem for him, giving him the oil well as a
Christmas present. And that spring--. Pat had made a deal with
Atholl. (Everybody sort of knew everybody else.) He said, "Atholl,
I think there's oil under the Newhall Ranch." These are direct
quotes, almost verbatim.
"Why, that's silly," Atholl said.
Pat answered, "Well, Atholl, I'd like to put a group together
to explore for oil."
Now, they'd been drilling for oil down there on the Newhall
Ranch for generations. That's where oil was first discovered in
California, down in those hills north of Los Angeles. So to shorten
it up, Pat Calhoun put together a group called Barnsdall, sank a
well, and they hit in 1936 the most important oil discovery in
California for generations, right on our ranch. And Pat Calhoun had
ten percent of that oil action for himself. Atholl had been so
skeptical about finding any oil under the ranch that we ended up
with only ten percent of the royalties.
Pat Calhoun left more than a million dollars for all seven of
his children. Afterwards he put a Hungarian countess, who was out
of work at the time, up at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and
he used to go to call on her with a carnation in his lapel
buttonhole every day. I think he was about eighty, and she was
about seventy-five, but they were a very attractive couple. He was
killed when he was crossing the street, in an automobile accident.
He was run down and killed. I will never forget that. Here he was
in the prime of life, and didn't live to enjoy it all.
Anyway, that started off the oil. That's why we're getting
into all this, to lead up to the oil on the Newhall Ranch.
Riess: The had been selling oil rights to other outfits?
Newhall: We got a lot of our land from Union Oil, for example. The oil
companies- -there was a period that the oil companies had huge
holdings out there in our area, because oil had been discovered and
was being worked here and there in those southern California fields.
And Union still has, or their heirs had- -you know, these oil
325
companies have all changed around now, but they, and I think it was
Union, they own the mineral rights under some of our grazing ranges
on some parts of the ranch. But we still have two working fields on
the ranches. So this oil money is what started the recovery of the
ranches .
Riess: Was that generation sort of naive about money? In Ruth's book, she
explains that whenever there were profits they would be distributed;
everything was consumed.
Newhall: You mean the earlier generation, up to the time we went broke?
Riess: Yes.
Newhall: Yes. Oh, if somebody needed some money, they'd just take some money
out of the company, or borrow it. By the time Atholl took over,
nobody was getting anything. Atholl was able --he hired George
Bushell to run the ranches. They increased the citrus groves.
George planted some fairly extensive walnut orchards. And cattle- -
we put in feed yards . We used to feed about twenty thousand head of
cattle there. We'd run about ten or twelve thousand steers on the
range, and they'd take in- -buy and fatten up in the feed yards --
another ten thousand, something like that. This is more or less the
Newhall ranch I'm talking about. The other ranches were lesser
versions of it. Most of them either ran or fattened or raised
cattle. We had some properties in the Central Valley that, one or
two of them, made a good income growing just regular farm produce,
crops, cotton, a lot of beans, stuff like that.
But we were broke. I keep saying that. When I say broke, I
mean that we were getting no money. None from it.
Riess: Your father, of that generation, was the only one who was completely
bankrupted?
Newhall: They were all bankrupt. Oh, some of them lived well. But they were
getting no money from the Newhall Ranches . Elizabeth Chesebrough is
a cousin, and her husband [Arthur] ran the ranch down there at
Newhall. When Atholl came over he was quite rich because the
Gladding-McBean Tile Company was selling a lot of tile sewer pipe, I
guess tiles for the men's and women's rooms in the Standard Oil
stations, and he had some Standard Oil stock, and he was a Standard
Oil magnate .
Fentress Hill was another. His wife was Marion Newhall. He
was a participant in a big redwood lumbering operation. So some of
them in different areas of California endeavor, did have an income,
but the big homes were either sold or abandoned, and they were all
living much--. My father really did go broke. He ended up owing
money, and as I say Atholl bought his shares of stock.
326
Riess: So the legacy that was ultimately divided up that you suggested go
into arbitration, what was it?
Newhall: Okay. That was the Walter Newhall estate trust. Walter Newhall
owned one fifth of the whole company.
Riess: Just that fifth was the only thing that was left? That you might
participate in?
Newhall: That was it. And my father was heir to one -thirteenth of it,
because there were thirteen in that family, in that generation.
These were all Uncle Walter's nieces and nephews. And then I would
have got one third of my father's, so that was all I would have got.
Leila "Tangev" Newhall. and Kenny
Newhall: There was one branch of the family- -sons or daughters of the Henry
Newhall family- -and things were so hard they had moved to Europe
before, and therefore were there during, World War II. One of them
who came back to California finally had been a German prisoner.
This was Tangey. She had been living in Biarritz over in the south
of France, and she got caught there because she wasn't allowed to
take her dog home on the Gripsholm or whatever it was . She missed
the last Swedish boat out of Lisbon, because her maid had told her
that the Germans ate dogs. So she wouldn't leave her dog, and the
Germans moved in, and by golly, the dog died two weeks after the
Nazis moved in. Tangey had literally canceled her passage on the
Gripsholm. and spent the rest of the war- -I think she was president
of the whist club or something- -at a German internment camp in
occupied France.
Riess : Her name was Tangey?
Newhall: She called herself Tangey. Her name was Leila Newhall. But
everybody called her Tangey because she liked the song "Tangerine."
She never married. She always thought there were germs in places,
so she always washed her underwear with rubber gloves on. Now,
don't ask me how.
Alice was Tangey' s sister, There were three children in that
Henry Newhall branch, Donald, an artist in New York, Tangey, and
Alice. If you want me to personalize what happened with my
involvement in this company, this is what happened. Alice came
back, and she was the sweetest little old maid you ever met in your
life, except she had been marrried to an Anglican clergyman who had
been trying to marry her mother. When her father [Henry Newhall]
died, Alice's mother was a very wealthy widow. Henry, her father,
was one of the original five Newhall sons. And Uncle Walter, who
327
left this legacy in the end, was Alice's guardian, and he thought
that the clergyman was a scoundrel, and a remittance man, and was
after his deceased brother's widow.
So Henry stormed into the house and kicked the priest down the
front stairs and said, "Don't you ever darken our door again."
Well, he darkened the door just long enough to come back and get
hold of Alice and marry her. And I guess she had a reasonably
livable life. She bore one child, called Kenneth. And that was the
only living heir in that branch of the family.
Alice was smarter about the war than Tangey. She got out of
Europe just in time. She came back on the Gripsholm with her son
Kenneth in tow. And Kenneth was a case.
Riess: What's Kenneth's last name?
Newhall: Kenneth O'Meara. The clergyman's name was the Reverend something-
or-other O'Meara.
Kenneth was a problem. He was a big guy, very heavy, about my
age, and he had a very high, piping voice. He was a very strange
man. We got to be pretty good friends.
I used to enjoy all my family, and I loved Alice, because Alice
used to like to play the mandolin. She brought me a Hawaiian steel
guitar, and so we'd sit there and play the "Song of the Islands"
together. She came to live with my mother, who had had a stroke,
and they were living in the Women's City Club, that one on Durant
Avenue in Berkeley. I used to go down there. My mother lived there
during the war most of the time.
Alice was one of the sweetest people you'd ever meet. Why, she
was amazing. How she would marry any man is beyond me, but she did.
She had married that parson, and then he died, of course.
Riess: So did Kenneth prove to be a problem?
Newhall: Kenneth was a problem. I don't know exactly how you want to
personalize all this , really how frank you want to be about all
this, but Kenny took to the bottle. I was at the Chronicle by this
time. This was right after World War II, right after, and I was
Sunday editor, I guess. Kenny began wandering around the bars in
San Francisco and ran up a lot of tabs. Somebody called Dixie got
hold of him. Dixie was a saloon keeper, and Kenny's mother was
terrified he was going to marry Dixie, and she didn't know what to
do about him. She finally bought a little house in Berkeley when
she moved out of the City Club, right across from Cragmont School on
Marin Avenue. And she loved our kids, Ruth's and my kids. One of
them, Tony, went to Cragmont School.
328
Alice was in- - . I did not mention that she had always felt
humiliated because she had been disinherited specifically by name by
Uncle Walter because she had married this clergyman. (I forgot to
mention that, which is an interesting part of the story.) I thought
that was quite unfair, frankly, and so when Mrs. Harlow died and I
got the family members all together, Alice's legacy was one of the
problems .
I had not met Alice at this time, but I argued, "Look, Alice
should get just as much as anybody else." And in the end Alice did
indeed inherit her shares. Now, remember, Alice had a big chunk of
her own stock from her father, but this is Uncle Walter's trust
we're talking about. And that's why Alice and my mother and I were
all pretty good friends.
Alice moved to Santa Barbara, and Tangey came home after the
war. I mean, these were characters, this family, you can't believe!
She came home ,
and they moved in together with Kenneth down in a
house in Santa Barbara, on Butterfly Lane. Did you ever see that
great play about Teddy Roosevelt digging the canal, "Arsenic and Old
Lace?" where they kept Teddy Roosevelt upstairs and sent him down
to the basement to dig the canal, and they'd murder these old men
with the elderberry wine?
Riess : Yes , yes . This was the look of the whole thing?
Newhall: Yes. They kept Kenny in a room over the garage down there in Santa
Barbara, and when people who came to call and who knew Kenny and
wouldn't be surprised, they'd reach up and ring a bell, and then
Kenny would come out and they'd all have a visit. It was an
interesting thing.
I had really a great fondness for Kenneth, and Alice said,
"Gee, if anything happens I hope you'll take care of Kenny." I
said, "Sure, I will. I'll do my best." She died finally of cancer,
and there was Kenneth. Well, Alice, absolutely to my astonishment,
not horror, but shock and astonishment, Alice had decided to
bequeath to Ruth and me a legacy of half of her Newhall farming
company stock. The other half went to a charity, and some tax
things were involved. I was absolutely astonished. I tell you we
were very close, but I just couldn't believe it. And here was
Kenneth.
Now, if Kenneth had children, then he would inherit everything.
So that makes me sound as if there's a motive for a novel in here,
about what's going to happen. What am I going to do with Kenny, am
I going to poison him, or am I going to keep him living forever?
Riess: What was left to Kenneth directly?
Newhall: Nothing. Oh, a few thousand dollars, and his keep, sort of. I
329
think he could live in the house. He would never go hungry, but I
was the executor, keeper, conservator, whatever you call it. No, he
would never sign over the conservatorship . The Crocker Bank was
trustee. Anyway, Kenneth had enough for a little spending money.
Now we're up to about the 1970s, almost. I believe Alice died
probably in around the early seventies. Kenny lived there in the
little Santa Barbara house, because Leila survived for a while,
Tangey survived, and they lived there. But Kenny, as I say, had
taken to drink, and he would float around Santa Barbara. He was
known very favorably, fondly in every bar, but of course he owed
everybody in town.
A few years later after Leila died, Kenny fell into the hands
--this is not exactly really a California history we're talking
about, but it's kind of interesting- -of an Irishman who had been a
footman or a butler in the old country. This Irishman had some kind
of a nubile Irish wife. They had come over here and they decided
they were going to pick up Kenny, and somehow cash in on his
mother's money. There was another woman in Santa Barbara, who was
okay. She acted as housekeeper and was really very nice to Kenneth.
But people were after Kenny because they saw a lot of money there.
He never married. I beg your pardon, he did marry; he got away
years ago and married once before he came back, before Alice came
back to this country. He married some German or Norwegian girl, and
they went to Norway, but Alice got him back again, and that was
dissolved.
Then he came back here ,
and he married a very nice woman who
had a couple of children of her own. They were divorced. I always
liked her, she's still alive, she's still living in a house that
Ruth and I provide for her, because this house had belonged to
Alice. But she's now taken care of. And Kenny never marrried
again, and he has never fathered any children- -that we know of.
Kenneth struck up a lot of very strange friendships. I kept
pretty much in touch with Kenny because he was down in Santa Barbara
at that time, and Ruth and I were in Piru. I felt responsible to
see that he at least had enough money to pay his debts, and be cared
for. We had some arrangement with a woman to take care of him. She
sort of got him fed and stuff, or would find houses for him where he
lived.
A short time after Leila died Kenneth had got into trouble with
diabetes. Kenny just was accident-prone. And eventually his leg
was amputated. He was over here in San Francisco at St. Joseph's
Hospital, and I used to visit him all the time. He had no friends,
except these strange people once in a while, but they were in Santa
Barbara. When Kenny got out of St. Joseph's he took his solace in
alcohol.
330
The Irish handyman- butler, and his wife who had been a barmaid,
took Kenneth on a trip to Mexico- -Kenny in his wheelchair and all.
And I was very nervous all the time. I said, "Am I going to end up
with ten more Mexican cousins who are going to get all this money?
What's going on? What's going to happen? This is an awful thing.
Kenny is just headed for doom here, because nobody loves Kenny much
for himself." He was about three-hundred pounds then, and not very
tall, and confined to his wheelchair, and most people thought he was
not quite right, from an intellectual standpoint. Kenny wasn't all
that dumb, but he did have his limited horizons at times.
Riess: It sounds awful, actually.
Newhall: Well, I'm trying to be very frank about it, because there is the
makings of a novel in Kenneth O'Meara's bizarre trip through life.
Believe me, Kenny was my friend and he was a problem. He was a
lonely man.
Somebody, and I forget who it was this time, one of his flaky
Santa Barbara keepers , persuaded him to take a trip over to
Copenhagen, to go to that garden they have there, that amusement
park, famous in Denmark.
Riess: Tivoli.
Newhall: Tivoli, you're absolutely right. And I was so nervous in a sense- -
I've never said this- -I didn't know what might happen to Kenny in a
Copenhagen Danish clinic to prepare Kenneth to bear children, or
something. I didn't know what was going to happen. So I said to
Tony, my son, "Look, you'd better tag along on the next flight and
just watch what's happening with this kid. I don't know what's
going to go on, whether they're going to suddenly come up with a
Danish baby or something."
Tony landed over there the next flight, and he had no trouble
finding out where Kenny was, and just sort of saw that he was on a
sight- seeing trip. Tony was interested in chess, so he caught the
plane to come home and stopped off in Iceland, and that's where
Bobby Fisher was playing for the world championship, so you can date
it with that. You remember Bobby Fisher? I think he won it, didn't
he, against the Russian [Boris Spassky] up there in Iceland? And
that would have been in I think the early seventies [1972].
And one reason why I was acting in this kind of paranoid way is
that the Irishman that I had mentioned and his wife took Kenny down
to Mexico. They took him down there, out to Lake Chapala. I found
this out later. I didn't follow him that time. Hell, I like
Mexico, I figured he wanted to have a good time, be my guest.
But Kenny's Irish escorts started legal procedure and had
papers made up to adopt six Mexican children. Now, you see, if
331
Kenny had children, the problem was- -this is fairly complex- -but
Alice's will said, "Issue of the body of my son." And Alice meant a
Newhall. If Kenny had any natural children all Alice's estate would
go to such natural children or "issue." But the lawyers who drew up
her will had left some boilerplate in the end which said that the
word "children" included adopted children. So there was going to be
a hell of a lawsuit if a lot of adopted children showed up asking
for Alice's estate. I mean, there was no question in anybody's
mind as to what Alice had meant. It was weird.
Well, Kenny's Irish friend and his wife got papers to adopt
these Mexican kids, and for some reason or other, it fell through.
I think they found that maybe a Mexican adoption would not hold up.
Coming back across the border, they decided they would make their
fortunes another way. Kenny traveled by wheelchair --he had the bad
leg- -so they took the tires off his wheelchair, and they filled it
up with marijuana or cocaine or something, and they brought him
across the border, and I think this probably paid some of their
expenses. I think they were successful in that.
Riess: How do you know that one?
Newhall: I can't remember. I guess Kenny told me. I guess. I'm really not
sure. They were not arrested, but I think the woman who took care
of him most of the time told me this, because she was so mad at the
Irishman. But really, it was very confusing.
Kenny finally took sick and died. Alice had left some money to
the hospital in which they took care of him, and they gave him a bad
shake in that hospital. I came down one day to see Kenny, because I
tried to be quite --you know, follow him, and help him out, and to
make sure he was getting fed and stuff. It took me three trips to
that place before I could find the doctor. They wouldn't do
anything with Kenny or for Kenny. They found him boring and a
nuisance. I finally got the doctor on the telephone in his private
airplane with his own private phone in it. I thought, that's a hell
of a way for a doctor to be taking care of patients down in Santa
Barbara. Santa Barbara's a strange place, it's full of a lot of
strange people, and rich people, but--.
Kenny stayed there for a while and then he got out, and then I
took him to another hospital. He had been having trouble with
gangrene; he was just this terribly pathetic thing. Kenny was an
alcoholic, and I more or less- -I didn't encourage it, but I didn't
discourage it. I think alcohol was the only pleasure he ever had,
really truly. I know I certainly felt that if I was in that
condition that is probably how I would float away.
I'll get off Kenny with one more story. We'd go down and try
to have dinner with him, or take him out, or fool around, every
couple of weeks. There was a place called Santa Glaus just outside
332
of Santa Barbara- -he was living down there in Summerland- -we were
having dinner at this quite nice restaurant in Santa Glaus, sort of
a roadside chop house. And this story is to demonstrate that Kenny
was not a moron. Kenny was an expert in the field of sports. He
used to watch a lot of sports events on television.
At this little family celebration we were having the people at
the next table were in a bibulous frame of mind discussing horse
racing. The fellow at the adjoining table said in a loud voice,
"I'll bet anybody here you can't tell me the name of the only filly
who ever won the Kentucky Derby." They couldn't answer him
correctly, they lost their bets. And then the fellow turned to us
and said, "Well, anybody at your table here want to take me up on
that? "
Kenny looked up at him. He said, "I regret, sir, I knew the
filly's name, she won in 1915, but I regret I don't seem to
remember," and the fellow jumped up and said, "You won, you've won."
I asked, "What do you mean? Who do you mean?" He said, "The name
of the filly was Regret." That's the story. I think it was
probably correct. I've never checked it.
333
XII NEWHALL LAND AND FARMING COMPANY
Corporate Leadership
Newhall:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Well, that's enough wandering around. So Ruth and I did inherit a
substantial part of Alice's share of the Newhall Land and Fanning
Company, and that was the way we got back into it, at least
financially. This is aside from the Walter Newhall estate, now. So
that's the reason that we participate to any extent at all, and I've
been still fairly active in it, although I'm not as active in it now
as I was when Atholl was still there.
Atholl was a problem. He
and very unreasonable. I was
of calm him down. And then he
after I bought the Signal, the
furious because I think the Si
tax assessor of being a crook,
ranchers don't understand the
farming.
got to be very old and very crabby
one of the few people who could kind
finally took off and got mad at me,
little paper down there. He was
accused the Los Angeles County
or something like that. Corporate
difference between newspapers and
But I always made it my business to be as active in the Newhall
Land and Farming Company as possible, at a policy or advisory level,
or something or other- -a morale level. I would try to keep them
modest and honest. I enjoyed it.
Riess: You are called a communications expert in the company report.
Oh, I guess I put that down for want of anything else,
anything I want.
"Communications consultant."
I put down
Yes. See I had sold the Signal by that time. I have always been
listed in some newspaper context as editor of the Chronicle or
editor or publisher of the Signal. Peter McBean puts down rancher.
Different people do different things.
334
Riess: Who's Jane Newhall?
Newhall: Janey is a first cousin of mine, lives right up here in San
Francisco. She was my closest relative of the lot; although we have
different grandmothers, we have the same grandfather. Jane is the
only child of my Uncle Edwin, who lent my father some of his shares
in another family company which have been since paid back. We were
all very close, and we all lived in the same house during the late
unlamented Depression. She still lives there. Janey is a spinster,
she is still a member of the board.
M
Riess: When I looked at the board members listed for Newhall Land and
Farming Company I thought perhaps Ezra Zilkha was a pseudonym, you
in another guise!
Newhall: Cousin Ezra. He's the most active non-family member we've ever had
on the board. He's a very smart young man. And very ambitious.
The banquet we held in his honor to welcome him, I got up and said
that he was from now on formally Cousin Ezra. In part he is an
Iraqi Jew and has a private investment company. But we have to keep
it in the family.
We're having all kinds of trouble in the company, now. People
are investing in it and they's speculating in it, and we're going
through a very difficult period. See, we went public to sell stock
when Tom Lowe was president back along the end of Atholl's life in
there, about 1972 or '73- -I really can't remember the exact year,
but that's easily ascertainable . And since then, it's been a
different ballgame, if I may coin a phrase.
Atholl went through a very, very difficult period getting old,
the same way I am now, sort of. He hired and fired about four or
five executive vice presidents. I don't know, but I think
psychologically he wanted- -it doesn't matter if I say this --he
wanted the company to be his monument, to be a granite headstone on
his grave, and to bring it down with him, almost. He wanted to die,
and he was mad at me in the last two or three years .
Riess: You mean he'd rather destroy it at the end?
Newhall: Well, let it destroy itself without him, or something.
He'd asked me one time if I would take over and run the
company, and I wouldn't. I was at the Chronicle then, and I said,
"No." For whatever it's worth, he has a son Peter, who has a great
deal of stock. He has my father's share as well as his own, and his
mother's. Atholl and his son did not get along. He was terrible to
Peter. It was a very difficult relationship.
335
Fortunately, when I was more active with the companies I hired
a guy to run the San Francisco office of the White Investment
Company, which was my great -
grandmother '
s estate. And Atholl took a
great shine to him. He was a young man, and his name was James F.
Dickason, and Atholl sort of transferred his filial attention to
Jim. Jim Dickason eventually became president and chairman of the
Newhall board. Atholl was the last family member who had any
active, leading participation in the management of the company.
Riess: Flattering that he thought that you would be the person to run the
company, wasn't it? Or wasn't it?
Newhall: Well, it's just as if he transferred from Peter to me, and then he
got mad at me and transferred to Jim Dickason. Atholl- -I was always
very loyal to Atholl. I was loyal in that I tried not to let people
react and get together to fight him. There was plotting, there were
family feuds going on. I told you about the letter I wrote. They
really, everybody, were dedicated to Atholl 's destruction.
Difficult as he may have been, he was a remarkable man, he really
was. He was a movie character actor, a magnate, and absolutely
dictatorial. People had a hard time getting on with him.
Dynasties and Families- -Taking the Good with the Bad
Riess: If it's a board, why can't you get rid of the dictator?
Newhall: You're afraid of him, afraid to do without him. This goes on in
every big company in the world. American corporations are- -I don't
know if they're unique, but it's the same as dynastic situations in
a general society. How is the power wielded or maintained in any
dynasty? It's primogeniture in England.
Riess: Well, you saw it at the Chronicle, didn't you?
Newhall: Sure. And I'm sure that now at the Chronicle they're going through
all kinds of problems deciding how they're going to shake out the
different deYoung family controls and relationships now that Phyllis
Tucker has died. The whole thing, Chronicle Publishing Company,
will be vested in the heirs. That's exactly the same kind of will
that Henry Mayo Newhall left. It goes through family groups per
stirpes. I don't even know how the deYoung family will work it out.
There's a lot of ill feeling here and there. And this happens in
families, and I think it's terrible.
I really cherish this strange Newhall family, because it's one
of the few things I have to give me some kind of security, to feel
that I am in fact a part of something on the planet Earth. And I
have great sympathy with people who have nowhere to go- -nothing to
336
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
which to relate themselves. No wonder you're running around the
street with cocaine if you don't know who your mother is or who your
father is or whatever. I can really be terribly sympathetic. I've
never had that problem.
That's funny, because that reminds me of Paul Smith, and that was
his problem, too.
Right, you bet it was his problem. Absolutely. I'm not sure he
would ever have indicated it to anyone, but absolutely. He was
never sure .
But you still would have been sure, even if you hadn't gotten the
legacy.
I
Mmm. My childhood--! can't explain it. I had all the security I
needed from my childhood. I know that I was a human being
somewhere, and there were people to whom I mattered, my mother and
father if nothing else. I knew my name, and my father's name. I
knew that people were very nice to us for some reason or other,
usually. That's not always the case. I mean, I could sit there and
know that anyone approaching me was approaching me out of
friendship, and not with any kind of evil design in his heart.
I read that some member of the farming company actually wanted you
to come down and buy the paper.
Jim talked me into it.
Jim Dickason?
The reason I bought the paper, that's where we started,
first question you asked me today, wasn't it?
That's the
You said, "A young Newhall Land and Farming Company executive
suggested I buy the Signal as an investment in a growing paper and
community." r Santa Clarita Valley Magazine interview, no date.)
Right, that's Jim Dickason, who became the president and chairman,
eventually. He was my protege, of whom I'm very proud. He started
out up here in San Francisco. Remember, I said Atholl transferred
his filial affection to Jim, and Jim went onward and upward.
And he didn't have any trouble getting along with Atholl?
Jim is an interesting person. He's just retired. He's still a
member of the board. He did a tremendous- -well, he could handle
Atholl. When Atholl would come back from a trip, he would bring Jim
gold watches from Switzerland and ties from Paris and things like
that. Atholl was a very lonely man. You have to remember somewhere
in Atholl there must have been a residual little voice of guilt
337
about why he hadn't protected my father's share the way he had
protected everyone else's in the family. I don't know what the
problem was, I really don't. However, the luckiest thing that ever
happened to me was that he didn't. I have never regretted it. I
never regretted what happened because it was all perfectly legal and
understandable .
Jim--
But getting back to your question about why I went down there,
Riess: Are you saying that if you would have had all that money, you would
have gone to seed in some way?
Newhall: I think I would have died. I don't think I would have survived as
long as I have, I really don't. I've seen what it does to many,
many people, not just in my family but in many families in many
situations not too dissimilar. I think maybe 25 percent or more, up
to 50 percent of the people with whom I associated, just by chance
in college and prep school, either died suicides or just sick before
their time with alcohol or drugs. Really, a great many of them just
destroyed themselves. They were aimless.
I have no complaints at all. The luckiest thing that ever
happened to me was to go broke. I mean it. When I say broke,
perhaps I wasn't living in a cardboard carton in the street, but we
had no money. Ruth and I started out with zero. My mother helped
us a little bit. But Ruth has always been a good hard worker.
Financing the Purchase of the Signal. 1963
Riess: You were saying that Jim Dickason said you should come down.
Newhall: He said, "Why don't you buy the Signal?"
I was myself very active in the origins of the development of
the ranch, real estate development, and that's this thing I guess
we're going to get into. He said, "Why don't you buy the paper?
This is going to go."
I said, "Well, that's a pretty good idea." I was at the
Chronicle still. This is 1963, the year Kennedy was killed. I
said, "Well, I'll look into it." As it worked out, I had to buy
another paper at the same time called the Record Ledger in the town
of Tujunga, which is across the hill in the San Fernando Valley up
above there by La Crescenta. It turned out that the publisher of
the Tujunga Record Ledger, whose name was Ray Brooks, had just
bought the Signal. I didn't even know he'd bought the Signal.
because the Trueblood family had owned it.
338
Anyway, I bought the Signal for what amounted to $60,000, and I
think I paid $150,000 for both of the papers, the Record Ledger and
the Signal. I showed the Newhall Land and Farming Company CPAs the
financial statements of these papers. I asked, "Is this Tujunga
Record Ledger making enough to carry itself?" They answered me,
"Oh, yeah." Well, goddamn, as it turned out the Record Ledger was
losing a fortune. I mean, what kind of CPAs were we using? We're
not using them any more at the farming company, I'll tell you.
Anyway, I unloaded it, I sold the Record Ledger back to Brooks
for half the price that I'd paid him, and he was dumb enough to
think that was a good deal, if he could buy something back for half
of what he sold it for. Well, hell, it was losing so much money I
was lucky to get a dime for it. But the Signal was worth the whole
thing .
Brooks had owned that paper for only about four or five months ,
and I came along, and I don't know why he sold it to me. He
shouldn't have, but he did. I knew it had this tremendous future,
but I also knew it was going to be losing money for a long time.
(And I lost money on it for ten years.) So I got Jon, my son, to
come down. And I got one of the kids at the Chronicle to come down
as a publisher, Dave Bynum, who has now got a scucessful wine
operation up in the Sonoma or Napa Valley. I was still working
full-time at the Chronicle. I was just doing the Signal work out of
my left hand, weekends. That's the way I got into the Signal.
Riess: Did you buy it yourself, or did the company buy it?
Newhall: Oh, no. I did, but I needed help with the financing. I figured I
needed a half million dollars to make it pay in the end. I got them
to guarantee a note, my personal note at the bank, for a half
million dollars and that's where I got into the argument with
Atholl, really, in the end. Jim said, "Oh, this is going to be a
money-maker," and I said, "Hey, Jim, look this is going to take a
long time." The farming company people wanted to buy the Signal and
get me to run it. I said, "Forget it. I will never, ever, ever
again run anybody else's property for them. If there are going to
be losses, I want to take them. If there are going to be any
profits, I want them."
So they took a 40 percent position and they in return
guaranteed the note. I put up the rest of the money. The note came
due in about five years, and I couldn't quite meet it. Atholl was
mad, and he was going to withdraw the company's guarantee of the
note, so that's when I sold the paper. But I made the sale on an
option basis--! would keep control of the Signal for another five
years. About that time, 1975 --this is a very quick history of it
all --the Signal began making money. But I paid the note off. I had
a little argument with my son Jon. He wouldn't sign- -see, I'd given
339
the kids all a little stock in the Signal- -he wouldn't sign off his
part of it. But I paid off the note within a couple of weeks of
when it was due.
Atholl was really mad. And I mean, I could resent it if I
wanted to, but I don't. You see Atholl was the kind of man who
would never understand what a newspaper was. He could never
understand that a newspaper is the only battlement, the only trench
we have against the encroachments of a dictatorial society. After
all, Atholl was a dictator in his own mental process. They cannot
cope with debate, not even opposition. They can't cope with debate,
regardless of how the debate turns out.
Riess: You said that papers don't make money. I mean, how--?
Newhall: Did I?
Riess: Well, in talking about the Chronicle- -
Newhall: Oh, the Chronicle made a lot of money before I left.
Riess: I thought it was the Chronicle enterprises. It was actually the
paper itself that was making money? Or were you always taking the
TV stations into consideration?
Newhall: In all my discussion of the Chronicle Publishing Company I have been
referring only to the San Francisco Chronicle- -the newspaper.
No, no. If I did leave that impression, I didn't mean to. The
Chronicle .
forgetting all the rest of the enterprises, when I first
became operationally involved with the running of it was losing a
little more than a million dollars a year in 1952. I said it could
not make money- -we would not have survived on that basis only--
unless we had some backing, perhaps from the TV or something. But
the Chronicle itself began making money in about 1962 or 1963. See,
that's nine years. And then after signing the joint agreement with
the Examiner- -I left very shortly thereafter- -we made I think three
to six million dollars a year. Then I think it went up more. Now,
in 1988, they may be a little leaner. I'm totally unacquainted with
their present situation.
Riess: You have said that you wouldn't go into the newspaper business to
make money .
Newhall: That is correct. I've said that many times. If you're in something
to make money- -I'm kind of lying when I say that, but there is such
an expenditure of creative energy necessary to make a newspaper
work. This is not a business where you can look for a couple of
smart guys and just let it develop. Newspapering is the most
competitive business in the world, at least certainly the most
competitive I've ever seen.
340
The Arrangement with the Morris Chain. 1973
Riess: But the Morris chain, they're making money?
Newhall: Maybe- -maybe they're losing their shirts.
At first I wouldn't sell the paper to Morris. (This is a long
story.) He came out, some newspaper broker dug him up, the Signal
was not making money- -this was 1972- -but Morris wanted to buy the
Signal.
We made a deal to sell it to him, and then he was going to hire
us to run it. Ruth and Tony were both around. Before we signed it,
I remember Charles Morris and I had breakfast together at a
restaurant down there, and he said, "By the way, Scott, we're going
to have to let some of the staff go and cut the expenses so we can
get the Signal on the track to make money."
I said, "Charles, I'm not going to sell you the paper. You
have to got to be willing to lose money for up to ten years if you
really want this paper to be successful. I'll tell you what I'll
do." (I still needed to pay off Atholl.) So I made a deal with
him. Morris could buy the paper if he would lend me $125,000.
That's all I needed to pay off the rotten note. If he would
lend the paper $125,000 I would give him an irrevocable option to
purchase the Signal in five years. If Morris purchased it, the
$125,000 would go toward the purchase price. And if he didn't buy
the paper I would have to pay back the $125,000 loan, with all
interest. I guess I'd give it back to him or keep it or something.
The eventual purchase price of the paper would be determined,
computed at the time of sale, at one and one-half times the gross
annual revenue, so the longer the paper went, the higher the price
went, if the revenues continued to climb. Because you had to have
some kind of a formula for price in a case like that.
And so he did indeed buy the Signal after five years. Oh, I
really didn't want him to. You know, at first five years seemed
like a long time, but the years race by very fast, particularly if
you begin to make money. The Signal began to make money- -the five
years were up on the first of January, 1978 --the paper began to make
money in about '75. Our revenues, when I sold it to him, were about
$1,200,000, so that meant Morris had to pay $1,800,000 for the
paper. Then Tony and I and Ruth continued to publish the Signal for
another ten years. But Morris owned it. He put up a grand new
plant against my advice.
Riess: Put up a plant?
Newhall: Yes. A big newspaper plant, with a printing press and all.
341
Riess: You mean it wasn't necessary?
Newhall: Oh, hell, I just worked out of rented quarters. When we owned the
Signal we were a kind of floating crap game, literally. We owned
about ten typewriters and ten desks. That was it. Then the rest of
it was expenses . We rented the quarters ,
we rented the phones , yes ,
everything .
We began to make money in about '75. He paid me a million
eight, over a five-year payoff. I left the Signal last year. Tony
quit last year. We had a big blow-up. I don't know how much you
know about this. It's an interesting story. The Signal made a net
profit the last twelve months we were there of $1,679,000, and
that's before taxes, but after all, you can see why I didn't want to
sell it.
Riess: And you couldn't get some of the family to rally around and help you
with that $125,000 note?
Newhall: No, I wouldn't. I guess I could have. But I wouldn't. But in my
opinion, it was even embarrassing that I originally asked the
company to guarantee my note. I can't run a paper, I would never
try to, unless I have absolute total control over how I want to do
it, and I cannot stand the pressure or the problems or the friction
of having to have a meeting and explain to your shareholder this ,
that, or the other. They just end up in shouting matches; I've seen
it too much at the farming company. That's why in this little paper
we're starting now [Citizen! when two or three people offered me a
considerable amount of money if I wanted, I said no. I said, "I'm
willing to lose my own money on it, I'm not going to have to lie
awake nights worrying about losing yours."
For a little paper, which the Signal was, I think that's a
pretty darn good return. And if it had continued, we'd probably be
making about two million this year, and so on. But the balloon will
burst. I think Morris is probably not making anything now. We're
locked up in a hell of a fight there, and he's giving away his
advertising, and everything else. But that's a different story.
[See Chapter XIII.]
Riess: I was wondering what your point was in saying that he had put in the
plant, as if that was unwise?
Newhall: I wouldn't have done it, because I've never wanted to operate my own
press. That is a business in itself. That is simply because of the
scars from the Chronicle: San Francisco's a very highly unionized
city, and of all the tough unions in the world, probably the
typographers and the pressmen are the toughest. I just didn't want
to cope with them. If anybody ever struck a paper I have now, I'd
just shut the doors and quit. I just didn't have to cope with it.
I'll pay them just about anything they want, within reason.
342
Riess: What did you do to turn the Signal from profitless to profitable?
Newhall: That is a long story, and I mean a long story. It's the same thing
exactly as the Chronicle.
Riess: Did you do promotions?
Newhall: Same promotions, same in most cases.
Valencia- -"Shangri-la?"
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
The Signal and the farming company are two completely different
facets or different compartments of my activity down there. They in
no way overlap, except I suppose in my overall approach to the
problems afflicting twentieth century American society.
Oh, juicy morsel to drop. But, on the other hand, the reason that
you went down and did it was because Dickason, you said, suggested
that this was a good move, to get involved in this community, that
was part of your community.
He might have figured that I could profit personally because the
whole area was slated for development, and that a small paper there
might, in turn, develop into something much larger.
And your part would be the newspaper package.
Well, I was just as active with the company, too. I have had to
carry a dual role, what might be described as a conflict of
interest, but I've tried to never let them conflict, that's all I
can say.
They certainly must conflict about development.
You can vote one way as a member of a board of directors ,
and write
an editorial another way as a newspaper editor, or that's the way it
seemed to me .
You editorialized about it?
At the Signal we editorialized totally much of the development.
It's a very- -just takes a lot of discussing, it really does. There
is development and there is development.
[interruption]
The Signal story is probably just as important a story
journalistically as the Chronicle . but it's not as local. It's an
343
interesting story. But then there is another story, as I say, about
the California ranch and the way that California society is now
developing. You've never seen anything like this area down there.
I'm telling you. You've never seen it. Have you been to southern
California lately?
Riess: I haven't driven by that area, but I'll tell you that I am
predisposed to hate it.
Newhall: Yes. So do I.
Riess: And so I'm really kind of all excited to hear about it.
Newhall: Oh, it's fascinating what's happening, I think, to human beings.
I'm going through a very difficult period spiritually in my own
life. I thought I was going to create Shangri-la in our corner of
southern California. And instead we may have created Dante's
Inferno, I'm not sure which yet. It's not Shangri-la, I'll tell you
that. It's interesting.
Riess: Well, and of course, if you hadn't, someone else would have, and
they wouldn't have done it as well.
Newhall: Well, you have to remember the Newhall ranch part of this
development is only about a third of the physical, geographical
entity in which the Signal circulates. It's in the mountain basin
--do you know where it is really we're talking about?
Riess: No.
Newhall: I really should fly you over in the helicopter and we'll see. It
has a true identity just as much as San Francisco Bay Area does. In
fact, instead of being a bay surrounded by hills, down there it's a
valley surrounded by hills. Just as rugged, or more so. To see
what has happened there, as a result of the billions of dollars at
stake in this valley, and I say billions very purposely, is a
fascinating study of the exploding West Coast, or of the American
culture. It's unbelievable. The people in this valley--.
It's now called the Santa Clarita Valley. That was our first
great fight: What shall the name of this place be? There was a
little town of Newhall. Well, people still call it the Newhall
area, because no other name so far except Valencia has really stuck.
Riess: What is Valencia, actually?
Newhall: That is the Newhall Ranch Company development area of the valley.
Riess: But it's not the same shape as the Newhall ranch?
Newhall: Valencia is the most easterly and flatter portion of the Newhall
344
ranch. It is what is commonly known as a master-planned "new town."
I thought up the name "Valencia" after Atholl had asked me to come
up with a name. It's a concept I had, and unfortunately, as I say,
concepts do not always work out ideally. Valencia is not as good as
I hoped. The Newhall part of the Santa Clarita Valley, that is
Valencia, is not as good as I hoped it would be, but it's not as bad
as I thought it might be. So, somewhere in between.
We fought and fought and fought, and I fought and fought and
fought for my ideas through the paper, but not against the company.
It's not as conflictive in terms of an interest as you might think.
The biggest crusade the Signal got into was to turn the whole
geographical Santa Clarita Valley, including Valencia, into a
separate county. We fought to become a new county. We lost that.
The farming company also went along on that one . Tom Lowe was
president then, and he agreed. If we formed a county he'd go for
it, but he'd fight against forming a city. And I agreed with him.
Riess: Was that a reasonable fight?
Newhall: Oh, hell, it should have been a county. We voted for it out there
twice, by a substantial majority. But of course the rest of Los
Angeles voted against it so we lost our county.
Riess: Wasn't that unprecedented?
Newhall: Yes, in recent history, sure. The politicians have set it up in
Sacramento so no new counties can be formed in California. You
can't do it. We voted for it out there' it won. But the whole rest
of Los Angeles also had to vote in favor of it. So if you try to
start a county and split off from in Los Angeles County- -you can't.
Riess: Because they saw that this was a big tax base that they would lose?
Newhall: Well, that's right. That's true, you see. But the entrenched
county politicians argue no, that a new county cannot be a county
because it can't support itself. Then they contradict themselves
saying, "Hey, we can't afford to lose this valuable tax base." I
mean, it's political. And it's going to destroy California, if you
realize that five individuals basically control all of Los Angeles
County, as surely as the dukes in England controlled their counties
in about the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or their dukedoms, I
guess you would call them.
Riess: You mean the five supervisors?
Newhall: The five supervisors. They are elected, and they have absolute
total power over their areas. Each of them controls a little
different acreage, about up to 2 million inhabitants in each
district.
345
Riess: My God.
Newhall: Yes. You realize that Libya, of which we are so frightened, is
only double the population of the Fifth District in Los Angeles
County. I think people think of Libya as being a real country.
It's an illusion. It just has a bad supervisorial district, at the
moment .
Riess: Trying to turn the Santa Clarita Valley into a county- -was it called
the Santa Clarita Valley at that time?
Newhall: No. It was called nothing- -Newhall, or the Newhall -Saugus area. It
should have been the Santa Clara Valley, but there's a Santa Clara
Valley up here. The Santa Clara River also exists down there,
another Santa Clara River, so the first argument we ever got into
was what shall the name be. And I said, "Let's call it Valencia
Valley. The farming company is spending so much money promoting the
name Valencia, why don't we all get a piece of the promotion
action." Well, they thought no, this is a trick of the farming
company. I mean it's local politics.
Riess: Who's "they" that we're talking about?
Newhall: Everybody else down there. The old guard. Because the farming
company looms so big down there. It is the "villain" in the eyes of
the rest of the Santa Clarita Valley. The farming company is big
and it's frightening to the local people. The company is a
venerable villain. Now, of course, it's becoming a generous
villain.
Riess: Okay. So the farming company liked or did not like the notion of
calling it Valencia Valley?
Newhall: They [the local residents] fought the name Valencia Valley to the
death.
The local people hated the name Valencia Valley because they
were convinced the farming company was trying to impose it on them.
But, on the other hand, the farming company executives were totally
opposed to "Valencia Valley" as a name for the whole area because
the farming company wanted the name for themselve, alone. Think
about Beverly Hills or Bel Air or Hillsborough. See, Valencia is
the Bel Air or the Beverly Hills or the Hillsborough of the whole
area- -and these are relative terms. The new town community Valencia
has turned out to be a snobbish high caste place. There is a social
structure down there that is based on social and financial caste.
It's just the same as it is in India or San Francisco. Or in the
academic world in Berkeley.
346
Signal Readership. 1978
Riess: Let's get back to the Signal, and how you turned it into a
profitable paper, with a great readership.
Newhall: The Signal. I think, was probably a unique paper. Many of our
editorials ran on the front page . I used to write the editorials .
Some were over-written pretty heavily, but they were fairly rigid or
opinionated and, I hope, humorous, and we paid no attention to the
existing community likes and dislikes. I wrote what I felt like and
paid no attention whatever to local taste. Most of the editorials
and some of the news features were somewhat or actually vastly
different in approach than the contemporary press usually assumes.
I think the disintegration of American editorial writing is
profound, I really do.
Riess: Well, you were a front-page editorial writer.
Newhall: I used to put most of the editorials on the front page. That's the
reason they read the papers, so they could have something to laugh
at or sneer at or hate or sometimes like- take your choice. That's
always been a technique of mine, but it's a fact.
Riess: Did that increase the circulation?
Newhall: Yes, but "readership" is a better word here than "circulation."
Readership. Yes, you see, the Signal was circulated or delivered to
every home in the Santa Clarita Valley. But even with this total
kind of circulation our readership was very high. Last year, the
fellow who owns the Signal. Morris, he sent in a general manager and
I think he was trying to send a message to Tony. I think Morris was
ass -deep in Newhalls and wanted us Newhalls to get out. He wanted
to own his own paper. He could never bring himself to admit it, but
I think so .
This new business manager hired a polling firm to make a
survey. I said, "Why bother to make a survey? It's going to cost
you a lot of money. I can tell you exactly what the poll is going
to bring out. You're going to find out that about 90 percent or
more of the respondents read this paper. That will be two or three
times higher than any other newspaper coming into the area."
Well, the poll- taker comes in goggle-eyed after presenting this
bill for $10,000, which to me was too much to pay. He said "You
fellows don't know what you've got here. You ought to publish this
survey, you ought to capitalize on this. Do you know that you've
got 87.5 percent readership? In all my experience, no newspaper has
ever had this. I just can't believe it."
I said, "Gee, that's swell. Will you sign a statement to that
347
Riess:
effect, that you've never seen a paper that has the same readership
we do?" "Oh," he said, "I don't know if I can do that. It might be
bad for business." What a guy!
I am telling this story to demonstrate that the Signal kept its
readers reading. But a great change is taking place now in the
Santa Clarita Valley community and I am totally bewildered and
perplexed. I don't know if the new generation of residents can be
reached. I mean that, I don't know if the Signal's going to make
it. I think profits may be headed down. The Signal probably went
from a million and a half profit last year to possibly zero profit
for the next calendar year or fiscal year.
I can't explain that exactly, except that during a period in
which Morris sent out his own business manager- -this was a year and
a half ago- -when they made the survey and stuff, after that they
dropped $500,000 in profit for that twelve -month period, because of
the silly expenses, including making surveys and such he was running
up. Morris' new manager was there supposedly to cut the costs, and
now he's gone from three-day-a-week to six-day-a-week distribution
of a relatively large paper. It's not as large as the Chronicle.
but the Signal, you know, is a big paper. In the end, our Wednesday
editions were probably as large as the Chronicle. We'd go sometimes
about 120 pages, something like that.
So people didn't supplement it with the L.A. Times: they just read
the Signal.
Newhall: Well, we never, never were in competition with the Times . as far as
I was concerned. We'd only use wire stories if we had to. The
Signal was a totally local paper. Today the Morris people are
trying to make it a big daily paper.
Riess: So why the drop of income?
Newhall: Because the Signal is being delivered free of charge to a growing
population and it is being delivered twice as frequently- -six days a
week. They still get all the ads, but I think they're beginning to
offer special inducement advertising rates. And publishing six
times a week is expensive.
Television, and the World. 1989 --From Bad to Worsetftf
Riess: Is the readership changing out there, now that the Santa Clarita
Valley is more upscale?
Newhall: Economically, it's upscale. Intellectually, it's probably pretty
well downscale.
348
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
[laughs] That's what you don't want on the tape.
Well, why not? I have not too much hope for the literacy of the
American citizens. The Signal's competition, if you want me to talk
philosophically, is not the Los Angeles Times. The Times is a great
newspaper anyway, and so is the New York Times . I get that, by the
way, I get the New York Times service for the Citizen. And that's a
hell of a good little newspaper--! should say big one, whatever you
want, it basically is a wonderful paper. The New York Times hasn't
deteriorated at all, as far as I'm concerned, over the years.
Television,
destroy us.
Great mystery?
Television is the great mystery, and it may
To me it's a mystery, what its result will be. Television may
destroy us. The stuff on television- -I 'm not talking about some of
the most wonderful things in the world which have been on some of
the public broadcasting stations some of the time- -but the whole TV
fare is more frequently a business of covering the world of news in
fifteen or twenty- second bits. This is not just a joke, either.
There is a non-knowledge imparted in television that's frightening,
and more people and more people are watching TV, and I think fewer
and fewer people are reading newspapers. I don't say fewer are
getting newspapers, or buying them. But I think fewer and fewer are
reading them. And I think it's very frightening.
I think it is, too, Actually, news tends to be frightening, and at
the same time it's saying that this is the way the world is, and so
people are just kind of more and more inured.
Well, you've got a problemwhat is the "world?" Before television,
"the world" was what we got through books and newspapers and so on.
And a world we actually could touch and visit, and see for
ourselves. But now, the world to most people is what they see with
their own eyes, on a television tube. This world is often vastly
different from the reality. But it looks real. I mean, wow. It's
terrifying.
It's more violent, and yet the violence is presented in a kind of
movie -tone version.
In a way, yes. Put it this way: Rudyard Kipling invented, or rather
manufactured, the English upper-class (and lower-class) role model.
And now television is manufacturing the American cultural role
model. Therefore television is not a mirror of real behavior, the
real world.
I think it's the other way around. I don't think television is
349
necessarily reproducing what actually happens in the world; I think
rather that people are beginning more and more to live television
lives, and behave the way they see people behaving on TV. I don't
think the real world is quite as violent as you think it is, looking
at television, but it is becoming more violent because of
television. That might sound like a contradiction.
Riess: Life is even more of a struggle than television shows us, but it's
not as glamorous a struggle. Television makes "pictures" out of the
struggle for survival all over the world.
Newhall: That is a most apt and convincing way of stating the curse of the
magic tube.
Where this always brings me is the horrible problem of
population pressure, which is the basic reality in the world and
probably always has been. The American people, the American
society, American culture as we've known it, is disappearing, and
it's disappearing rapidly. I think if you take a trip down to
central Los Angeles or to Miami or to the Texas border, you will see
why.
Ruth and I had the marvelous opportunity to visit and spend
quite a lot of time in Mexico when there was almost a fresh
beginning after the series of early twentieth-century revolutions in
Mexico. It was an empty country. There were no roads there; they
had just started to build the Pan-American Highway. It didn't even
go through yet to Mexico City. We got down there somehow in our
little baby Austin in 1934, and then traveled on horseback over the
course of a couple of years.
That country- -I'm sure there are more people in Mexico City
today than there were in the entire country then. Mexico City was
about a million when we got there, and it was crystal-clear, and it
was beautiful. Maybe there were six, seven million in the whole
country. The whole country had been laid waste, and they were
beginning to come back. My cousin had the Caterpillar tractor
agency for all of Mexico, and the Caterpillar tractor started to
rebuild Mexico. Now, Mexico is becoming the greatest debtor nation
in the world, despite its oil. It's a tremendous population
problem. We are going to absorb the Latin American overflow whether
we like it or not, I don't care how many border ditches we dig,
unless we all exterminate each other somehow.
And I sit here and tell you quite frankly, I don't want to go
to Miami, I just don't want to go to Florida. Apparently, things
are a bit of a mess there. I don't see how our American society can
assimilate all these people who are coming, and that includes of
course the Asians and, oh Lord, from everywhere. I don't see how we
can assimilate all of them at a speed of light without vast or
revolutionary changes in our culture. I think the Asians,
350
incidentally, will eventually be predominant all the world over,
which is probably a pretty good thing.
Riess: They've begun in China doing something about family planning.
Newhall: They've had to face it. They've lived in penury and peasantry
because of non- family planning for thousands of years. They have
historically solved their population control problems by killing
great masses of people in wars, too.
Riess : Do you think that your concern and worry and dismay goes up every
year, or is this a specially bad time?
Newhall: I'm much more aware of it than I was, and I think maybe it's a sign
simply of my age, to a certain extent, and my personal
disappointment or depression that I'm not twenty-one and going to be
able to see all these wonderful things all over again. I'm sure
that's part of it. Travel was the greatest desire that Ruth and I
ever had. I was very fortunate to be able to see quite a lot of the
world's surface and the world's peoples.
But today we are all homogenizing right now. There's no longer
any place I really am that interested in going for travel or a
visit. We were able to make a trip around the world four or five
years ago, so we got to Burma and Nepal, which have not yet been
totally run over by the Hilton or the Sheraton Plaza hotel people,
or whatever, or with the narcotics and so on. Ceylon [Sri Lanka] is
still a nice place, except it's totally uninhabitable at the moment
because of political problems. But this world is pretty messed up
and dreary. At least, there is no place I want to go.
Riess: Other newspapers and journalists have been paying attention to the
Signal since news broke in August 1988 that the Newhalls had
resigned from the paper. Why?
Newhall: I think some newspaper people got a kick and enjoyed a certain
refreshing quality about the old Signal, because it was totally
undisciplined, in a sense. It was a two- or three-man band. We
went our own way.
I have been in a position, and it is the most important thing
in my life, I have been in a position, to a certain extent at the
Chronicle . but with the Signal, of writing or saying or doing
anything about anything at any time that I wanted to . And nobody
could say no. That has been a tremendous privilege. It has been a
tremendous lot of fun. Also, believe it or not, I have some
feelings of responsibility too. I sat there and wrote anything I
wanted, and [laughs] I think was able to see some things quite
clearly.
This whole business of life is fascinating. Well, our world
351
can be very absurd much of the time. I'm a fairly cheerful kind of
guy most of the time. I was able to laugh more than cry. Look, how
can anyone watch all this hullaballoo with a straight face, all this
shouting in TV and on the front pages of the L.A. Times, the New
York Times . and everything about this fellow John Tower becoming
Secretary of Defense.
Riess: Yes, what do you think about that?
Newhall: What do I think about it? I'll tell you exactly. In the first
place, he's a known drunk. Now, half the world are drunks. Half
the guys in Congress are drunks to begin with. People don't like to
accept that perhaps, but it's a fact. Everyone is calling poor old
Tower "a womanizer." There's not one guy in Congress who hasn't
been, if you'll forgive my words, fanny-chasing back there. How
many times- -I don't want to get into the women politicians because I
don't know much about them- -but how many Congressmen or Senators
have come back from Washington with the same wife they started out
with? Damn few, if you'll study it.
"This guy Tower is guilty of being a human being, just another
American slob, and they're making this big to-do. The fact that he
stole- -or not stole, but profited from- -a hundred million dollars,
whatever it was, from his defense contracts, well, almost
everybody's a crook, but I do not excuse that, I don't.
But the guy, Tower, is no more fit to be Secretary of Defense
than a dragon. Hell, he's a warrior and a boozer. He's no more
godlike than you or me or anybody else. So I came out with an
editorial absolutely backing him up for the job and saying, "Let's
get this thing over with and elect the booze -fighter. If I want
somebody back there, I want a booze -fighter. I don't care about the
rest of it." Now it made no sense. Really, it made no sense, but
neither does all this goddamn--excuse me- -neither does all this
hypocritical Congressional investigation.
Every man sitting in that investigating committee--. I don't
know if you watch it. Television is the only way to see it now. If
you watch the television, I think it's Sam Nunn who's chairman, and
this chief investigator is sitting in Tower's old chair. Every man
in the Senate who is investigating him knows damn well what Tower is
like. And they sit there, "Well, we're finding out things, we're
going to have a problem."
I guess I'm impatient. I think it's hilarious, and I don't
think it matters in the end, I guess, who they put in there. Maybe
a chimpanzee would be better.
Riess: Well, it's like who they put in for president, that nothing of
substance was dealt with.
352
Newhall: Nothing. Nothing. I don't know if you heard poor old Bush's speech
about national budget policies and so on. And that swell guy Dan
Quayle. How can you help but either get bitter or laugh or
something? It's so incomprehensible.
Riess: So, do you feel better after you've written an editorial?
Newhall: Oh, no.
Riess: Does it feel good?
Newhall: [laughter] Well, it can. I've been pretty tired lately. The one
on Tower was just a repetitious cliche, kind of. See, does anybody
down there in the Santa Clarita Valley care if John Tower is a lush
or suffering from chronic satyriasis. I've got this thing: for whom
am I writing? Am I writing for myself, or am I writing for the
people here? What am I doing? And I'm really in a very confused
state of mind now, I honestly am, as you will find out.
Riess: If you get your readers feeling as bad as you're feeling, let's say,
then do you tell them what to do?
Newhall: That's why I feel so bad. I've been in the business for a long
time, and I don't know where the American people are headed. Today
it seems to me the sons and daughters of the World War II American
people are lazy. They're totally lazy. They're not working as
hard, they have privileges and luxuries that they have not earned.
They have feelings of omnipotence and omniscience to which they're
not entitled. I think Americans have become a predatory and a
carnivorous people, despite our love affair with being kind and--
Riess: And with being vegetarians.
Newhall: Perfect: with being vegetarians. Were I a member of the Swiss
Confederation, I think I would fear above all the United States of
America. I think. Possibly Iran is the most frightening force on
earthI'm not in love with Iran. The simple peace-loving American
citizen, when his comforts and his luxuries are challenged, can
become a very fearsome person.
The head of the CIA, Webster or whatever his name is, came out
the other day and said, in public, "The CIA should play a more
active part in Mexico now. Because there is a lot of political
ferment down there, and Mexico's economy and the social structure
are fragile." All Webster meant, of course, was that the CIA is
going to go in and shore up some repressive leader. Because today
the old party line Mexican presidents have a real opposition in the
elections, and so on, and Mexico may be headed for another
explosion. The last real Mexican rebellion was in the twenties,
early twenties, and we're now in the nineties, so that's seventy
years. That's a pretty long haul.
353
You know, it's pretty hard to be a messiah unless, of course,
you have a lot of money to pay the bills, and if you don't object to
being nailed up once in a while. But anyway.
Riess: I'll get back to newspapers. You said about the New York Times that
it's been consistently good, and you're taking their wire service
now.
Newhall: Not really the wire service. I get what they call a clipping
service. I can clip anything I want in the paper and use it. See,
it makes no difference to them because at the Citizen we publish
only twice a week.
Riess: The press is the fourth estate. It is a power.
Newhall: The press is the most powerful thing in the world. They are the
most powerful estate in the world, or can be. They are the only
defense human beings have to secure their own safety, to provide for
their own security, their only defense.
Of course, the first thing any tyrant does is to chop off the
press of the people to stop the flow of news. And then the public
has no recourse to much of anything, except bayonets or sticks. The
press has just got to be careful. Today the press is playing it a
little too straight-faced. I mean the working press and the editors
are letting too many politicians play them for suckers. The press
is swallowing too much hokum about our deficits and our economy, and
about the threats of Russia and Nicaragua and China- -on alternate
weeks- -and oil spills, and toxic garbage piles and drugs, and gun
control and dozens of other popular subjects.
Now, please understand, our planet is indeed in hellish
trouble, but I think the problem with the press is that both
television and newspaper editors are paying too much attention to
what our politicians and government agencies and high-powered
business publicity agents are saying about these things, and the
press, taken as a group, isn't doing enough thinking for itself.
"Somewhere between the KKK and Tombstone. Arizona"
Riess:
Newhall:
What did the Signal do in the presidential primaries?
use the power of the press?
How did you
The Signal, how much power did we have? We have been very
influential, indeed, on some local things, but you've got to realize
out there in Valencia, or Santa Clarita Valley, whatever you want to
call it, historically the bulk of the population is drifting around
354
somewhere between the KKK and Tombstone, Arizona. You've got to
remember that to begin with. The only way you can get to them, I've
said this earlier, is to either infuriate them or entertain them or
something. Out there in the Santa Clarita Valley even Dan Quayle
I'm sure is too much of a liberal for most of those guys. You
wouldn't believe it.
Riess: The people who are buying the million-dollar homes?
Newhall: Right. I will have to explain--! hope we can talk about this at
least briefly- -there are some brilliant, there are some marvelous
people out there, that is true, but most of them are underground.
They're out there, but they're trying to get away from all this mess
we've been talking about. There are some brilliant people,
engineers, a lot of guys in the movie industry and stuff like that,
and the arts and so on, but they have moved out our way because they
can't take the rat race in Los Angeles and Hollywood and such.
But, the 80 percent who are not so brilliant- -all these blond
Anglo-Saxons with derivations from Minnesota or perhaps Viking
country, the fjords, or middle Germany somewhere- - to them, the
repeating rifle is what the Koran is to a good Mohammedan. I mean,
they will shoot anything that moves if it has fur or feathers. They
will buy any vehicle as long as it can run across fences and go up
the gullies and canyons and break up the botanical environment.
The women flock to night club strip shows that these male
animals, the hunks of men, put on. And the men love female mud
wrestling matches. It's sort of Oklahoma, you know, among the hot
tubs, I guess. A man out there is either a member of the National
Rifle Association or he's a transvestite- -and there's not much in
between.
Riess: Or a male stripper.
Newhall: Yes. It's an interesting society.
Riess: But those aren't the people who are moving into the land that's been
cleared for the development of Valencia, are they?
Newhall: Valencia is better than most of it. Valencia is physically really
quite a nice place. There are a lot of planning and lifestyle
restrictions in Valencia: you cannot park a lousy- looking car
outside your home in the street, all the utilities are underground,
there are pedestrian paseos in every neighborhood so you can walk to
market.
Riess: Nice.
Newhall: Oh, yes, Valencia is nice.
355
But the rest of a lot of Valencia and surrounding neighborhoods
are just ramparts of condos . These big beehive blocks are built up
something like the tenements of ancient Rome. And these condos look
they're full of laboratory experimental animals, and you could
reach in one and pull out a rabbit and see what he's being tested
Also they live in communities behind locked gates. As an
editor I don't know how to reach these people and make them read a
newspaper. I'm puzzled. It's driving me crazy, basically. What is
line of communication? And I don't know if it's worth reaching
them, when I figure out who they are. Why bother doing this? It's
a kind of a difficult period for many reasons, now.
Riess: Had you thought of buying a television station?
Newhall: Oh, I wouldn't take one were it given to me. I'm just not
interested.
Riess: I think that we ought to stop. We're being signalled, [noise in
background]
Newhall: All I'm doing is rambling anyway.
356
XIII SCOTT NEWHALL AND BEN BAGDIKIAN IN CONVERSATION
[Interview 9: March 16, 1989 ]##
Newspapers- -Governed by Democracy, or Personality
Riess: [to Newhall] Mr. Bagdikian has written that the journalists, the
professional staff of newspapers, might consider electing their own
editors. I thought that that was an interesting idea to talk about.
I also want to talk about what journalism schools are doing, and
your experience with journalism students, and the people you've been
hiring over the years, and your own teaching at the school of
journalism at Berkeley.
Newhall: My teaching at the school of journalism was purely for a year or two
or three ,
in a practical reporting course in 1A or whatever they
used to call it, in the undergraduate division. You get a bunch of
young kids and tell them how to write a society story, sort of.
No, but Suzanne, you have brought up a topic about which
[laughing] - -we would have a fairly sharp difference.
Riess: Fairly sharp difference?
Newhall: Yes. A difference in approach. The concept of newspaper staffs
electing their editors. I would think it would be the worst thing
that could happen to newspapers, from a practical standpoint. I
don't think democracy should be considered as a possibility, as a
practical alternative in a contemporary newspaper. I think that's
what's wrong with them, some of them. Well, it's been tried for
many years .
I'm sure Ben knows. Wasn't the Milwaukee or Minneapolis paper
for a while sort of taken over by the staff? And the Oakland
Tribune might have gone through that for a while, I'm not sure. I
think the last judges of a successful or good newspaper- -and of
course then I'll start talking about what's a successful newspaper
--are the people and the kids who work on it.
357
Riess: You mean the last people to know.
Newhall: I think the great successful newspapers basically have been guided
by a personality. I don't think they're democracies, shouldn't be
democracies .
Riess: [to Bagdikian] Well, I guess you were talking about it in the
context of corporate ownership. This would begin to be a cure?
Newhall: We're talking about different eras maybe, in a way, yes.
Bagdikian: I think that the Milwaukee and Kansas were employee ownership, and
even that was arranged so that they weren't voting on what to cover.
It was really concentrated at the management level.
No, I had something else in mind, which would be what the
Observer in London does, and some of the European papers do, which
is that the staff would elect the editor, not the publisher but just
the head of the news operation, for a period of three years. And
then that editor does what any editor does, which is to be the
leader in the tone of the paper, the direction and the running of
the staff.
The reason I think it would be better than what's happening now
is that the money men have taken over the newspaper business. By
money men I mean people who are investing in it as though it were a
sardine factory. They don't care one way or the other what it does,
and they'll jump off it as soon as they can make more money in
tobacco. But they're under such pressure to maximize profits and
they're so sophisticated now about demographics that Knight-Ridder ,
for example, gives its editors a map of their circulation area in
which every postal zone is rated by demographics. Perfectly
reasonable for circulation purposes, but it says, here are the
demographics of the affluent people we want to be interested in this
paper, so pick news that will be of interest to them.
Newhall: You're saying that's, as you perceive it, operating now.
Bagdikian: Yes. Increasingly, the pressure for profits go always up. These
are the people who are put in as editors and as local publishers and
increasingly their eye is not on that community and that paper,
their eye is on their next transfer, because if they produce the
profits they get promoted to go to the company headquarters or
whatever.
What it means is that it's like editors in book houses now, a
revolving door of people, and it reduces stability. The editors
come and go, and the publishers come and go. But they're also
saying very specifically to the editor, "It's not enough for you to
put out a good newspaper. If this year we don't increase our ad
lineage, you won't get your bonus and you'll be in trouble."
358
It used to be true that the good papers--! agree with you
completely- -took strong personalities: strong owners, strong
editors, or owners who were smart enough to give an editor his head.
That's being diluted in a very determined way by people who more and
more are bureaucrats in editorial positions.
I think that the selection by staff would do two things. First
of all, I don't think they would make worse mistakes, on the
average, than management, especially remote management. And
secondly, I think when it comes to reporters- -if there's anything
alive in a newsroom, they don't want Mr. Goody Two-Shoes, they want
somebody whom they respect. It would be a separation of church and
state, because if the owner in Rochester or in Miami says, "Pull
that cartoon about Ed Meese because we've got a case pending," the
elected editor is a little less vulnerable.
Now, I think it's a pipe dream, myself, because I think the
owners should have a right to appoint whom they want, and they would
have to give that up. I don't think it's going to happen. But I
think that it should. I repeat it because at least it will raise
the idea that the executive in the newsroom needs to be more than
just a good manager. They now send editors to get MBAs ,
to business
schools, so they can be better business managers. And I think
that's as bad for the business as anything.
[to Newhall] Did you get into any of this with the Morris people?
I've been living this life for twenty-six or-seven years. I agree
with every word you [Ben] say about the corporate takeover of
newspapers. I'm trying to remember, that's a rather lengthy
description you gave of the problem. We started out talking about
this business of electing editors as a response to this corporate
takeover .
Bagd: Yes.
Newhall: I'm trying to cut it way down. I agree with everything you said,
because recently I have been associated, in one capacity or another,
with a corporately-owned newspaper owned by a corporation that is
essentially moronic. They were smart enough to leave us alone,
until a few years ago, or at least I kept them out, literally. But
I question the premise of whether a successful response is for staff
to elect or provide their own editors.
The corporate ownership, be it a person or committee or
whatever, I agree --no, I shouldn't say I agree. There are all kinds
of grades and shades, colors and shades of corporate owners. The
so-called bottom line is in a sense what they're interested in, but
there is still fantastic ego content among some corporate owners.
There are so many people who set themselves up as corporations who
359
are running papers just because they want to be publishers. This is
an aspect of American journalistic professional life that perhaps
not too many people are close to.
Riess: Part of the American dream, that anyone can run a newspaper?
Newhall: A publisher or editor has immediate social status. He has immediate
superficial power. He is immediately an important person with an
identity in the community. And a lot of guys are publishing papers
that should long ago have died. Let's run down the line: the San
Francisco Examiner has no reason, no corporate business reason,, for
existence. The Los Angeles Hearst paper is worse. The Los Angeles
Times is probably making money, or a lot of money, I don't know.
You may know more about that than I do. But they have such immense
wealth behind them.
Young Otis Chandler, who I guess is not so young now, wanted to
put out a successful newspaper and- -this is my personal opinion--
wanted to be seen, perceived as a great significant figure in the
newspaper world, and I think he's done a wonderful job in building
up a great newspaper. I'm quite a fan of the L.A. Times.
There's also down there something called the Daily News . That
used to be a throw- away, the Green Sheet. Now the Chicago Trib
people took it over, and then Jack Kent Cook, who owned the
Washington Senators, and the Lakers, bought the News. He's pouring
millions of dollars into a paper and doesn't know where they're
going or what they're going to do. He's got on his staff some
strange cats that are in corporate positions. They come and they
go. I don't know if they know what they're doing. They f Daily
News] come out in competition to us. By "us" now I'm saying the
Signal or the Citizen, which is this little paper I've started.
The reason I'm so sensitive and responding in a strange way is
that as I'm sitting here talking to you today, I have to make up my
mind whether or not I'm going to close up this paper I've started,
because of the economic pressures involved. I've always operated a
paper where I've felt that- -I'm not answering your question now
directly. A paper in the old-fashioned way depends sort of on a
personal leadership, a direction of something, and telling it, as
they say in the trade, as you see it.
Morris has hired himself an editor who is in my opinion a
pretty typical psychotic, investigative reporter- -probably smart,
but all he wants to do is the so-called investigative reporting, and
he has such a thrust in him to do this that the facts don't get much
in the way of what his investigation really does or does not
uncover. I don't want to personalize this, but it's fascinating to
me. His wall is covered with these plaques, you know, with the
simulated mahogany with the little brass things on it with the
engraved things. He just won a headline award.
360
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
You made a very perceptive remark, that there's a whole
generation of guys or women in this business who are just going
step by step onward and upward from weeklies to semi-weeklies to
dailies, small dailies and large dailies. It's a strange new breed
and generation of people --and I'm not saying necessarily coming out
of journalism school- -but investigative reporting as such has become
such a fetish that they've forgotten what it really is. I've always
wondered why the word "investigative" is always in front of the word
"reporting" these days. I mean, the spirit of reporting basically
should be kind of investigative.
From what I've seen of the weekly papers, that is what they end up
doing, just biting off one investigative issue per week. That's how
the East Bay Express in Berkeley works.
Did Morris bring this editor in?
No. He was brought in by a woman staff reporter. You know, we had
a split-up with them about six or eight months ago. I had sold
Morris the paper in a long involved option and sale in 1978, with my
son staying on as publisher. Morris, who owns the Signal, lives in
Savannah, Georgia. The Signal was always considered a Newhall
paper, and Morris had no identity with it. I think there was a
certain problem of status as far as he was concerned, and it came to
the parting of the way. We made Morris an awful lot of money. The
Signal was very successful.
Is that why he stayed out of your business?
I guess so. I wouldn't let him hurt the paper. He'd want to cut
costs or he'd want to do this. I said, "Look, Charles--" I first of
all refused to sell him the paper until it was making enough money
so he'd be satisfied. I said, "You let me take the losses," which I
did. Then when I sold it to him, I came out about even on it; it
didn't bother me one way or another. The Signal comes out six days
a week now.
Newspapers and Development in Southern California
Newhall: I don't know if you know this area or not. You know San Fernando
Valley and up north there. Our area is a boomtown, it's the fastest
growing community, I guess, in the United States, if not the world.
We've gone up now to about 150,000 in about fifteen years from about
15,000. We're now having this fight with the Los Angeles County
people--. It's an involved situation. The Newhall Land and Farming
Co. is putting up another ten or twenty thousand houses, and there
are more of them around.
361
This pristine, to me, beautiful southern California
countryscape--! fought for years to try to have it at least
reasonably well-planned so that life wouldn't turn into just a
jumble of condominiums full of people watching TV all day. And I
see the whole thing collapsing now with this fantastic thrust of
white flight population coming north across the hills. Morris wants
to capitalize on it. He thinks, gee, just because a lot of people
are coming there, they're all going to read papers, and papers will
therefore get advertising, and everybody will get rich.
Riess: When you had the Signal that was, I thought, what you were trying to
do, influence planning and so on.
Newhall: Yes, that's right. Because of my personal involvement with the land
down there, I had wanted to build Shangri-La. Any kid does. And
now the town of Valencia, the part that our family company is
building, is really not that bad. It's not as nice as I had hoped,
it's not as bad as it might have been.
But we are being encircled by a ghetto, a sub-yuppie ghetto,
that's all I can call it. They're people who are interested only in
what car they drive. Can they meet the payment on their plastic
credit cards? Are they able to afford their home? (I'm jumping
from papers now to building a community.) We build 100 or 1000
homes, and they're all sold three times over before you break the
ground to put up the next house . So then you end up with a
community of that nature.
I guess the reason I'm spending my time on this is because in
America the population boom is having a fantastic effect on
newspapers. By that I mean I think we are facing an illiterate or
semi -literate community in years ahead. We're putting out a paper,
we're doing our best, we're trying to cover some of the problems --
the Citizen, now. The Signal [laughing] with its investigative two
or three lead reporters or editors or whatever, they are digging up
investigative crises. One of them is "The School Buses are
Dangerous", "The Sheriff Ignores 911 Calls." Most of such stories
that they've done have been inaccurate at best and untrue at worst.
They've been in this frenetic thrust to come out with headlines,
good black metropolitan headlines.
Riess: Isn't this the equivalent of your promotions, though?
Newhall: No, because these "investigative" Signal stories are simply
incorrect and frightening. They have had I think a very damaging
effect on the community's stability.
Riess: Well, I mean, would they say that it is just to increase
circulation?
362
Newhall: No, I don't think it's that simple. I think the present Signal
editors want more plaques on the wall. They want recognition for
having exposed "these terrible ills of society," and they're
forgetting the serious ill of society which is the growing
functional illiteracy of a great many millions of gullible people
who do not have the time or the energy to read. I think newspapers
are losing touch with the human beings in this country, and I think
we're in terrible, terrible danger. I know this is sort of
rambling, and I apologize.
Bagdikian: Scott, I wonder what you think of this: First of all, newspapers
generally have been for development because it's meant rising
population, more money, better advertising.
Scott: That is correct.
Bagdikian: And I think the emphasis in the news has followed that, that "what's
good for the builders is good for the paper." Or that it's good for
the town, but in fact it's also good for the papers in terms of
revenue .
And they've done something else, it seems to me. In a very
natural way- -because I don't think this is the result of a
conspiracy of evil people --they have spread out geographically, so
there are no more place names in newspapers anymore. I think two-
thirds of California papers have no city in their flag. They spread
out because it's the advertising base, but they don't cover the day
to day things in the communities they cover. And one of the reasons
I believe that newspapers are losing their per capita readership at
a really frightening rate- -they haven't got off 63 million total for
twenty- five years --is that what really gets people reading the
newspaper, I think, is not schlock- -most people are not dumb, or
semi- illiterate- -but the things that are close to their lives that
they care about. And what are they? The neighborhoods, the
schools, what the zoning board is going to do to that road next to
my house. Bread and butter coverage in a town is not just the big
spectacular investigation, but it is what makes people begin
reading.
My theory of how you get a reader, my soap opera theory, is
that the reader reads that the school board is thinking of closing
the school that their child goes to. They begin reading what the
school board does. First thing, they know the characters on the
school board, and they know what's going on, and they pick up the
paper the next week or the next day, because they're going to get
the next chapter. They're involved.
I think the trouble is that the philosophy of coverage of
papers now is, get the big socko story every now and then, but don't
cover the day-to-day things, because nobody cares. I don't think
it's true that nobody cares. I think now that there are thousands
363
of communities in this country that have no systematic way of
finding out what happened in their own community. I think that's
how a newspaper readership is sustained, by getting them involved in
the things that they know about personally and care about.
Newhall: I wouldn't disagree with you at all. That's what we've tried to do
--both at the Signal and the Citizen- -for twenty- five years. All
anybody cares about down there right now is roads and schools. But
why have they got roads and schools in the shape that they're in?
Because they haven't paid any attention or given a damn for twenty-
five years, while the big tract developers came along and built
tracts without schools, built homes to which the only access
sometimes I guess is by helicopter.
I feel that total frustration of the ability to reach these
people. I'll give you an example. Let me repeat: this is what
we've been covering, either in the Signal or the Citizen, for
twenty- five years. Today, under Morris, the Signal now wants to be
a daily to compete with something or other. They are trying
basically to fill up the paper, so half the stories are just faked
up. I mean they're not really to the point of what's going on. You
don't need a six-day or seven-day paper there in that community
right now.
I have felt that a newspaper, a literary product, a written
product is so important that we circulate the Citizen to everybody
in the valley. That's 44,000 homes. When you have to deliver
44,000 papers twice a week- -have you ever seen 44,000 papers dumped
on the ground in front of you that you have to fold and band and
deliver, free? I think the day of a paid small paper being a viable
vehicle for an advertiser is almost down the tubes, I really do.
Bagdikian: Why do you think that?
Newhall: Because the Signal . which we used to also deliver everywhere,
40,000, believe it or not, three times a week, the old Signal was
interesting enough a paper that we had voluntary pay, and we ran the
voluntary paid circulation up almost 40 percent at one time.
Bagdikian: And if they didn't subscribe, they'd get it anyway?
Newhall: They'd still get it. They'd get it anyway. Everybody in the
community got it.
Bagdikian: How do you explain that?
Newhall: Because it was a hell of a good paper, and it covered all these
things. We told our readers in shocking terms, or comic terms, or
insulting terms, what was wrong with them or their community, and
what the problems were. And they thought, yeah, gee, that's right.
And at least they read it for amusement if nothing else.
364
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Riess :
Newhall:
Riess :
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Isn't that an overwhelming attraction to an advertiser, that here
are people that don't have to pay, and they pay anyway?
The Signal was fantastically successful. The month we left, twelve
months preceding, we sent Morris $1,600,000 in profit. Now, eight
months later, I think he's probably lucky if he's breaking even.
What caused the change?
He has gone to six days, so his cost of circulation has doubled. We
were three days. He's had to hire, I suppose, -some high-priced
people to replace us. We were working basically for nothing,
because we felt that it was our paper.
You mean Ruth and Tony.
Yes, Tony was getting paid fairly well. But our staff were being
paid like coolies. Toward the end it got so uncomfortable --the
Morris people toward the end would call from Savannah and just say,
"Send us some more money." You see, he [Morris] has a chain of
about twenty absolutely junk weekly or little daily papers that lose
money, most of them. We were the number one money-earner of the
chain. And then he has a few of these mysterious TV stations he can
pick up, he thinks, for a dime on the dollar.
Why was the staff paid like coolies?
Well, Ben can tell you that. The young people have to go to work
somewhere when they get out of school. When I say coolies, we paid
them anywhere from $300 to $400 a week, with the top person getting
$400 a week.
There are profitable daily papers that pay their reporters $200 and
$300 a week. The median starting salary on daily papers last year
was $13,000 a year.
Newhall: Yes, I know, but I never taught Morris that.
Well, all right, on the Citizen, now, this is a little paper
that Ruth and I started with our own money, and we're going
everywhere. I pay the Citizen staff a dollar less than they got at
the Signal. We have had a lot of legal problems, and most of our
staff came from the Signal, but they're probably averaging $400 to
$500 a week, the staff, maybe closer to $400, I don't know. And
it's pretty expensive out there where we live, most of them can't
afford to live in the Santa Clarita Valley. This is an upper middle
class kind of area. Affordable housing is probably a $250,000 house
or something, which is still quite a lot of money. I'm losing- -
well, this is pretty confidential- -but sitting here I'm losing a lot
of money a week trying to put out a newspaper. To be a messiah, to
365
amuse and entertain and advise the world,
on forever.
I'm just not going to go
Morris I really think probably has gone from a million and a
half in profits to either a break-even point or maybe even losing
money. And then you've got the Jack Kent Cook crowd sort of
hovering over Morris, and I imagine they're also dumping a lot of
money .
Money: "A newspaper is not a sausage factory"
Bagdikian: Tell me something, Scott, you were making money on that paper?
Newhall: A lot of money.
Bagdikian: Good money.
Newhall: The paper was making money, not old Dad.
Bagdikian: So they come in, and I would assume that they have a natural
interest in how this money gets made. Why do they kill the goose?
Why do they screw things up?
Newhall: I can't tell you, except that I think it's totally a matter of ego,
or whatever are the words they use now, self-esteem.
Bagdikian: You know, the same thing happened on the Peninsula.
Newhall: Excuse me- -I '11 finish after one sentence. It was not Morris' paper
as far as the world was concerned, it was our paper. It was always
Newhall, Newhall, Newhall. Ruth was the editor, Tony was the
publisher, and I was kind of the ancient mariner or Banquo's ghost
at the feast, and that was the situation. And I just don't think
Morris could take it any longer. He sent a general manager in to
report directly to him, because he wanted to think that Tony didn't
know how to run the paper. The general manager was there, it was a
horrible period. And in the year the general manager was there,
before he finally was tossed out, the profits went down by about
$750,000.
Bagdikian: I'm surprised that, although this is a newspaper company that bought
it, that they really don't understand that it's not a pickle factory
or a nut and bolt plant, that a newspaper is a peculiar animal.
Newhall: Well, when I sold the paper to Morris finally in 1977, I did an
editorial, because I smelled that all this was coming. And in the
366
Riess:
Newhall:
editorial I said literally "a newspaper is not a sausage factory."
That was the title of the editorial. And I was trying to send a
message to Morris to lay off and hang in there and make some money.
I think as I said at the time, in that editorial, the first thing
chain owners do is fire the society editor and hire an assistant
bookkeeper with a quill pen or a computer, and then pretty soon
they're going to start losing money. I wrote it all out. But it
worked out the way it worked out.
I think historically we had about reached the end of our swing
anyway with this strange tank- town paper. The Signal was, I
suppose, a kind of unique, semi-country newspaper. Our whole thrust
editorially was slow development, slow development, better planning,
don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. "
You're going to have
traffic problems." "There's not enough water." 1
It was all written
out, and nobody has paid much attention, because now the area is
full of dozens and dozens of people who are making a fortune out of
the pillage, the rape of this land.
The biggest business in town is real estate brokerage. The
real estate brokers are making millions. The developers are making
more or less millions. The merchants, thereforewe are
overmerchantized--they are all cashing in on the cash, or on the
credit cards at least, that are in circulation around the community.
The realities of the area are that the local people who would follow
us and read the Signal and say, "Gee, you've got a great paper,
you're right, we just don't want this to happen to us," the next
thing you know they're out there buying four or five acres, and they
want to get in on the cash that's available. There is this
perpetual American credo of personal gain.
[to Bagdikian] When you and I talked on the phone you were saying
that one of the questions you would wish to put to Scott would be
about, and I scribbled down some of your words, "In the editor lurks
the dream, frequently an illusion, of leading the community. The
editor gets the chance" --the Signal- -"and then the romantic goal
meets the reality of advertisers."
We had no problem with advertisers by the time I sold the paper to
Morris.
I bought the Signal for I forget how much, not much. The
purchase price was $60,000 or $90,000. It was a paper that had been
founded in 1919. I lost money on it, about half a million dollars I
guess- -or six hundred thousand dollars. I sold Morris an option- -to
do this quickly- -in 1972 because I had to pay off the money I put
into the paper. I'd had some trouble with our local Newhall Land
and Farming Company because I had attacked, in editorials, some
things and totems that the then more prestigious directors admired.
They had guaranteed the note I signed for the money to buy and
operate the Signal, and I had to pay it off.
367
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
So I sold Morris the paper. We had made a deal, but hadn't
signed it, and Morris suddenly said, "Okay, Scott, now--" and the
deal was made on the basis of one-and-a-half times the gross revenue
in this paper --"now, we've got to make this paper pay, so we've got
to start cutting here and there on the staff." I said, "Charles,
wait a minute. You can't do that. You're going to lose the paper.
You've got to be willing to sustain losses for a while, and you'll
do well." I knew what was going to develop, so I said, "I'll make
you an option deal." I gave him a five-year option that he could
exercise at the end of five years. I said, "Let me keep the paper
until it breaks even or makes money, let me take the losses, and
then you can have it."
By the time I sold it to him, we were probably making 10 or 15
thousand dollars profit a month, and that seemed to satisfy Morris
enough to keep him out of town. And he bought it. And then we
operated, and there was a steady increase in profit. As I say, I
think it was $1,679,000 for the last fiscal year, about the time
Tony left- -1988. A year before, the profits had dropped off
dramatically when we had this swell corporate general manager. He
just was in the way; he was a nuisance.
So then I said, "Well, you know, if they're going to run the
paper this way with their corporate people, I can start up a paper
here, and surely the advertisers and the public are going to want
it." With the Citizen- -this is the other paper- -we started twice a
week. (Morris went to six days a week.) And we've been really quite
successful in a way, except we're losing a hell of a lot of money.
I'm not sure--. If I had a lot of money, and by that I mean maybe
four or five million dollars, I wouldn't have to worry, and we
could, I think, eventually take over. I really do, except I am
discouraged with the world at large right at this moment.
What would you do with four or five million dollars?
Put out a good community newspaper and take losses for about five
years. Morris is knocking us out by undercutting us. Every time we
get an advertiser, he'll come in with lower rates under his card
rate and undercut us. It's probably illegal.
I also guess I might as well mention one of the most important
aspects: Ruth and I worked out a non-compete agreement for ten years
with Morris. For ten years we could not work for any other
publication in the circulation area. That agreement expired last
year. My son Tony- -Morris wangled it around when he got Tony's
stock that Tony's non-compete agreement would not start until he was
terminated or until he left the paper. So then we went to court,
and I've been in a tremendously expensive lawsuit. I think Tony's
agreement is a defective non-compete agreement. This is not of too
much interest to the public at large, but Morris succeeded in
368
Riess:
getting a restraining order which we are now appealing, and Tony is
not able to work on our paper. So Ruth and I, and we are both of us
slightly over twenty-one, are sort of staggering along with the
Citizen, doing our damndest.
If you had the four or five million, what could you do with the
Citizen? It sounds like you just gave up in a way on being able to
deal with the community you were serving.
Newhall: Well, Morris is committing suicide with his paper. I think he's
going to go under. These papers come and go, and Jack Kent Cook,
he'll go under probably. The Times. I think, will go on forever.
Unless they really screw it up. The Times is a very elaborate
corporate structure now. You probably know a great deal more than I
do about it.
Bagdikian: I was going to say, you're right. I think Otis is probably mostly
concerned with the overhead.
Newhall: No, I think he's rather more remote from it. But I have to hand it
to him for permitting his paper to- -he spent millions on that paper.
I have to hand it to him.
Bagdikian: Well, I have great respect for him, as a person. He was the kid who
came in and withstood all kinds of pressures while making it into a
real newspaper.
Newhall: That's right. Even Stanford, once in a while, graduates a
successful man. [Bagdikian laughs] How about it?
Anyway, I apologize for getting off into this, but this may be
a facet of contemporary, at least southern California, journalism
you're not totally familiar with.
Bagdikian: Well, I'm fascinated and depressed. My son is an editor on the
Bakersfield Californian.
Newhall: Oh, well, our former managing editor, who quit in disgust over
something Morris did, I forget what, I think it was this new general
manager that he brought in, is now working on the Bakersfield
Californian. No, it's the Fresno Bee.
Bagdikian: In Bakersfield they have their own trouble. The owner died.
Newhall: What family was that?
Bagdikian: That's the Fritz.
Newhall: I didn't know them.
Bagdikian: They have a terrible male disease in the family in which at age
369
forty or forty- five, the men become non-compos and they die. They
ran out of sons --one of them is still alive --and the mother took
over, sort of held on, and now she's just died. She had a daughter
who lives in New England. The business people don't know much about
newspapers, so the news staff is shoring things up, and hoping that
the daughter of the family will take it over.
Newhall: Bakersfield has had its own unique economic problems, as you know,
with the oil industry and that.
But I think that not too much separates us in our view of the
realities and the responsibilities of a newspaper, and I think one
of the responsibilities is survival, and integrity, and as I say,
this corporate thing on which you have expounded I agree with
absolutely. It's a terrible thing that's happened to American
people. I just wish I hadn't sold this thing to Morris- -but I had
to.
The Audience: Readers, or Television-watchers
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Don' t you think that one of the things that is true of a newspaper
--it's true of some other businesses, but it's just peculiarly true
of newspapers --is that, yes, it has to survive, economically, but it
has to become in a very special way a part not just of the
community, but of people's daily life in a profound way. You don't
do that overnight. And what's to me the most valuable thing that
any newspaper has, is that someone is moved to go out on a rainy day
and pick up a paper out of the driveway because they want to see
what's in it. In modern life, that's an enormously valuable
commodity.
These bushwackers who come in and buy it up because they're
collecting them like bottlecaps don't understand that. They come
in--"We're going to change a lot of things"--and what they're doing
is changing an element that somebody's built into their daily life,
and that the community has .
You change that, it seems to me, very carefully, and with great
sensitivity. An outsider who comes in, probably under pressure to
maximize profits, and sees it as a great managerial opportunity, is
fooling around with an organism that ought to be approached with
care and humility. But the big fast buck investors come in with
profit maximization, and with scorn for what looks like an
excessively personalized running of newspapers.
I go along with you completely. The problem that I run across,
practically, is that today- -I'm afraid a very small percentage of
the people are willing to walk outside in the rain and pick up any
370
newspaper that's chucked there, particularly if they have not paid
for it.
Bagdikian: Do you think that's basic, or do you think it's because a lot of new
communities, and new families, have not grown up with the idea that
the paper's in the house every day?
Newhall: I think so.
Bagdikian: And they get it from television.
Newhall: I was going to get into television.
Bagdikian: And they think they know everything because they watch television.
Newhall: Well, you know, fifteen seconds can give you a hell of a broad view
of the United States history, can't it. [laughs] We could hold
forth on that for the hour!
Bagdikian: Do you think that there's going to be a reaction against it, and
eventually a generational recognition or boredom with television,
and we'll go back to wanting to know something more than what we get
from television?
Newhall: I live in perpetual hope.
Riess: [to Bagdikian] Do you think that?
Bagdikian: There's a percentage of the audience that's getting bored with
television.
Newhall: I think there's a backlash underway right now, I really do. You see
different sorts of little pieces of it bubbling up here and there,
like this woman who's yelling about "Married With Children," which I
haven't been able to see yet.
I was not going to bother just to screech about television
[laughter] but I see on television such stuff that I wouldn't
believe was possible in our generation. I wouldn't. The horror,
the violence, the death--. I've seen my granddaughter sitting there
looking goggle-eyed at a television show in which the parents
literally had armed themselves--! don't know if the parents had come
here from Mars and were adopting the bodies of earthlings or not--
and they were shooting their children with machine guns. I don't
think that's awfully good fare. And I am not exaggerating.
Bagdikian: I'm sure you're not. I think it's a scandal. I think it conditions
the whole population from the time their eyeballs focus, and this is
quite aside from what it does to newspapers, which I think is not a
good thing. What it does, by giving a sensory jab every few
seconds, is produce a short attention span. And one of the effects
371
is to make you impatient with print.
Newhall: Yes. I don't know what the threshold of attention is, or what's
happening to it.
Riess: You get people in journalism school who've been out working, and
then they come back, and they decide to get a degree. What is their
future?
Bagdikian: We aren't typical. We are a graduate school, deliberately small.
We take forty students a year.
Newhall: And you get very superior people, I'm sure.
Bagdikian: Well, we do. And they're not just superior academically. We're not
terribly enthusiastic about the 4.0s, because they've been grade-
grinders. But I think we are overstocked with journalism schools.
We overproduce. And what's happening to most journalism schools is
that the money is in advertising and P.R., and now those schools
teach all of that- -communication theory, advertising, P.R. ,
and
journalism--and the journalism part is getting smaller and smaller.
When students ask me, I tell them, you don't have to go to
journalism school to become a good journalist. About a third of the
people who start every year have not gone to journalism school, but
they have some college degree, which I think is superior, rather
than just journalism training alone.
The good people I know are basically interested in doing a good
job. They're much more socially aware than I was when I started.
They see the role of the paper as being much more important than I
ever thought of when I started in newspapers. But I think they get
socialized very quickly by whatever organization they're in because
what do we all want? We want to get on Page One, and if certain
things get on Page One every day, after a while you build that into
your system. You don't bother with some things; you do with others.
Newhall: Too many by-lines.
Bagdikian: Well, I think it has become very personalized. And another thing, I
think one thing that never happened before, certainly not to this
degree, is the reporter as celebrity. It's partly the investigative
thing. And once you do that, it seems to me you start being- -you do
different things than you would do if you were just being a good
reporter.
Riess: Maybe they're trying to meet television on its own ground though, in
that way. Talking about personalities, we all seem to know the
shifts in the casts of characters on the television news, but you
never know in a newspaper who's shifting around.
372
Newhall: You never know, you just see a new set of by-lines. But I say
there's too many by-lines. It's the custom now to give everybody on
your staff a by-line. They put their by-line stories in their scrap
book so they can go onward and upward to the next paper. And when I
was in the business- -this is a horrible way to start anythinga by
line was a great thing. You got a by-line when it was something
that was above the ordinary. Now one of these blonde girls, you
know, with the lapel jacket, comes in to go to work as an
investigative reporter, and she'll get a by-line when she's done a
six-paragraph story on something or other telling the world that the
bus was late. Just nothing, nothing. It's a problem. Ruth says
the only way you can keep them is give them a by-line.
Bagdikian: Well, don't you think part of that comes from the emphasis
television puts on personalities?
Newhall: Yes.
Bagdikian: On television, anybody who stands there in a newscast and reads a
badly-written piece is suddenly known to the whole community,
[laughter]
Newhall: Look, this is killing me. I really have a hard time turning on a
news show now and watching it anymore, because if I turn around with
my back to the thing, I can't tell you which female or which male
voice it is, who it belongs to. Every woman on television has the
same voice--! don't know if you've noticed it or not- -they pronounce
things the same way. And the men are pretty much the same. I am
not sure there is any mental process taking place in television
newscasting. I think the news stories are coming straight into the
eyes and going directly to the mouth. They don't go through the
brain of the newscasters. But anyway, we all face that. I think
it's the major problem, perhaps, that's affecting our whole
newspaper problem.
Fostering Cowardice and Violence
Riess: We have just had a lot of headlines about Alar on apples and cyanide
in grapes--
Newhall: We're living in a world of cowards in which one's own precious skin
is of such fantastic value. The good old salt-of-the-earth
Americans will believe anything, that cancer is going to strike
them, that there are germs and things around that are going to kill
us all. We now see where the people have been so traumatized by
television and oversimplified newspaper reporting that they will
believe stories that our food supplies are poisoned, that two
poisoned grapes from Chile may wreck either the Chilean economy or
373
our economy, our apple crop may be wiped out because of something
that nobody knows exactly what it is .
I have to give it to the poor old Chronicle, which at times has
been criticized, they do a pretty good job at trying to find out
what this stuff supposedly is on the grapes, and what it really is
going to do to you. But in the meantime, you've got people keeping
their children home from school because they think there might be an
apple core on the floor of the bus or something. I mean, I think
our nation is half out of its mind.
Riess: What would your editorial be?
Newhall: Well, to be honest, I would have to think about the plot of an
editorial on this subject for a long time, maybe forty- five seconds,
or maybe even fifteen minutes. I would probably fake by at first by
suggesting: "Give your apples to the teacher and let her worry about
it."
Today I am convinced there is simply too much national
credulity or panic or whatever, lack of leadership, I think, among
intelligent newspaper editors and publishers and an intelligent
television leadership. Television has such a fantastic capacity for
good, for education, for entertainment. Yet for reasons that Ben
knows better than I- -I don't know much about the television
business --they are filling their screens up with slop, anything that
will catch the attention of an adolescent or juvenile public.
Riess: Well, what about television? Is it harmful physically?
Newhall: I think the overwhelming evidence is that the violence on television
does in fact have an enormous effect in real life.
Bagdikian: I just read a study. This generation, the baby boomers, who are the
first generation that has watched television at its intense
development, from about late fifties to early sixties, has lower
savings, more homicide, and more instant gratification than any
generation before. I think television is the biggest single
influence on that. When you look at the skills that go into
television advertising and the putting together of the shows it's
frightening, because it is attention- fixing, and the one purpose is
to get your attention, because that's the most valuable commodity
you have. I used to think that the hysteria over ratings was ego,
but one rating point on a network is worth thirty million dollars of
revenues a year. That's why they fire people who lose a point of
ratings .
The result is this powerful instrument with the most highly-
paid and sophisticated people who put together the commercials. The
programming that supports the commercials and so forth, bang bang
bang, crashes and so forth, so you won't change channels, I think it
374
has at the very least numbed people. Worse than that, I think it's
created a norm of violence and gratuitous sex and violent sex- -it
isn't all just a fantasy that people dismiss. We know that a lot of
people confuse television with the real world.
Presidents and Television
Newhall: I agree with every word of that. It's a restatement of an old axiom:
"ontogeny recapitulates philogeny." Today I think many, many
individual people are living according to the role they perceive on
television. I don't think the role on television is necessarily
built on the real actions of real people. Ronald Reagan was a
master of establishing a behavior pattern for Americans. When he
was at his greatest, embracing the bereaved families in a navy
aircraft hanger somewhere during the funeral rites for the survivors
of a crash or the Marine bombing victims or something, Reagan was
living an American movie scene. It had nothing to do with realities
of the matter.
Now, we are left today--! don't want to get political about all
thisbut now we are going to reap the harvest of Ronald Reagan.
And I don't know if Bush is going to be able to maintain his sanity
when he realizes the enormity of Ronald Reagan's legacy, which is
that we've gone bust. Now, we're going off into another subject,
but Ronald Reagan was an actor, not a president, like him or not.
Riess: You mean morally bust, or what kind of bust?
Newhall: Oh, I think morally certainly, but also financially.
Bagdikian: Nixon wrote a very interesting thing a couple of months ago about
the television coverage of the campaign, how terrible it was, and
how coverage of Nixon was so bad during Nixon's years as president.
And he said something which I think is perfectly true. He said,
"Reagan learned how to beat television news at its own show-biz."
Newhall: That's right. He set the stage for it.
Bagdikian: He knew exactly, and his people knew the erogenous zones of
television, and played them.
Newhall: Nixon, you say, wrote this? I didn't see it, but it's so true. If
you will go back in your papers now, and TV, you will see a picture
of Ronald Reagan probably in 95 percent of the editions of the Los
Angeles Times or the New York Times or the Chronicle- -not so much
the Chronicle maybe. On TV, every show, there's the president doing
something. I don't think you'll see a picture of Bush once a week
now. The guy's disappeared.
375
This is not germane really, to what we're talking about, but I
just do want to make the observation I think George Bush is facing a
very serious period of- -I don't know what the modern medical term
is, but just sort of anxiety or panic. I think this guy's got
problems , real problems of what to do . He '
s suddenly here as
president, he's chairman of the board of a company that I think is
losing more money than even the Newhall or Santa Clarita Valley
Citizen is [laughter], and here I'm sitting half out of my mind
trying to figure out what to do about it.
Bagdikian: He's got no room to move around in.
Newhall: He's been rebuffed and he wants to be liked. I think the American
people really are facing a very interesting, if not deadly, few
years. I don't know.
Bagdikian: One of the things I think that may have been the legacy of the
Reagan years is the accentuating of making it personally at the
expense of your obligation to the rest of society. It's suffused
everything. "I've got mine, Jack, screw you." That was the message
for all those years. You lose a sense of community responsibility,
of national responsibility. And I don't think that's inherent in
people , I think you can draw out good things in people .
One of the terrible things that television does is not merely
to portray a few 100 percent monsters --there's a little bit of
monster in all of us. It not only stimulates the most superficial
gratifications, the sex and the violence and materialism that we all
have, but it enlarges it in the world around us. I think there were
other times in which there were authority figures of some kind--
whether it was a school teacher, when they were authority figures,
or the president of the United States, or the local preacher--who
were constantly encouraging a sense of obligation to one's fellows.
And where do you hear that now? You watch television, seven and a
half hours a day, say "Buy it."
Newhall: A lawyer whom I admire very much once told me --he was a trial
lawyerhe said, "If you have to win a jury, don't ever let them
think that you're telling the jury what to think about your client.
Just set it up so that the jury thinks that they discovered that
your client is an innocent man, and you're not telling them he's
innocent." If you start going around exhorting people to do this
that and the other, you're going to get nowhere. I think you have
to either kid them into thinking it is their idea; give them some
stuff and let them make up their minds.
Riess: That's a very subtle program.
376
Bagdikian: I don't think it's unmanageable at all. I agree. And what I think
is important is that television has to deal with one great big
audience. And you make certain assumptions about one great big
audience. You don't give anybody their first choice. You give them
their fourth or fifth. Newspapers can give people their first,
second, third, fourth, fifth choice. If a newspaper prints
something that's for the people interested in education, and you're
not interested, you move your eyeball, and so forth.
Communitv NewsDauers
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
Bagd:
Newhall:
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
I think an audience for a newspaper, and for broadcasting for that
matter, consists of groups of people, each group having its own
priority of interest. And those groups generally are intelligent
about what they care about. An auto worker wants to know what's
going to happen in making automobiles, and a broker wants to know
what's going to happen in the stock market, etc., etc. But the
minute you homogenize them all, you're not going to give anybody
those things that primarily interest them, affect their lives, and
inform them about the outside world that affects their lives.
You're giving them mushy stuff that may affect it a little bit, but
not much. I think we're starved for some emphasis in our news about
those things that truly make a difference in all our lives, instead
of the jazzy stuff or the weather.
Well, what does make a difference in our lives?
every person.
It's different for
Except that mutuality in every community which seems to fade from
the media these days, what one does about the schools and about the
things that we all mutually support.
They all care about schools, but when it comes down to their
interest in reading the paper and following the story, it's only if
their school is involved.
Well, isn't that good enough?
Yes, but if you have fifty schools, then you have fifty different
sub-groups, don't you?
Yes, but somebody has to say, "Your school isn't going to work
unless you're willing to pay for the whole system." Who says that?
We have said it for twenty- five, thirty years, and nobody pays any
serious attention- -they will not vote for it. The latest trick down
south around Valencia to get some money for schools- -you know
Proposition 13 hasn't exactly turned us into a Utopia here in
377
California- -was to pass a tax fee on all new homes. Nobody who
lived there had to pay any more school fees; just the people who
built new homes would have to pay school fees. That tax proposition
of course passed, because the only voters were people to whom it
would not apply. I took an editorial position against it, to
everybody's anger. I said, "Look, it's unconstitutional to begin
with." But, of course, it passed, oh, overwhelmingly. Most of the
local people said, "Look, we're doing this for our community," and I
just said, "Bullshit. You're doing it for yourselves, so you won't
have to pay the tax, or the fee for the new schools."
The appellate court, I think, threw it out. It was
unconstitutional. We can't get the general public down there to
participate in a tax program, or a fee or tax program, or bond
district, to build our schools. In our area, which is so fast-
growing, schools area very serious problem. I mean, that is numero
uno.
Bagdikian: What do you think goes on in the mind of the average parent who is
confronted with that, and says, "We'd better get some decent schools
for my kids." I mean, what is the next step to turn that into
something practical and financial that will do it?
Newhall: Well, you want me to be realistic? In the average parent in our
area- -this sounds so awful on tape --the only thing is, she wants to
be sure that her child will go to a school that will not be
contaminated by any racial- -I'm saying this very mildly- -any racial
problems, any social caste problems, that it will be the best
school, and they will have to pay the least for it. There is so
much self-interest, it's frightening. I can become very kind of
glum or pessimistic.
I do think people, human beings, are the only thing we've got,
and I think they're the best thing we've got, and I've always loved
them. I've always tried in the newspaper business to kid them along
into having a little more fun and doing a little more for their
neighbor, but it's kind of tough to do it and get any action now.
Riess: When you talk about following a story day by day, is it really
essential that the paper be daily?
Newhall: No, I don't think so. The Signal- -excuse me for popping in so fast
--is faced with the problem of putting out six days worth of news in
a community that probably needs at the most three days.
Riess: So it isn't necessary to see that story coming at you daily.
Newhall: I think that daily situations are perhaps too much for the average
man and woman who don't have that time to devote to it. I am almost
thinking right now, of going from two days a week to one day a week,
and I think we might have more impact. Nobody agrees with me.
378
Riess: What do you mean, they don't have that time to give it? Are they
also reading the L. A. Times at the same time, or what?
Newhall: No. In a family of readers they are probably both working, they're
both trying to earn money to keep up the payments on the house.
Now, this is a kind of yuppie southern California community about
which I'm speaking. They have to get the kids down to karate
school, the wife has to then go and work part-time, and spend the
late afternoon in a physical fitness salon and so forth. There are
too many demands on everybody's attention. They're too busy.
Riess: But you know, when you were talking about the Chronicle, people
couldn't start the day without having read the Chronicle .
Newhall: I think it was a much simpler, more naive and contented society.
Riess: And that's the way you edited it; you made it so they couldn't start
the day without it.
Newhall: But we had a community here that had some things in common, or an
identity with San Francisco. In the south, our community doesn't
even have a name- -I can't give you a name by which you could
immediately identify it. Remember, with the Chronicle, with San
Francisco, you had Camelot, and you still do, even though Camelot is
infected now with misfortunes and worse politicians than there used
to be. San Francisco is still the municipal Disneyland of America.
Bagdikian: But also wasn't it big, so that something was happening all the
time?
Newhall: People thought so. And things are happening, yes.
Bagdikian: Compared to a smaller community.
Newhall: There is nothing spiritually exciting or culturally exciting
happening in our area right now, which is larger than Berkeley,
incidentally. It's not just a little town.
Bagdikian: How much population?
Newhall: Oh, about 140,000, I guess now. Sure, we deliver to 44,000 homes.
Riess: Of course, we don't have any newspaper in Berkeley.
Newhall: No. You don't have a paper in Berkeley, and tragically the sense of
community in old Berkeley has been shattered- -or at least as I
perceive it now. I mean, I feel that Berkeley's about three or four
different communities now. I would never start a paper there,
because I wouldn't know whether to write it for you, or for these
fellows down next to the waterfront, or the people up in Homeless
379
Park, whatever they call it now, People's Park- -I wouldn't know who
my potential readers would be. I don't know if there is a Berkeley,
except for the University.
Bagdikian: I think that's kind of true.
Newhall: I lived there, you know, for years, over next to Tilden Park, for
some twenty, thirty years.
Bagdikian: There's always some group that's going to start a weekly.
Newhall: And the people who will read it won't advertise. That's your
problem.
The Chronicle
Compared to the Washington Post
Riess: In Press Watch, by David Shaw (Macmillan, 1984), he notes the
similarities between the Washington Post and the San Francisco
Chronicle --
Newhall: That's the first time I heard that.
Riess: --and sets them off against the L. A. Times and the New York Times.
He says the Post had more personality stories, more whimsy, more
style than substance. I thought, gee, those seem like sort of the
words that you [to Newhall] might have used at one point when you
were thinking about the Chronicle. [to Bagdikian] I wondered- -you
were at the Post, what would you say?
Newhall: I would like to hear Ben's comment about if he thinks that applies
to the Washington Post. You don't have to tell me that it applies
to the Chronicle.
Bagdikian: The lack of substance, of course, I would not accept. [laughter]
But I think it's perfectly true. One reason I liked it at the Post
while I was there is that it was a writer's, reporter's paper. The
New York Times is a bureaucratic machine, it's an institutional kind
of thing- -a little better than it used to be. But the Post was a
bunch of fractious individuals who somehow got the paper out every
day, and they were led by an editor who was almost as smart and
lively as Scott.
Ben Bradlee loved things that were exciting and interesting,
and it was a very good combination, because we also ran a lot of
serious stories. But there was a point at which he would say, "my
380
eyes glaze over." Also, he let reporters have their head- -too much
head in a sense that some bad writing would get in.
But no ,
I would not argue with the fact that in that way the
Chronicle for the last thirty years, and the Post, were both much
more interesting. Post writing wasn't always good. I have to say,
and I don't say it just to you, Scott, I think the Chronicle writing
is as good as any in any newspaper, and I think the editing, the
technical editing, is as good as any paper. I don't see bad stories
in the Chronicle. I see them in every other paper.
Newhall: You mean bad stories mechanically, or professionally as such?
Bagdikian: The stories are not permitted to fall apart halfway through.
The Post is not as well edited, but it had that individuality,
and when you were reading something it didn't look as though it were
just another link in the sausage. I would not argue with that. I
don' t know what David Shaw meant about substance in the case of the
Post: it has a lot of entertainment, but I don't have an argument
with that. He may have been thinking as compared to the L.A. Times.
which could stand a little bit more of that.
Riess: Well, maybe Washington is also Camelot, and so you have another
Camelot paper.
Bagdikian: Washington's different. It's a company town, and there's the
natural cohesion that is easy to react to.
Newhall: There is an establishment there in which the newspapers from all
over are very much a part of it. It's an awful town, too, from
another aspect.
Bagdikian: Terrible. I left it. I say it's a company town. There were
connecting links to the middle-class residents. The non-middle-
class simply disappeared. Middle-class people were either in the
government, lobbying the government, or reporting on the government,
and everybody knew the major figures in the news, and so you had a
focal point for a paper. It made it very easy, I think.
Riess: And who owned it?
Bagdikian: The Grahams. And there again, I think the Post became what it is
today because of Phil Graham. He was a brilliant, driving person
who had an idea.
Newhall: Who was very vigorous and relatively young at the time. With
reference to the Chronicle. I will sit still for anything anybody
says about it in those terms, or substance even. I don't care.
381
'Taking Things Straight On"
Newhall: One thing I think was not perceived in the years in which I had
anything to do with the real important basic policy of the paper,
the direction of the Chronicle- -certainly we fooled around with a
lot of stuff, as I said earlier, and I like people, I like to kid
around a little bit- -the most important drive I had at the Chronicle
and the most important contribution this strange paper made, I
think, was its adherence basically to an anti- establishment policy
that was opposed to the forces of hypocrisy, of antagonism,
conflict, the centralization of oligarchic or tyrannical powers that
were a threat.
I start with the McCarthy era, the loyalty oath. Eisenhower
was okay, sort of. Vietnam was the worst thing that ever happened
in my lifetime. Then Watergate. And now this Iran-Contra thing.
The Chronicle, underneath all the games we played, you will find, if
you go back to the files, was probably the first paper in the
country that took on, straight on, some of these things.
We were opposed to Vietnam, and I had arguments with the
deYoung family about it. And the Joe McCarthy was a tough era. I
was kicked off of KRON--I used to make a little weekly television
commentary --because I called McCarthy a paranoid on live TV. That
was in the very beginning of the McCarthy act. This was before most
people knew who the man was. This country has been through some
dreadful ,
dreadful ,
dreadful eras .
The Reagan era was so much more sophisticated, and as Ben has
said, it was choreographed so beautifully, that people don't know
yet what has happened to us. The invasion of Grenada was the most
laughable, but also one of the most dangerous things that ever
happened to me, but I don't want to get into all this now.
My spiritual, if there is such a thing, principle, what I was
trying to do with the free press of America, was to keep it free.
If there is anything that is important today in the United States of
America, it is the American press. And I don't know if they're
going to be able to accept their responsibility and the challenge,
and see us through what I think may be a very frightening,
desperate, frustrating four or eight years. I don't know how we're
going to make out, this country.
Bagdikian: How do you think the main body of, say, daily papers will do it,
when confronted with that?
Newhall: It's a tough question. It depends on who has some control over
their editorial policy, and I don't mean just editorials as such.
By the way, the Signal we just basically built on editorials.
382
We had to fake along with the news as best we could, because we
didn't have the staff, but the editorials I used to write were
outrageous, ridiculous, exaggerated hyperbole. We fought along on
the most amazing things down there. They were, oh, so rambunctious.
But to answer you, it depends on the people you're turning out
of school. I can be very cynical about things, or at least
skeptical. And you know, Woodward and his partner Bernstein, they
started a whole new wave of journalism. The Post let it go and let
it happen. How much they guided it I don't know* you know much more
than I do.
Bagdikian: I don't know.
Newhall: So now, I imagine half the kids that come into your school, or young
people who come into your school, they all want to be investigative
journalists, they want fame, instant fame. During the Senate
committee hearings that rejected John Tower as Secretary of Defense
I hated to see Bob Woodward's by-line on this stupid little Tower
story about how Tower pinched some young lady in the ass, you know
that? I mean, that was not a high-class piece. I thought it was
sad. Because it doesn't do the cause any good.
Bagdikian: And it didn't do the paper any good, either.
Newhall: I'm sure. Everybody jumped on it. I didn't. I just didn't bother.
The Pulitzer Prizes
Newhall: Do you remember the episode when that young lady reporter on the
Post- -it was a story or series of stories by the young black girl
who got a Pulitzer Prize for her series about some kids on cocaine
in New York City, or something like that? Well, that particular
Pulitzer Prize story certainly blew up in our faces, and it didn't
do any of us in the newspaper business any good. And I know the
Post had a tough time living with it. However, I'm taking the
trouble to mention it here because that was an interesting example,
in my experience, of what has been going on today in the Pulitzer
world in newspapers across the country. At least I wouldn't be
surprised if it's still going on.
Incidentally, I want to mention, for the record, that I have
the greatest respect and admiration, professionally, for the
Washington Post. I shall always be impressed with the fact that
they were able to break loose from the Washington establishment and
set an example of great newspapering. [Watergate]
You know, I used to be a Pulitzer Prize juror myself for quite
383
a number of years. We would all go back to New York; each of us
would stay at the fancy hotel of his choice and live high on the hog
on our own expense accounts. And for a couple of days we would wade
through a morass of newspaper scrapbooks and clippings.
Riess: Who hands in the names of candidates for the Pulitzer Prize? How
does this work?
Newhall: Well, basically any American can nominate any other American for a
Pulitzer Prize in journalism. As to the selection process, there
are a lot of guys from the papers around the country, and they go
back to Columbia University in New York. At Columbia the Pulitzer
staff breaks the jurors up into different judging categories. One
of the categories, for example, is for the best news stories under
deadline; another for the best editorial writer, and for the best
editorial cartoonist, the best series, and so on. There were, I
think, about three of us jurors for each category. After working
through all the nominations, the jurors would send their
recommendations to the Pulitzer committee, which is more or less a
permanent committee tied up with Columbia. And this committee would
announce the awards.
Well, in the year of which I am speaking, none of us on this
jury was impressed with the editorial-writing entries- -or with the
editorials themselves. Incidentally, the other two fellows on this
editorial-writing jury were Lee Hills and Felix McKnight. Lee Hills
was a very smooth operator and a very highly- regarded newspaper man.
He had the top job with the Knight newspapers at the time. Felix
was a very good friend of mine. He was independently wealthy, I
believe, and, as I recall, was editor or executive editor of the
Dallas Times-Herald.
So we decided that we could not recommend a Pulitzer Prize for
any of the material that we had waded through. We wrote a very
stuffy formal report to the Pulitzer committee saying something
like, "We feel none of the nominations in the editorial-writing
category reached a quality high enough to satisfy the Pulitzer
tradition." However, we added, "In the event that the Committee
sees fit, however, to award a prize for editorial writing, we submit
the following five names for your consideration." And we sent them
a list of the five best that we could agree on.
Later in the year I picked up the Chronicle . or somebody sent
me the AP or UPI story on the Pulitzer Prizes, and to my horror it
seemed that the Pulitzer committee had not only announced an award
for editorial writing, but they had given the prize to someone
entirely different from the five candidates whom we had recommended.
Obviously, I didn't like that. You pay your own passage back to New
York City, and you do this service not only for the glory of it but
also pro bono publico. I was furious. So, I picked up the phone
and called the Dean at Columbia then, I forget who it was--
384
Bagdikian: Ed Barrett, maybe.
Newhall: I think it was. Ed's a nice guy, by the way, I really liked him, so
I'm not sure it was Ed. But anyway I said, "What the hell is this
all about? Why have you given the prize to some ringer?" And he
answered, "Well, everybody figures that it was So-and-So's turn for
a prize." And I got so goddamn mad I wrote them a letter and
resigned. I quit, and I will never go back again and do that job,
because I figure why waste time trying to pick a winner if certain
members of the establishment are simply going to take turns at the
prizes . I turned in my badge on that one .
Bagdikian: I wish more had, because until recently it was always "somebody's
turn," in the Pulitzers.
Newhall: That's right. You always see some particular papers there. And
there are a lot of hard-working editors in this country who have
turned out Pulitzer material, and they get no recognition.
Bagdikian: The Post and the Times get a lot, and one year when I was at the
Post I was pushing for one of our stories to be nominated with
Bradlee. He said, "No, let's not do that on this category. Next
year will be our category." [laughs]
Newhall: I think it's sad, because that's not my style, it really isn't. I
promise you the Chronicle, as long as I was there, and probably for
many years to come, will never get a Pulitzer Prize, to a certain
extent on account of my attitude, because we were a maverick paper.
There was nothing that outraged some of the establishment more than
success .
Bagdikian: And something else is also unfair, and I've contributed to that
unfairness. The Chronicle now is contrary to the stereotype that
people have. But of course, those things die hard.
Newhall: Yes. You know, Chronicle -bashing is fun.
Sacramento and City Hall Coverage
Bagdikian: What you've said about the Chronicle' s basic stand on civil
liberties issues, also the freedom of individual style of living, I
think really has been admirable, and I have not made enough of a
point of that. But I do have a question. Along with that, and
along with the fact that it was an entertaining page to read- -and
that's a wonderful element to have in a paper- -how much would have
changed in the content or the dynamics of how it was put together if
every day you ran a couple of columns covering city hall or covering
385
the bread-and-butter kind of news, which really didn't have much of
a place in the daily Chronicle back then?
Newhall: The greatest weakness we had in the Chronicle the years I was there
was the fact that I could not find- -now I shouldn't say "I," but
from where I sat--couldn' t find somebody who I thought was capable
of covering Sacramento or San Francisco politically, to my
satisfaction. I can only apologize, the fault was mine, it wasn't
anybody else's. I kept telling Abe Mellinkoff, "For God's sake, who
have we got?" We tried Jerry Burns, we tried two or three people.
It was terribly important. So the whole paper sort of covered
City Hall simply as a total package. We covered City Hall but in an
up and down way, perhaps. Sacramento is the most uncovered beat we
had, and I think Sacramento is probably the most unimportant --or
unattended- -goddamn beat in the world. [laughter] I still do. And
it wasn't because of that, though. I just never got around to
taking a swipe at the soft underbelly of Sacramento.
Bagdikian: I think Sacramento's undercovered by everybody.
Newhall: Yes. Listen, that place, if it's not undercovered, why have you got
the worst Mafia or gang of crooks in the world still doing business
up there. That's what's happening. It is so bad, where do you
start?
Bagdikian: At the beginning.
Riess: Well, actually, you considered buying a Sacramento paper. Would
that have been one of your ways of getting started?
Newhall: Well, we were talking about buying the Union. And I don't know how
it would have worked out.
Bagdikian: Would Skaif have sold it?
Newhall: It was then owned by about five or six guys who had bought it from
somebody or had taken it over, it was in terrible shape. I can't
even remember with whom we were dealing, but it was one of about
we came very close to buying it, very. Charlie and I drove up there
a couple of times and talked with them. I probably could get it
back in my head- -I've forgotten about it.
Bagdikian: How long ago would that have been?
Newhall: Dolly will be able to tell you. It must have been after we were in
a little better shape, so I'd say in the early sixties.
Bagdikian: Was John McGoff an owner at that time?
Newhall: I don't know. I sound stupid. I can't remember. It was losing
386
money. The Sacramento Bee was--
Bagdikian: You could have beat the Bee.
Newhall: If I had felt we could have, I probably would have pushed it pretty
hard. But I had enough problems right here in San Francisco. I was
busy. I've always been half off my rocker; I didn't want to go
totally off.
You're absolutely correct, though, when you say that the
Chronicle did not properly mine those particular cultural bonanzas,
San Francisco City Hall and Sacramento. And Sacramento still is not
covered.
The Hearst Papers
Bagdikian: There's another question I've had, Scott. When I thought about the
Chronicle and looked at it, and when I would come here during the
fifties and sixties and look at it, I wonder how much that emphasis
you gave the Chronicle --good writing and fun- -was a reaction to the
fact that the Examiner was such a deadly dull reactionary paper.
Newhall: Well, if you want the answer, I've spoken to it I think in these
tapes. Actually in a sense we stood by and let the Examiner die of
old age. I mean, the Chronicle didn't do it all. Our greatest
assistant was the Examiner .
They were coming out for decency in a
city that was basically indecent. We were purposely being
provocatively indecent. We just went along and let them expire.
I guess I should explain a little bit, for whatever interest
you may have . When I took over my active part in this Chronicle and
Paul Smith- -a great man, and a very, very good personal friend of
mine left, it was the most difficult time in my life. The
Chronicle was losing a million- some thing a year, and that was a
major amount of money at that time. And the deYoung family had no
money either. At least they simply could not continue losing a
million or two forever, although they did have a TV station. We had
the problem of being a more or less moribund paper. The Hearst
papers--. The rest of them were dying, committing suicide, and I
felt my mission in life was to save the Chronicle.
You have to tie your wagon to some star. The Chronicle became
self-sufficient about 1962 or 1963. All these games we were
playing- -we made it fun, as you say. We got people to read the
Chronicle and actually pay for it. And the advertisers--. I've
been through all this, as Suzanne knows. After 1963, we were more
or less self-sufficient. The Examiner was in desperate trouble, and
in the end we negotiated this joint agreement.
387
Bagdikian: Why did they sign away the morning, why did they sign that
agreement?
Newhall: Oh, committing suicide. Randy Hearst, whom I like and admire for
being a nice man, sat there and said, "You know, if we go into the
afternoon, we'll probably end up with about 275,000, and you guys
will have 350,000, 375,000, that's not a bad deal. You give us the
Sunday paper." I told Charlie, I said, "Look, if he wants to commit
suicide, you'd better go ahead with it." Because that was the only
thing that mattered, who was going to have the morning.
Bagdikian: Was it bad judgment, or that the Hearsts were bored with newspapers
anyway?
Newhall: I can't answer for them. I think they were crazy. But I think they
would have kept their doors open for a long time. Look what they've
done in Los Angeles. You talk about a moribund property. I think
they're going to close up in Los Angeles. At least they are talking
about it more or less openly. I don't know all the answers to it.
I do know at the time I felt a joint agreement was a wise thing to
do, it would give the Chronicle, which I had been so much involved
in, a total domination as far as I could think, because it was the
morning paper.
Bagdikian: I get the impression that the Hearsts had let the Examiner run down,
not just editorially, but in their plant, their presses. They
didn't want to spend money.
Newhall: It was an old and rotten plant.
Bagdikian: Isn't that what's happening to Hearst papers everywhere?
Newhall: Are any of them successful now?
Bagdikian: Not many of them. Albany succeeds, I suppose, because they've got a
monopoly. They've gone into smaller papers now. I used to talk to
some of them in Boston, guys who were living in the 1890s, waiting
for a telegram from the chief to tell them what to put in the paper.
Newhall: That's true. You see, when the old gentleman died, he left behind
him a whole network of old boys, and they were still in charge.
Some of them got old and died, and of course their papers died along
with them, because there was no one in that organization who had
been groomed or brought up- -there was no leadership. Randy Hearst
--. I don't know if you know any of the Hearst boys. I've always
liked Randy, though his lack of self-esteem or self-confidence is
tragic .
388
Bagdikian: What do you think is going to happen to Will [William Randolph
Hearst, III]?
Newhall: I don't know. I do not include him in what I was saying. I don't
know him. I met him once, and I don't know. I think he's in a
spot; he's got the Chronicle all over him like a tent.
Bagdikian: I think it depends how long he pays attention to it. In a way, he's
got a wonderful deal. He gets to put out a big paper on small paper
circulation. But I wonder if he'll get bored after a while, because
he's interested in computers and things like that.
Newswriting. and Computers
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
Bagdikian:
So are my sons .
These computers I'm not sure yet what their impact has been on
writing or newspaper coverage. I have purposely assumed the posture,
you know, of old-fashioned horror. [laughter] But I think
computers may have an impact on the human being that may not have
been expected.
Some of the bad things in writing, for example.
I do have a great respect for the art of writing, I really do. On
the Chronicle we did our best. We had to fake along with it. Syle
was important; sometimes style was the only thing we had. But some
of the kids really sort of caught on, and they got interested in it.
I thought they were swell. They had a very free hand, and we had a
hell of a good bunch of editors.
Well, they got well edited, and they do today, I think.
I just have been thinking about the people who were really
responsible for the paper, and that was Bill German and Gordon
Pates--! don't know if you knew Gordon or not- -and Abe Mellinkoff,
and Stanley Arnold the Sunday editor, and Templeton Peck, our chief
editorial writer, and our promotion manager, Larry Wade, and Phelps
Dewey. They were the top people when I was there. I thought they
were marvelous.
I use a computer to write now, and I'm addicted to it.
They say once you try it you can't let it go.
But one of the things I've wondered about. Unless I'm really on to
something, I tend to write sloppy and then clean it up. And in the
computer, the realization that you can change things instantly as
389
you go along is very different than when you're going at a
typewriter, and you have to think ahead because it's a pain in the
ass to retype the whole thing.
I think that you have a greater sense of coherence in how
you're thinking when you use a typewriter, and a sense that, "If I
don't get it right now, it's really going to be a lot of work to
retype." And then if you do retype, you're looking at it as it was
and I've got a sieve-like mind and I like to see where changes are
going to be. But if you're constantly in this evolutionary change,
with a computer rolling it out in a liquid way, I think there's a
tendency to lose the sense of form.
Newhall: Well, you get into the wire copy syndrome, don't you.
Bagdikian: Yes. Go on and on and cut it from the bottom. And how do you think
it's going to affect newspapers, other than in writing?
Newhall: I don't know, and I'm not a proper judge, and I'll tell you why. I
guess my situation is probably kind of unique. I can use a
typewriter the way you use a computer. If I make a mistake, I just
keep going, and I never go back. But I correct or edit it with a
pen and then I give it to a typist. I use it more or less the way
you would use a computer, except I don't actually physically rewrite
it on the screen.
Bagdikian: It used to be in a newspaper you'd do that when you were working
fast. You did it, and you x-ed out, and then you pencilled it over
and turned it in and that was it.
Newhall: Look, I couldn't hold a job, I swear to you, I mean that, I couldn't
hold a job in a modern newspaper, because I have to have somebody
there who can type it and read my writing. I don't know how they do
it. And then, I will correct that. I have them print it out. I'll
correct that at least two or three times. And it's very unfair.
It's not professional newspapering or writing in the old-fashioned
sense anymore, as far as I'm concerned.
Bagdikian: One of the things that has happened, I think, with computers and
data bases, is that you see a story now, and it's filled with- -and
frequently at an advantage- -with references to things that happened
in the past, because they can pull it out of the data bank. But you
sometimes see that it's in there only because they pulled it out of
the data bank and they want to use it. Like, "The same thing
happened in 1906." Of course, we all love libraries and going
back.
Newhall: I don't even know what a data bank is. I mean, I wouldn't know how
to use it.
Bagdikian: It's very complicated, as a matter of fact. That's why sometimes
390
somebody has to intervene.
Newhall: It's a shorthand library system, I take it, of some sort.
Riess: This seems like the criticism that the language in newspapers- -well,
probably in general- -has deteriorated in the last twenty years.
David Shaw blames academic permissiveness.
Newhall: Oh, you mean the language itself deteriorating?
Riess: No, newspaper writing.
Bagdikian: Did he say newspaper writing has deteriorated in twenty years?
Riess: Yes.
Bagdikian: I disagree.
Riess: Some newspapers are hiring English professors and coaches.
Newhall: We've got a coach, we call her the editor. [laughter] And she is
Ruth.
Bagdikian: Don't you think that the public demands better writing now than they
did forty years ago?
Newhall: I'm not sure I agree. I think the public can't understand something
that was written in 1890. You're talking about twenty or thirty
years, what's that? I'm thinking about a hundred years ago.
Bagdikian: I had my first newspaper job in 1941. In the forties most newspaper
writing by far was stereotyped, wire copy kind of writing, inverted
pyramid. A lot of people learned how to do it, and every fire story
sounded like every other fire story. You didn't make personal
observations, and you didn't use adjectives that weren't standard
news service adjectives.
Newhall: Yes. This was the era of the teletype machine, and the wire service
that had made such an impact, and everybody, as you say,was using
that when I first went to work. There were teletype machines, all
right, but still the old reporters had the most marvelous command of
syntax and vocabulary, and would write feature stories that I
thought were wonderful. And I don't think the kids now- -they can do
it sometimes, they tend to overwrite a little bit when they do it--
like me.
Bagdikian: I think I've seen more good writing in more papers now than I saw
thirty years ago.
Newhall: I wouldn't quarrel with that. I read the Los Angeles Times quite a
bit, and I also get the New York Times . and there's some marvelous
391
stuff in both of those papers. (I don't see the Washington Post at
all.) There's some marvelous stuff. There are still some awfully
good writers. Of course, a lot of them are going free-lancing, or
going to magazines. There's some very good writing in America
today.
Bagdikian: What I think has happened is that the division between the kind of
writing that's done in a magazine and the kind that's done in
newspapers is diminishing, so that you see features, whole articles
written in the style that used to be true only in magazines. I
think that's a plus. So I would disagree with Shaw.
One place where it's very clear what computers have done is in
copyediting. You can't copyedit as fast on a computer as you can on
paper with pencil. A lot of papers, because computers have saved
time and money at the reporting end, have assumed it would be true
at the desk, but discovered it takes much longer. Also the
relationship between the copyeditor and the reporter has changed,
because the reporter's way over there, and talking on a kind of
loudspeaker as reporter and editor watch their separate screens.
You see just this much of the story at a time, and the editor is
changing things, and the reporter may or may not--
Newhall: It's fascinating.
Bagdikian: And so you don't get the kind of learning process, I think, and the
interchange when the editor says to the reporter, "Look, there's a
picture here. Fix that." It's all done by machine at a remote
distance. I think that changes things.
Newhall: Yes. In our little paper, and in the Signal, the editor would call
the reporter over still, even with the terminals, talk to him, or
yell across the room. You don't get that much anymore. There was a
tremendous interchange in the papers during the thirties and forties
and fifties, anyway- -it began to die out in the fifties, I think, or
sixtiesbetween the editors and the reporters.
I think if I had to cover a community and I had a metropolitan
paper I'd be inclined to go back to reporters and rewrite men- -you
know, we used to have a bank of rewrite men. They'd be older guys
who knew how to write. A reporter would go out and get the stuff
and phone it all in, sometimes wouldn't come in all day. I won't
say it was great literature, but there was a lot of colorful writing
sometimes. These guys were old-timers.
Bagdikian: There was a police reporter at the Post. Al Lewis, who'd been a
police reporter for forty- three years. And I don't think he's ever
written a story.
Newhall: One guy was down at the old Hall of Justice in San Francisco- -Harry
Peters. I don't know if he went to the new Hall or not. I don't
392
think he ever came into the office, not even for his paycheck,
maybe. I guess he'd come in once a week to pick up his paycheck,
don't know if some of these old beat reporters could write a
sentence .
Newhall's List of Good Writers
Riess: [to Bagdikian] When we talked on the phone, one of your questions
for Scott, and you didn't know you were going to get to see him face
to face, was about his heroes in newspaper writing. I don't think
I've ever asked you [to Newhall] such a question. I don't have a
picture of you with a pantheon of heroes, but did you when you
started out?
Newhall: Well, I started out my first year in the business reading Vincent
Sheean's book, and Walter Duranty and all the old idols of the
thirties, and the Russian, Communist Revolution, the Spanish Civil
War. There was a lot of personal writing. Hearst had H.R.
Knickerbocker. The Seldes brothers [George & Gilbert] wrote about
the press. John Gunther and his "inside" books had a tremendous
impact on me. He was slick and he developed a style that I think is
still being felt, particularly in foreign correspondence.
But in terms of just great writing and newspapering, I think
the greatest American journalist who's ever lived is Henry [H.L.]
Mencken. There would be a lot of debate, maybe, about it. I've
never known a man who could write a better story in my life.
Riess: Did you ever meet him?
Newhall: No, I never met him. And he lived to about the 1970s, didn't he?
[1880-1956] He got quite old. But man, he was a good writer.
Lucius Beebe was not a great journalist, maybe, but he was an
awfully good writer. I really admire writers. I'm trying to think
who really were good writers that I knew. Evelyn Waugh was a
novelist, George Bernard Shaw was a playwright. That's about the
pantheon. Edward Gibbon's writing style is still in a class by
itself.
Riess: You've mentioned The New Yorker. Is it because of its editing?
Newhall: The New Yorker had more influence, I think, on the Chronicle in the
thirties and forties, maybe fifties, than any other publication. We
read it religiously. Everybody.
Bagdikian: Is that general reading in the newsroom?
393
Newhall: It was then. Well, I spent most of my earlier years on the Sunday
magazine, This World it was called then, and it was a little
different than it is now. And Time magazine had a tremendous impact
on my approach toward the English language ,
and Time' s imitators and
so on. Hell, This World was an imitation of Time, kind of. But The
New Yorker, and E.B. White, and "Talk of the Town," and the profiles
they did--. And they're still coming out. Ruth reads them still
every week. I just don't have the time to.
Bagdikian: That's interesting, because The New Yorker was very careful, I
always thought, with being clear in its writing, but it also
permitted the development of subtlety. As a kid, I think my first
idea that humor wasn't limited to Captain Billy's Whizbang was
looking at these New Yorker cartoons and saying, "Now, why is that
funny?" and then having to figure it out. And I'm interested that
in the Chronicle in those days, a lot of the staff read The New
Yorker regularly. I don't think that was true in many papers.
Newhall:
Bagd:
Newhall:
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Bagdikian:
Maybe not, but you know Wolcott Gibbs, George Jean Nathan and
Alexander Woollcott- -these were great writers and critics.
That tells me a lot, not just in style. That's very interesting.
Ruth still reads The New Yorker. She did a lot of reporting and
writing, and everybody --we 11, we all tried to imitate the
sophistication of The New Yorker. What the hell. I don't know, I
just liked it.
But also, The New Yorker broke the mould- -not broke the mould, but
it was a strong example that contradicted the wire service stuff.
It was those "Notes and Comments." You see something that happened
on the street, and it was a very interesting account. And so did
Time magazine. Time magazine for a lot of people was attractive
because they'd been reading newspapers in which everything was told
backwards. The last thing that happened is first. Whereas in Time
magazine you saw the week's events told in a narrative. In The New
Yorker it was perfectly all right not to begin with the guy being
run over by a truck, then where he lived, then what time he left the
house that morning. You began with his leaving the house.
Ruth won't allow anybody to write in any style but the narrative
style. The guy gets run over in the last paragraph, more or less,
[laughter] Then they settle the estate. It's not quite that bad,
but her stories --someone said, "Well, they all start with 'It was a
dark and stormy night...'" [laughter] And so on.
The New Yorker also took on McCarthyism and Vietnam.
You bet they did, absolutely. They were clean.
Oh, and the Vietnam War, too. They paid for that.
394
Newhall: Did they pay?
Bagd: They paid in a very odd way. I went to New York and I talked to
Bill Shawn about that. They began saying very clearly what was
happening in Vietnam, and young Jonathan Schell went over there- -
he'd been on the Harvard Crimson, and he looked like a good
respectable Harvard yuppie, and the generals all gave him plane
rides and were showing him what a wonderful war it was. He began
writing it straight, and he wrote to Shawn, who was an old family
friend, and Shawn said, "This is a story." It was a story about
various kinds of bombing and spraying raids.
The New Yorker began saying very plainly why the war was bad.
And the kids on the campuses began reading The New Yorker for the
first time. It ruined their demographics. Suddenly it shifted the
median age. I have all the figures some place. It dropped it ten
years. It dropped the income level way down, compared to The New
Yorker's usual one. The New Yorker had been the leader, or first or
second, in ad pages every year, and there was a period of about six
years when they weren't losing money, but they had drastic losses.
The circulation stayed about the same, but it was the younger, less
rich people reading it.
Newhall: Less affluent, the readers?
Bagdikian: Yes. They were more college kids. The kids were going to be
affluent, but not for a few years. I asked Shawn, "Did anybody ever
come to you and say, "This is causing some financial problems'?" He
turned red, which he does easily anyway. He said, "Why, that would
be unthinkable." And I believe it.
Newhall: The New Yorker- -now that it comes up- -was my first experience with
contemporary reporting of what people said, and not what they were
trying to tell you. And one of their tricks was quotes. If you
listen to a politician now, of course, they have polished and
cleaned themselves up for TV; they come out and tell you something,
they tell you the world's going to hell, but they're wrapping it up
in a package where supposedly things are just swell. You can just
tear anything to pieces, if you really report what's going on. I
mean, believe me, Vietnam is an example.
Ruth and I worked together on the founding of the United
Nations conference here in San Francisco, and we enjoyed a
considerable success. We beat the ass off the New York Times in one
story, which was the Charter itself. I had a young lady, a member
of the deYoung family, Nan Tucker, who was working on the
conference. She was the best leg man I ever knew; she couldn't
write too fluently, but she was a marvelous girl, or woman, and she
knew everybody.
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
395
We began to piece the whole thing together, the U.N. Charter,
paragraph by paragraph, the original founding charter. And so we
had the whole thing down, word for word, paragraph by paragraph,
about a day before Alger Hiss and his staff--Alger Hiss was then, I
don't know, secretary of the conference --had the thing written down
for the delegates and the press. So we published it.
The New York Times staff--Scotty Reston was among themwas out
here working in the Chronicle offices, their staff, and they asked
if they could have permission to release the text in the New York
Times. I said, "Sure, be my guest, just be sure to give us a credit
line." They wouldn't do it. So we beat them a day. That's the
Times for you.
So imperious .
That's right! I just laughed. "All you've got to do is put a
credit line, tell them where you got it." [laughter]
Bagdikian: It isn't news unless the New York Times says it is.
Political Fallibility- -An End of Innocence
Bagdikian: That must have been very exciting, that whole time.
Newhall: Yes, it was. It was a fascinating thing. That's where I learned
really how fallible political leadership is, what people are really
like . I learned there that kings and queens and dictators and
presidents and generalissimos are people no matter where they are.
Bagdikian: In what way, what do you mean?
Newhall: Our chosen dignitaries and leaders are basically very fallible human
beings, and they're motivated with very personal and normal reasons.
Bagdikian: That you learned at that conference here? What do you mean, in
personal behavior?
Newhall: No, no. Oh, no. Well, when I was nine years old I still thought
that American Presidents were God. In 1923 I had to go with my
father out to Arlington Cemetery to listen to President Warren
Harding make a Memorial Day speech. And as I sat there in the
sunshine with the flags flying and this stately white -maned figure
booming away, I thought, "My god, here's God." Well, after a few
years I finally suspected that Warren G. Harding probably was not
God, after all. And by the time I was thirty-one years old,
covering the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945, I
figured there was no use waiting any longer for God to show up.
396
Riess:
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
Riess:
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Newhall :
Bagdikian:
Newhall:
But not until 1945 did you lose your innocence? [laughter]
When I was five years old I was growing up on Calvin Coolidge,
although I didn't realize until much later that he was probably the
dumbest president we've had.
[laughing] And the sleepiest. That's what Mencken said.
But in the meantime , you did have that notion that there were very
fine leaders, a notion my children growing up haven't ever had.
It was the notion of a standard stereotype. You saw these formal
pictures that were taken by Bachrach or people like that, and that's
the only thing you saw of these people. You saw their formal
statements in the papers. You didn't see them at conventions that
were televised.
And now, thanks to television and modern technology, newspaper
technology, I think every kid is brought up to think of a political
leader as suffering from satyr ias is and is a drunk. So we've got a
problem there .
But also, one of the things I think television has done, not to beat
up on television forever, is that I think it produces a deep, deep
cynicism. Kids grow up knowing that this is all baloney that
they're seeing, the commercials and such stuff. But it's a very
insidious kind of cynicism, because I think television in a sense
gets across the message, "Listen, I know this is ridiculous, and you
know it's ridiculous, and we're in this together."
Not the commercials.
Well, the commercials and the programs,
ridicule things that kids ridicule.
Well, yes.
The commercials in a way
The commercials for kids generally are pillorying the adults and
showing that- -but there's a kind of cynicism that comes out because
these kids have been inundated with all of that. They have seen the
president almost picking his nose. One of the things Reagan did so
well was to make sure he was seen only in heroic or friendly scenes.
You had to be sharp to catch him napping, when he was at a banquet,
[laughter] You know, there's a whole generation of Reagan kids, and
adults, who think all those photo pictures of him and stills were
made from ten feet away, when they're actually all made from fifty
yards away with television photo lenses. The public, watching TV,
never sees all the security, they have no idea what the true
physical presence of their president is like, in terms of security.
397
Bagdikian: There's a book by a guy named Mark Hertzgard, called On Bended Knee.
about how the Washington press covered Reagan. It describes how for
practically every public appearance the staff would draw the
footprints for the president and whoever else, because the camera
angles were always worked out with elaborate care. That's what
counted.
Newhall: When the pope visited Mexico, five, six, seven years ago, whenever
it was, he was going out to a little town to either bless the people
or be seen by the faithful, or whatever. The townspeople- -I don't
know how well you know rural Mexico- -were all standing around. The
trucks arrive, complete with fences, straw, corn husks, or whatever
the pigs eat, and a truckload of pigs, and put up a pigpen so that
somehow there will be a rural setting for the pope to do his
business there. When the pope departed after the mass or after the
blessing, the stage set crew picked up all the pigs and all the corn
husks, and off they went.
Bagdikian: When Adlai Stevenson was running, I think it was the second time,
they had planned, his staff, and the media, the television and
movies, to have him visit a house he'd grown up in a district that
would have been useful for him. There was a script- -it wasn't a
word to word script- -but he will enter through this door, he will
look at it, and this will bring back memories of the time he was
young. He had been shown this, and all the reporters were in on it,
and he spoiled it all. He walked in, looked around, and said, "You
changed the wallpaper." [laughter]
Newhall: That's very funny. You know, he was a funny guy. We got to know
him. He was a pretty good friend of Nan Tucker's whom we were
talking about. They were very close. He was a bright guy. He was
too bright to be a president.
//#
Riess: Is there anything that the media could do to save this
administration?
Newhall: Maybe not become a part of it. I mean, the whole establishment
there, the press is pretty close to- -well, they depend on each
other, don't they, the way the drug smugglers depend on the growers,
and the cops depend on the robbers .
Bagdikian: I have a good friend in Washington, and a former colleague, really a
good newspaperperson for whom I have a lot of respect. When William
Clark was in the Reagan White House, I kept seeing these puff pieces
in Newsweek about Clark's basic instinct for the heart of the
matter. How, without any background, he's learned from his past
political experience how to see the essence of whatever he handles,
and has the great wisdom. All of it was obviously not true.
398
I asked my friend, "How is that happening?" He said, "Well,
they're very good at it. When Clark gets back to his desk after an
announcement by the government in his area, there are forty
telephone messages on his desk from reporters. Clark picks the
reporter who will be the most useful, and calls him over." This guy
said, "I get called every now and then." He would go up to see
Clark, and he would ask Clark, "What's the president's real feeling
about the next step?" Clark said, "Wait a minute." He picks up the
phone, dials. "Ron? This is Bill. I've got so-and-so here in my
office. What do you think is going to happen next?" And then he
puts it down, and he gives him a little nugget.
Well, at four o'clock in the afternoon, when your deadline is
at six- thirty, that's pure gold in the conventional standards of
reporting in Washington, where everybody is looking for something
different. There are 6500 credited domestic correspondents in
Washington now, and they're all lusting to get a separate lead. And
these guys in the White House learned how to play it. The political
operators have become much more adept at doing that than the
journalists have in dealing with it. It doesn't take a gift from
heaven to do otherwise. You just don't get too close.
Also, reporters ought to get out of Washington regularly.
Getting out of Washington: America Today
Newhall: I think you can see Washington more clearly from Berkeley, or even
southern California, than you can from the Potomac. To me, it's
more transparent. When the people I knew went back to do a stint in
Washington, they always seemed to become hypnotized. You get there
and you're caught up in the show itself, and you see the stageset
and the actors and the stagehands and all the stuff and the makeup,
you don't really see what's happening.
Riess: You mean, there shouldn't be all these Washington bureaus?
Newhall: There have to be, I mean sure, but it all becomes an "in" thing
there. I can't explain it. I just think from a distance you can
tell, by browsing through television, the wire services, the papers,
there are many very gifted correspondents back there, believe me.
They're all beating their own brains out, and if you're away from
it, you can see both the trees and the forest in front of you, and
you can make up your mind I think fairly clearly about what the
reality is, sifting it out of all these different competing sources.
Bagdikian: In my experience in Washington you get absorbed with who wins and
who's losing in every particular little power struggle, for turf,
399
for policy, and after a while that begins to be your impression of
what's happening to the United States of America. That isn't what's
happening to the United States of America.
Newhall: That's right. That's the game. This is all part of a much larger
game that's being played- -a much larger game.
Bagdikian: But also they confuse what is happening in the world with the public
dialogue between the power brokers. The things said for political
purposes often are provably untrue, but pass for reality in the rest
of the country. It happens over and over again. I think that is
why, to me, one of the great deficiencies is that reporters don't
get out of Washington.
Newhall: They ought to bring all the bureau people home or send them to
different parts of the country to see what America's like. Oh, my
god, in my opinion, there are some basic changes taking place in our
American national policy that are going to be very important. I
don't know what's going to happen.
One thing, a number of administrations --now I'm just
pontificating, and I apologize- -one huge problem that is being
pushed aside back there is what will our immigration and
naturalization policy really be in the coming years. We haven't
faced that for generations, I think. You know, one day they're
digging the ditch between Mexico and California, and the next day
they're arresting all the Mexicans coming off an Eastern Airlines
plane and saying, "Look, you're a wetback; we're going to send you
back to Costa Rica," or wherever the hell they come from.
This country's problem- -and this has nothing to do with what
we're talking about now, reporting, except you can sure see it if
you watch- -our problem with immigration is going to come home in a
way that people have not thought about in terms of local elections
and control. Florida--! won't go to Miami, literally, I don't think
you can get me to Florida. I just don't want to go. And southern
California I'm used to.
Bagdikian: What do you mean?
Newhall: The makeup, the ethnic makeup of this country, what's an American
today? It would shock people if they really knew what some of the
true percentages are, in terms of votes. In southern California,
in the Los Angeles School district the Anglos are in a distinct
minority.
Bagdikian: Is that true?
Newhall: Literally. Los Angeles public school district Anglo population is
only 35 to 40 percent.
400
Bagdikian: What will you do?
Newhall: I don't know. But I don't think George Bush does, either.
I got a list of things that just startled me about population
habits or makeup the other day. It did startle me to learn how many
women are working, and how many Hispanics there are here, and the
distribution of wealth today. The Valencia-Santa Clarita Valley is
almost totally a product of white flight, totally. Some Hispanics,
but very, very few Asians, and very, very few blacks.
Bagdikian: Well, economically, one of the things that scares me is that an
enormous portion of the population, mostly middle-class young
families, are living that close to spending all of their income, and
it wouldn't take much of a drop before they go below the line.
Newhall: I think it's terribly dangerous. I don't know how so many people
manage to buy the houses, and they line up to buy them, and I don't
think they're paying for them. Well, look at the savings and loan
institutions. I have no answers for it, because I don't know what
the scope of the problem is, and I don't think the papers do, and I
don't think the administration has a clue.
401
XIV THE NEWSMAN'S LIFE, AND CHANGES IN JOURNALISM
[Interview 10: July 12, 1989]
A Typical
Riess: Would you describe a typical day at the high point of your career?
You're going to have to decide when the "high point of your career"
was!
Newhall: I'd always have a lunch date with somebody--! really can't describe
it sensibly at this point because it's remote as to what took up all
day, but believe me, it began at ten in the morning and quit at
about seven or eight at night. It included all the meals and
discussing editorials for an hour, say, and people were always in
the waiting room, and people were always on the telephone. It's the
way any two-bit corporate manager, one of these executives in the
Brooks Brothers suit, works now, except we didn't have the
electronic equipment that they have now. It was all by telephone or
by personal conversations and letters --dictating letters all the
time.
Sometimes Charlie would be waiting at ten o'clock in the
morning, would join me in the office. Dolly would go and sit
outside. Charlie and I would go out to lunch, probably at the
Pacific Union Club. We'd come back, and he'd come inside, and we'd
sit all afternoon. I'd forgotten that that was a great part of the
typical day.
Ruth N.: Then Charlie would go home about seven, and Dolly would come in, and
Scotty would race through his necessary business.
Newhall: All the correspondence.
Ruth N: And sometimes get home at ten o'clock for dinner.
Newhall: Well, I was working pretty hard then. I had a very special kind of
position there. I had a superb staff of editors to take care of the
402
paper on a day to day basis. But I had to see that the paper was a
success. I can't explain the difference. But I had to worry about
how we promoted the paper, how we circulated it, what color the
trucks were painted, the labels or trademarks we would design and
use, what the billboards and rackcards would be like, what the
advertising campaigns in Editor and Publisher or Advertising Age
were, what motto we used, how we dressed the paper, what type we
used. It was a little bit of everything.
[added later] Incidentally, back to your question about what a
typical day was like, it happens that I finally found an old tape
that we made when Ruth was interviewing me back in 1967. As you may
recall, our house down here in Piru burned to the ground five or six
years ago. I thought all of Ruth's interview tapes had gone up with
the house, but there was a single tape interview that survived the
fire. And this entire tape was in answer to her question, "Can you
describe what happened yesterday in your office?" This was on
February 25, 1967. So I am having this tape transcribed, and we can
either insert it here or add the text as an appendix. [Following
Chapter XV. ]
Chronicle Editors, and Dolly Rhee
[additions dictated by Newhall]
Newhall: We've talked about Chronicle promotions and how we finally got the
Chronicle organized for the great battle with the Hearst people. I
think I should mention here that I personally had plenty of time to
concentrate on packaging and promoting the paper while the day-to
day production was taken care of by the most gifted and best-
organized group of newspaper editors I have ever known. These
fellows were smart and tough and all armed with a great sense of
humor. And they were able to handle our post-war newspaper free-
for-all in the Bay Area.
From my point of view we were so well-organized and in tune
with each other, I could be gone anywhere in the world and stay away
as long as I wanted and the Chronicle would just keep on going- -
flowing along like the muddy Mississippi. I am not speaking here of
our well-fed stable of literary dandies and con men, our columnists
and feature writers. I am talking about the editors: Gordon Pates,
managing editor; Abe Mellinkoff, our city editor; Bill German, the
news editor; and Stanleigh Arnold, Sunday editor.
There were others: very important, our promotion managers, J.P.
Cahn, a fellow from Stockton and Stanford, who started us off on the
Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt; Phelps Dewey, a handsome and
deceptively mellow young man who came from his own paper somewhere
403
near Santa Fe in New Mexico (Espanola, I think); and later Larry
Wade, who came from the Riverside paper down south. Later on Larry
left the Chronicle to work in the vineyards of the Lord. He took a
fund-hunting job with the religious entrepreneurs in Berkeley who
are organized up on top of the hill just west of Euclid Avenue near
North Gate over at Cal. Larry raised a lot of money for the greater
glorification of the Heavenly Host, but then came back to earth and
helped me out when we were trying to get the Signal off the ground
down at Newhall.
Anyway, for years I enjoyed the immense privilege of having
time for dreaming up promotions or investigations , or outrageous
exposes. I really didn't have to worry much about whether or not
the paper was coming out on schedule, which it always did. Most of
all I enjoyed the great luxury of being able to attend daily
editorial conferences and study at length the inevitable problems
and questions of our planetary troubles, the problems of war and
peace, of our rising or falling national economy, of California's
huge water plansending northern California water south to Los
Angeles- -education in our schools, racial tensions, where to build
Candlestick Park, what to do about topless and bottomless dancers,
what to do about Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger and all
the rest of those scoundrels who have "enriched the fabric of
America the Beautiful."
And speaking of privilege and convenience and this luxury gift
throughout all these years of building up the Chronicle . the
luckiest luxury was handed to me by my Uncle Birdie. You may
remember I have mentioned earlier on that in the old days at San
Rafael one of our family intimates was a young Presbyterian minister
named Remsen D. Bird, who after a stint at the San Francisco
Theological Seminary in San Anselmo became president of Occidental
College down in Eagle Rock in the shadow of Los Angeles. He had
lived with us in San Rafael and was more or less my godfather.
Well, Dr. Bird always followed the post-college careers of his
more challenging students, and for whatever reasons he may have had,
a very personable young woman of obvious oriental ancestry landed on
my mother's doorstep at the Berkeley Women's City Club on Durant
Avenue in Berkeley in 1942. She was bearing a letter of
introduction from Dr. Bird, who suggested that she might be a
perfect candidate for something-or-other in the newspaper business
in general, and on the Chronicle in particular. A day or two later
a young woman, five foot tall, or short, dressed and polished as if
she were headed for an opera opening, showed up at my desk in the
dingy Chronicle offices, and said she would do any kind of work, no
matter what.
She identified herself as a Miss Elizabeth Rhee, or as she
preferred, Dolly Rhee. She said that she had graduated from
Occidental and subsequently earned her master's degree in
404
comparative literature at USC; that she was the American-born
daughter of Korean immigrants; that after World War I her father had
cornered the rice market and established a fancy fruit-packing
business in the California Central Valley; that the rice market had
subsequently gone bust; and that thereupon the family had moved to
greater Los Angeles and opened an oriental restaurant which was
reasonably successful despite the fact that in this particular
dining establishment "the customer was always wrong."
Dolly materialized at the Chronicle shortly after Pearl Harbor
and she never left. She started in as a copy girl for This World
and a typist, and later became my secretary when I became Sunday
editor. She left the paper when I resigned in 1971 and still works
as my secretary and takes remarkably good care of my often sloppy
affairs .
In describing Dolly and the aura about her, she is a tiny
person, well-groomed and generally immaculate, but with the
commanding presence and vocabulary of a muleskinner, and the mellow
disposition of a pit bull. You see, Dolly came to work in 1942,
almost at the time the Japanese -Americans and the Japanese aliens on
the West Coast were being sent away to dentention camps behind the
mountains. And very few of the sidewalk Anglo-Americans could
distinguish between a Korean American and a Japanese American.
Dolly was often subjected to embarrassing or unfriendly advances on
the streets of San Francisco.
Within the Gothic battlements of the Chronicle itself, Dolly,
who had come to us from the more or less ivy-covered Victorian halls
of academia, had to somehow adapt herself to the earthy inkstained
world of the American newspaper. And so, after a year or so at the
Chronicle, she developed her own defense against the lustful remarks
of the copy desk and the lechery of the composing room. Dolly still
sums up her experience in assimilation into the furnace room of
American journalism by remarking, "When I arrived in town and came
to work at the Chronicle. I was still a little oriental Plum
Blossom. After the first six months in that goddamned bull pen I
became Plum Tart. It was the only way I could handle those savages
in the composing room."
Some people around the paper considered Dolly to be the Dragon
Lady, a tyrant. Some regarded her as a kind of short-tempered
angel. Whenever Count Marco thought he was running into trouble he
would come marching in carrying Dolly a bouquet of violets. Lucius
Beebe used to send her gold ornaments on her birthdays.
From 1942 until today, Dolly has handled our affairs. And
during the twenty years I was the active editorial executive at the
Chronicle she could keep my office going whether I was there or not.
She handled the phones --there were four --she kept my personal
accounts, she made engagements, acted as intermediary with the staff
405
and public, she poured coffee, wrote letters and handed out theater
and opera tickets to the staff.
Dolly quit three times- -once when I tore the phones off the
wall. She threw the women's liberation squad off the premises when
they came downtown to picket the Chronicle. She tried to serve the
BART publicity committee hemlock instead of coffee. When her
husband was recovering from a heart attack, she hit him over the
head with a stew pan and threw him out of the house forever. She
swore like a trooper, ate like a bird, and dressed like a fashion
model- -and she still does. But most of all, she kept my office
going during some very busy times .
And, oh yes, Dolly's family was always successful. Her younger
sister Mary was very active in southern California educational
circles, and her young brother, Dr. Sammy Lee, became one of
America's most renowned athletes. He won the high diving gold medal
in two successive Olympic Games, and he continues to tour the world
as an American presidential ambassador of good will.
[end dictated addition]
Stress and Drinking*
Riess: {Have you seen changes in drinking behavior among your colleagues?)
Newhall: In terms of alcohol consumption- -of course, this is the history of
modern man to a certain extent, and I had to quit drinking myself
because I was pretty alcoholic when I was a youngster --there was a
lot of hard drinking before the war, during the war, and right after
the war. Then I think people tapered off into cocaine and marijuana
and stuff. I don't see nearly the alcohol consumption these days,
but it may be just my age.
Riess: We're talking in the newsroom, though.
Newhall: Even in the newsroom, I don't see any. Some of the guys may be
puffing on a few of their own chemical substances- -I don't know- -and
there's been such a hip -hip -hurrah about this silly cocaine and
marijuana crisis that everything is all twisted. Alcohol is a very,
very, very powerful and difficult drug, dangerous, and yet I just
*Questions designated { ) were suggested by Lynn Ludlow and Peter
Mellini, newspaper historians.
406
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
don't think it's used around the city rooms as frequently as it used
to be.
There used to be a lot of drinking in newsrooms. I've told the
story about my first day on work. There was this police reporter
passed out on my enlarger, when I was a photographer. Literally, I
had to haul him off and throw him on the floor to get about my
business.
Why was there all that drinking?
I don't know. I think it was custom, and I think a lot of people
who are subject to- -I don't mean to get into a physiological
discussion- -who are subject to a so-called dependency or to habit-
forming concoctions are probably pretty good reporters and writers .
I don't know which comes first- -the chicken and egg situation- -the
reporter or the alcoholic.
Well, is it a stressful job, and you need to drink because of the
stress?
Which comes first? The stress, or the job, or the drink, or what?
Do you think it's a stressful job.
Oh, yes. Yes. Very, very. It's damn near killed me.
As editor, yes.
Well, I think all newspaper people wouldn't be in the business if
they weren't stressful -type people. You get somebody who's sitting
alone there, you know, cranking along at about 98 or 102 IQ, and
he's all full of tacos or cheeseburgers, or, you know, waffles or
something, he's not going to be all that good a reporter. Forgive
this--
[ chuckling] I'm trying to picture that person.
Of course, now it's computers, but you don't see a guy working,
writing priceless, historic prose, who mostly just feeds his face
during the day and sleeps and snores at night. Most of the fine
reporters I have known were accustomed to spending half the night
wrestling with their insoluble psychic problems.
In other words, you don't have couch potatoes in the newsroom.
Not very many. These days you may be getting some more. But no.
It was a job. It was a performance. It was a lifestyle. It's a
little different now, because people come in with fancy resumes and
pasted-up scrapbooks. Today I doubt that many city editors look up
from their desks and say, "Hey! We've got a job open. Do you know
407
Riess:
any good reporter who needs some work?" and some guy comes tottering
in, a friend of somebody.
That's interesting that you say it was a performance. I mean, who's
the audience?
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Who's the audience? Everybody around you in the streets, at the
party, or in the restaurant at night. You're a newspaper man with a
press pass, and you're all set to go. You're quite a person. And
now, you have to be an investigative reporter and ask pertinent
questions and dig up whole stories about how the elderly are doped
up or something. I don't want to get going on some of my pet
peeves. Come on!
Reporters in the thirties tried to live up to it. They
glorified it. And it's the best work and job in the world, I still
maintain. I wouldn't be in any other.
You really are emphasizing the show-biz nature of it.
We were all on stage, if that's an answer,
that newspaper people are still actors.
And I suppose, in a way,
Kickback
Riess: {Was there much sleaze and kickback in the newspaper business?)
Newhall: How do you mean? I really don't understand. S-l-e-e or e-a-z-e,
whatever it is? Sleaze. Yes. That's a fairly new word for me. I
mean, in the last two or three years. I don't like it, but anyway
I've never run across it much.
We're talking about taking money on the side or something, for
giving favors in newspapering--is that it?
Riess: Sure. Money, or travel, or whatever.
Newhall: When I was at the Chronicle . we used to be quite rigid about it. I
never had any problem with it. I really didn't. I said to our
people: "Look, if you've got any problems, pay your own way." It
didn't bother me, and I never had to climb on anyone for taking any
favors on the side. I never encountered it, and I think my
colleagues were basically all pretty straight. When they were
traveling with the teams and stuff, the teams would sometimes pay
for it. Sometimes we would, and there was always a little argument
with some teams about who would pay for what. I never did like
accepting a free ride, if there was any even slight whiff of "quid
pro quo .
"
408
Perhaps I can give a specific example of my personal attitude
toward newspaper people doing something unprofessional in our
newspaper. It was the custom- -and still is, I believe- -in major
leagues and, I think, some of the smaller baseball leagues, that the
local sports editor, or one of the sports columnists, also kept the
box score.
I always felt that a reporter should not do this. It wasn't
that they were getting any money, but it was the fact they might
make the so-called "hometown call." In other words, you've got a
big, important game going on, and when your reporter is in the
observer's box there, and he makes a call of a hit or error,
whatever it is, I think it can tend to go for the hometown team. I
asked our people to decline to participate in that. They no longer
served as scorekeepers. But that's not a sleaze deal. It's just the
fact I didn't think newspaper people should participate in
competitive sports if they were going to write about them.
Unions, and the 1968 Strike
Newhall : I have always worried about unionization of reporters. I really
regard this newspaper business with some veneration. Again, like
the hometown call in the ball park, I'm not sure that reporters and
editors should be union members .
We were going through a period in my earlier years of very
aggressive and highly-organized unionism. I became a member of the
Guild for a while ,
and then I quit when I got into one of the more
executive jobs; I resigned. I don't think the Guild is particularly
a problem, but it offended me personally, spiritually, to see a
reporter become anything but his own agent. I can't explain it. I
just don't think reporting and unionism go together,
it's awfully important now.
I don't think
The Guild has been pretty good about it. If the Guild had been
a society of reporters and writers --now I'm being very sort of
caste-conscious, I know- -then that would have been fine with me.
But I didn't like them hitting the bricks along with cashiers,
vendors, and telephone operators, who are very nice people, you
know, and the hod carriers. That's all.
Riess: You were at the Chronicle when they struck in 1968.
Newhall: Yes, and we put out the paper. It was a very difficult period, and
all I felt was, I did not want to see the Chronicle cease
publication. I had no beef. If they want to go in the streets,
that's their right. My feelings toward the Chronicle were very
personal and very emotional, and I didn't want to see the San
409
Francisco Bay Area without a daily San Francisco Chronicle.
So Ruth, Stan Arnold, our Sunday editor, Gordon Fates, our
managing editor, Hugh Buel, promotion manager, and I put out a
little typewritten paper. We pasted it up on wax. Ruth can tell
you more about it than I can. We stapled it, I believe, about eight
or ten pages and we had it printed somewhere in the East Bay. We
covered just the wire news that would come in. And we never missed
a day. We put it in all the hotels, and the airport, and stuff like
that, just for public sale. It was a little thing, about regular
letter size, 8 1/2 x 11.
Ruth will remember it. The Chronicle staff members were all
parading up and down outside on the Mission Street sidewalk. One of
our women's department people was married on the picket line. I got
a case of champagne ,
and we lowered the bottles down to them on the
sidewalk. I tried to keep it on a very friendly basis.
I wrote an editorial in this funny little paper we put out,
saying, "Let's not be bitter when this is all over. We've got to
get this paper going again." I really didn't want the Chronicle
itself, as a living organism, to cease. That probably answers more
than you need.
You know, Tony, my son, is now back working at the Chronicle.
He may take over Phelps Dewey's job. Fhelps is assistant to the
publisher. A couple of months ago when Tony was in San Francisco
discussing whether he could work out the Chronicle job, he was
coming back from lunch with Phelps when he ran into Dick Thieriot,
Charlie's son, in the elevator.
Tony said, "Well, I see it's the same old Chronicle. The
Pickwick Hotel's still across the street, the old Mint's still
there. Nothing much has changed." Then he said, "Gee, I see
there's still a Thieriot going up and down in the elevator here."
Dick said, "Yeah, I see there's a Newhall going up and down in the
elevator, too." Off they went. Anyway, it was a very nice day in
my life, to have Tony go back to work at the paper.
Reporters and Columnists :
Delaplane and Caen
Riess: {Who is the best reporter you ever met?)
Newhall: I've met a lot of very, very, very good reporters.
Ruth N. :
Magnificent reporters. I can name some. I think of Stan Delaplane.
Newhall: He set the style. Also, Charlie Raudebaugh, George Draper, Mike
410
Ruth N.:
Newhall:
Ruth N. :
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Ruth N. :
Newhall ;
Ruth N. :
Newhall:
Ruth N. :
Grieg, Mike Harris.
Art Hoppe was an excellent reporter. A lot of these people turned
into columnists. Scotty, can you tell one reason why they turned
into columnists?
Sure --they were great writers.
There was McCabe, too, Charles McCabe, who was a great writer.
Are you talking about writers or reporters now?
Well, we started out talking about reporters. Isn't it a loss, in
some way, if they become columnists?
Well, their wares are on display. It is a loss to the reporting
staff, yes, but not to the reader.
They can get their message across better in a column, perhaps?
Oh, I don't know about messages. Writers or reporters, what are we
talking about?
We're talking about reporters.
Because essentially, there can be a hell of a difference, and it is
not, unfortunately- -well, you've got me going on another subject
now. There used to be reporters and writers. They used to have a
bank of rewrite men in most newspapers. I don't know if you're
aware of that or not. They'd sit there with their green eyeshades,
and they'd just churn out story after story. They would have a
bottle of booze on the desk, and off they'd go. They were great
writers- -fast and smooth.
The stories would be telephoned in.
They would be telephoned in from the beat, and then these fellows,
the rewrite men, would write them. They were usually getting on a
little bit in years, or weren't quite as energetic, but they could
write very, very well, and very fast, and quite clearly, and spell
well.
Some of the best reporters I know are not writers,
wonderful reporter.
You'd better identify her.
Nan McEvoy was a
Nan McEvoy was the former Nan Tucker, who was a granddaughter of
M.H. deYoung and is now the majority stockholder in the Chronicle
today. She came to work on the Chronicle when she was in her early
twenties. She's about ten years younger than I am, and we worked
411
together a great deal. She is basically not a writer, but she was
extraordinarily skilled at going out. You would tell her what you
wanted to know, and she'd go out and find it. That is what I
consider a good reporter.
Newhall: Legman.
Ruth N. : Yes, a legman.
Newhall: You see, this is where this bothersome investigative reporting gets
me. The good investigative reporters- -most of them, I think, are
not necessarily good writers. Some of them, sometimes, you do have
a good, brilliant combination, but you can get some awfully smart
people out in the trenches to dig up anything from anybody. We have
a guy who is basically illiterate, a fellow who was a photographer
on our latest paper, the Santa Clarita Valley Citizen. He was
probably one of the best reporters I've ever known. I don't think
he can sign his name. He's a photographer.
Ruth N. :
Barely.
Newhall: Yeah. I shouldn't say that. I won't mention his name now, but he's
awfully good. Yet some people can write so beautifully. You have
to make some kind of relationship--.
Riess: So when you talk about Stan Delaplane, then, what are the qualities?
Ruth N. : He had both. He was a combination.
Newhall: He was a great reporter. He won a Pulitzer, you know, for reporting
on the state of Jefferson that some smart local promoters were going
to carve out of northern California. He did a series on that.
Del's great prize -winning series was whimsy, but it was also fact.
Ruth N. : He went up into the northern counties, and I think he himself got
the movement going to form an independent state up there, because
they were getting nowhere. In Sacramento the politicians were
paying no attention to the northern cow counties, so they were going
to form their own state. He managed to do a tremendous series of
pieces that staggered the Sacramento establishment, and he won his
Pulitzer Prize.
Newhall: It was brilliant writing. The people up there in Siskiyou County
loved him. Then Del and Ruth went down to cover the cotton fields
at Firebaugh or Mendota.
Riess: Cover the cotton?
Newhall: [laughing] The cotton story- -the cotton pickers of Central
California. Ruth picked a couple sacks of cotton. Well, they got
so plastered, I don't think they ever came home. [laughter]
412
Ruth N. : We did, we did.
Newhall: Del was a really old-time, classic newspaperman. There's only one I
know, right now, anywhere close to him, and that was a kid on the
Citizen. Gary Johanson. These people are really old-fashioned
story-tellers. They write beautifully. They love to read, and they
love people. I can't explain it, exactly.
Riess: I just finished reading that second Russell Baker book, Good Times.
and it seems almost like you're being kicked upstairs to become a
columnist.
Newhall :
Ruth N. :
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Ruth N . :
Riess :
Newhall:
It depends.
This is what had happened. In one or two cases when Scotty dealt
with these people who became columnists, Scotty had tried to get
raises for them. The Guild was very strong, and while the Guild had
accepted the situation when we had to cut out all the people who
weren't quite up to par- -you know, when the Guild came in, they had
to fire a lot of these people who may not have been earning their
Guild salaries- -on the other hand, it leveled everybody out. So for
a while, I don't know how long it lasted, the Chronicle had a policy
of never paying anybody above Guild scale . In other words ,
there
were no merit raises for reporters.
The only way a Chronicle writer could get more money was to
become a columnist. So two or three of these people became
columnists, because otherwise the Chronicle would lose them. There
were other papers out bidding for their abilities, and naturally
every man, particularly at that age where they're raising young
families, has to go out and make money. They became columnists and
that was the answer to that stricture on not raising salaries.
Sometimes our columnist would be picked up, syndicated, and make
quite a lot of money.
Then did they also continue, without a by-line, working on the paper
ever?
Not really. Writing a column takes it out of you.
It takes too much work. A daily column, particularly, is a killing
task.
Did you do the same with the Signal?
columns?
Elevate people to writing
No, all we just wanted to do was get out the paper. But in the
Signal . let me add, the whole paper was more of a column. The
Chronicle had columns in it, but the Signal was a very personal
413
production, in a sense. The editorials were on the front page, for
example, and they were probably as well read as anything. Ruth did
the only real column in both the Signal and the Citizen, and it was
probably, per capita, the most widely-read column that ever appeared
in a newspaper. I may be wrong.
Riess: It was the gossip column wasn't it?
Newhall: Yeah. It sort of pulled the community together, and it set the cast
of characters .
Ruth N. : There were little anecdotes about people to kind of personalize--
people like to know where they are and who are the people who are
important.
Newhall: This is exactly what Herb Caen achieves so brilliantly in the
Chronicle.
Ruth N. : Herb Caen, I think, is the best columnist that's ever been.
Newhall: They don't come down the pike that easily.
Riess: So you'd say that was who you were emulating, if there was someone
that you were emulating.
Ruth N. : I couldn't possibly emulate Herb.
Newhall: She filled, though, that need among the readers down here in the
Santa Clarita Valley.
Ruth N.: I filled that gap. I couldn't emulate Herb. Herb is such a gifted
writer. I wouldn't even want to mention his name in the same
breath.
Riess: On the other hand, San Francisco is full of so many characters. Is
it possible that this area does not have enough?
Ruth N.: That's only part of it.
Newhall: No, but you have to manufacture them. Remember, San Francisco is so
full of these characters because of Herb Caen. He manufactured most
of them. Believe me! That is, again, a two-way street.
Ruth N. : He has created something in San Francisco. [to Scott] Have you
told about when he [Herb] went over to the Examiner and Paul Smith
said, "Columnists come a dime a dozen. I can get someone tomorrow. "
And he tried half a dozen people, half a dozen people who were very
adequate writers. None of them- -they just didn't have that magic.
Riess: Where do you get your information, or where did you, as Mimi?
414
Newhall: Well, the phone's been ringing all afternoon. Still.
Ruth N. : I went places. Just moving around. Of course, once you write a
column people tell you things. Once in a while you run dry, and
then you just think up something, you know, something about history,
maybe, you drag up a little bit of history. I see Herb doing that.
I recognize the technique. Every now and then he will describe a
trip to Sausalito or something like that, and I realize he's out of
items. This is everyone's habit. [to Scott] Excuse me, I
interrupted you.
Newhall: I interrupted you.
Riess: Why "Mimi?" [Ruth Newhall 's pseudonym]
Ruth N. : Mimi was my mother's name, and Scotty suggested it.
Newhall: Her mother and I didn't get on very well. [laughter] I stole her
daughter from her.
Ruth N. : It was just a good column name.
Newhall: You'd better believe it. She didn't speak to Ruth for three years.
Riess: [to Scott] And then how long did it take before she spoke to you?
Newhall: I hoped never.
A Dialogue About Computers and Newspaper Copy
Riess: {Let's talk about major changes in the newspaper craft and the
effects of new technology, including jet travel. I suppose the
first change is computers.)
Newhall: From typewriters to computers, and the whole newsroom environment
has changed, because it's now so quiet. And you have somewhat
better-dressed people sitting in there, clicking away at these
keyboard computer screens. I don't know how anyone can write on
computers, but that's just personal. I feel that a typewriter is
necessary to relieve some of the stress and frustrations of
creation.
Riess: Because it's physicalpounding on the typewriter.
Newhall: The physical. You can pound away at it, and you can fix it up and
edit it with a pencil, and somebody else can bother about cleaning
it up. It's been a major change, just in sound. There's a whole
different sound in newspaper offices.
415
You mentioned jet travel. Communication and satellite
communication is all instantaneous today. Radio and telegraph did
make a lot of changes in breaking important long-distance news
stories. I'm talking about deadlines. But now no newspaper can
beat the television screen. Oh, maybe in a minor fact or two, here
and there. But now- -and this is tremendously important --the only
thing left for newspapers is to process the news in a more
delectable form than the television screen provides.
Riess: So you're talking about a physical change.
Newhall: Well, electronics and modern communication have made a tremendous
impact on the content that newspapers must adopt, in the style in
which they must present the information.
Riess: And how about a new kind of person that works at this quieter, less
physical newspaper?
Ruth N. : I feel very strongly that the technology hasn't changed the
personnel as much as the comparative rewards paid in television
compared to those in newspaper. The low pay in newspapers is the
chief thing that brings a change of personnel. There are better
jobs almost everywhere for the kind of people who used to be
reporters, and that is the big thing.
To come back to technology: I find, and most of the younger
people find, the computer enormously more convenient. Scott misses
the pounding and the noise and everything. I don't miss it at all.
I just love the ease of operation, the ease of making corrections.
It used to be an abomination to make so many mistakes, that you had
to correct them. Now you can produce reasonably clean copy all by
yourself and turn it over to your editor on the computer. I believe
Scott reacts to the computer much as Chester Rowell reacted to the
typewriter. Chester Rowell felt very strongly you could not express
yourself on the typewriter. He wrote his editorials in longhand. I
feel that there is no difference in self-expression. I like the
convenience of the computer.
Newhall: I disagree rather remarkably with her [Ruth]. I think she let drift
into her conversation that current myth that, gee, the writer can
now give his copy clean to the editor. That's what's wrong. They
are trying to turn writers into machine operators .
They are
basically trying to get a writer who will deliver to the press a
finished story and do away with the editing of the newspaper. Ruth
will say, "No, I go through every word on the computer." Sure. So
she's just cleaning up what the computer delivered to her. This
whole new electronic technique is an attempt to cut out man jobs,
man hours, and short circuit the human brain as the copy goes from
an underpaid and under -educated reporter to the idiot on the street
who's going to buy today's newspaper.
416
Ruth N. : I disagree totally. He thinks of struggling with the machine as
being a struggle. It is not. It is a great facilitator. Great, to
me and to most of the people I know who use the machines .
Newhall: If you have time for it, it's swell.
Ruth N. : It doesn't take any more time.
Newhall: It takes a lot more time.
Ruth N. : I've been an editor on both, and this is--
Newhall: [chuckles] I'm just laughing.
Ruth N.: Well, so am I.
Riess: [laughs] I guess I will, too, then. [laughter]
Newhall: So let me say this. What I'm getting to is that the problem with
newspapers today is that they're so much slower in production than
they used to be.
Ruth N. : I cannot agree with that.
Newhall: She doesn't agree. I will give you a figure right now, and I
absolutely will stand behind it. When I started as a photographer
in the Chronicle, we could get a news picture on the city editor's
desk about four minutes after walking through the front door into
the office. It now takes twenty minutes.
Ruth N. : It depends on who you have operating.
Newhall: No. Have you ever seen, with all modern cameras and things, any
fast, productive photographic magic?
Ruth N. : You're talking about cameras. I'm talking about type.
Newhall: I was just speaking of cameras, so far. Now, do you question that,
that the old 4x5 cut film system was faster?
Ruth N. : Yes, I do. Then it had to go to the engraver.
Newhall: That's right. I've said to the editor's desk.
Ruth N. : But you're talking about production.
Newhall: There have been many changes in production that have speeded this
up, but we were talking about editing now, and writing, I believe.
Ruth N. : You're talking only about pictures.
417
Newhall: I started about pictures; that was the first thing I said.
I'm a slow writer, but I can turn out and edit my copy with a
typewriter and a pencil faster than most of you guys can do it on a
machine .
Ruth H.:
Newhall:
Ruth N. :
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Ruth N. :
Newhall :
Ruth N.:
Riess:
Ruth N . :
Riess:
Ruth N . :
Newhall :
I disagree with that.
Well, this is going to be personal, because I'm kind of slow.
These kids now will cover a story about how some supervisor has
got his hand in the till, you know, and they're going to do a piece
on it. They'll come in, and they'll knock it out on the computer,
in your paper, the Signal, or the Citizen, and give it to you. If
it's clean, you'll send it through, and usually it's a piece of
garbage .
I will not send it through.
It's garbage- -most if it.
Why is it garbage?
Because the kids are in a hurry, and they can't write, and with a
machine they think they can write faster.
We had some excellent writers, and they turned out excellent copy.
We had some poor writers, and they turned out poor copy. It was not
the machine.
I didn't say they didn't, but they didn't save any time on the
machines.
It saved an awful lot of time. I wrote copy. I was able to write a
column and sometimes three or four stories, and edit the whole
paper, which I could not have done, I could never have done, had it
been in typewritten form.
Well, maybe either of you could have done any of these things better
than any of these people who are coming along can do them now.
We're much more experienced than they are.
A lot of people compose and think as the machine comes on. They
turns on the machine, and they turn on their thinking.
It's totally individual.
I'll go along with that. I was not brought up to do it and I refuse
to, because, manually, I cannot. Honestly I just cannot handle an
electronic machine. I make so many errors typing it that I would
418
spend my whole time going back and looking for that button to push
to delete.
Ruth N. : It bothers him because he's not adept at all.
Newhall: I write on a typewriter, and if I'm in a mood to write, I won't even
stop. I just write something. If I want to correct it, I write it
again, and write it again, and then the final correcting is much
faster with a pencil.
Riess: Is this a big issue in newspapers?
Newhall: Well, between us.
Riess: I know between you.
Ruth N. : No, there is nobody left in his category. He's the last of a breed.
Newhall: She keeps saying that. It's not true. Shall we talk about Emory
Holmes? He would have been at home in a typewriter, and he probably
was brought up on a typewriter. This is the black fellow we were
talking about who wrote for the Citizen and the Signal, and now may
go up to the Chronicle.
Ruth N. : He writes beautifully, and he has no problem with it [the computer].
Newhall: He does, but I don't know how much the machine takes out of him.
I'm serious!
That's enough of that.
Riess: That's right. The tape recorder is one of the machines that must
have come into the business since you got into it. Has that been a
good thing?
Newhall: It's a wonderful thing.
Ruth N. :
Only occasionally. I don't believe in tape recorders. There are
times when they are useful, if you want to pick up an exact quote at
certain times. I have watched reporters who depend on tape
recorders. They see that their tape recorder runs through the whole
interview, and then they come back and have to process it through
their heads. They lose all that time.
Newhall: I think it depends on the individual.
Ruth N. : Yes, once more.
419
Newsrooms Mirroring Social Change
Riess:
Newhall:
Ruth N.:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
(Since you "broke in"- -I like that term for getting into the
newspaper business --since you broke in, what are the changes in the
ethnic, cultural, religious, and class backgrounds of people in the
newsroom? }
Well, to me it has simply mirrored what has been happening in the
1970s --awakening interest among the American people to problems in
our democratic society, including the female of the species, and the
racial background of people. And the handicapped. They come up
with all these double-barreled adjectives about people. They're no
longer cripples; they're "physically impaired." They're no longer
poor; they're "disadvantaged financially" or something.
Economically disadvantaged.
reflection.
Aside from that, it's just a total
And have papers suffered from it or gained from it?
Myself, I think both. I suppose we're talking about "affirmative
action." I think the whole nation has gained and also suffered from
it. When I say the whole nation- -the system. I think, has suffered
to a certain extent, but the citizens, I think, have gained. Jobs
have loosened up for some people, but there has been a period of
stereotypes for the last ten or twenty years, where you have to have
so many women, or so many Latinos, or so many blacks, or whatever or
whomever .
I'm going to mention this. We've been talking about Emory
Holmes, this black guy. I think I can sort of answer that it's had
an impact with this: the Chronicle is desperate, it seems. (I
thought they got over this.) When the Citizen closed down,
Chronicle was interested in two of our writers.
Emory Holmes. This guy is black,
amazing. The Chronicle called up about these two writers. Of
course they couldn't see Emory's color in a by-line, but when they
heard he was a black guy he was numero uno. They're interviewing
him today or tomorrow. They're dying to get him on, because
everybody's trying to be good. They're trying to satisfy all the
liberals and all the people.
But will the readers know that he's black?
Well, he'll be visible around town. Then they won't get under
attack from the ACLU or whatever it is.
Is that the issue? It's not that newspapers were being written by
white people for white people, and that to get wider readership you
have to have a wider representation on the staff?
the
One of them is
I mean, he's really black, he's
420
Ruth N. : No. That's not a consideration.
Newhall: It's a visible thing. It's a posture again. It's a stage setting.
Newspapers are written, or should be written, by people for people.
Period. Who cares what the color of a guy is or what the sex of a
person is sitting behind the typewriter?
Ruth N. : You see many, many more women in newsrooms now. Well, you see it in
the whole society. This is a conscious effort. More people of
various ethnic backgrounds. As you said, it goes through the whole
society. However, I don't think it is a conscious thing with
newspapers to get readers. It's a conscious thing to go along with
this whole social movement.
Newhall: Yeah, it's internal.
Ruth N.: And I think it's being successful.
Newhall: This is all a very difficult, very sensitive, perceptive question.
If you run a newspaper in a community, and the newspaper is suddenly
going to be represented by an Anglo guy with a bad chin and a beard,
or a young fellow who comes out of a good school, or a black, or a
woman, or a Latino- -well, it may have an impact on the story that
that person is sent out to cover. This is an area- -perhaps you
don't quite follow what I'm getting into.
Riess : In anthropological research you send an Indian out to interview an
Indian.
Newhall: It may be the worst possible thing you can do, but oh well.
Riess: Well, in the kind of groups where they really have traditionally
never talked about those questions with outsiders--.
Newhall: Ah, yeah, sure. Sure.
Riess: Does that happen also in the news business, though?
Newhall: I try not to do it. Once in a while. If you're going to have a
meeting of the KKK, which we've had down there, you'd be inclined
not to send a black reporter out, I think, if you want to get the
story. Or you'd send out a black and white. Then you'd get a good
story. I don't know if that answers it or not, but there are
stories that do call for certain kinds of journalistic attention.
Riess: {Changes in the number and role of women journalists--.} We [Ruth
Newhall and Riess] were talking about that a little bit this
morning. It sounds like there are more, and their role is wider.
Ruth N. :
Right, just like in the whole legal profession, and the medical
421
Newhall :
Ruth N . :
Newhall ;
Riess:
Ruth N . :
Riess:
Newhall:
Ruth N . :
Newhall :
Ruth N . :
Newhall :
profession, and business --in all forms of activity.
Which is very good and reasonable. You know, there were lots of
women at the Chronicle in World War II on This World magazine. That
was the best staff we ever had. The men had to get a job when they
came back. The women were sure good, the ones we had. But I should
mention, if I haven't, that the reason there was only one woman on
the city staff of the Chronicle ever since I knew that paper, until
Ruth finally broke the barrier, was a girl called Carolyn Anspacher.
She wouldn't allow another woman on the territory. I mean, she
wouldn't. She was a bitch. That's what they called her. I loved
Carolyn. We got on pretty well. Ruth was the only woman she
allowed on the city side.
They asked her advice whether they could hire me .
She was an old-fashioned sob sister. She was a smart girl. She
came from Cal. She was in the dramatic arts there, and she lived
and wrote and died in a kind of a Shakespearean fashion, sort of a
lady Hamlet. Carolyn, she was something.
This is a hatless
{When did reporters stop wearing hats?)
They stopped when the whole society stopped,
society in California.
And they wore the hats in the newsroom?
Oh, some of them would. They always did in the play, Front Page .
and so the reporters followed whatever they saw on the stage, I
think. Walter Winchell always wore a hat. You know, a fedora or a
gray felt hat.
But that's an eastern custom, more.
I wore a hat as a kid, but they quit wearing hats in my generation.
Yes. They quit before we grew up.
Everyone wore one on their way to school.
Educating Journalists to be Writers
Riess: {What changes have occurred in the educational background of your
colleagues?) I guess we should narrow that one down to the Signal
When you came down here and took over the Signal, did you have the
same kind of staff and the same quality of people that you could
call on?
422
Newhall: We couldn't afford it.
Ruth N. : There were only about three people on the staff, number one, and
there were only two people on the editorial staff for a long time.
Newhall: We would have a managing editor and a couple of reporters.
Ruth N. : One reporter.
Newhall: But they were all totally beginners, or what they now call "entry
level."
Riess: Out-of- journalism-school beginners?
Newhall: Depends. Most of them. We couldn't hire somebody who was working.
We just didn't have the money.
Riess: So that means, then, that you've trained a lot of people, in some
way, in your mold.
Newhall: Some of them. Some of them don't buy it, you know, and wander on.
It's hard to get somebody who can be trained.
Ruth N. : We've had a lot of good, loyal people a lot.
Newhall: Oh, yeah, but we've had an awful lot we can't wait to get rid of
because they don't understand or don't have the talent. It's really
difficult.
Ruth N. : You get a talented person, and you enjoy it, and they enjoy it, and
it goes marvelously. It's a highly individual activity.
Riess: It sounds like from what you said yesterday, that there are two
talents: the Nan Tucker McEvoy who's the great reporter, and then
there's the writing talent. In the small paper, you have to get the
two in one .
Newhall: She [Ruth] has to sit there and edit their copy. She can tell you
about it. One out of ten can write a paragraph. [to Ruth] What do
you think?
Ruth N. : I'd say more than that, but they all need a great deal of
instruction, and it's the kind of instruction they do not get in
journalism school. It has prejudiced me deeply against journalism
school .
Newhall: You can't instruct them to spell.
Ruth N. : You can't instruct them in grammar, apparently. They ought to
exclude them from the field when they show much incapacity at the
423
Newhall:
Ruth N. :
Newhall:
Ruth N.:
Newhall :
Ruth N. :
Newhall :
Riess:
Ruth N.:
Newhall :
Ruth N . :
Newhall:
Ruth N . :
Newhall:
Ruth N . :
Newhall:
Riess:
craft of the English language.
Ruth is very heavy on grammar and spelling.
And also on narrative style.
And on a certain amount of style. [to Ruth] Your sights are very
high, and you expect a Ph.D. or at least an M.A. to work for you for
$275 a week.
I just expect someone with a common knowledge of English and a
little bit of knowledge of the world about them. It takes an awful
lot of editing.
Ruth expects somebody to come and apply for a job who's had seventy
years of experience traveling around the world, who has college
degrees, who--
I don't expect. Now, really. I don't expect. We have this whole
series of elementary rules that we give them when they come in, and
they have to learn them. They get screamed at if they don't pay
attention.
"They get screamed at" is right.
Those are rules of grammar or style?
Yes. Rules of grammar, style, approach to a story- -little rules and
big rules. There are rules of interviewing, all kinds of rules.
Some great writers can't spell.
They should have learned in college.
I do not venerate spelling as the criterion that she does, because
many, many great writers don't spell worth a damn.
No, it is not the definitive. Emory's a bad speller.
I think it helps, but it doesn't have much to do with writing.
It helps, and if they consistently misspell common words, you post
them on their board so they learn. They learn.
All I'm saying is, if you took a great story written by one of these
illiterate spellers or whatever, and you read it to them, dictated
it to a secretary and had her type it, the story would be there, and
the misspelling would be gone.
When did you develop these rules?
424
Ruth N. : Oh, over time you begin to see the common errors that everybody
makes, and the things that they misleamed in journalism school.
Riess: But it was down here, with the Signal, that this became your role,
and you were able to define everything.
Ruth N. : Yes. This is where I became an editor rather than just a reporter
or writer. Up till then, on the Chronicle . I was a writer or
various different things .
Newhall: Great capabilities.
Ruth N. : No. I was just a very ordinary writer. But down here I had to
prepare other people's copy for the paper. They are taught to write
things down to a common level of dullness, and I'm trying to get
them to spark it up, so to speak.
Riess: Is this the distinction between the old idea that the story started
out with the who, what, where, why, and then proceeded, and that you
could always lop off the last two-thirds of it?
Ruth N.: Yes. That is writing for the Associated Press.
Newhall : That came in with the wire services .
Ruth N. : It came in with the wire services and should go out with the local
editor.
Newhall: But it was a very, very, very valuable device.
Ruth N.: Very valuable. It should be taught as an alternate rule to all
freshmen.
Newhall: It teaches you what to look for. You've got to learn that first.
Ruth N. : Oh, yes. You learn that, but then you learn to write. But many of
them never got past that.
Newhall: But the press services do it, as I'm sure you know, simply because
they service a lot of papers and can start trimming from the end in
a hurry to make it fit .
Ruth N. : But that's a tool. That has nothing to do with writing for your own
paper.
Newhall: Except that's what people have learned.
Ruth N. : What?
Newhall: Except that that's the style that has developed.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Newhall:
Riess:
425
Well, are they still learning that?
you have to reteach?
Is that one of the things that
That's the way. You read the stories in the papers that are coming
out today, and they have never gotten past Journalism I. Nobody is
teaching them. This bothers me very much. On some of the bigger
papers you get some excellent writers. You get good writers on the
Chronicle, on the Los Angeles Times --not all, but you'll find some.
While we're on the subject of writing, let me remark the importance
of the written words. If papers do not write and present the news
for the people that they wish to reach, they will fail. The Los
Angeles Times, for example, is an extremely well -written newspaper.
People will read it. If a paper is not well -written- -we 're talking
about well -written papers. There are lots of papers that have
pictures of naked women in them, or stuff like that you pick up in
the supermarket, they're very successful if the woman is well-
designed. But in terms of literature, a newspaper, in telling the
news, has got to tell it well or they will just lose their audience.
So the only level on which they can compete with television is to
write better and better and better.
Newhall: In my opinion absolutely and I pray that the written word will
survive .
Ruth N. :
Yes, I think there's an enormous field there, if you can make people
enjoy reading. Enjoyment is the answer. I'm not talking about your
border illiterates. I'm talking about the average educated person
that you want to read your newspaper. The average, middle -class
person will read something that he enjoys reading. Enjoyment is not
part of the training of most of these young, would-be writers.
Riess: Their sense is of mission and duty or something like that?
Newhall: Oh, they do come along. They do.
I think the real value of journalistic education is for the
student to learn what and why a newspaper is- -what it represents,
what its role is, what its responsibility is, what its power is, and
why, and what it means at the moment to our Republican-Democratic
society. A lot of kids, I'm afraid, don't even know what a
newspaper is.
Ruth N. : What its historic and social role is. And that is not suitable for
undergraduate training, because they don't have the background.
Newhall: We taught at Cal, when I was there, the history of American
journalism.
Ruth N.: A little bit, yes.
426
Newhall: You go back to John Peter Zenger and a little before. Every kid
should know something about the so-called freedom of the press, the
history and the role of the paper.
Ruth N. : But I have a great feeling that undergraduates very seldom
understand that.
Newhall: Possibly. Probably.
Killing Stories, and Journalistic Ethics^
Riess: {Over the years, were you ever asked to kill a story?)
Newhall: It happened very infrequently in the Chronicle . It happens all over
the country every day, believe me. Every day. One time--. The
Ridder family, a very famous national American newspaper publishing
family from San Jose and back in the East and so on, Joe Ridder was
picked up for drunk driving down in San Jose. I was sitting in
Charlie Thieriot's office. Joe had the gall to call Charlie and ask
Charlie to kill the story that he was picked up for drunk driving.
Now, if a publisher or editor is picked up for drunk driving, that's
his problem, and we damn well ought to run it. When my son was
picked up for cultivating marijuana down here in Newhall, we ran it
on the front page under a large headline.
But Charlie said, "Okay, Joe forget it. You owe me one." That
kind of stuff goes on. I never would have got involved in it in my
life. I had to do some very, very, very painful things about what's
happened to members of my family and my friends .
[to Ruth] You had another story.
Ruth N. : There was one time when I remember a managing editor just putting a
story away in his desk because it ran counter to his political
opinions at the time. And he was let go, basically. That was the
trigger that ended his career at the Chronicle. He went on to a
distinguished career elsewhere, but he did put that away. At the
time, he was leftist-oriented- -very affiliated with those groups.
Some long study that somebody had done didn't jibe with the tenets
that he was espousing, and he stuck it in his drawer. There it
stayed, and that was the end of that particular career, at the
Chronicle .
Newhall: These were very, very minor, infrequent things.
Ruth N. :
Very infrequent.
427
Riess: So that they're the exceptions that prove the rule?
Newhall: I didn't say any rule. All I'm talking about is the San Francisco
Chronicle .
Ruth N. : And little newspapers all over the country- -
Newhall: Oh, they'll kill stuff all day long.
Ruth N. : Yes. They will kill things and do things at the order of the
chambers of commerce.
Newhall: About half of them.
Ruth N.: I get these stories all the time from reporters that come in from
other small newspapers, saying, "I wrote a story on this and the
advertisers didn't let it run," or "I took a picture and the
advertiser thought it wasn't flattering, and I got fired over it."
Newhall: Half the reporters in the country have quit because of those things.
Half of them take it for granted. I don't think you can come up
with a rule on it.
Ruth N. : One of the best things to ever happen to us in the business- -it
didn't look like it at the timewas having Jon arrested for growing
a marijuana plant. Or five marijuana plants. The reason it was a
good thing was because thereafter, over the years, when people came
in saying, "Don't print my name in the drunk driving column," we
would just point back to that, saying we don't suppress the news.
Newhall: Everybody has his turn.
Riess: Is it in journalism schools that you learn about the ethics of the
profession?
Newhall: If they will teach them what a newspaper is and what it should be,
that's great. But they're making missionaries out of a lot of the
beginners now, instead of reporters. I can't explain it too well.
Your job is not to go out and preach the gospel; it's to write
stories about people who are preaching the gospel. I don't know how
else to say it.
Riess: I was actually surprised last night at the degree of horror you
registered to think about credentialing [giving press rights] to
people who were not reporters.
Newhall: Oh, it's terrible. I keep saying a newspaper reporter, let alone an
editor or publisher, is one of the most privileged human beings on
earth. He can go anywhere. All doors are open to him. Public
bodies must listen to him. I'm speaking kind of in an ideal way in
this country.
428
Ruth N. :
Newhall:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
They have a lot of power.
They have power, privilege, and they are extended unbelievable
courtesies. They can be in on all kinds of exciting things that
will, in some way, influence society. Therefore, to do anything to
destroy the credibility, the image, or the true role of the
newspaper representative is, I think, a terrible, terrible sin.
If we are going to, as newspaper people, accept these privileges, we
must be honorable about it, or we will destroy it.
(Aside from direct requests, do you recall any subtle ways that
pressure was applied to influence your professional standards?)
We try very hard to limit the Christmas presents, the favors, and
all that sort of obvious kind of favor -buying. Everybody tries
that.
Stores and promoters around town will send over a turkey or
something at Christmas to the newspaper offices and stuff like that
--have a big party and drink the booze and carve the turkey. It's
very minor. You know, so George Mardikian's restaurant gets a good
mention in Herb. I don't know whether he gave Herb a turkey, I
don't think so. Herb doesn't take much, if anything.
(Did you ever kill or change a story out of personal concern?)
harks back to the case of Jon, and the answer is no?
That
No. On the other side of that, I've had to write some very, very
painful stories about people who were my close friends. I always
had to tell them ahead of time, and I did. I said, "Please
understand or please forgive." [See earlier story of Charlie Camp
and his son Roddy's suicide.] Those are very difficult problems.
(
In cases like that, you talk to the people ahead of time.
Oh, I always do. Always, if I personally knew them or if they had
called in, I would try to explain it in this sort of vapid way about
the mystery and responsibilities of the omniscient press and what it
all meant.
But you couldn't have been omniscient, and there must have been many
stories in the Chronicle that you didn't know about that hit you the
next day.
Not much.
How could you be in touch with everything in the paper every day?
I knew just about everything that was happening in the paper. I was
429
in pretty close touch, believe me. You know, it wasn't I. We had
the greatest editors in history, I think- -Abe Mellinkoff, and Bill
German, Stan Arnold and Gordon Pates. Golly! We could do anything
with the paper. And there was always Dolly around to keep the
pieces together and the animals under control.
Riess: So you would absolutely trust them.
Newhall: Oh, totally.
Riess: On those days, for instance, when you were locked up with Charlie?
Newhall: Dolly had to keep it all going. When Charlie came in for an
extended period she would go to her outside desk in Stan Arnold's
office. Oh, I could be gone for six months and they- -and Dolly- -
would put out this paper, absolutely. If it was something that they
didn't automatically agree with, or knew I might debate, it was not
a dictatorship. We always, I think, just worked together.
Riess: When we talk about newspaper photography, it's clear you still have
a passionate concern for it. (What changes have occurred there?)
Newhall: I'm very old-fashioned, but I do care about it because it could be
better. Today, 1989, more and more papers are running color
pictures, which I have many doubts about, because newsprint is not
good, slick paper. They're getting a little better all right, but
color is for TV, and color is for the magazines, and so on. This,
again, is old-fashioned, I guess I would call it.
I was earlier saying that when I first became a photographer we
had some very primitive devices, but they were fast. We could bring
a picture in, have it developed, washed, and a print made and on the
editor's desk within a matter of a very few minutes --and I mean five
minutes .
Riess: I had no idea that it could be done that fast.
Newhall: But now, you see, they've got all this marvelous new technique,
which is going down the tubes now, because of electronics.
Nevertheless, they've had these little cameras, the type you use,
thirty-five millimeter- -I went to work, by the way, with a thirty-
five millimeter camera. And I said, "This is the world of tomorrow,
fellas, and we're going to have little candid photos." But
basically we were still using Speed Graphics with cut film. With
cut film, you just take it in, slam it into the developer, slam it
into the fix, and throw it up wet into the enlarger, and you'll come
out with your picture. Now it's a little cumbersome, the rest of
the mechanical process.
Riess: You can deal with it wet?
430
Newhall: Oh, yeah, that's the whole point. It is cumbersome to dry these
tiny little negatives fast enough. I was telling them at the Si;
and the Citizen. "For God's sake, will you get some kind of frame,
and you can run your negatives through wet," because the drying
takes ten, fifteen minutes. Well, for me today to sit around
waiting twenty minutes for a lousy, stinking picture to come up- -I
can't stand it. I'm serious about that. I think it's a very great
weakness. Maybe they can do it faster. I'm sure they must in the
larger papers. I don't know. But there is a very significant wait,
and I'd rather use a Polaroid, which everybody laughs at.
Riess: I see that the L.A. Times does run a color front page photo. It's
almost a substitute for a banner headline. I mean, it's the thing
that you see.
Newhall: Yeah. That's right, and it's changing there. I think of newspapers
in black and white, and I'm sure I will be proved quite wrong.
Again, I don't want to see color type. You know, you read black
type. Color newspaper photos don't mean anything to me, because--!
don't know, they just don't.
Cares and Woes
Riess: Karl Kortum said to me, about you, "Scott can't help but react to
calls for help. Imagine the number of people with problems who talk
to him every day. But he never has had the newspaperman's normal
defense --cynic ism. Instead, he has developed a kind of detachment.
He sits back, listens, and doesn't talk much, but he knows exactly
what's going on. He's happiest, I suppose, in his own thoughts, but
he can't stop caring, and caring will kill him someday."
Newhall: [muttering] Son of a bitch. [to Ruth] You answer it.
Ruth N. : I think that's correct, but I don't think caring is going to kill
him. I think he's very practical. I think he does care about things
very, very much- -all kinds of things --but I don't think that that's
a destructive thing. I don't think he plunges into things to the
point of destruction.
Newhall: Like the Citizen? .
Ruth N. : You pulled out when it began to get dangerous, yes.
Newhall: I think Karl is right. I'm trying to look at it quite objectively.
I care. This is why I've been in the business. I care so deeply-
-
you know, every guy has a little Messiah in him. I've got a lot.
Ruth will tell you. Lately, I can't sit and watch television. I've
been getting so upset and excited, I get up and walk out and sit by
431
the pool. [to Ruth] Isn't that true?
RuthN.: Yes, that's true.
Newhall: I can't stand it when I see journalism baying down the wrong track,
paying attention to the wrong things--! hate the words "right" and
"wrong" --paying attention to things that are not of consequence,
historically, to us. To me, America is the world. It is paradise
for humans, and we are constantly destroying ourselves. I care.
That's why I've been in the newspapers in the last few years. It
gave me a soapbox on which to expound my cares, and my irritation,
and my frustrations, and my fury. I think Karl is quite right,
frankly, objectively. Things do matter to me a great deal.
Riess: He talks about the newspaperman's normal defense being cynicism.
Newhall: Yeah. You know, you look at your first dead body, and you have to
protect yourself. Again, that's why you've got the Ben Hecht,
Charles MacArthur plays, in which they'll sit around and make jokes
about the "stiff" this, that, or the other, because death is not
necessarily the most beautiful visual experience in the world. So
the old newspaperman was a cynic- -wisecracking, fast- talking,
sometimes well-educated and frequently very literate.
Ruth N. : You see a great many horrible things in this business.
Newhall: Yeah, and you don't want your own concerns and fears and depressions
necessarily to haunt your writing. I can't explain it all.
Riess: [to Ruth] So he's not a cynic.
Ruth N . : No ,
no .
Newhall: Well, I am a cynic.
Ruth N.: Oh, you're a cynic in--
Newhall: In a sense. But a cynic is a person who cares, believe me. I'll
tell you who really cared, and that's Mencken. He was, in a sense,
one of the world's greatest cynics.
Ruth N. : You're a cynic about a lot of phonies. You slap the label on a
phony very easily. I don't mean you use that word.
Newhall: Oh, you mean people that matter. The only three people who really
matter are the three of us sitting here. I don't know about you two
all the time-- [laughter]
Riess: Why is it that you are reading about the Roman empire?
Newhall: I think we in America are reliving the Roman empire, totally.
432
Ruth N. : He reads history of all kinds.
Riess: The decline and fall is what we are reliving?
Newhall: Well, yes, everything, but at the moment I am drifting through
Plutarch. We're about at a little bit before Caesar.
Riess: What kinds of insights does it give you, two hours with Gibbon?
Newhall: He's such a marvelous writer. I guess he could write about
anything. It's way overwritten, by the way, but it's marvelous. To
me, his grasp and descriptions of humans and social structures are
the most remarkable, most delicious I've ever read. And I hadn't
read him, you know. I've always had a copy around somewhere, but
it's always a formidable -looking thing. But, oh! His descriptions
of social order are something! I could read you part of a chapter
on the Christian church. He had them tagged, but he was very warm,
he was never bitter.
Ruth N. : Don't use up the tape. [laughter]
Riess: Maybe it would be fun to run a column by him in the paper.
Newhall: Gibbon? Yeah. Could be, easily. It would frighten a lot of
people , would infuriate a lot of people , if they could understand
what he was saying. I could read you one sentence about the
Christian monks and the ascetics, you know, the hermits and stuff --
this guy, he's got people typed.
Glamour, and the Good Old Days
Riess: Somebody referred to the relationship between the two of you as a
Tracy-Hepburn relationship. I had to come down here to see the
Hepburn end of things .
Newhall: I think Katharine Hepburn came out ahead on that relationship.
She's still around. [laughter]
Riess: It was defined as "black- tie dinners with the world's Who's Who,
safaris through steaming jungles, thousands of miles sailed through
storm and saline beauty, and, of course, the mighty Signal .
"
This
was the article in the Santa Clarita Valley Magazine.
Newhall: They're all the same article-- just rewritten.
Riess: But there's a lot of glamour attached to the two of you.
433
Newhall: To other people, perhaps. It's been our life, you know.
Ruth N. : We don't go around doing glamorous things.
Newhall: You know, we're the luckiest two people in the world, Suzanne, to be
perfectly honest. In my opinion, nobody now can ever experience the
wonderful discovery of this planet that we were able to explore in
the 1930s, because in the 1930s there were so few people. The world
was still made up of all these different communities, and different
cultures , and different languages , and now the world has turned into
one big automobile row with Bob's Big Boy Restaurant or McDonald's,
or a Howard Johnson's Motel at every other corner.
Ruth N. : We went through Mexico at a time when it was very, very much like
when- -who was the man that made the early trips? My mind has gone
blank.
Newhall: I'll tell you in a minute. Englishman- -
Jennings .
No, not Jennings.
Ruth N: No, he was an American, and he made these trips about 1830.
Newhall: Incidents of Travel in Yucatan and Central America.
Ruth N . : Yes .
Newhall: One of the volumes is upstairs. It was Stephens --John Stephens.
Ruth N. : Yes. Anyhow, the stories and descriptions he gives in the 1830s
were very similar. They hadn't changed in the 1930s.
Newhall: The change in Mexico came starting about '34.
Ruth N. : The change came, and the population, of course, exploded. That was
what made the difference.
Newhall: World War II has changed the world --enormously.
Riess: You call this luck?
Newhall: Well, we were lucky to have lived then. That's what I'm saying.
You can't do it now, because wherever you go you will find the same
hotel, the same restaurant, the same shops selling the same shoddy
material. That's why I don't want to go traveling too much in
Europe. It's been destroyed. Have you seen it lately? Jesus!
Riess: You were talking earlier about how you feel that this place [home in
Piru] has what you were looking for in your travels.
Newhall: Yes, but our home here in Piru will be destroyed ike that some day.
Somebody will come along, buy the old mansion, and make a bed-and-
breakfast out of it. Then pretty soon they'll put in cabins and
434
they'll knock out the trees and gardens and orchards, sell the air
rights, and put something else up here, and it'll be gone. Honest!
Riess: Are you planning to do anything about that?
Ruth N. :
Nothing. We are going to be dead.
Newhall: Unless we give it to the state and say, "Well, if you're interested
in it--"
Ruth N. : The state can't afford to maintain it. It's expensive to maintain.
Riess: Back to the romance.
Ruth N. : I don't know enough about Tracy-Hepburn.
Newhall: She was pretty tough to get along with. She was named "Woman of the
Year," and [to Ruth] so were you. That's true. I quit drinking,
but he got drunk and came struggling onstage as she was making her
acceptance speech.
Ruth N . : I never had that much power .
Newhall: She [Hepburn] did, or she thought so. Spencer Tracy was the top dog
there ,
but they had a hard time .
Ruth N. : He [Scott] spent the first five years of our marriage making sure I
knew my place, because I was older, and I was quite confident.
Newhall: She never learned who was at the head of the family. [laughter]
Riess: [to Scott] She [Ruth] said that you promised that you would be
making ten thousand a year when you were twenty-five.
Ruth N. : No. When you were thirty. And when you were thirty-five- -that was
it, when you were thirty-five you would be making the income
generated by a million dollars.
Newhall: I don't think I quite made it.
Ruth N.: You did. Just about.
Newhall: Well, it depends what a million dollars is worth these days. No, we
were ambitious. You know, we were broke. Nobody, nobody, nobody
believes it. We were broke, with no light at the end of the tunnel
that we saw.
Ruth N. : We had a lot of pressure as the children were growing up.
Newhall: We hocked everything we had to educate them. We felt an education
was necessary so that they could take care of themselves when the
435
big bombs came, or something. But no matter how broke we were it
was a wonderful, wonderful world, and I don't think it's such a
wonderful, wonderful world anymore, because there are too many
people in it for all of them to enjoy the comforts they may deserve.
Ruth N. :
[to Scott Newhall, who has left and returned] We were talking about
Berkeley.
Newhall: The junk people on the street. Boy, what a scene.
Ruth N. : First the businessmen wrecked Berkeley by trying to make too much
money out of their little subdivisions instead of beautifying that
locale, and then the left movement people came along and just ruined
it with clutter and messiness and deprivation. It's too bad. And
they never had the proper newspaper to lead them, either. [Ruth N.
leaves]
Developing a Vision of Shangri-La
Riess: In Ruth's book [The Newhall Ranch. Huntington Library, 1958], she
ends saying, "If the city dwellers come to establish houses, schools
and factories on the Newhall ranch, it will be nothing more than
H.M. Newhall expected. He lived and made his fortune furthering
growth and development. The ranches today and the outlook for the
future stand as a testimonial, et cetera, et cetera, to all of
this .
"
So it was In the cards that there would be growth and
development?
Newhall: It was in the cards that someday Los Angeles was going to expand, I
guess .
Riess: And then you came down here to run the newspaper, and you got closer
to that expansion.
Newhall: Well, I was much more active with the Farming Company before I got
the newspaper. Then I had to pull back from active involvement.
After seeing this wonderful world, and then seeing all the
problems and seeing some of the ugliness and some of the beauty, I
had hoped that whatever heritage I was involved with would somehow
provide the Santa Clarita Valley wih a kind of practical Shangri-
La.
In the early 1950s the Farming Company decided to develop our
own land ourselves, instead of selling it to developers. I had
hoped we could build a parkthat's a pretty short description--
that we could build a garden instead of a ghetto. So the Farming
Company hired the best planners ,
and they came up with some
beautiful concepts.
436
I held a meeting and chaired it. We included every one of our
architects, and our executives, and farmers and all the planning
consultants, and planning designers, and people who were going to be
involved in our city building effort. I said, "The first thing you
have to do when you start building is this, you have to build a
community in which you accept the automobile as a machine or a
conveyance that is here to stay. Then you must, somehow, resolve
the problem of separating life- -family life, home life, pedestrian
life- -from the automobile."
Unfortunately, we had a little problem building a Utopia out
here in the Santa Clarita Valley. You see the problem is that
southern California is filled up almost exclusively with human
turnips. But we have tried. It hasn't been perfect. You see, out
here in the Santa Clarita Valley we're approaching gridlock now.
We've built these homes. But there are pedestrian malls and paseos
and cluster communities. They are not, every one of them, an
Italian hill town or Positano, Italy, or something like that, but
they're better, rather than worse, I think.
Riess: Did you have to lobby the rest of the board on these issues?
Newhall: Well, I used to be, always, somewhat vocal. I tried to be poetic as
well as practical. I think we made more money because we did our
developing better, but it takes more money going in. I really was
hitting them up. I mentioned it just casually yesterday. I was
really lobbying them for water, water, water, water for pools.
I said, "You've got a desert here. You want to make a fortune
out of it? Put water into it." Look what they've done with Palm
Springs and places like that. It's all an illusion. They've got
this vast desert. You put some pools in. This is a nice little
pool right here [pointing to patio pool of Newhall house]. And
green, and plants, and give these poor people seeking an oasis what
they're looking for.
We've done pretty well. We haven't done as well as some of the
developers. I think Irvine, on the whole, is better, Westlake may
be better. These are developments down here in southern California.
You've seen them up north. You've seen them out along the ocean.
Riess: You said that you were most active with the Farming Company before
you came down.
Newhall: Atholl McBean wanted me to take it over- -I mentioned it before--
become president or chairman. I said, "No, I'm in the newspaper
business," so I never did make it. But there was no one else in the
family who was sort of interested. That's all. I was always a
very, very small up and down shareholder. But Ruth and I have been
more or less the center of the family's joint familial interest in
437
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Ruth N . :
Newhall :
this, and we've been able to fairly well keep in touch. Of course,
you see, the family owns only about 35 percent of the company now,
in terms of shares, but they still are very well -represented on the
board of directors. Things go along.
What are the planning entities here?
Los Angeles. Or the city?
Are you under the county of
Both. The city of Santa Clarita is a little piece right in the
center of the valley. But most of the present building explosion is
county .
And has the complexion of these planning groups changed over the
years so that growth has been slowed?
Oh, that is a long and involved situation. Billions of dollars have
been made in Los Angeles County by the supervisors, and by their
friends, the developers, out of the growth of Los Angeles County.
Generally speaking, nothing can be built without a permit from the
county. You have one supervisor who is in charge of the whole
northern section of Los Angeles County- -I've never been able to nail
him for how much money he gets --but they get into office by going to
the developers, including the Farming Company, and everybody pays a
thousand dollars a seat for a table at the banquet. I once went to
one. This is big political money. I mean, this is big. I don't
know where this guy's got his safe deposit boxes. They're probably
in Switzerland or Panama or somewhere .
Aren't there citizen groups who would just absolutely eat them
alive?
Oh, southern California politicians are running around as if they
were Bourbon kings just before the French Revolution. But you can't
get at them. You can't touch them. You can't nail them. We've
never been able to. The Farming Company has donated money, many
dollars, legally, from their point of view, for political banquets
and such. But I'm sure he takes money from his campaign and so on.
But this is a whole long story in itself. That is one reason that
Los Angeles County is so scarified. [Ruth N. returns] [to Ruth] I
was trying to talk a little bit about the planning process in Los
Angeles County.
The Farming Company lives or dies on what they call the
"entitlements" that they get. Entitlement means a county or city
permit to build a city, to build a water company- -or some other such
benevolence .
The approval from the planning commission.
Yeah, the approval from the planning commission. The planning
commission is totally a creature of a supervisor whose name is Mike
438
Antonovich. Generally, the Los Angeles County supervisors have been
friendly with the Farming Company and went along with the company's
planning, which was fine, because our plans were pretty darned good.
The last guy- -he's a good friend of ours now- -was Baxter Ward. But
the present guy, Antonovich--! can't figure him. He's starting his
third term. He's probably the most stupid man I've ever met.
Ruth N. : He's saying yes to everything. All the dumb--
Newhall: I can't nail him with the money, though. Anyway, he has the power
and controls his appointees to the planning commission. He can
grant to any builder, not just the Farming Company, the necessary
permits to go ahead with a program to build, say, a thousand or two
--or five or ten thousand- -houses . It's a matter of many millions
of dollars.
Riess: Well, whatever we're getting at, I just see what must have been a
dilemma for you.
Newhall: It was terrible. I had a vision of building the most beautiful
place on earth, and I was not able to get them to do it. But it's a
hell of a lot better than a lot of places.
Riess: Where does that vision of building the most beautiful place on earth
come from?
Newhall: Well, I love beautiful things. Traveling around the world, you just
tend to see- -the beauty struck me more than the poverty. The
poverty never bothered me that much. People talk about poverty.
Well, we're all poor, but look how many beautiful things have been
done. Things that are not necessarily needed, but beautiful things.
Riess: It's hard for me to think of your being inspired to build the most
beautiful place on earth for people you have called turnips .
Newhall: Well, I thought maybe it could turn the turnips into a higher order
of vegetable.
The vision I had now comes back to me. Victor Gruen had been a
fugitive from Hitler in Austria. He came over and brought over his
friends, and they just started planning. They were good architects
and all that. I had a deal. One day while I was visiting with
Gruen, I said, "Look. We're going to break this up into little
villages. I'm going to go over to Europe. Picasso's still alive.
Matisse is still alive. Miro and Salvador Dali are still around.
I'm going to go over and make a pitch and have each one of them
design a fountain to be the centerpiece of each one of these
villages." And Victor said, "I'll go with you." We were going to
go and do it, but in the end it just wasn't practical. I mean, I
wanted to do something that would make this place memorable. You
remember talking about that, Ruth. I still am trying to get the
439
Ruth N.:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Ruth N.
Newhall:
Riess :
Fanning Company to put in more fountains and pools .
Scott made books. He made these great big books.
I pasted up books and showed them pictures of Hadrian's pool, among
other things , Spanish colonial patios ,
Chinese temples and villages
and such. I took the chairman down on visits to Mission Viejo, and
Westlake and San Diego, and oh, we went all over. I wanted him to
see the best.
I've never talked about this much, because I don't like to.
But I'm just disappointed that our company development is sort of
upper bourgeois --not so much Christian Dior as Calvin Klein jeans,
sort of an upper middle-class line. Some of the homes are so close
to next door to their neighbor I think it should be illegal. Now,
I'm moaning about what should have been. But what is, is.
What did you do with Gruen? He laid out the overall plan?
He had a big firm.
Did the Gruen associates get down to the distance between houses,
density questions? They must have.
Not quite the distance, possibly, but we had all the villages marked
out, and there is a dead-end street system so there wouldn't be this
great traffic and all that sorrow. But there is a matter of reality
and a matter of the available dollar. I'm not trying to criticize
the people who did this. We have the best people in the world in
charge of our company.
There's one thing you must realize: we, the Newhall Land and
Farming Company in this case, had all this "raw" but beautiful land
on our books at a cost of almost zero, acres and acres and acres,
40,000. Most of the developers in southern California, except for
the Irvine people, and a few like that, have to come in and buy
their development land at thousands and or hundreds of thousand
dollars an acre before they can begin. There's this basic
difference in profit out of it. I think it was our responsibility
to do better, and I think we have- -on balance.
It is generally better. Valencia is beautifully landscaped,
have planted thousands of trees .
They
Oh, the landscaping is pretty darned good. I think the San
Francisquito Canyon development --it' s called Northbridge now- -will
be beautiful someday.
Frank Lloyd Wright had something to do with a whole community
outside of New York City, one of his Usonian communities. Everyone
who lived there was to have been psychoanalyzed before they would be
440
admitted to it. Would you be interested in planning communities to
that extent?
Newhall: No. I used to say to these young planners, "Look. The one problem
you guys have got is the problem of personal choice, the problem of
individual taste. You can't just stamp out the same thing here- -the
same house and garage and patio --time after time. You've got to
give people a chance to make a choice. There's a question of free
will."
They said, "Oh, well, we can program free will into the
computer." This is literally what he told me. I gave up, because
the beauty of much of these things that I love comes from a certain
amount of distinction and personal taste.
Ruth N. : Conflict and diversity. The idea of building a tract of half-a-
million- dollar homes boggles my mind, and the people are all, kind
of, of an age that move in.
Riess: It's a capital T tract all right.
Newhall: That's right. Your roof has to be the same color. Your house has
to be the same color as all the others. You can't paint it. You'll
be hauled into court by the homeowners' associations if you do.
There are restrictions, covenants covering every house in Valencia.
Ruth N. : You can't leave your pick-up truck parked in the driveway.
Newhall: My response to all that was when Ruth and I moved south we came out
here to live in Piru among the orange groves.
Riess: When you came down here, you knew about this house?
Newhall: Oh, I'd known it. I was told it was vacant, that the people had
gone or died. One of our young men in the Farming Company came out
and rented it, but then he went away to- -was it during Korea? No
the Vietnam mess.
Ruth N. : He became assistant secretary of the navy under Johnson.
Newhall: He went away, so then we bought the old mansion and fixed it up.
That was the great and enjoyable part of our lives.
Riess: So you lived in Berkeley, and you lived here.
Newhall: Basically. And I've lived in San Rafael.
Ruth N. : We were twenty-nine years in the Berkeley house, and we've been
here, now, for twenty -one.
441
The Newhall Bovs
[addition dictated by Newhall]
Newhall: By the way, Suzanne, I have talked so long about so many things I
simply cannot remember what I have said about our total family
participation in so many, many things, particularly in our handling
of the Signal. And for the record I would like to make a couple of
comments here. The Signal was essentially a joint family effort.
I, myself, was certainly very active in its development, but without
the real day to day serious leadership and input from Jon and Tony
and Ruth, there would have been no lasting Signal in my life.
You see, I bought the Signal in 1963, shortly before John
Kennedy was assassinated. But I still continued with the Chronicle
full time, or was out steamboating on the Atlantic or running for
mayor of San Francisco, until 1972. I was commuting up and down the
state between the Chronicle and the Signal for a good bit, but early
in the game my son Jon came down to Newhall and at first sold ads,
but then became editor and also functioned as publisher. This was a
tough period. Newhall was more or less a restless cow town, and Jon
found the community hostile and unexciting.
Tony had been away at the Peace Corps in Peru and later at
Stanford Business School until about 1968. He and Ruth then came
south- -we had bought our Victorian home out in Piru by thenand
both Tony and Ruth took a more and more active part in the paper.
Jon became so bored he finally quit and went north to start his own
very successful "alternative" weekly feature news service for
college papers and radio stations.
Tony took over as publisher of the Signal, and Ruth became
managing editor. I wrote the editorials from the early '70s on.
Ruth handled the writing staff and produced the paper. Tony
organized the advertising, circulation and printing until we finally
all pulled out in mid- 1988. While we were there, the Signal was
totally a family enterprise, and it was, in the end, very, very
successful financially. The Signal was a great experience for all
of us .
Skip, my oldest son, who is still with the Jet Propulsion Lab,
has always been so busy and so successful in his interplanetary
programs and space navigation systems that he never had the time to
succumb to the cry of the rogue newspaper. And Tony is, by the way,
now working back at the Chronicle --both he and Jon had worked there
many years ago as copy boys. Tony is currently assistant to the
Chronicle general manager.
[end dictated addition]
442
XV RUTH NEWHALL, MARRIAGE AND CAREER
Meeting and Marrying Scott##
Riess: [to Ruth] Let's start out with your side of the story of first
meeting Scott. Obviously you made an impact.
Ruth N. : I was secretary at the art department, and I took attendance in
various classes, particularly at the beginning of the semester after
registration, so that I could type up correct enrollments and so
forth. Before that class met, Professor Eugen Neuhaus ,
who was an
art professor and a California painter and a German, came into the
office, sat down, and said, "Well! That poor Mrs. Newhall from San
Rafael, they've lost all their money. She came to see me. I used
to go over and give lectures to their garden club.
"She came to see me and brought her son. She's enrolling him
here in the art department. There are not many parents who bring
their children in, of course, to enroll them, but she has always had
all this authority and all this money. Now they've lost it, and she
is settling down in Berkeley. Her son, who always expected, I
think, to go to some eastern college, is coming here and enrolling
in the art department."
I just heard the name and so forth, and so when I took
attendance I was interested in seeing who this young man was. The
first I remember was his very blue eyes. That was what I saw, and I
remembered. He would stop by the office and talk; I had one of
those half -doors on the office, and he would stop by and talk.
Riess: You were four years older than he was. Didn't that make you
considerably older?
Ruth N.: Yes. I felt considerably older. Yes, much older. At the time, I
was twenty-two or thereabouts, and he was eighteen.
We discovered that his mother and my father had known each
other when they were very young, when they were both at the age that
443
Riess :
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
we were then. She had dated his roommate for quite a long time. So
my parents had them over to dinner, and there were a couple of
things like that.
We both signed up, independently, to go on Professor Neuhaus's
European tour. Then the bottom fell out of the dollar. That was
the Roosevelt year, when he took office and went off the gold
standard- -devalued the dollar. We no longer had enough money to
make the trip. The dollar had suddenly plunged in relation to
European currencies, and we had to withdraw from Professor Neuhaus'
tour.
However, each of us figured that we could make the trip on our
own if we did it on the cheap. I was so much older than he that it
didn't occur to anybody that there was any chance of any romance.
That was the way it sort of followed-- that there was no chance
whatsoever, because he was a kid and I was an adult, you see.
But in fact the two of you were infatuated?
No, I wasn't at the time. No. It came on, I guess. Close exposure
at that age, of course, does things like that, and during the trip
the relationship changed. That became apparent to our families when
we got back, and my family threw a wing-ding about it. They were
absolutely appalled. His mother, on the contrary- -
You mean on moral grounds?
On moral grounds ,
and
with all these stories
true. He was unstable
them at the time, "If
always have said, why
what kind of a person
problems ,
but I don' t
partly wrong, but, on
been now almost fifty-
long run, I was right.
also Scott was unstable. My mother came home
about what an unstable, unreliable- -which was
But I knew what he was like. As I said to
you think I'm so awfully smart, which you
do you think I'd be stupid enough not to know
this is?" I said, "I know he's got his
think they're all that serious." Well, I was
the other hand, I was right. After all, it's
six years that we've been married. So, in the
His mother went to Reno with us when we got married.
His mother must have been very pleased about it all.
He had been a problem child. He had been very difficult for his
parents. I don't know whether it came out in his talking with you,
but he was difficult. Nothing evil, just constant trouble, getting
kicked out of schools.
His mother kept saying, "I hope you have children just like you
are, and you'll know what we've gone through." [laughs] She kept
saying that to him. And, of course, we didn't. Our children were
444
very well-behaved. We had very little trouble with any of them. We
didn't have any who turned out to be alcoholic or drug users or
getting into any difficulties whatsoever, so we did not "reap the
whirlwind," which was interesting. Anyhow, so much for that.
Riess: Was your mother reconciled eventually?
Ruth N. : As soon as she had grandchildren. Scott and I did a lot of
traveling for about four years. We started around the world in a
boat, as I'm sure you've heard, and did horseback riding in Mexico,
and just skated around.
Then we felt it was time to start raising a family. And, of
course, the minute a grandchild arrives things become very
different. My mother couldn't bear the thought of not seeing her
grandchild, so things changed. Relations never were completely
normal, I would say, though they were friendly. I had been very
close to my mother and my father, and they never got back to that
point.
Riess: You were an only child?
Ruth N. : No. I'm the oldest. I have a brother and a sister, both younger
than I, both of whom are still alive and flourishing.
Riess: When you married Scott, did you have that feeling that you were
moving into this huge Newhall dynasty?
Ruth N. : No. That was no part of it at all. And, of course, we had eloped.
The first hint I had was when we went to Thanksgiving dinner up in
Hopland, on Scotty's mother's side of the family. All these people
were there, and I began to see what a huge and close family he came
from. But that had not been part of the picture. His mother had
moved to Berkeley with the children, and both of us were in school,
and we spent the summer in Europe so I had never had, really, any
opportunity or dealt with the family at all. This was a surprise to
me.
Riess: He was a "catch," wasn't he?
Ruth N. :
Well, I guess, except they were so broke then. I liked his
educational background and his absolutely continuing intellectual
curiosity and his appreciation for art. He had all these attributes
of things we liked to do together, and things we enjoyed. You don't
often find that among young men. And that was what really made me
sure that he was the kind of person I wanted to be around.
Riess: And, in fact, did you start dreaming and scheming and cooking things
up, at that point, that you would like to do together? Did you have
a life plan at all?
445
Ruth N. : Well, at the time, when we were first married, what we both wanted
to do was more traveling, and I was appalled when he got the idea of
buying a boat and starting around the world, because I had never
been on a boat, really. But he said, "Oh, you can learn navigation
easily," and he was right. It's not all that difficult. I was
terribly seasick going out the Golden Gate the first time, but I got
over that and was never seasick again. We went to Mexico on another
trip, and we enjoyed that.
Scott's Self -Confidence
Riess: But beyond that- -I mean, you certainly had been geared up by your
family and by your education to be something, and so what was your
sense of your own future?
Ruth N. :
Oh, one thing. Before we got married I said, "I have no intention
whatsoever of settling down and being a housewife, so forget it."
And he said, "I promise you that I will keep you working as
long as we are married." So I said, "Okay, that's a promise." And
he has .
He said, "I will always have someone working in the house to
help with the house," and he has. "And there will always be a way
for you to get out, because you don't belong in the house either."
It's not that I don't enjoy cooking and housework. I do, but I
don't like it to be my only activity. So he was very, very
supportive right from the very beginning.
Riess: Well, he sounds like he was very self-confident. He knew that he
was a man who would be in that position to be supportive.
Ruth N. : Well, he predicted. I said, "You know, we're going to have to live
on my salary while you're in school." His mother gave him $50 a
month, which was then more than it sounds like. I was earning $100
a month at the University. On that $150 we could save. We saved
enough to make our trips, and that was really extraordinary. But it
was a different dollar and a different time. I said, "You know, you
can't live on my salary forever."
He said, "No, I promise you that by the time I'm twenty- five, I
will be earning ten thousand dollars a year, and I promise that by
the time I am thirty- five, I will have the income of a millionaire."
He had no idea how he was going to do it. He was just very
self-confident. And I like self-confidence. I think it's a very
good trait.
446
I was
He said, "Why don't you
My assistant in the
Riess: It feeds itself.
Ruth N.: Yes. That's right.
Riess: So, in fact, he actually got through Cal.
Ruth N. : No, he did not. He quit at the end of his junior year. We had been
married, then, about a year and a half. Henry Hart, who owned an
Oriental art store in San Francisco- -and whose best customer was
Albert Bender --taught a course in Oriental art on the campus.
his reader; I read his examination papers.
come and learn some of the practical side?
store is going to be gone this summer. I will hire you to come in
and work in the store, and you can learn a little bit about the
retail business and about Chinese art, and it'll be a whole new
field for you." So I said, "Fine, I'd like to do that."
Well, Scotty was appalled. That was leaving him hanging out to
dry. Meanwhile, however, he had bought a very small camera. Candid
photography had just come in, "candid" meaning snapping it when it
wasn't posed. Up until then they had always posed everybody,
because the film speed and the lens speeds had not been great enough
to be able to catch casual photographs . So he bought this small
camera and he had been snapping pictures around the campus , and he
said, "I will try to be a newspaper photographer then. I'll go down
to the Examiner and see if they will hire me," because he knew some
staff member down there or something.
He went to the Examiner. They didn't need anybody, so he went
over to the Chronicle . He happened to hit the Chronicle exactly as
some photographer had quit, and they were desperately in need of a
new photographer. (This is the way people get jobs. It's
accidental, usually.) He telephoned me and talked in whispers. I
remember the whisper. I was in the office of the store, and he
telephoned.
He said, [whispering] "I've got a job in the Chronicle . and
it's going to pay me a hundred dollars a month! But I have to--
I'll come up."
I said, "Yes. Come on up." He came bursting into Henry Hart's
store. It was a Friday, and I was standing up in the balcony above.
He said, ignoring everybody, "I've got the job, but I have to
develop my own pictures, and I haven't any idea how to do it." A
little man who was down below said, "What pictures are you going to
develop, young man?" Henry Hart led this man out and introduced him
to Scotty, and he said, "This is Albert Bender."
Albert said, "Scott Newhall? Oh, I know your father." And
Scotty said, "Yeah, and I've seen a lot of your work at the
University," and so forth.
447
Riess:
Ruth N.
He said, "Well, young man, you stay right here. You just don't
move. Just stay right here, and I'll be back." In about, oh,
twenty minutes, he came staggering back. He had been up to
Newbegin's, and he had about eight to ten books: How to Develop a
Picture: Photography, by Ansel Adams; How to do Your Own Darkroom
Work, and all these things.
Scotty sat down and did all these formulas. He wrote them
down, put them in little slips in his pocket. After his first
morning at work he called me, again whispering on the phone, and
said, "I took a picture and it came out." [laughter]
day.
That was beginning of his newspaper career. That was the first
Riess: And he really absorbed that. I mean, he was a quick learner,
obviously. It wasn't just luck at this point.
Ruth N. : Yes. Oh, yes. He became very settled. He decided to walk away
from it after he had got beaten up in a fight by somebody who didn't
want his picture taken.
Riess: Did you think that was the beginning of a life in newspapers, or was
that just a job?
Ruth N.: No. He had gone into the newspaper business because he was afraid
--we talked about this --he was afraid to approach strangers. He was
very diffident. He never wanted to admit ignorance, I think. He
wouldn't ask a bus driver where to get off. While we were overseas,
even though he could speak German better than I could, I would have
to ask the policeman which was the way to someplace. I've never
minded going up to perfect strangers and asking questions or talking
to them. He did.
He said, "You know, the newspaper business would get me over
that. I'd have to. That would cure me of my shyness." And he
said, "Well, the nice thing about the newspaper business is you get
into all different kinds of environments. It gives you an overlook
on society, and you can decide where you want to land."
At the same time, you're one step removed, because you are behind
your camera.
J
That's right. Yes, or you're a reporter. No matter what your
function is, you get into all kinds of things, and you can ask
questions .
He said, "Then I'll make up my mind. I'll do this for the
summer, and then I'll go back to school." When the fall came, they
raised his salary. He liked the work so much, it just seemed like a
good idea to stay on, and so he didn't go back to school.
448
Ruth on the Chronicle Staff: Herb Caen and Carolyn Anspacher
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
What was your impression of the importance of family to him?
want to have children?
Did he
Eventually. I think we felt it about equally. I began to get
restive. Of course, I was older than he. When I began to see my
late twenties approaching, I think when I was twenty - seven- -. No.
We got back from the trip, he lost his leg, and that glimmer the
Kleebergers loaned us their house out in north Berkeley- -it was a
lovely house- -for Scotty to recuperate. They were up at the camp.
We stayed in the Kleebergers' house for about six weeks while he
recuperated. It was there we decided--.
I was very cautious. I said, "You know, you don't have a job."
He said, "Yes, I'll have a job." He said, "It will take nine months
before I can get off crutches and get a wooden leg, and we might as
well start, because we can't go anywhere. We've got to stay home."
It turned out to be a very good time to have a baby. Our
oldest son was born in '38, and the war in Europe started that fall.
We couldn't go anywhere, really, and we couldn't go back to Europe,
which is what we had thought of doing. It turned out to be a very
good time for a family.
Was the loss of the leg a psychic setback at all?
to have been.
It doesn't appear
No. It was a shock. I mean, he was a very good tennis player, and
it cut right out those vigorous active sports and things, but, as he
said, there's a lot else to do. He was on crutches for a year. He
couldn't put a leg on for a whole year.
During that year he went back to the Chronicle. We had got to
know Paul Smith very well- -as a matter of fact he had come the first
leg of our voyage in our boat with us, we were very close friends- -
and he got Scotty back working in the library, sitting mostly.
He had gotten to know him when he was a newspaper photographer?
Yes. We had become very good friends right away when Scott started
working. We had good friends there at the Chronicle, and he enjoyed
it. He just liked the Chronicle, and we had a lot of fun.
I said, you know, now that we had a family, I needed to work.
I wasn't going to stay home any longer. My mother-in-law had given
us the services of a West Indian woman who came in and helped out
during the first weeks I was home with the baby. I just decided to
keep her on. I could hire her for about half my salary, and she
stayed for fifteen years, through four children. She stayed on
449
until she got too old.
Riess: So your first job was with the Chronicle?
Ruth N. : Yes. I went out to an employment agency, because I had taken
secretarial work when I was ten years old, and I could do shorthand
and things .
Riess: When you were ten years old?
Ruth N. : Yes. I stayed out of school a year because I was too young, my
mother thought, for my class. I took shorthand and French that
year, and shorthand, when you learn it at that age stays with you.
So I warmed up a little bit on it, I had to do a little practice
thing.
Then I happened to mention to Paul that I was looking for a
job. I said, "Well, I've been out job-hunting, and I don't like
much." He said, "What do you do?" I said, "Well, I can do
shorthand." And he said, "Well, we desperately need an editorial
secretary. Our secretary's just quit. Why don't you come in and do
that?" So I said, "Fine. I will come and do that."
There weren't as many openings for women then on newspapers.
Of course, now it's totally open. I mean, I think there are more
women than men in most city rooms.
Riess: What did the editorial secretary do?
Ruth N. :
Secretary to everybody--! mean, anybody who had letters to do,
principally the managing editor and the editor. Chester Rowell had
his own secretary part-time, but when she was gone I would work for
him too, and for the managing editor, and for Paul.
After I had been there about four or five months , they hired
this young man called Herb Caen to do their radio column, and they
needed somebody to handle his letters because he got a lot, and do
the radio log. So they moved me into that. I still did letters for
the managing editor, but I sat in Herb's office. He was nineteen
years old at the time, and I was about twenty- seven or thereabouts.
When he came to work I was already pregnant and was going to quit in
a few months. When I quit, Paul took him off the job and said, "Go
away for a month, and when you come back we're going to have you do
a general column, not the radio column anymore."
The day we were leaving, he came in and told me. He said, "I'm
supposed to have twenty to twenty- five items a day. How do you like
that?"
Riess: Isn't that incredible? He was only nineteen.
450
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Yes, when they hired him.
Did they recognize that he had this gift?
Oh, he had been working in Sacramento, doing an awfully good radio
column there.
What's a radio column?
Oh, just like Terrence O'Flaherty did on television. Television
didn't exist then. You wrote about radio personalities and
programs. Are you familiar with Terry 0' Flaherty's thing? It was
that.
But he hadn't finished school?
Hadn't got to college.
I didn't realize that about him.
Yeah. He was just very brilliant, and he was an awfully good ball
player. He was a semipro-- almost went into baseball. His sister
was quite a good musician, so he was very musically oriented, too.
He knew a lot about a lot of things for a young man, and he just had
this gift of being a writer.
I really enjoyed that work. Then I quit to have the baby--.
Yes. That's right. It was before the baby was born that I went to
work at the Chronicle, when we got back from the trip. After Scotty
had his amputation, I went in as a secretary, then became pregnant,
then took two months' pregnancy leave, came back, and then I did
book reviews for Joseph Henry Jackson.
Every now and then they'd have stories they needed writing, so
they'd pass them on to me, and I suddenly realized the way to get a
job was to be there when a job opened up and to have done some
writing and show them you can do it. That's the way most women then
got into the business. Men got in as coming in as copyboys.
Generally speaking, they were hired on- -Art Hoppe was hired on as a
copyboy, and a lot of people were just hired. That was where they
had their beginning. Women would start as secretaries, men as
copyboys. Then, if they showed diligence and began to write and
things, then when they needed someone there was somebody ready. It
suddenly occurred to me that that was the way to get into the
writing business, which I did.
Was there someone in particular who recognized you? Was it Paul
Smith, you would say, who really saw that you had the potential?
Actually, I was hired for my first writing job by Bill Richardson,
who was then editor of This World, a weekly news magazine. He had
451
asked me to do some writing. Scotty was working for him then. When
they would need things done in a hurry, they'd hire me, and then
when they needed another staff member, he asked if he could hire me.
I remember I recommended somebody else to take my job, and that was
the way we sort of passed things on.
Riess : Were there any other women on the paper?
Ruth N. :
Yes, Carolyn Anspacher was there.
Riess: Tell me about her. What was she like?
Ruth N. :
Carolyn was the queen bee. She was a somewhat tall, dark person,
with angular features. She was bright, determined, emotional, and a
resourceful reporter. She was what was called in earlier times a
"sob sister," which meant that she was usually assigned to highly
colorful stories. The one I remember best is the kidnaping of two-
year-old Marc de Tristan, son of Count Marc de Tristan and his wife
Jane [Christensen] ,
who was the best friend of Mrs. Charles
Thieriot.
They were very rich, very prominent Burlingame people, and when
little Marc was snatched from his nanny while out for a walk in
Burlingame, it became the story of the century. All the press and
wire services set up shop in a Burlingame garage about a block from
the home of the stricken family, who surrounded themselves with
guards. Carolyn was there, day and night, sleeping on a cot. All
the reporters watched each other like hawks.
Well, one day, late afternoon, a call came to the Chronicle
city desk from the owner of a tiny rural store up in the Siskiyous,
saying that local lumberjacks had found the kidnapper and the little
boy driving on a remote lumber trail ,
and had brought them in and
were waiting for the sheriff. Little Marc (this was after three or
four days) was unhurt. Well! Talk about scoops!
The city editor Abe Mellinkoff, first made sure this was the
only phone within ten miles, and then got various reporters to keep
the lady storekeeper on the line so nobody else could be notified.
He then called Carolyn at her Burlingame garage station and said,
"Stay calm and don't say a word. Little Marc has been found. He's
fine. I want you to get up to the de Tristan house and tell them.
Now."
Ruth N. :
Carolyn didn't turn a hair. As all the other reporters looked on
idly she said, "Yes, Grandma. Okay. Well, I'm so busy I don't know
that I'll have time to get the stockings." She kept talking this
nonsense while he told her the circumstances of how the baby had
been found. And she said, "All right, all right. Nothing's going
452
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
on. I'll go out now." And so she got up and left and, of course,
went out and doubled back to the Tristan house and was able to walk
in and tell the parents that the child was safe and well.
What a scoop! What other papers would have been there?
Examiner and the Call, and--
The
The Examiner, the News, and the Call, and the Tribune . and the AP
and the UPI. Everybody. It was a big story, because this was an
extremely wealthy and prominent family.
When you looked over the scene at the Chronicle, what job would you
have liked? Would you like to have been editor? How high did you
aim?
Ruth N. : I wasn't particularly ambitious. I had too much to do, raising a
family. I was in and out of the Chronicle for a number of years.
They said I had the thickest employment folder of anybody, because
every year I would take maybe a month or two off while the children
were on vacation, or to clean house and get things in order, and
then I'd go back to work. I could not work absolutely steadily, and
then when I did finally quit, I worked in the opposite direction. I
would go in on vacation relief when people were gone. When the
editorial writers were gone, I would go in and write editorials. I
worked everywhere but society. I refused to work on the society
page.
Riess: Why?
Ruth N. : It seemed trivial to me. I don't know. I just had no interest at
all- -none. I didn't want to spend my life going around to parties
and things like that.
I loved reporting the United Nations conference. I loved going
to Mexico City and reporting on the conference there. I liked
reporting the Berkeley campus. That was a very stirring time to be
reporting it, but I just enjoyed it, because I liked the people and
I liked the contacts, and I had a good time. I liked the other
reporters in the pressroom. I was not trying to be queen of the
May, I just was doing a job I very much enjoyed.
Riess: I thought there was a man running the society page.
Ruth N. : While I was there it was Mildred Brown Robbins. She was a lovely
person. Is, I should say. I think she's still around. She's three
or four years older than I, but not much. Later, Frances Moffatt
came in from the Examiner, and she was excellent. She was there
while Scott was there; she was there, basically, after I left.
Riess: When did you leave?
Ruth N.: In 1952, when Scott became executive editor.
453
Newhall Children
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess :
Ruth N.
When you were on the paper, then, it was because you wanted to work
and be busy, not that you had a career mind?
No, I didn't. My career goals were more or less- -I wanted to be
doing something I enjoyed, but I figured that the career, if there
was going to be a career, was Scott's and the childrens' . I mean,
they were the ones we had to worry about. Scott always had a lot of
hobbies ,
and we were always terribly busy with those ,
and very busy
with four children. The four children were all within five years,
and so that really kept us jumping. Taking them on vacations --it
all took a lot of planning, a lot of careful planning, to occupy
their vacation time and everything. I mean, we took them to Tahoe.
We took them on long trips in these vehicles that Scott built up.
We visited every national park and monument in the West.
This is the vistadome on a four-wheel drive army ambulance?
Yes. We went overland through the entire western America and taught
the children to read maps and feel at home and always be oriented
with where they were. It was very valuable that way. And taught
them to drive. They all learned to drive when they were about ten,
because out in the desert they can learn how to manipulate a
gearshift and all that sort of thing, which is more difficult on
city streets. We had a lot of fun with them.
Could you give a brief history of your children at this point?
first one was Skip. Nicholas is what his--
The
He changed his name to XX. Don't ask me why. I don't understand
why he does anything. But he's called Skip universally, and lists
himself in the phone book as Skip. We called him that because Paul
Smith called Scotty "Skipper" from our days on the boat, and then he
began to call Skip "the little Skipper." We all began to pick that
up, and we finally just began calling him Skip. That is his name.
That's what people call him, all other reports to the contrary.
The only reason I said Nicholas is because I looked at the portrait
up there on the wall, and it's signed Nicholas.
Oh, yes. That was originally. That was my grandfather's name, and
I thought it was kind of a nice name, but he never liked it, so I
said, "Well, drop it. Whatever."
And he started out in Berkeley schools and then went off to--
Middlesex, then to Stanford, then got his Ph.D. at Cal Tech, and has
worked for Jet Propulsion ever since. He's still at Jet Propulsion
454
Lab. He's got his Ph.D. in math and astronomy, the combination.
Riess: And he always had an interest in math?
Ruth N.: All the children did. Yes.
Riess: And Tony and Jon- -Anthony and Jonathan- -were the next?
Ruth N. : That's right. They were twins.
Riess: Were there any other twins in your family?
Ruth N. :
My mother, grandmother, and great -grandmother were twins. The
doctor denied it was happening, but it did. [laughter] Yes. This
is definitely- -of course, these are all fraternal twins. That's the
kind that comes down through the mother's line, so they're not alike
at all. I mean, they're brothers, but they have very little other
resemblance.
They all went to Stanford. Jon went to Gate in Santa Barbara
because he had had polio and had a lot of corrective operations on
one of his legs, which had also been injured by- -he was chewed up by
a dog when he was two-and-a-half . He had operations between the
years of thirteen and fifteen- -they wanted to wait until he was
adolescent to do it- -and we wanted him close to home so he could
come up to the doctor's and be nearby. He was the one who went to
Gate, and Tony went back to Middlesex, where Skip was.
Riess: How did you decide on Middlesex, of all the eastern schools?
Ruth N. : Because of the scholarship. The people at Garfield School in
Berkeley had told me about the scholarships that they offered. You
take tests, and you didn't have to be, as you did in most places,
broke to get a scholarship. They would estimate about how much you
would have to pay. They would give a full scholarship. We couldn't
afford to pay at the time. We had no money, and we paid a little
bit, but it was deductible. You see, it was a donation then. I
know there were several families there that had their children on
full scholarships, who had paid the full amount, but they became
donations and therefore deductible.
But they had this scholarship program that was very good, and
it was a good school. I felt they learned an awful lot. I know,
when we first sent them there all of our friends said, "How could
you bear to do that? How can you send them away?" And then the
following year they called up and said, "Do you think it's too late
for me to get Steve into there?" [chuckles]
We sent them away when they were fourteen. Of course, by the
time they were fifteen to sixteen their parents were wondering what
monsters they had spawned, you know. On the other hand, our
455
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
children, because they were so glad to get home and "out of jail,"
as they put it, were always very nice to us. We never had any
problems at all with their not being nice. They always treated us
with the greatest friendship.
Jon has been described as physically and mentally resembling Scott
and having the same sense of mission.
Jon's very much like Scott, yes. I'm not sure he looks like him,
but he's very much like him temperamentally. Tony is more like me,
people tell us that. I can see it also. He's more relaxed, not as
driven. Jon was always the one that was stirring things up. Tony
was the one that was straightening things out. It was sort of their
different characters. They're born with them.
Both of them have been on the Signal with you.
They both have been, yeah, and Jon's now in computers. Tony's real
love is computers. The one thing he's worried about, moving north,
is his whole computer setup. They all love computers and math, and
they are very much oriented in that direction, though they also are
very fond of the newspaper business.
Jon started his own news service after he left the Signal. He
started a sort of--what do you call it? An avant-garde or some kind
of a strange little news service that carried a lot of protest
stories and things. It was during the Vietnam War and during the
sixties. He was very militant about it and very much caught up in
the thing. He started it that way.
After the war ended, and that decade sort of ended, his news
service just got into running oddball and funny stories, and he
didn't enjoy it so much. He decided to sell it. He sold it. It
was very profitable. He sold it for a very good price and didn't
have to work for about four years. He stayed home, studied
computers, did a little writing, invented some programs, did all the
cooking while his wife went to work for first the Chronicle and then
the Oakland Tribune . When they had children they moved to Oakland,
to Montclair. She's still a columnist at the Tribune as you may
know.
No, I don't. What's her name?
Barbara Falconer Newhall. She does a Sunday column for the Tribune
and some other things, too. But basically she does the Sunday
column. During all the time, still Jon did all the cooking, which
amazed me. Jon used to come home from Stanford and say, "Mom, will
you warm up a little milk for me? I always burn it." Well, then,
all of a sudden he's making all these strange things. You know,
he's making lasagna and cooking the Thanksgiving dinner and doing
all these things that he's discovered he likes to do. He does the
456
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
shopping and the cooking, and Barbara looks after keeping the house
clean, and it works to be a very good division of labor. It's very
handy, though he's back at work now, so it's changing.
You had a daughter?
Yes, and she was killed. She was two years younger than the twins.
It was like having triplets, because girls develop faster than boys.
So by the time she was about four, they were virtually the same age.
Skip was sort of the outsider. These three were very close to each
other.
She was killed in a very freak accident, a week before
Christmas, when she was twelve. She was out singing Christmas
carols with a bunch of friends, and it had been raining. La Loma
used to come straight down the hill into LeRoy and do a sharp turn.
They were out in front of a house on LeRoy, where we had some
friends ,
and this tow truck came down the hill , lost its brakes . He
had parked it on the hill. It was empty; the man wasn't in it. It
went down the hill, and the children all scattered. It hit her.
They all went in different directions, and she was the one that got
hit and killed right away.
What was her name?
Penny. Penelope --Penny. That was a blow.
What year was that?
That was '55. Let's see, she was born in '43.
in '41. Skip was born in '38.
The twins were born
Behind the Scenes
Riess:
Ruth N.
I was wondering about these promotions Scott cooked up.
behind any of them?
Are you
No, I wasn't behind. I was the helper. Scotty's the creator. I
was the helper. I wrote the clues on the treasure hunt, I did
things like that, or the rhymes on various occasions, or parodies of
songs. In other words, I would help with the execution of the
ideas, but I didn't dream them up. No, I'm not that creative.
Scott's the creator. I do the dull work. I've written clues for
more treasure hunts than I can describe, both up in San Francisco
and for the Signal . I've done them both. As I said, I'm really not
the creative type. Scotty is.
Riess: You reiterate that.
457
Ruth N.: Well, we've sort of worked as a team.
Riess: Did you ever feel trapped?
Ruth N. : No. Never. There's always something doing. When Scott went
through his psychiatric treatment, and when he left the
psychiatrist, the psychiatrist called me and he said, "I can
guarantee you one thing. Your life may not be smooth, but you'll
never be bored." And he was right. He was absolutely right. I've
never been bored.
Riess: How do you feel about the women's movement? Are you a feminist of
some stripe, and have you written about it and talked about it?
Ruth N. : Moderate. There are a lot of things about the feminist movement I
don't like. But, on the other hand, I feel strongly about equal pay
for equal work, which has generally been true in the newspaper
business. The only thing that was missing up till very recent years
in the newspaper business was the accessibility of top jobs--
promotability , you might say. I could see a certain amount of sense
in that among young women who were raising their families, because
with my own experience, a family has to consume a certain amount of
time. If you are through with raising your family, then there
should be no limit on you. But, if you've got a young family, it
seems to me you're not going to be 100 percent for your job.
If
Ruth N. : Scott, for example: when his job got pressuring, he would get in at
work around nine-thirty to ten in the morning. He wouldn't get home
until ten o'clock at night. I mean, he was working a ten-hour day,
at least. A lot of it would be just consumed with talking to
Charlie, but no matter what, I could not, at that state in my life,
have worked those hours. I had to be with the children.
I think it was very good for the children to have me working .
As a matter of fact, when I gave up being a police reporter, they
all burst out crying. They just hated to see me give that up. They
loved that. They liked me to work. But there would be times- -you
know, during the summer you can't abandon them. I would carefully
arrange all these many programs for them, but I had to be home at
certain times.
Riess: What we call "quality time."
Ruth N. : That's right. When they're little, you can leave them with
caretakers much more readily than you can when they come to a stage
over eight years old when they can wander around. You can't say,
"You can't leave the house." You sort of have to be there. There
is a period, sort of between eight and sixteen, where you have to be
458
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
there a good deal, at least certain hours. That's why I loved the
police reporting. It was because it was in Berkeley, and I could
get home in about five minutes. I could check on them all the time,
or they could come by the police station. That worked out
beautifully- -a job at which you can keep your finger on them.
So you had the police beat for Berkeley, and then you also covered
the University?
Yes. I covered Berkeley. Let's put it that way. The police was a
little part, and that's where the pressure was. The University
furnished the major news stories, and I'd spend a good part of every
day up there, wandering around, talking to people and so forth.
We were talking yesterday about news management and the loyalty
oath, basically talking about the loyalty oath. Do you remember
some of the people that you dealt with most in that? I know George
Stewart wrote a book about it.
Malcolm Davisson, Earl Warren, John Francis Neylan, Robert Gordon
Sproul were the ones that I chiefly remember. I saw a lot of
Malcolm during that time.
These were the people that you would call to find out what they were
saying today about all these things?
Malcolm was chairman, I believe, of the faculty committee. He was a
professor of economics, and he was chairman of the Department of
Economics. He was one of the protesters. He was a very balanced,
mild- -he was not one of the crazies, as we call them. He was a non-
signer, and he sort of led the Academic Senate's formal stand
against signing the loyalty oath.
I learned a lot in that. We were at a cocktail party one day,
and some general walked up and said, "What is this all going on over
in Berkeley?" Somebody who was on the other side said, "Oh, a bunch
of crazies won't say that they're not communists." Well, that's so
easy to put it that way, but--.
Vietnam Years
Riess:
Ruth N.
How did you all get along through the Vietnam period?
sympathies divided?
Were
No. We were all frantically opposed to the Vietnam War. We felt
that the government had let its people down. They were lying to us,
obviously. I did a great deal of historic reading. Scotty turned
to me when Mrs. Nhu, who was Diera's sister-in-law, came over with
459
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N.
Riess:
Ruth N,
her beautiful daughter. Scotty said, "Who are these people and
what's going on over there? Why are all these Buddhist monks
burning themselves in the public square?" I got all these books
out, and I went into them very thoroughly, and I did a precis. I
said "It was as you've suspected. Things are being screwed up.
History is being distorted."
Nobody mentioned publicly, you know, that Ho Chi Minh had been
promised by President Truman that Truman would support his
independence if he organized guerrillas against the Japanese during
the warwhich he did. I mean, he had done it all, and then he
wrote these letters to Truman saying, "Okay. I did my part. How
about you?" In return, the American government supported the
turning over of Vietnam to the French. The Vietnamese had been
betrayed by us, and it was a real betrayal. Then, as the war went
on, it was quite obvious that our government was lying to its people
and I felt frantic about it. I really did. I felt like I did
during the McCarthy period.
When you feel frantic about something, in a way a newspaper is a
good outlet, but that can make you even more frantic, because you
write and write and write, but it doesn't do anything.
It does in the long run. We were the first paper to speak out, the
Chronicle was, against Vietnam. I was not on the Chronicle then,
but I was marching. Scotty and I would have long talks about it. I
marched from the Ferry Building to the beach. The kids felt very
militant about it.
That feeling finally spread so that all the respectable people,
like the New York Times and so forth, finally picked up on it. So
it adds up, and it was the same way as the McCarthy thing. I had
felt frantic there, thinking democracy is going down the tubes, you
know- this insane slander of all the nice people I know is killing
the country. But eventually, just at the brink, sanity takes hold.
Is there any other way that you tried to use the power of words?
I made a great point of marching in my newest Magnin's suit, so I
didn't look disreputable. There were a bunch of people who were
doing that. I know one of the women sidled over to me, and she
said, "I see you have the same idea I do." [laughs]
After you had done all that background work, you might have written
an article for wider distribution.
No. When it's not a popular viewpoint- -
You just can't get it printed?
Well, they will print it, but it's like these things on the Op/Ed
460
page, one person's opinion, and it doesn't make any difference.
It's only when it gradually becomes the majority viewpoint--. You
just--. It's like little drops of water, you know, you just keep
hammering at it from your little corner, wherever it is, and
eventually it works .
I'm much more a believer that things can be accomplished
eventually, that the country can be saved if enough people have it
in mind. And when I say "saved," all I mean is that no wild people
from either side of the political spectrum be allowed to run away
with it. It's getting very, very difficult, with the drugs and
everything else, to make sense out of this country.
Transcribers: Chris Fenner, Elizabeth Esheleman, Shannon Page, Noreen Yamada
Final Typist: Joyce Preetorius
461
XVI AN INTERVIEW ON A TYPICAL DAY- -
FEBRUARY 25, 1967
[Introductory note by Scott Newhall: This tape
was made on February 25, 1967. The interviewer
was my wife, Ruth Newhall. She had made a series
of tape interviews with me which were in storage
in our home in Piru in southern California. Our
home burned to the ground in February 1982, but
for some reason or other this single tape
survived and is herewith included.
By way of background, on this day, February 25,
1967, the biggest rumpus around San Francisco
was the ongoing environmental debate over
whether or not the Rockefeller people, and their
project architect John Portman, should be
permitted to proceed with their plans for the
Embarcadero Center development at the foot of
Market Street. Also, although the topic covered
herein is described as a typical day in the
Chronicle editor's office, on this particular
occasion Charles Thieriot, the Chronicle' s
publisher, happened to be out of town. On
almost all really typical days, Charlie and I
would spend a good deal of time together.]
Ruth: Why don't you just sort of review a couple of typical days. You've
had a lot of things going on I know, so--.
Scott: Well, it just occurred to me, if anyone wants an idea of how things
sort of operate around Chronicle at the moment, what's been going on
the last day or two, if I went through the day from a narrative
standpoint, it might be fairly illuminating. Let's take Thursday.
I had a lot of stuff going on Thursday. Let's see, there was to be
a meeting of the Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation of which I am
462
president, a special meeting to make some technical changes in the
articles of incorporation. It had to do with our tax situation,
somewhat.
Ruth: The meeting was at 10:30 in the morning at the Standard Oil
Building?
Scott: At 10:30 in the morning at Atholl McBean's office up on the 17th
floor.
After getting out of bed, groaning and creaking in more or less
every joint, getting myself pulled together, I got up there. I made
it with about thirty seconds to spare because the traffic was really
quite heavy and Market Street is now in the process of being cut up,
you know, for the removal, or rather, relocation of utilities for
this ridiculous BART transit system and so on. And- -let's see, I'm
talking about Thursday--.
Ruth: You have been under somewhat of a strain in your relations with
Atholl McBean.
Scott: Oh yeah. He gets mad at people and it's sort of my turn for being
mad at. But that was neither here nor there. The main thing was I
wanted to resign as president of the Foundation because my cousin
Janie, who's Miss Jane Newhall, who's a very good friend of mine, is
a perfect person for the job and, oh, we'll talk about that later.
Our session in Atholl' s office was just a family conference,
the Foundation meeting, and I had to be there. Atholl is getting on
in years. He is now around eighty-eight. I think he just had his
eighty-eighth birthday. Anyway, we met and made the necessary
changes, got young Scottie as treasurer, and so on.
Ruth: "Scottie" being Walter Scott Newhall, your cousin?
Scott: Right. And so I attended this meeting at Atholl 's office and
afterward got a cab and got back up to the Chronicle . around 11:30
or so. Let's see, then I had to get hold of Phil Burton, who is our
congressman- -kind of an active Democrat, liberal congressman for San
Francisco- -because I had been mixed up in a hell of a fight on a Job
Corps situation down in Newhall, and--.
Ruth: The fight is the local community opposing a Job Corps facility in
the Newhall area.
Scott: Well, the ladies down there have raised a protest. The men don't
care particularly what the Job Corps situation is. But the Job
Corps agency wants to bring six hundred girls to a barracks out near
Saugus to train them to be, you know, nurses aides and, oh, airline
counter girls and things like that. In other words, you know, low
skill or some semi-skilled things.
463
There has been a very, very vicious battle in the columns of
the Signal covering this case. We have been absolutely strong for
the establishment of the Job Corps girls' center. It would be set
up in a barracks where they used to have fifteen hundred sort of
overflow Los Angeles drunks drying out. The county leased the area
from the City of Los Angeles for a rehabilitation center.
Ruth: They call it, locally, The Drunk Farm.
Scott: Right.
Ruth: Very beautiful site.
Scott: It's a nice place, and it's a good place for these girls. And I
don't think that they are going to corrupt the morals of good, old
Saugus or Newhall or canyon country.
Ruth: They'll have a hard time.
Scott: Yeah, they're all having a hard time fighting it out down there.
Anyway, all these fat babes out of Oklahoma are fighting it, to keep
the girls out of Saugus, so I've got to do a little phoning here and
there. As a matter of a fact, I've spent an awful lot of hours on
this matter and it's still a very bitter fight- -oh man, it's bitter.
I don't want to go into the intricate angles of it, except that I
had to get a hold of Phil, who's a pretty good friend of mine- -I've
known him for years- -and get him to get some pressure on the Job
Corps not to back off in the face of the Newhall -Saugus community.
Ruth: It offers economic opportunity.
Scott: That's right, not to back off in the face of the local antagonism.
Because this [location] is only one of three possibilities I'm
trying to convince these guys in Washington that it's more important
than ever that they select the Newhall area site for the Job Corps.
If they don't it will be taken as an indication by these Birch
Ladies that- -by 'Birch Ladies' I mean they're far right
conservative- - .
Ruth: They would think they'd won.
Scott: Yeah. Morons from the Middle West, you know, that they would think
that they'd won. And so we just have to give them a licking on the
matter. So I got hold of Phil and talked to him about it.
Then he spent quite a lot of time talking about who we are
going to back, who the Chronicle is going to back for mayor in San
Francisco in this forthcoming election this year. You know McAteer,
Senator Eugene McAteer, state senator for San Francisco, is going to
run. He was a big Cal football player. And Jack Shelley is going
464
to run again, and they're both Democrats. Jack, of course, is a
former labor skate- -a San Francisco Irishman, head of the Bakery
Wagon Driver's Union, you know. Now he's an older man.
Ruth: And was a congressman for many years.
Scott: Many years a congressman. Phil Burton took his seat. I am
wandering around about this because this was a long conversation on
the phone with Phil on this. It was on all these topics.
Vice -President Hubert Humphrey was out, you know, last weekend,
and invited two or three of us from the paper to come to a dinner.
He had a dinner for twelve or thirteen people. I couldn't go, so he
very kindly phoned. I was embarrased, as a matter of fact, when he
phoned. I jumped to my feet and said, "Well, Mr. Vice President,
I'm standing at attention, in honor and respect for the man, not
particularly the office." I think I also said there is only one
job tougher in the United States than being President, and that is
being Vice President, particularly right now.
Anyway, Humphrey called. I had met him before, and Phil is
kind of close to him, and I told him a little about the Job Corps
battle and told him not to lose heart in having to represent an
administration with which he might not be in complete intellectual
accord. He's really had a tough job- -I am very sympathetic there.
And I talked to Phil that time- -I'm jumping back a couple of days to
an earlier conversation--.
Ruth: It was on Tuesday you talked to them, wasn't it?
Scott: I think it was on Tuesday, yeah. And then I said okay, and told
Humphrey I was going to call Phil and give him a fill-in on it.
Ruth: Was Phil in San Francisco or Washington?
Scott: He was in San Francisco. He came out from Washington, you see, with
the Vice President. The Vice President was out here to make an
address at Stanford, among other things, where they had a pretty bad
time from the students. I personally admire Mr. Humphrey, because
he is a bright guy. I mean he is not like this Johnson, you know,
completely sort of a Reagan- illiterate-citizen-politician, or
whatever the hell they are. Although Johnson, I will admit, is at
least a pro; he knows how to screw up in a professional manner.
Anyway, getting back to my day, then I got on the phone with
Phil for a while, talked to him--.
Ruth: And you were talking about who you were going to support.
Scott: Who the Chronicle was going to support. And I said, "Well, I can
tell you this, I don't know. I think Shelley probably is the only
465
man who could win, that's my own personal feeling." You see, the
decision will eventually not reside in me.
I talked to Jack about this the other day and I said, "Now
look, if you want some help, I'll write some speeches for you, four
or five speeches for you." He got pretty hot about it. I told him,
"If you go along a certain line you're going to get a fair shake
anyway from the Chronicle, as far as news is concerned."
And because McAteer is, frankly, a savage, as far as politics
goes--I won't say a crook, but just a typical opportunistic,
absolute skull. He's handling his campaign--. You know how these
fellows running for office have these little pamphlets or brochures,
or whatever, with pictures in them? Well, McAteer' s got a picture
of himself blocking a punt in one of the Cal games. He was I think
an All -American or something, football player for Cal, and I'm
afraid the punt hit him in the head when he blocked it, but at least
he did block it.
And then he has pictures of him as a big game hunter, with kind
of a three day beard on him, standing up with a rifle, and his foot
on the carcass of some poor dead animal that didn't wish him any
harm at all and actually wasn't planning to take away his football
or anything else. Now you may be fascinated to know that what's
going to kill McAteer' s campaign is the fact that in the biggest
picture of all, his foot is right square on the head of a brown
bear.
As you know, the official animal of the state of California is
a bear. And any guy who's dumb enough to have a picture of himself
with a scrubby three-day beard- -you can smell him in the picture- -
and a rifle and his foot on the dead carcass of a bear, which is our
sacred animal here in California, doesn't know the kind of trouble
he's going to be in for when the voting time comes.
Ruth: Particularly if you're going to write Shelley's speeches.
Scott: Well, I didn't say that. But anyway, I talked to Phil about some of
these matters. Phil is very ambitious politically. I talked about
the Burton machine and might have told him that I felt it would be
--he and McAteer were buddies, and Phil figured they could make
sweet music together- -and I said, "For God's sake, Phil, you can't
go for this guy. He's too vulnerable. We could put him in jail if
we wanted to, you know. He's got a restaurant down in Fisherman's
Wharf and one in Sausalito and he's always got little deals going on
the side. He's a bad guy for public life." (And I'm saying for
public life; this is not a personal statement.) So we disussed this
whole San Francisco political thing, and then I had to go in and for
a couple of minutes talk to the editorial writers.
These days I have less and less chance to spend much time with
466
the editorial writing staff. I talked to them, among other things,
about Humphrey, because I think the Vice President handled himself
really with some dignity, when you consider that the students at
Stanford gave him a pretty bad time when he had to somehow act as
the spokesman or apologist for this Vietnam thing and so on. This
poor guy just has to grin- -Humphrey I'm speaking of--and pretend
that he's all for it. I just wouldn't want that job for- -there's
not enough money in the world.
Let's see, I am not going to recapture it all--. Then in the
meantime I'm sure I called down to Jon Newhall, my son, who was
putting out the Signal, or to Larry Wade about the Signal' s business
and about the latest on the Newhall -Saugus Job Corps battle. And
then there were a couple of very involved matters again down there
aside from the Job Corps.
Ruth: The secret meeting of the water board.
Scott: The water board. A secret meeting in violation of the Brown Act
where directors of the Board excluded the press .
Ruth: [telephone rings] All right, that was an interruption. Jon had a
bulletin to bring from the Signal?
Scott: Yes. He had some news from the Signal on this water board secret
meeting, as a matter of fact. (Remind me that later on I talked to
Bob Raymer and I'll tell what that was about.)
Then the next thing, I had an engagement--. Oh, and then the
phone rang and it was Charlie Thieriot who was going down to the
Santa Anita thing, you know. He had to go to a funeral, one of his
aunts -in- law died or something, and he was going down to the annual
Santa Anita stake race.
Charlie had some comments to make about the size of the type on
the commuter crossword puzzle, or something in the comic page, I
just don't know what. Oh, I know, we talked for about twenty
minutes, a very intricate problem with this Chronicle -Examiner
Printing Company amalgamation. He was explaining how we all want to
be friends and not screw each other, but how he can screw the rest
of them. It's kind of a delicate, diplomatic thing. We had this
all worked out in a meeting earlier in the week, when he and I and
Randy Hearst and Charles Gould met and thrashed out some problems in
newsprint consumption and stuff like that.
It's quite wearing and tearing, some of this, because you
should be able to decide it in about twenty minutes. It's just- -you
either do it one way or another way and that's that.
Then I had a meeting at noon with an agreeable fellow called
Lindquist, "Lindy." (I don't know what his first name is, Bill,
467
maybe.) Young Mr. Lindquist represents David Rockefeller out here
in San Francisco. As you know, the Rockefeller people have just
bought and announced their plans for the development of a huge area
in downtown San Francisco. This is a big and very important area
for this city, four blocks right down near the Ferry Building, and
the Ferry Building post office and redevelopment of the Golden
Gateway neighborhood.
I wanted to talk to Lindquist about a couple of things. I
think the Rockefeller plan is not too bad, but specifically what I
wanted to talk to Lindquist about was to say that the facade of the
old Sailors' Union building which was down there on Commercial
Street should be preserved. Before they get out the big steel ball,
you know, and start busting it up, I wanted to--.
Ruth: Why did you want to preserve the Sailors' Union?
Scott: Well, I think that this is just absolutely imperative, a must in San
Francisco.
Here in town the Sailors' Union Building is widely known as
Fink Hall. The longshoremen call the building Fink Hall. Every
kid who's ever shipped out of here in the summer as a cadet or
something like that went down to Fink Hall and got a temporary
permit from the Sailors' Union. Every summer a lot of Bay Area kids
tried to ship out as cadets on the trans -Pacific and around- the -
world liners.
Ruth: When I was in college everybody used to do that.
Scott: Sure, and then, you know, in the meantime union protesters mobilized
at Fink Hall and Rincon Hill during the battle of Rincon Hill in the
great general strike in 1934 and so on. Old Andrew Furuseth really
started this thing going here in San Francisco, and this is a very
strong union.
Ruth: I think they began in the 1880s.
Scott: Harry Lundeberg became the Sailors' Union president later, and he
was kind of a pragmatist among labor union leaders. The old San
Francisco shipping tycoons used to say you could do business with a
man like Harry Lundeberg, you could sort of buy him off. But you
couldn't handle Harry Bridges, the Australian who came over and who
represented, during the thirties, kind of the left wing, and was
head of the Longshore Union.
But anyway, the Sailors' Union hall down there was the hiring
hall of the Maritime Union, and the facade of the building is made
out of this white ceramic tile with these sort of Moorish
embellishments and arches. And there was a stained glass window of
old father Neptune, I think, riding a porpoise or whale or
468
something. All this ornamentation is in one sense a kind of
frightful thing, but it's a piece of this city, and the Rockefellers
shouldn't take an iron ball and knock it all down.
I said, "Look, why not save the front of the building and put
it up down in the Rockefeller's own complex and start up a
breadline--! mean, start up a restaurant, and either call it the
Sailors' Union, or call it The Breadline, or call it the Irrawaddy
Oyster Palace, or something like that. This kind of off-beat
hustling will beome so chic, and so "in"--. You put sawdust down on
the floor and serve them some sort of dairy lunch, fishes and salads
and stuff like that. A restaurant impressario could make a fortune
with this kind of scenario. On the other hand, if there is no place
for the Sailors' Union facade in the Rockefeller development, we
could take the facade and move it over by the Maritime Museum."
Lindy was very receptive to all this. I had already called
Justin Herman on Tuesday or Monday- -you know, Herman's head of the
redevelopment agency in San Francisco- -and I told him what I had in
mind. He said okay, we'll call the whole thing off --the demolition
of the building- -until you talk to the Rockefeller people. Then I
had, of course, another idea in the back of my head. All of this
was happening, you know, before noon or around noon.
Ruth: Where did you meet Mr. Lindquist?
Scott: In my office. And I said, look, instead of going out to lunch,
let's eat here. I've got some stuff I want to show you.
Ruth: You mean in the conference room?
Scott: In the conference room. The editorial writers were through by this
time. He said, "Oh, great." Time was a little tight, and so we had
some awful hamburgers. I've had a bellyache ever since. We just
sent out and got some hamburgers, that was all, and some jello. Had
to get some jello to coat my stomach, you know, to protect it
against the depredation made by these exotic American dishes of
varying grease and sauce "to go." Anyway, Lindquist and I were
catered by this dreadful restaurant downstairs.
What I really had in the back of my head, aside from saving the
facade of Fink Hall, was perhaps one of the biggest civic trademarks
that I think could happen to San Francisco. Karl Kortum, a very
good friend of mine whom I mentioned before, I believe, is director
of the Maritime Museum. And on a trip to the Falkland Islands in
search of some old vessels--.
Ruth: This was last year, right?
Scott: That's right. There are a bunch of old vessels down there. Karl,
you know, really has tremendous influence in San Francisco. A lot
469
of people probably don't know it.
Ruth: He sparks all these guys.
Scott: And he gets all these guys going. Karl's pushing and shoving saved
Ghirardelli Square. No matter what anybody says, this was his idea.
He saved The Cannery also, down between Ghirardelli Square and
Fisherman's Wharf.
Ruth: He's got that whole North Point area going.
Scott: Right. And it's just catching fire and still growing. Well, when
Karl was down in the Falkland Islands, which are about as far away
as you can get- -you know, The Falklands are just east of the Strait
of Magellan-- .
Ruth: One boat a month and no airplanes.
Scott: Yeah. They sent an airplane out, you remember, a couple of months
ago, to show the British flag or something, you know. Some
Argentine people get very huffy about it. The islands are British,
you know, and there's the Falkland Island Company with its
headquarters in the City of London, and I mean the City of London,
in the heart of downtown England.
Well, anyway, the Falkland harbors are full of these old hulks,
both wooden and iron ships that tried to get around Cape Horn and
were driven back by storms and were towed in and beached there or
something. They were abandoned. And the Falkland Island Company
apparently owns these ships, has title to them.
Ruth: By right of salvage.
Scott: Yeah. Those old hulks that still have decking and stuff are used
for warehouses, and some ships are just sitting there. Karl
discovered what, as I said earlier, is to me the most exciting and
important article or artifact in existence today as far as San
Franciscans might be concerned. And that is the remains of a wooden
sailing ship that came into San Francisco bay in 1849 at the time of
the Gold Rush. These were the ships from which the crews deserted
and went to the gold fields. The name of the hulk in the Falklands
is the Vicar of Bray.
Ruth: Marvelous name.
Scott: It's a wonderful name, and the Vicar himself was an interesting
fellow.
-
Ruth: He was during Henry VIII 's time, wasn't he?
Scott: It might have been. I was going to say, I thought it was during the
470
Stuart regime. But the Vicar was a fleet-footed fellow, switching
around from being a royalist to a roundhead to a royalist again.
Ruth: Yeah, he was a Catholic or Protestant.
Scott: Anyway, the Vicar had staying powers, and the ship named in his
honor also has some staying power, and the remains of this hull are
there. That ship was in San Francisco in 1849 when the Gold Rush
really took fire. I believe the Vicar brought some passengers. The
crew, of course, most of them disappeared. But the captain was able
to get enough guys to get his ship out of the harbor. As you know,
under much of the downtown section of San Francisco are the hulls of
these old ships that were left to rot or sink. And the idea
basically that Karl has sort of generated--.
Ruth: That what Karl does. He generates ideas in people's heads.
Scott: Right. He was dedicated to getting the Vicar of Bray back here in
San Francisco, putting it inside a glass pavilion, or in the old
Haslett Warehouse at the foot of Hyde Street, or on display
somewhere. It would be tragic if the final Gold Rush ship were to
disappear.
So, at lunch the other day that's what I really wanted to
discuss with Lindy and the Rockefeller crowd, to try and get them
interested in salvaging the Vicar. Lindquist seemed to snap at it
like a trout. Believe me. He really did. I mean, I had some
magnificent brochures and books that Karl produced. Lindquist got
so excited. He said, well, I'm going to stay over and I'm going to
bring in- -I don't know who, General -somebody, and somebody else, two
guys he brought in the next day.
I said, "Look, I want to put you together with Karl. Karl
knows all about it." I said, "I just want you to know, if you want
to incorporate this into the design of your development plan down
there at the Embarcadero, we'll give you every bit of support we
can. Remember, this is a personal conversation. It's not my idea.
It's yours or Karl's. You guys work it out. But the Vicar has got
to be brought up here and I think you're just the people to do it."
The Examiner came out the other day, when the Rockefellers
announced their plan, and in their typical Examiner Oklahoma
fashion- - .
Ruth: You're putting down Oklahoma. It was Iowa or Texas a couple of
weeks ago .
Scott: Well, the Examiner' s chief editor comes from Oklahoma. Literally.
Ruth: What did the Examiner do?
471
Scott: They said, "Oh, we ought to call this new project 'Rockefeller West'
instead of '
Embarcadero Center.'" I suggested to Lindy and his team
that if there's any name they shouldn't call their big San Francisco
project it is "Rockefeller West." Embarcadero Center is a perfectly
good name ,
because the Embarcadero was the sort of external or
peripheral heart of San Francisco, and it was very San Francisco.
But the point I was making to Lindquist was, "Look, if you
don't want the Vicar now, just tell me, because basically what we're
doing is handing you a million dollars." I said, "With the help of
the Vicar, we're going to make you San Franciscans in one easy
lesson, and for very little money. And if you are not accepted as
San Franciscans, you're going to have trouble. You don't think so,
but you will.
Anyway, Lindy was pretty excited about this, and so we had a
meeting on the next day and went through the whole thing and Karl's
gonna get together with their people. I think maybe, if necessary,
we'll send Karl down to Atlanta to see John Portman, who is the
chief architact on the project. I talked to Lindquist on Thursday
about some of these ideas and concepts and how he could become an
instant Californian--or David Rockefeller could. And so we had
lunch, hamburgers, and then he had to go.
Then what happened? Okay, I was trying to say that my days
melt into each other. After lunch with Lindquist, as I recall, I
wrote an editorial for the Signal. I write most of them, not all of
them, but most of them, and I wrote the editorial about this
executive session of the water district down there and how they were
in violation of the Brown Act. I remember, however, before
dictating it I called up the water district lawyer down in Los
Angeles. I wanted to give him a fair chance to refute the facts as
they had been told to me- -specifically, that the general manager of
the water district got up and said he would not discuss in public
some matters pertaining to the annexation adjoining Newhall-Saugus
real estate. According to the Brown Act, that is not legal- -a
normal annexation must be discussed in public.
Ruth: Didn't you ask him if they had discussed these matters in
the executive session?
Scott: Well, I asked him first, "Did the Board chairman say that he would
not discuss this problem?" The lawyer said, "I don't remember," and
then I said, "Well, what did you discuss in private, besides
personnel matters?" And he said, "I don't remember." And so I
advised him to get some of these cheap comic magazines that
advertise, you know, memory courses.
I ended up writing an ill-tempered piece, which is just a
ridiculous editorial basically. As I recall, the title of the
editorial was, "This Has Got To Stop."
472
Ruth: And then what happened?
Scott: Well, all of this is not exactly in chronological order, but I
should mention that in between and during all these things I am
talking about, there are people bringing in stories or editorials,
or stuff to be read. For example, I had to change one story, a lead
on a labor story. I felt it should be more accurate, and also I
didn't want the writer to be fired, beacuse at the moment he's out
of favor with some of my Chronicle colleagues, or at least one of
them.
Ruth: You told me to mention Bob Raymer.
Scott: Yes, I received a copy of a so-called retraction and a possible
lawsuit. Bob Raymer, who is one of the partners at Cooper, White &
Cooper, a very good friend of mine, a good, smart man, believe me--I
mean, most lawyers aren't worth a damn, you have to tell them
exactly what to do, and then they have books, you know, with certain
form letters and sample suits, and they fill in the blanks and send
them along for you- -but Bob has been just a tremendous help to me.
I can talk to him almost like a sounding board to decide what I am
going to do .
I talked to him for about twenty minutes or so, just about this
"possible retraction."
[Tape, Side 2]
Ruth: Thursday evening I talked to you about meeting for dinner, and you
said there was someone waiting for you, waiting to talk to you.
Scott: Gordon was there talking to me at the time. That's right. I went
out to dinner that night. I'm leaving out a lot of stuff.
Unfortunately, we should have had this interview the next day, right
off on Thursday.
Let's see, politics. I'm just trying to think of the different
fields, if I talked to anybody in Sacramento on Thursday, and I
didn't. As I say, I talked with Raymer about this lawsuit, and
there were probably twenty calls which were just calls, you know,
from Jon or someone .
Ruth: You got a letter about Yvonne D' Angers.
Scott: Oh, mail, sure. All my mail is there, and stuff I have to read--
proofs and such, editorials. That's right.
I did get a letter about Yvonne D' Angers, telling us some stuff
about her early life. You remember Yvonne was San Francisco's
favorite Persian Lamb, whom I've already talked about at great
473
length.
Ruth: The letter was from- -you might mention where it came from.
Scott: Well, it came from Tehran, all the way from Iran, a packet of
clippings from Tehran. It was full of material which showed Yvonne,
this topless dancer, as a girl of fifteen being given the top award
for excellence in her school--! think it was in her art studies --
anyway, in school in Tehran, in Iran. She's this little girl, very
nice little girl, she really is, and she came over here to America
just a couple of years later, after getting her scholastic honors in
Iran. There were some clips in the letter about her father, who was
going to sue the U.S. government or some damn thing, I don't know.
Ruth: For cutting off his source of support?
Scott: Exactly, sure. But here's a kid who really did well back home, you
know, in the old country. And as I have recounted elsewhere, after
she had been here in the good old United States of America for a
while, suddenly our brilliant immigration department decided to
deport this dangerous foreigner as an undesirable alien.
Ruth: Well, to come back to some of the other things that you were doing.
Scott: Then I had to spend about a half an hour retouching Tiffany Jones.
I have to repaint it, you know, every two or three weeks.
Ruth: What do you mean, you had to repaint Tiffany Jones?
Scott: Yeah, that's what I had to do Thursday night. You see, Tiffany
Jones, this slick new comic strip, is a real live monument to the
low grade intellectual hypocrisy of most American editors. Tiffany
was a comic strip created by a former high fashion illustrator. And
the original plot of Tiffany Jones was a story about an attractive
young girl who raced around the world with the intercontinental jet
set.
The story itself was perfectly clean and almost virginal. It
was really aimed at teenage girls. But in the original samples of
the early episodes of Tiffany, the artists had depicted the young
heroine as actually possessing breasts. As a matter of fact, as I
recall, Tiffany would have needed about a 32B brassiere- -that is, if
she used any bra at all.
Now remember, we are talking about 1967, not 1867, but even so,
the editors of America, particularly the editors of Eastern and
Middle -Western America, for some reason would not buy the adventures
of Tiffany Jones unless the authors performed a mastectomy on her
and pictured the young lady without any glandular paraphenalia.
And, as far as I was concerned, this was stupid, hypocritical,
sanctimonious editorial hokum, and I was irritated. So, as a
474
Ruth:
Scott:
Ruth:
Scott:
Ruth:
Scott:
Ruth:
Scott:
Jon:
Scott:
result, whenever a week or two of Tiffany Jones proofs came in, I
would spend whatever recreational time I had in the office
retouching Tiffany with brush and poster paint, and rearrange her
cleavage and turn her into a proper young woman.
I had already done the first part of the last couple of weeks
of the strip. And Thursday evening I tried to finish up this latest
job of what you or someone else decribed as painting "hard- core
Tiffany." That took a while, and I'm not quite finished with that
sequence yet.
Well, anyhow, let's come on to --then I think that takes care of
Thursday, doesn't it? And at the end of the day?
There were two or three more things, actually, I might remember--.
Do you generally keep a diary?
Oh, a schedule, yes, but not in any serious detail,
trying to think what other projects I was going on.
But I'm just
Didn't I talk to you, Jon- -my son, who runs the Signal . who is
here tonight with us here in the room- -didn't I talk to you on
Thursday? About Reverend Sam and this dragster thing? That was
Thursday, wasn't it?
You might mention that project, too.
Well, see, this also took place on Thursday, one of the calls. Down
near the Newhall Ranch, there is a community situated up a box
canyon called Val Verde, which is basically a negro community. In
Val Verde there are absolutely no serious sort of recreation
facilities for the kids.
It's sort of a tiny, little rural ghetto.
It is a rural ghetto in a box canyon. You know, they're going to
seal it up some day, too, if we're not careful. And I mentioned to
the most able, or I should say the most personable, outgoing man out
in Val Verde, a gentleman called Reverend Samuel Dixon, who is with
the- -oh, I don't know, the church of the Five Square Gospel, or what
is it?
Macedonian Church of God in Christ.
Macedonian Church of God in Christ. And the name is --well, this
particular house of the Lord is not exactly Canterbury Cathedral,
but anyway, the Reverend Sam is a very, very fine man, and he is out
there not because he likes it, but because he wants to do something
to help his congregation. And the other day I asked the Reverend
Sam Dixon if he thought the kids out there- -if I were to give them a
475
drag racing machine or a race car chassis and the engine parts and
all the stuff that was needed, if they would like to build one up,
and would it be a good project? And I happened to call Jon at a
time when the Reverend Sam was, I think, sitting across the desk.
Is that right, Jon?
Jon: Exactly.
Scott: And Jon told me that Sam was in a little trouble because he wasn't
exactly sure at this point what a dragster was, but the kids had
become so enthusiastic about it, had been bugging him so much that
they had come to the church or something, hadn't they, for the first
time in history, or in the front row.
Jon: They had gone to meetings, and they had gone to church, and
everything, for the first time.
Scott: And they kept saying, "When are we going to get the dragster, when
are we going to get it?" And he said, "Gee, we've got to produce,"
and we had a long conversation about this . And in the next day or
two I've got to get another chassis because I have, as you know,
this one dragster chassis that I kinda hate to--.
Ruth: You want them to build up their own racing machine, basically,
right?
Scott: Well, I'd like to give them all the parts and tools. Then they
would put it together and make their own machine, so it would be
theirs. And so I spent some time talking with both Jon and the good
Reverend about how we can do this, and agreed to meet them down
there at Val Verde next Saturday at 11:00, I guess --what did we end
up with, 10:00 or 11:00?
Jon: Eleven o'clock.
Scott: Eleven o'clock, and talk it over with the kids and really see that
it's a serious matter. I want to see the kids really get out there
and do something.
Ruth: How many kids do they have between sixteen and twenty-one?
Scott: Jon knows.
Jon: He says about fifteen. He thinks about half of these are very much
interested in the project.
Ruth: Fifteen or fifty?
Jon: Fifteen. He says about six or seven are probably interested, or
maybe more. Other than that, there's nothing to do.
476
Scott: The youngsters have nothing to do.
Jon: He says absolutely nothing.
Scott: And are they even closing up the Val Verde park, you know, earlier,
so at night the kids can't go to the park?
Ruth: Not even in the summer evenings. They close it at 5:00.
Scott: So that was another little project I was working on during the day.
And let's see-- .
[Aside] That's apparently Jon talking to his twin brother,
Tony, in the background.
Ruth: Wait a minute. May I turn this off for a moment? All right. You
said you hadn't said anything about bacanora.
Scott: Yeah. Well, simply that in one of the phone calls during the
afternoon sometime I talked to Larry Wade down at the Signal again,
and we have a personal project going of introducing a tequila -like
drink. This is personal, this is not even Signal business or
anything else. It began, you remember, with the De Anza bone
promotion of the Chronicle's . which I have not yet really discussed
--I think it would merit some discussion. But, anyway, Larry has a
bartender down there in Newhall who is concocting some kind of--
Ruth: Down in Newhall?
Scott: That's right. A drink that will make bacanora palatable. It's, you
know, one of these cactus distillates, bootleg booze from the back
country of Sonora. And bacanora goes way back, and we've been
through a lot of trouble to get the name, trademark, and get bottles
and every other damned thing, and labels and all that, simply
because it's a project and we're doing it. Now, this bacanora
project is not, for example, a study in classical American
journalism, but it was a small part of last Thursday. So, Larry
called me about some plans to fly down to Hermosillo, the capital of
Sonora, to get some good stuff. Some gold label bacanora from the
tiny little town of Arispe up in the mountains of northern Mexico.
[End, February 25 1967 interview]
476a
TAPE GUIDE -- Scott Newhall
Interview 1;
tape 1,
tape 1,
tape 2,
March 22
side A
side B
side A
1988
tape 2 ,
s ide B
Interview 2: March 23, 1988
tape 3, side A
tape 3, side B
tape 4, side A
tape 4, side B
Interview 3:
tape 5,
tape 5,
tape 6 .
April 6
side A
side B
side A
1988
tape 6, side B
Interview 4: April 7, 1988
tape 7, side A
tape 7, side B
tape 8, side A
tape 8, side B
Interview 5: April 12,
tape 9, side A
tape 9, side B
tape 10, side A
tape 10, side B
tape 11, side A
tape 11, side B
1988
Interview 6:
tape 12,
tape 12,
tape 13,
April 18,
side A
side B
side A
1988
tape 13, side B
Interview 7: May 3, 1988
tape
tape
tape
14,
14,
15,
tape 15,
side A
side B
side A
side B
tape 16, side A [side B not recorded]
1
1
11
22
33
43
43
54
65
76
84
84
93
107
116
121
121
133
143
155
168
168
178
192
201
211
222
225
225
235
247
259
272
272
282
292
305
312
476b
Interview 8 :
tape 17,
tape 17,
tape 18,
February 16, 1989
side A
side B
side A
tape 18, side B
Interview 9: March 16, 1989
tape 19,
tape 19,
tape 20,
tape 20,
side A
side B
side A
side B
tape 21, side A [side B not recorded]
Interview 10:
tape 22,
tape 22
tape 23,
tape 23,
July 12,
side A
side B
side A
side B
1989
tape 24, side A [side B not recorded]
Appendix tape, side A
Appendix tape, side B
316
316
323
334
347
356
356
365
375
387
397
401
401
442
452
457
426
472
477
476c
APPENDICES 477
A. Edited transcript of 1967 interview by Ruth Newhall of 477
Scott Newhall, discussing being a newspaper photographer.
B. Draft letter by Scott Newhall for Bank of America, 484
January 31, 1964.
C. "My Search for Scott Newhall," by John Luce, San Francisco 488
Magazine .
July and August 1968.
D. "Berkeley Fellows at U.C. Sather Gate Meeting," a speech by 497
Scott Newhall, May 23, 1969.
E. "Saga of a Venus in a Fat Trap," San Francisco Chronicle. 502
February 28, 1990.
F. "Even Enemies Mourn Exit of the Newhalls from Namesake 504
Paper," Los Angeles Times. Sunday, August 14, 1988; "Angry
Newhalls Launch Own Paper."
G. "Privileges and Responsibilities of the Free American Press," 507
an editorial by Scott Newhall in the Santa Clarita Valley
Citizen. Sunday, September 11, 1988.
H. "A Razor's Edge: The Life and Times of Scott Newhall," by 509
Elliot Blair Smith, California Business. July 1989.
I. Jean and Karl Kortum and the San Francisco Waterfront, by 514
Karl Kortum, April 1990.
J. Christmas Greetings from the Newhalls, 1985, 1986, 1988. 516
K. An Interview with Scott Newhall about Music, April 1990. 523
L. A Musical Postscript by Newhall, April 27, 1990. 550
M. An Editorial by Scott Newhall: "Garbage From The LAFCO 555
Trough," Newhall Signal. June 26, 1987.
N. Herb Caen's Return to the Chronicle, by Scott Newhall, 555c
August 29, 1990
Appendix A. 477
On Being a Newspaper Photographer
[Edited transcript of an
interview with Scott Newhall
conducted by Ruth Newhall in
1967.]
I walked up and asked the desk clerk, was Mr. Weismuller there. I
suppose I should say for the record that Mr. Weismuller was the most
famous swimmer of all time. He was sort of the Babe Ruth or Bill
Tilden or Bobby Jones of swimming, held Olympic and world records, and
was the most famous of the Tarzan characters in the cinema. He had
this great Tarzan yell, and he was a big, big handsome guy, and Lupe
was a fiery little girl whom I thought very, very attractive. Lupe
was also a movie personality. This was one of these movie marriages.
They'd get married and unmarried, and nobody knew whether they were
getting divorced or married or what.
So I went up to the Alexander Hamilton Hotel and asked the desk
clerk if he would put me through. The clerk was shocked that I should
be so indiscreet as to ask at the Alexander Hamilton for someone by
name. So I walked over to the house phone --and I was very nervous
inside, mind you. I not only didn't know how to make a picture, I
didn't know how to get hold of anybody, how to talk to anybody.,
I think I should mention right here that the main reason, or at
least another reason, that I got a job in the newspaper business was
because I was afraid to talk to people. We used to call it
inferiority complex, and now they would say I didn't "relate well" or
something like that, or some other post-Freudian term, or some damn
thing. I remember I used to get on street cars in San Francisco and
ride to the end of the line and then ride back because I was too
embarrassed to ask the conductor which was the proper street to get
off at. When you're in that kind of shape, and that sort of nervous
and self -centered condition, you need some kind of shock therapy. I
figured the newspaper business would either kill me or cure me. As
you know, now I won't shut off. I have been ordered off of street
cars for talking too much to conductors.
Anyhow, I got on the house phone, all scared inside, and asked for
Mr. Weismuller, and the operator said, "There's nobody like that
here," and the desk clerk threw me out of the hotel. This young punk,
you know, hanging around. I stood out on the sidewalk and figured,
"Okay, they told me to come and get a picture. I'll just wait and get
a picture.
"
478
I must have waited for an hour or two ,
and pretty soon out came
this big handsome hunk of man, and this really quite attractive lady,
or woman, Lupe. She was done up in a coat, I recall, and flat shoes,
in a gaily informal Hollywood- stylish way. I quickly walked up to
them.
"Aren't you Mr. Weismuller?" I asked. "I've always admired you so
much, and the way you swim- -I used to swim a little myself. I'm up
here from the Chronicle to get your picture. It's my first day on my
first job." I leveled with him. "If I don't get a picture, I'm going
to be through. I'm telling you the truth."
He took a funny look at Lupe and she just began to laugh, and he
said, "All right, where do you want us?" I said, "Well, why don't you
get over there next to the post box." So they posed there and said,
"What shall we do?" Everyone apparently told them what to do. I
said, "Don't do anything, just look at each other," and I started
making what I hoped were some pictures.
I went back to the Chronicle and went through the routine that
Ansel Adams had outlined in his book. To my utter amazement, in the
dark room- -and I had remembered to turn the lights out and so on while
developing the film- -there was something on the negatives. I had way
overexposed them, but there was something. So then I had to make some
prints, and I will never forget that one of the old-time
photographers, Ted Pryor, came in and said, "Boy, you've got a lousy
negative there. But let me help you print it." We put it in the
enlarger and concentrated the light in certain places --we called it
"dodging" --and a very grainy, contrasty, technically quite bad picture
was produced from this roll of film which I had overexposed.
I went running out with it to the city editor, and he took a look.
I'll never forget, he said, "This is just the sort of stuff we want!"
I had expected to be fired! There were two people looking at each
other, that was all, no props, except they were leaning against this
post-box. He said, "This is the sort of thing that is going to save
newspapers!" He talked to me about what to write for a caption. And
they played it quite prominently in the paper.
I phoned Ruth and said, "The picture actually came out. I still
have a job. I haven't been fired yet!" That, I guess, was the end of
my first assignment. Since then, every day has been about the same,
because I'm still surprised when something I do turns out right. But
I have become philosophical and decided that no matter what you do or
what decision you make, it will always turn out all right, just so
long as you make a decision. It doesn't matter. Make a picture,
write a story, make a decision. As long as you get it done, it will
be all right.
I was a photographer for about a year, which takes some explaining.
To begin with, being a photographer is hard work. Newspaper
photography right now is a little in the doldrums because most editors
don't know a damn thing about pictures. They don't know what it's
going to look like. They've never studied art. I can be quite
479
serious that the best thing that ever happened to me was being an art
major. The art department gave me a feeling for graphics that has
been more important to me in terms of newspaper typography or other
graphics, layouts, anything. It made my professional life. Without
it I would have lost my job.
To me one of the great tragedies of newspaper ing, then and now, for
the last thirty, forty, fifty years is that except for very rare
instances most newspapermen have been extensions of the writing field,
of the economics field, of the political sciences field. A
newspaperman thinks that it is simply a business of writing. It is
not, at all. The newspaper is a graphic product. It is something to
be read, to be sure. But- -and these are my own personal feelings on
the matter--! am convinced that all successful newspapers, as well as
all successful printed media, have been those which to begin with look
as if they should be read. With a couple of exceptions, like the New
York Times . and so on, most newspapers are just great, soggy masses,
but they are the only game in town, so as a result they have a certain
acceptance .
During the 1920s there were some very vigorous tabloids in New
York. Some of the English papers were very lively. Mr. William
Randolph Hearst, the elder Hearst, was a great, not art critic, but he
had a tremendous appreciation of art forms. Anybody who could put
together a home of the style that he did down at San Simeon, which I
never have visited by the way, anybody who amasses just the amount of
crud that he collected, does have a tremendous feeling for graphics,
whether or not one would agree in every case with his taste. I happen
personally to have a great respect for old William Randolph Hearst's
artistic sensibilities, I really do. His journalistic efforts were
thoroughly repugnant to me ,
of course .
I have found, both to my delight and at times my horror, that the
greatest asset I had to offer the newspaper business was an art sense.
You can learn to write, a reasonably smart guy can learn to write
pretty fast, but an art sense takes a certain amount of exposure,
training, travel, teaching, and education. I found that I was able,
very rapidly, after being a photographer to enter into all other areas
of the newspaper business because of ray art training. I could make up
a page, I could lay out a page, I could design one, I could choose
decent type. It was not a mystery. It was not that I had to look at
a little list to see what sort of heads, or this, that and the other.
I could pick the whole thing up very rapidly.
As far as I am concerned, I think that- -I've never told this to
anyone much- -a major in art is perhaps a good deal more valuable, or
can be more valuable to your potential newspaper writer, reporter,
editor, or whatever- -obviously photographer- -than the typical major in
economics, in political science, in journalism. You can pick up the
techniques of journalism when you go to work, but you don't pick up
much of the background of Gothic art, or the Renaissance, or different
eras .
The study of art opens up a whole world of noble human experience.
480
Renaissance paintings, many of which are among the most beautiful
things that man has achieved, were propaganda leaflets of their day.
They were pushing the Christian God, or one of the many Christian
saints.
I studied a lot of philosophy when I was in school --or shall I say
I attended a number of philosophy courses , enough so that this whole
business of mass culture and the physical representations that
illustrate this culture are intensely interesting to me. I still
read, and except for dirty books which I read from time to time till
they get too boring, I read only historical novels, usually, because
they're painless. It's like putting a little sugar coating outside a
vitamin pill. I am still devoted to this whole historical study of
how man has related to his environment on our planet Earth.
When I first went to work in the newspaper business, and still
today- -one is almost ashamed to tell people in this business- -when I
tell them I was an art major, they laugh and think of a pair of
sandals, or giving out buttons, or marching forward against Vietnam.
You name it. And yet the artist to me is a philosopher. He is one of
those elite who really live in a world that is above and beyond and
removed from this mortal world of trouble and stress and bigotry. The
true artist and the true newspaperman should, or can, report what they
see, as some of the Athenian philosophers did. It is the function
they fulfill.
The first year I spent at the Chronicle as a photographer I was a
novitiate, an apprentice person. I learned to make pictures fast
enough. It took me a week or so and I was as good at pictures as the
next photographer. In two weeks you make maybe better ones, who
knows? But I was an apprentice person. I used to write a little,
too. Union contracts were not so rigid as they are now, and if they
could find a photographer who could write an English sentence, they
would get them to write. I would make a little candid picture of
somebody, and write a little story about it.
But mostly I spent that year learning now people, superficially,
behaved. I spent a great deal of time with death. I saw a lot of
murders and a lot of violent deaths, because you're called out at all
hours of the day and night to cover murders, fires, accidents, all
that kind of thing. It's like a forge. If you are at all sensitive,
death is not a terribly attractive sight, believe me.
There were a number of occasions on which I would have to inform
families that one of their members had met an untimely end. I would
go ring the doorbell, and the mother would come to the door. I could
tell by looking at her that she didn't know what had happened. I
would have to tell her that her husband or son or mother or somebody
had been run down by a train or a car or drowned or killed in an
airplane crash or something. Then I would have to stay with them. I
couldn't help it. I couldn't just coolly say this and run away.
I should explain there that it was, and still is, the practice that
the moment a tragedy strikes- -and tragedy is always considered News
481
with a capital N--the city editor tells a photographer to go get a
picture of either the person who has met the violent fate, or a
picture of his family. The newspapers are wired in, literally, with
the police department --they get the news just about as fast as the
police do- -and so many times the photographer of a newspaper is the
first person, not only at the scene, but at the home.
I remember on one occasion I had to get the picture of a child who
had been drowned out at the beach. I had to break that news slowly.
It took me quite a while. I used to work Sundays, and this sort of
thing happens on Sundays a lot, as anyone who follows statistics
knows. Brownings, crashes, accidental deaths happen on Sundays
because there are so many people roaming around doing different
things. So, here was this young mother, and her child had been
drowned. She was over in the Western Addition, near Fillmore. I
tried to break it gently. It's pretty hard to break it gently to a
stranger, because they know right away, they just have a funny
feeling.
I told her there had been accident and her child had been involved,
and the newspaper didn't know yet the extent of the tragedy, or how
serious the injuries had been. I had just been sent out to get a
picture of the child. I said this was just beastly, just terrible.
"I can understand the torture I have brought into your home my
bringing this news." I said, "Do you have a picture?" There was a
framed photograph on the grand piano in the living room- -it was not a
sumptuous apartment at all, but there was a grand piano with one of
those typical silk shawls or something draped on it, with the framed
picture of the only child.
She said, "Oh, hell! Take this. What good's it going to do me?"
She gave me the picture, frame and all. I hadn't yet told her the
child was dead. I said, "I'm going to come back and bring the picture
back, and then we'll all know how serious this has been." I said, "I
wouldn't worry too much, because worry won't help you." I told her
that the Coast Guard had said there might have been some fatalities in
this and--. She was there alone, I don't know what the family status
was, so far as a husband went.
I took the picture and ran down and copied it in the darkroom. A
lot of photographers on other papers--! don't want to be specific, but
some photographers on our own paper as well- -are fairly heartless
about just taking photographs and disappearing. But in about a half
hour I went back out, and she had not yet been told anything further.
So I sat and waited with her, just passing the time. She didn't know
who to call, and I wasn't going to.
You see, the thing was unravelling at the time. The child was
being taken to emergency, and so forth. It's pretty hard to find out
anything unless you go down to the emergency room. She was going to
be informed by the police when the child was pronounced dead by a
legally constituted authority. So I just sat and waited until the
police officers came, because I felt she shouldn't be left alone. Now
this is not in a sense the "old pro" newspaper practice, but this is
482
the sort of thing you have to go through to see the way people live on
our planet here. This used to get to me. I didn't like it.
I was one of the first people there when some barfly girl was
murdered. I say murdered, right out of hand, although there was a
trial later and the accused person was acquitted. I happen to know he
was as guilty as hell because I was there and he was sitting there
telling me how badly he felt about killing her. You can't kid me that
this fellow hadn't killed her. You can't tell me he would be sitting
there covered with blood, head to foot, apologizing to me for killing
this woman, and then be innocent. But that is a story in itself, and
there's no use going through that now.
You walk in on suicides, and you smell it as soon as you enter the
room. This whole business of violent death is something that you just
have to get used to. I saw a great deal of that, because so much of a
photographer's life is made up of two extremes--! guess there are
actually more --two very contradictory aspects of society. One is the
violence, the bloodshed, both accidental and purposeful, which usually
is confined to the middle class or the proletariat.
The other extreme is the society- fashions -women' s page photographs.
I would say that at least half the pictures, or more, made by local
newspaper photographers appear in the women's pages- -and sports, I
should add. On the one hand you have this violent, sweaty, world of
death. On the other you have this deodorized, social world of gaiety,
of charm, of recipes, home-making and all that stuff you find in the
women's section. Then you have the wonderful world of sports, which
is sort of fun.
And of course the bigger and more narcissistic the city is, the
more exciting the photographic journalism, the more violence, odds and
ends, bits and pieces. You don't have to fall back on service club
news and speeches made by the chief of police. I know the bigger the
Chronicle gets, the less attention we can pay to the local events that
are essentially utterly boring but so much a part of the city- -the
college women's club speaker, the "sons and daughters of whatever"
function. Except for sports. Sports is a thing unto itself, just a
whole world where there are lots of pictures used. It's routine that
when you have a sporting event you send more photographers out there
than there are players in the field, in some cases.
I remember on one occasion when I was covering one of the Cal
football games as a photographer, the Call-Bulletin established a
carrier pigeon service. The photographers would take their 35-
millimeter film and make a little roll and attach it to a carrier
pigeon. They would release the pigeon, and it would fly home to the
Call-Bulletin, theoretically, where the staff of photographers would
develop the pictures, you see. They made a big thing about their
carrier pigeon service. None of it mattered much, because the Call
was a terrible newspaper, and the pictures weren't very good anyway.
But they had a lot of fun with it.
483
At the Chronicle. Frenchy, one of the old photographers, and I had
to cover the next game. So we had our own little counter-promotion.
We got a duck, and made our pictures on the regular 4x5 plates with
plate-holders, and we put them all in a sack and tied them to the
duck's leg and then let the duck loose to run around the field during
a time out, or something, just to put the knock on the Call-Bulletin.
It was kind of our "flying goose service," or something. That was
just a sidelight.
There was a certain amount of competition among the newspapers ,
even among the photographers. The photographers are worse gossips
than the reporters, or anybody else. They are like women at the
village well as they stand around their developing tanks. You can
hear more misinformation, and more information, too, and you can hear
more, in a sense, wisdom about your city's characters and leaders than
perhaps almost anywhere else in a newspaper. A lot of reporters are
intense and young and reformers. Your photographers tend a little bit
to be philosophers and observers. They are not the reformers the
reporters tend to be.
As I said, the first year I was on the Chronicle was a year of
being an apprentice person, just learning what people are like, how
they react, how to relate to them. That's what I did the first year.
Some of the agonies come back to me as I sit here talking, the agonies
you have to witness and sometimes participate in. You have to harden
yourself. And that's why I use the great cliche that it's a forge.
You have to temper yourself, to make yourself tough enough so you
don't let it get to you, so you don't identify with it. But too many
newspapermen, in my opinion, a great many newspaper men, went
overboard the other way and rejected the whole thing, and refused to
communicate with it. They would make jokes or laugh about human
tragedy, or they would anesthetize themselves, particularly with
strong drink.
It's not an accident that these guys used to drink a lot. They
don't much any more- -oh, sure they do, in a sense, they get out and do
a lot of drinking. But when I went to work the newspaper man was
notorious, the man with the hat pushed back on his head, the press
pass, and so on.
The first day I went to work as a photographer- -each of us had our
own darkrooms to develop and enlarge the photograph- -there stretched
out on the bench of my enlarger was one of our star reporters, passed
out, dead drunk. I thought, "Man, I've really hit the jackpot! This
is the newspaper business." Since then the incidence of alcohol, or
its impact on the working press, has declined rapidly, so far as I am
concerned.
^~ -
Appendix B. 484
.
'
:', '
,
r
-Suzannt?
the ir.neir
f=*mm
"
. V
J^& r-'-r^ * -
.-- -
'
__ .
'
-
, >- i - "_ '
> * *&--
efftrts tTsecufe the parcel f San *rancisc lani necessary
:
f*rr
"'
-.'- V -
:
.-''.--v*r-V v - ' '-
.',
'
, -y --.^ -"- -
"fc';
-?'
;'
: :
heaff^ar|ferg_at ; .Calif errria and
This is a
-.^Viij r.---v, -
x^j^VV"
that. l,pr6^w&il1
Ene Bank subiait to the city highway
. . - .- .*- . .
.
* O V
i
-
--
emsry streetf.
-
:^>'--~- '^^^^'^i^:V-^"^^^r^'~ ---.' -:- -.
---Ijxj&s
committee , .lii an effort to clear up the title t* the "propertr
-
.,'---. -
.
..-.*- t f , . V
^^|^ -.\^ii -i-\ .
'
.."-%-
the tS* bank des fired for their headquarters. I had discussed'this
with San***Ba^' Stewart who was J^jJl highl^. placed B of A
officer. He was also the father-in-law of Jim Die kas on who was
then running our family WhJtJT Investment Company and pjMB^-
later became President and finally Chairman of the Board of the
Newhall Land anfi Farming Company.
I ^itli 4h imagine that anyone who cares to pursue
this matterC5P"Vay ve able to find an official version of this
application on file with the Supervisors' committee at about this
date .
.-
I think this application was eminently successful. I do
not know who signed it for the bank.
485
January 31, 1964
Streets and Highways Committee
of the Board of Supervisors
City and County of San Francisco
City Hall
San Francisco, California
Dear Sirst
There is pending before the Board of Supervisors
a petition by oar Bank for relinquishing a right-of-way
sasement along Spring Street south of California (approxi-
aately one-half block), and lissiiii' Street from Kearny to
Spring (approximately one-third of a block). This petition
was heard and its approval recoanended by the Streets and
Highways Committee) in December, last year, bat when the
ition came before the Board of Supervisors OB
30, 1963, we understand that it was referred back
to your Honorable Committee for further consideration*
We have previously written to the Board of Super*
visors respecting our plans but, since there have been
changes in membership of both the Board and the Committee
on Streets and Highways, we should like at this time to
give you additional facts and, if there is any other
information you would like to have, we respectfully invite
your questions.
Our Bank now controls either through fee ownership
or long-tern lease all of the property fronting on the
easterly side of Kearny Street running from Pine Street to
California Street, and all of the property fronting on the
southerly side of California Street running from Kearny
Street to Montgomery Street. This includes not only the
proper ty encompassing the two ri^hts-of-way mentioned above,
but all the land on both sides of the streets as well*
With the thought that our philosophy of planning
may be of some interest to your committee, and to the Board,
we are pleased to explore this matter with you in depth*
The reasorawe^assenbled this large and centrally
located block of property were far more compelling than a
simple real estate a Iventure, In essence, we are bankers,
486
2.
not real estate brokers.
W are planning to build a new headquarters for
our entire hanking enterprise. This edifice will be oar
front door to all the world; ve envision that it shall
become a respected, world-wide landmark for this and
certainly the next generation*
Therefore, this site was chosen with great care.
Whatever modest success ve have enjoyed in the past, has
mirrored the success of our native city, Saa Francisco.
When we build our new headquarters ve are determined
that ill the people of this city shall be proud of it.
With all humility ve hope that it shall be considered
one of the great architectural achievements of the modern
world*
The scope of our project is so great, and its
importance to us so urgent, that our planning mast proceed
as soon as possible* And, the sound planning necessary
to an undertaking of this magnitude cannot be accomplished
until ve know the limitations of the land on which we will
build.
There have been a number of idle rumors that we
are planning some monstrous structure that would overpower
and overcrowd San Francisco. That ve wish to build a box
reaching half-way to the heavens.
This is not at all true. v:e shall build nothing
that will clash vith any of San Francisco's architectural
criteria - either nov or at the future date when our
building actually starts, 'la are clearly aware of the
crisis in downtown urban development.
We are convinced that this undertaking will add
great value to downtown San Francisco, and these values
will be measured both in real estate dollars and in beaut?*
As you know, we have assembled far more land than
we need for the structure itself, sinply so that we can
surround our new headquarters with air and light, and
embellish our building with such luxuries as trees,
arcades and plazas.
487
-3-
Thia land is dedicated to an excitinj? long rang*
plan* We now hold title to all necessary land areaa,
-
including the all parcels ov*r vhioh the city holds a
right-of-way easement* In*** right -of*my vare important
when the property adjoining them re tided in different,
separate ownerships*
How that thflse separata ownerships no longer exist,
you nay agree with us that th* need for these right s-of-way
also have disappeared. The prolongation of these now on*
and unused rights of passage could seriously
the pii*4g phase of our project. If you so
! than our planning
and oar building shall gat underway.
He vish to repeat that it is our firm intention
in the new construction to conform to and indeed to
stay within - vhatvrar density requirements are applicable
to th* area whan th* building goes up* Ton also have our
assurance that our plans when drawn will conform to th*
lettar * whaterer requirements may be established by
th* City Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors*
Th* interests of th* Bank in this project coincide
with thos* of th* Board of Supervisors and th* City Planning
Commission* Orderly, intelligent planning will be greatly
facilitated and expedited by the Board* a early approval
of our petition for th* vacation of th* easements on Spring
and Summer Streets, which ve again moat respectfully request*
.. Appendix C. 488
San Francisco Magazine, July/August 196<
MY SEARCH FOR
SCOTT NEWHALI
, \
by John Luce
The San Francisco Chronicle is frequently damned for its failure to
provide "hard news" both national and international. It has been
called a daily magazine rather than a newspaper in the tradition of
the New York Times. On the other hand, it has been praised for its
liberal attitude and the liveliness of its columnists. Since any news
paper reflects the personality of its editor, John Luce interviewed and
studied the Chronicle's Scott Newhall, the man he believes is the real
voice of "The Voice of the West."
f I didn't know him, I said to myself
s I stood in Scott Newhall's office, I
light think Scott was not the Executive
ditor of the Chronicle at all.
In fact, I wrote in my notebook, his
ffice seems to be more of a sanctuary
ian the command post of a busy news-
iper. Its subdued, brown and green decor
d leather-backed chairs show a con-
vatism and cairn. The copper-trimmed
lographs on the wail, the silver ashtrays
that bronze cannon in the corner
eak of a deep, historical consciousness.
is room. I reflected, could be used by a
ivor to greet VIPs. It might belong to a
ofessor or a retired admiral writing his
:moirs.
I sat in front of Scott's desk and
imned the walls. Directly before me was
plaque, on which two topless women.
vied in eossamer. were holding up a
eld. At the bottom of the plaque was a
oil and the Latin word: AMO. On the
1 behind me was a portrait of Lucius
I
j
:be. in top hat and tails, leaning on his
ie in the Garden Court of the Palace
tel. Near it was another painting. It
:
wed an Englishman, in military uni-
Mti.
sitting before a window that over-
l
id a harbor. The Englishman had a
^ leg and held a spyglass in his hand. A
nee, furry animal was playing on the
jr beneath him. In the harbor, a sailing
was firine on a Chinese junk. Quite
ressive. I thoueht: it gives the room a
His desk, I noted, was on a diagonal
with that of his secretary, Dolly Rhee-.'..
Behind it was a black safe, about one and
a half feet square, on which was painted
the name: THE IRRAWADDY STEAM
NAVIGATION CO. An alabaster repro
duction of Botticelli's "Venus on the Half
Shell" was siting on top of the safe. On the
wall above it was a model of a side-wheel
steamer similar to that in the painting. The
ship was called the "Burma Queen." The
desk itself was cluttered with unopened
mail, copies of the Chronicle, hot rod
magazines and a paperback on hippies.
On the side nearest me was a brass tray
in which brass fish were supporting a
copper globe mounted with a rectangular
silver bar. The edges of the bar were in
scribed with the words: Sir Waldo Love
lock Scott. On the upper face was printed:
.900 Fine Five Taels: The Irrawaddy
Counting House at Rangoon. On the globe
was: The Irrawaddy Steam Navigation
Co., Rangoon, 1917; First Silver Bullion
Bar Minted Under Royal Charter.
I saw the bar and started to laugh. The
Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Co., I knew,
was a bogus outfit, one of Scott's favorite
toys, and he was Chairman of its Board. I
had first heard of it at the Gate School,
near Santa Barbara, where I was a class
mate of Scott's son. Jon. There, we had
formed a rocket society and were hoping
for a formal competition to test our mis
siles against a rival organization.
One night
Rangoon," had put up a cash prize for the
highest altitude achieved at the soon-to-
be-held "First International Gate School
Rocket Trials." After dinner, I asked Jon
who this mysterious benefactor could be.
"That," he answered, "is my old man."
'eeing the Irrawaddy again sent me
into a reverie about my experiences with
the Newhails. Jon, a short, scrappy boy
who had had polio in his leg as a child,
was a close friend at Gate. I first met his
parents when they took us to the Newhall
family ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley,
forty miles North of Los Angeles, for a
weekend. Later, I spent an August with
the Newhails at Tahoe, where I met Jon's
older brother. Skip, and Tony, his frater
nal twin. I remembered our pranks at the
Lake and Scott's stories of the Chronicle
and the characters celebrities, kooks and
ordinary citizens who came to see him
there. I always liked Scott; he was a great
storyteller and a compassionate man.
I was still smiling from the memories
when Scott walked into his office from an
adjoining washroom. He was wearing a
blue suit, a pinstripe shirt with gold coin
cufflinks and a blue tie. He moved slowly,
pivoting off his artificial leg, and stood
behind his desk, smiling that same, father
ly smile I had known as a boy. We shook
hands and sat down.
489
"Well," I said, breaking the ice after
almost ten years, "it's good to see you
again. I
gather the Irrawaddy is into silver
these days."
"Oh, yes," he said, grinning mischie
vously. He reached into his desk, pulled
out another silver bar and fondled it lov
ingly in his short, stubby hands. I men
tioned the Rocket Trials and asked him
what the Irrawaddy had done lately. He
answered with the same slow, ponderous
voice I remembered, totally serious as he
put me on.
"Well, let's see. We've been minting
money. We have been in the area of trans
portation: competition autos, vintage cars.
A rather diversified company."
"Where are you headquartered?"
"We used to be in the janitor's closet at
the White Investment Company, but the
mail piled up so. Most of our activities
center here now."
I had hoped to get some straight an
swers from our interview, but I was get
ting nowhere, fast. "Tell me," I asked
him, "was there ever really such a com
pany in existence?"
Scott sat forward in his chair. His
smile widened and then slanted up the
right side of his face, making him look a
little mad. "Isn't there always an Irra
waddy Steam Navigation Co.," he an
swered, staring me down.
I laughed, embarrassed by his inten
sity, and groped for another question:
"Who is 'Sir Waldo Lovelock Scott?'
"
He pointed at the peg-legged English
man across the room. "Sir Waldo Love
lock Scott," he said, "lately of Rangoon.
The founder of the firm."
"One more question." I said, looking
up at the topless standard bearers. "What's
that?"
He turned in his chair. "That," he said,
"is the Scott family coat of arms."
"O.K. Now I'd like to ask you about
your career."
"Couldn't we talk about something in
teresting? Why do you have to do this
story?"
I shifted in my seat, fishing for excuses
like a kid confronted by his school princi
pal. "San Francisco thinks you're one of
the most important and least publicized
men in town," I said. "I happen to believe
you are a good part of the San Francisco
consciousness. Besides, I'd like to see the
Newhalls again."
Scott sat back in his chair, gazed at the
ceiling, and then proceeded to list all the
reasons why I shouldn't waste my time
on him. He was, he told me, "not the
Chronicle" and "not the only indispen
sable man in town." But he was enjoying
himself, enormously. Finally, perhaps be
cause I did nothing but smile stupidly
throughout his performance, the interview
got underway.
I started by telling Scott what I had
learned of him from "Who's Who in the
West": that he was born in San Francisco
on January 21, 1914, the son of Aimer M.
and Anna Nicholson (Scott) Newhall. I
knew that his father had been active in
the H. M. Newhall Co., an import-export
firm. I asked Scott if his father had wanted
him to join the business.
"No," he answered, "he never made
up my mind for me."
"Did you decide on journalism in
school?"
"Actually, it was never discussed. A
teacher once asked us what we were going
to do when we grew up. My answer was:
'to retire.'
"
"What schools did you go to?"
"There was the Tamalpais School for
Boys, Tamalpais High, the San Rafael
Military Academy, the Webb School for
Boys, Lawrenceville and the Webb School
for Boys again. But I never got a diploma,
except for a certificate in welding from
the Samuel Gompers Trade School. I al
ways seemed to quit just before final
exams."
According to "Who's Who," Scott
studied at Cal from 1932 through 1935. I
asked him if he was interested in journal
ism there.
"No," he answered. "1 was an art
major. I was involved with the 'Occident,'
a literary magazine. Kind of a circulation
manager. We sold quite a few copies, but
the editors were interested more in being
literary than in increasing sales, so they
let me go. I did publish a little magazine
with a fraternity brother. It was very
Edwardian, as opposed to the liberal.
United Front. League-for-Peace-and-
Decency sort of thing. We did it purely as
an antidote."
"And you got married at Cal?"
"Yes, Ruth was a secretary and teach
ing assistant in the an department.
"
"You started at the Chronicle in 1935
as a photographer and eventually wor d
your way up to Editor of "This Wor "
Sunday Editor and Operations Manar.
But you took a year off, didn't you, d
'
set out around the world?"
"Yes. I came here to work and aft a
year I'd had it. I was beaten up a w
times too many for my alabaster bod 1
had enough money to buy a boat th:
S2500. I remember we sailed out ie
Golden Gate on this forty-two foot ken,
called the Mermaid, in 1936, at.it
March. We had fourteen cents in jr
'
pockets but plenty of food on board, 't
planned to do magazine pieces. Well.
fooled around a lot; it took us almc a
year to reach Acapulco. When we ot
:
there I got an infection in my leg id
almost died. We went to Mexico (
y,
'
they had good relations with German m
those days and had some new drugs at
weren't available in America. Theysirf
my life; if I had gotten sick here I w 14?
have died. Anyway, we came back re
:
'
and they took off my leg at St. Lu 's.
:
Then, after a period of readjustmei I
came back to work in the Chro:le'
library."
"You also took a year off durinjhe
War and served as a corresponder in
England. What happened there?"
if
I.was with the Royal Navy; 1 counV
volunteer, because of my disability. >ut
:
anyone could be a correspondent. I st ed
in London for six or seven months, nm^
1
'
ing around mainly with the British nd ;
American Air Forces. I
spent some ne :
in the motor boat flotillas in the Cha ei.
;
I
got frightened, and finally asked m eif
:
what I was trying to prove. I
got a de'
1
home on a British World War 1 destr er.
We went through one of the worst st iis-'
I've ever been through. One night iJSt
curled up in my bunk and figured: i 'm
going to drown. I'll drown comforta /."
"You're also a trustee of the San ) in--
cisco Maritime museum. Where did ou
set your love of ships?"
"Well, every summer we wei to'c;
Bolinas when we were kids. 1 was o hC'i:
beach all the time. Every year, the A ka;.
Packing Fleet come down in Augus Ml':
those beautiful ships. . . . One sumn .
took off from Cal and cruised ii[ !'::
Northwest Passase. My younger brrjr.,--
Hall, was a sailor he joined the Men .m-:
Marine."
"I seem to remember your hav ;
arcat love for Mexico."
Scott leaned back in his chair m
sighed. "Yes," he said: "there's n rat
ra'ce. That's the shortest way to put it
people are gentlemen and ladies. n
r
country to me ... I've never been treated
with anything but the utmost courtesy,
until I get to the border and run into
Customs. Immediately the Teutonic,
Anglo-Saxon types put you down."
I was silent for several seconds, re
specting Scott's reverie. Then, I asked him
:f we could get back to the Chronicle.
'You were appointed Executive Editor in
1952," I said, "by Charles Thieriot, who
ucceeded his father-in-law, George
Tameron, as Editor-Publisher. When you
ook over, your successor, Paul Smith, left
he Chronicle. What happened?"
"Well," Scott said, "Paul was an ex-
eptionally close friend of mine. When he
,.rst came on the paper, he built up the
-hole staff. But he lived a different life.
-,_ for example, he had three secretaries; I
ould never figure out what for. Paul was
-
Uways traveling; he was one of the most
lagnetic, gregarious men I've ever
nown. However, the paper seemed to
iffer because it had some rather ... it
,1 kve indications of being self-consciously
|:lf-important:
I don't know how else to
irase it. The Chronicle had less coverage
. ken than it now has, and a sense of
imor was somewhat lacking. Unfortu-
itely, it fell in circulation to a position of
urth behind the Examiner, the Call
,d the Oakland Tribune among the
:al papers. We had some serious operat-
Z losses. Charles Thieriot was working
"re then, especially at KRON-Tv. There
|is
a serious question as to whether the
jper
would survive. Then, Charles be-
ne Editor-Publisher. A growing crisis
uited in Paul's leaving. We started a
i.ig trip back up; sideways, whatever term
:ja
use. until today we are the largest daily
ij
Northern California. I don't say that
^|h any feeling of personal pride the
;
'_
flu's over. I was a born competitor and I
'_:..'
1
;-d
to fight journalistically. But I don't
>it to talk about our competition ai-
ueh you may notice I still use that
d."
"What were your plans for the
C-omc/e?"
"I wanted it to be the greatest paper
he country. The whole thing is the men
women who write it, edit it and put it
ther. line by line, trying to make it
e informative. And, hopefully, more
naming as well. I love to promote
490
cs; many of us have a touch of P. T.
num. I
enjoy getting people to read
paper, that's all"."
~
D
jntfi*
1
am
"
"id you have a philosophy about
the paper?"
"Well, I sometimes think the Chronicle
is like a barker in front of a tent, saying:
'hurry, hurry, hurry; the girls are just
about to take off their clothes." The people
get inside and they read a story about Viet
Nam. Seriously, I will say that if a person
reads the Chronicle he will be better in
formed than if he reads any other news
paper. We try to give more stories, shorter
ones. Most papers I know, with the ex
ception of about five, their only function
is to decide whether to use the United
Press or A.P. story. But I'm opposed to
machine journalism. Soon there'll be one
paper in this country, with different names,
and what amounts to thought control."
"Your opposition to machine journal
ism; this means columnists?"
"Yes. To me, a columnist, a good one,
is a very special thing. Frustration is what
kills more people than anything else, when
they have to conform. Give a man his
head, respect his dignity and he'll do a
job for you."
"You seem to have a special feeling
for Lucius Beebe."
"Lucius; ah, he was one of those rare
men who could write a sentence no other
man could. One of the great non-con
formists of our age; that spirit has given
us a certain success. He knew what he was
doing, the same as Bill Buckley: he's too
smart to believe what he says, but he says
it so beautifully it's effective. And, a lot of
people would like to believe it."
"What about the Chronicle stunts?"
"Well, I've been a participant if not
the author. Some I've inspired; some I've
just accepted. But I spend my time trying
to sell the paper. My main function is try
ing to get to the mail on my desk. I never
go out to speak, and never go through any
of this routine of a pseudo-pillar-of-the-
community figure. My job is here, work
ing under Charles Thieriot. a very intelli
gent and gracious man."
"One last question: What has been
your best moment on the paper?"
Scott sat forward, leaning on his fore-
a'ms. "It's hard to sort them out," he said.
"The day the Examiner was through was
the day Herb Caen came back to work for
the Chronicle. He was a first baseman and
I used to catch on a team. We were good
friends; when he left us, I told Herb there
would always be a first baseman's glove
hanging on a peg for him. One day, I
guess
he got a touch of nostalgia. The day we
passed the Examiner was about the third
day Bud Boyd was in the bush; nobody
could ever prove this, but I'm positive of
it. We had a hell of a fight,
but we beat
them. Gradually, most of the good writers
became part of the Chronicle. The men
who run the paper Charles Thieriot,
Managing Editor Gordon Pates, Stan.
Arnold, News Editor Bill German, City
Editor Abe Mellinkoff we've been to
gether for years. We know instinctively
how each other thinks. If we wanted to.
we could probably go on and on, if we all
don't drop dead in the next few days."
I left Scott's office feeling good about
our interview. He had been, as I expected,
typically modest about himself and his
role at the Chronicle. But I
thought I
knew him better than ever before, and
knew I was on my way to an interesting
story. I was also rather amused, for I felt
the story behind my story was interesting
as well.
I on Newhall and I
graduated from
Gate in the spring of 1959. Scott delivered
our commencement address, on the func
tion of education in a free society. Al
though I attended Stanford with Jon and
Tony, I didn't see much of the Newhalls
during college. It was not until I had
graduated from Stanford and started writ
ing in San Francisco that I became fasci
nated by their father again.
I was then working on an article for
San Francisco covering the history of the
Chronicle. Like many local armchair
editors, I once thought the paper was
overly-commercial and rather crass com
pared to the Eastern dailies. But the more
I read it, the more I came to believe that
the Chronicle was one of the most enter
taining papers in the country. I respected
its voice in community affairs. And I knew
that one of the loudest voices of the
"Voice of the West" was Scott NewhaH's.
I also knew Scott's role in the Chron
icle success story. When he and Charles
Thieriot began to direct the paper, the
Chronicle had less than 150.000 readers.
Yet, in the next ten years, when most
metropolitan dailies were increasing their
circulation by one percent annually, the
Chronicle was doubling its readership.
When it merged with the Examiner in
1965, the Chronicle had long since passed
its competition in circulation and was still
pulling away.
Scott. I decided, deserved much of the
credit for this success. Under Paul Smith,
the Chronicle had been a somewhat self-
conscious copy of the New York Times.
It had a sedate tone and stressed inter
national news. But under Thieriot and
NewhaH's direction, the Chronicle became
fun. Scott swung at his competition like
an editor out of San Francisco's frontier
days. He emphasized personal journalism
and developed such columnists as Art
Hoppe, Lucius Beebe, Count Marco and
Charles McCabe. He created the Chron
icle Features Syndicate and Foreign Serv
ice. And he authored or approved a series
of publicity stunts and far-out stories, in
cluding the Emperor Norton Treasure
Hunt and Count Marco's Fat Venus Con
test, Bud Boyd's ill-fated adventures as
the "Last Man on Earth," Jonathan Root's
stories on the sorry state of the city's
coffee. Art Hoppe's report of how Zambia
entered the space race and George
Draper's coverage of the "Society for In
decency to Naked Animals."
The stunts and stories all stressed
character. They also reflected what
Draper, a top writer who first worked
under Scott on This World, called "New-
hall's real feeling for the absurd." The
Naked Animals series, for example, told
of one Clifford Grout, Jr., purportedly
president of the 38,794-member Society,
and his crusade to clothe the vital parts of
our pets with shorts and bloomers. For
several days in 1962, the Chronicle ran
headlines like "City Called Moral Dis
aster Area" and carried page one stories of
Prout's adventures at topless joints and at
the Fleishhacker Zoo. It followed him as
he took his campaign to President Ken
nedy and then cabled Nikita Khrushchev
for an audience to found SINA chapters
in the U.S.S.R.
Ultimately Clifford Prout, Jr. was re
vealed to be Buck Henry, a writer on the
Gary Moore show. By then, most Chron
icle readers were thoroughly entertained.
Some, however, were only further con
vinced that the paper cared nothing for
the news. "I have always been proud of
my Chronicle subscription," one outraged
reader wrote the editor, "but I am rather
dubious if you continue to feature articles
on the front page about the clothing of
animals, especially when world-shaking
events occur at the same time such as
the two Russian astronauts who went into
space the same day your series began."
I.f Chronicle readers were outraged,
their reaction was mild compared to that
of the Examiner, whose circulation
suffered from every off-beat Chronicle
story. Nothing could have pleased Scott
Newhall more. He seemed to regard the
Examiner as an evil threat to the City. He
loved attacking his competition with
ridicule. When the Examiner, with typical
self-righteousness, attacked the Chronicle
for defending the topless clubs and other
"local indecencies," the Chronicle re
sponded with a one-line editorial barb
that was pure Newhall. "The trouble with
San Francisco is not topless waitresses,"
the editorial read, "but topless news
papers."
Although usually sarcastic in tone, this
and other Chronicle editorials achieved
serious results around town. Over the
\ears. thev helped save the Palace of Fine
491
service irom premature burial. They re
stored sanity in readers enraged by stu
dent demonstrators at Cal and by hippies
in their own homes. They cooled the
police from closing the Fillmore Audi
torium as well as the topless. They kept
open the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic.
They took on BART, George Christo
pher's Embarcadero abortion, the bull
dozers of greedy developers and the short
sightedness of the California Department
of Highways.
Even more important, the Chronicle
established a tone of liberalism in the City.
It reflected and reinforced what Herb-
Caen has called the San Francisco con
sciousness: a combination of great con
cern over issues and a tradition of humor
and fun. This consciousness, I believe,
smacked of Scott Newhall.
While Scott was influencing the City
through the Chronicle, he was also work
ing behind the scenes on a host of projects
destined to change its skyline. In 1949, a
Petaluma rancher named Karl Kortum
convinced Scott that the City needed a
maritime museum. Scott talked to Paul
Smith and the Chronicle assigned David
Nelson, then a reporter, to help Kortum
on the project. Over the following years.
Kortum. Nelson. Newhall and others
organized the Museum near Ghirardelli
Square, found a berth for the Balclutha at
Fisherman's Wharf, and urged the City
and state to develop Victorian Park and
Hyde Street Pier and to restore the Haslett
Warehouse nearby. On weekends. Scott
welded many of the models in the Museum
and personally supervised the wiring of
the Balclutha. He took a leading role in the
restoration of the waterfronC and later
urged Leonard Martin of the Cannery to
create a permanent home there for pianist
Earl "Fatha" Hines.
At the same time, he was active in the
Newhall family concerns as vice president
of White Investment and a director of the
Newhall Land and Farming Company.
Several years after I had visited the ranch.
the Newhall firms began building a
planned community, called Valencia, on
their property to compete with the jerry-
built tracks springing up in the Santa
Clarita Valley. In~1963. Scott bought the
then-weekly Newhall Signal and set out
to give a sense of identity to the Valley.
He editorialized against the John Birch
Society, the school board and local poli
ticians. And, true to form, he caused a
lot of trouble along the way.
The trouble came to a climax in the
fall of 1966. when the Ku Klux Klan de
cided to hold a rally to determine their
support in California. For their site, they
leased a box canyon east of Newhall.
one hundred Klansmen and
showed up, many of them carrying guns.
So did an even greater number of law
men, reporters, photographers and TV
cameramen.
The affair got going after dark as
head Klansman, a "Reverend" nai
Fowler, stood on a grassy knoll and i.
rangued the crowd with cries of violt*
and threats of the
"Jew-Comrnie-Niisgj]
Conspiracy." Scott, in hunting clothes, id
come out from the Signal with his :f
and was standing near the speaker. At ie
point, when he had the crowd well woid
up, Fowler spit out, "We're the sup<x
race; and the superior race don't wamo
niggers!" Scott fired back, "The supor
race doesn't use double negatives."
From all reports, the crowd could :
*
killed him then. Fowler screamed, If
they're any white niggers here, get '( !"
A group of rednecks pushed towdj
Scott, yelling, "Get a rope!" But ;>tt
stood his ground. Jon, Tony and ip
shielded him from the front, and Ch tt
Howe, the Chronicle Military EC of
covering the rally, stood behind Stt,
protecting him with his body. "I hac
hand over his heart," Howe said later
was beating perfectly regularly. The
was utterly unafraid."
Finally, the press saved the da
crowding in to find out who Scott is,
"I am Scott Newhall," he told once-
porter. "I am Executive Editor of the an
Francisco Chronicle, Publisher of
Newhall Signal and a drag racer cla
modified. I dropped in to listen to thi
fortunate and pathetic bunch expre
themselves in uncivilized language, ke
children in a pissing contest. Most of :ra
seem to be unsuccessful middle-aged :er
hunters and high school dropouts. <ly
family has live in this valley for one in-
red years. And if there's anything I d
it's bad grammar."
The Klan incident convinced me id
again that Scott was a highly unusual m
Nevertheless, few San Franciscans
who he was or what he had done. Thi '*
to Scott's liking, for he shunned pub ty
rarely granted interviews and prefer:
work in the background. He had few n
fidants: his friends were contemporar
the Chronicle or men who share h
hobbies coin collecting, building
sters and restoring vintage cars. n
people knew he had won the 1961 Ji
course D'Elecance at Pebble Beach \ ^i
1930 Mercedes he restored. Othe
1
re
ported he had garages full of car m
engines in the East Bay. To most r
however, he remained a mystery
-^
viously enjoying the myths put forw: i
explain him.
I have never cared much for r h
but I do love a sood mystery. So. aft
San Francisco piece on the Chroma
in, I decided to die into Scott Nev
character by interviewing many <
people who knew him best. I wan1 '
find out who Scott really was. and "
lay within his enigmatic facade.
492
Y FIRST RESEARCH Stop Was the
main branch of the Public Library, where
[ looked Scott up in Who's Who. Next, I
went to the California section and read
\The
Kewhall Ranch, a history of the ranch
tnd family written by Ruth Newhall.
r
rom it, I learned that Scott was the great-
wandson of Henry Mayo Newhall. who
vas born in Saugus, Massachusetts, in
825. Henry left home at thirteen on a
hip bound for the Philippines and sailed
hrough the Golden Gate in 1 850 on board
he Pacific Mail steamer. "Panama."
In San Francisco the elder Newhall
uilt an auctioneering firm into the H. M.
tewhall Co., became a director of South-
rn Pacific, and put his profits into six
California ranches. The largest was the
lancho San Francisco, 49.000 acres of
lack Angus cattle land in Ventura and
.os Angeles Counties. Before his death,
e moved to the rancho and offered to
;ild a station for the Southern Pacific if
iuid route through his land. This and
,ster station became the towns of New-
II and Saugus.
After Henry Mayo Newhall's death in
882. his five sons incorporated their
50,000-acre legacy into the Newhall
and and Farming Company and the
'hite Investment Company. But, by
orld War I, the once-vast empire was
inned by taxes, mismanagement and
lling crop and cattle prices. The Newhall
mily was thinning out as well: of Henry
ayo Newhall's grandchildren, only two,
mer and Edwin Newhall, Jr., were
:tive in the family firms. The Newhall
and and Farming Company might have
'ilapsed entirely had not Atholl McBean.
po
married into the family, assumed con-
pi.
The H. M. Newhall Co. prospered
ider Aimer Newhall. Scott's father, but
us hit hard during the Depression. When
on reached manhood, little was left of
s father's fortune: his inheritance was a
nail share of stock in his great-grand-
ther's declining empire, a fraction of
nat it
might have been.
This served to place Scott in historical
rspective, but I needed more back,
bund information before I tried to inter-
fw him. So. I talked with Frances
,3ffat. Chronicle Society Editor. She told
k that Scott's parents were both socially
eminent, but that he and Ruth cared
lie or nothing for the social world. They
td to give large parties at their home in
rkeley. Mrs." Moffat said, and Scott
fce attended all the night Giant games.
Invever. following his heart attack nine
&rs ago the Newhalls hardly go out.
Other sources -in San Francisco said
that Ruth Newhall was very important in
her husband's life. When he was growing
up in San Rafael. Scott had quite a reputa
tion as a "troublemaker" and "wild child."
He was a heavy drinker, and people
thought he might turn out "bad." He
eloped with Ruth, once a Terman Wonder
Child, who worked with him as a writer
on This World. Ruth seemed to direct his
energy, as did his tough, loyal secretary,
Dolly Rhee, the sister of Olympic diving
champ Sammy Lee. Dolly was also on
This World and called Scott "Old Dad."
Sufficiently armed with scandal, I
called Dolly Rhee and arranged my first
interview with Scott. Following that ses
sion, I went to see Ruth at the Newhalls'
home in Berkeley. She and Scott lived at
the very top of the Berkeley hills, in a
ranch-style house of weathered wood and
Arizona flagstone. Next to it was a shed
full of cars and auto pans and Scott's
machine shop. A parking area between
this shed and the main house was packed
with automobiles an old Lincoln, a
Chrysler station wagon, a grey Corvette
and maroon Thunderbird among them.
From the parking area, a pathway led to
a guest house that Scott built for his
mother. Paul Smith lived in the guest
house for a while after he left the
Chronicle; students were renting it now.
B'efore I rang the front door bell, I
stood on the steps of the main house and
looked out over the front lawn. Below. I
could see much of San Francisco, Marin
and the East Bay. Straight ahead was the
Golden Gate, its rust red towers bathed
in golden light. The view, I
thought, was
fit for a monarch.
I ran the bell, and Ruth, wearing a
grey tweed suit and white sweater, opened
the door. We went into the living room,
where we sat and looked out on the Bay.
Ruth, as I remembered her. was intelligent
and strong. She showed me several prod
ucts of Scott's machine shop: copper
prints and lamps and brass ashtrays. I
noticed two pianos in the corner and two
paintings, supple nudes, on the wall. Ruth
and I drank coffee and chain-smoked
Camels as we talked about the house.
"We originally rented it in 1939." she
she said, "when Skip was eleven months
eld. We had been living on Telegraph Hill.
This house had been a shack for a quarry
that supplied rocks for the streets in Berke
ley. We finally bought it at the end of
the war. Scotty added on several rooms
and did the flagstone work himself."
"I remember when I was at Tahoe vou
used to hunt arrowheads. Do you still?"
"No, we haven't been hunting for
several years. For a while, Scotty was so
busy on the Signal."
"I've heard about your panics."
"Yes, they were something. Sometimes
they lasted for days. We had wonderful
people over, and always some musicians.
I remember one morning Jon woke us up
and said: The Dean is asleep under the
oleander.'
"
Ruth looked around the room and con
tinued:
"It's sad, but the house is up for sale
now. We've been restoring an old Vic
torian at Piru. near Newhall. And we keep
an apartment in the City."
"What about the boys?"
"Well, Jon has been with the Signal
since he graduated from Stanford in 1964.
He's Publisher, and doing a great job.
Tony went down a couple of months ago
and is helping him out as Circulation Man
ager. You know he was in the Peace Corps
after college. Skip has been with the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Altadena: he's
going back to Stanford next year, in math.
to get his Ph.D. You ought to see them for
your story."
I
planned to see the boys. But first I
wanted to talk \viih Scott's contemporaries
at the Chronicle. On three separate oc
casions I met with Publisher Charles Thie-
riot. General Manager Gordon Pates and
City Editor Abe Mellinkoff. who revealed
to me the close communication that makes
the Chronicle run.
"We have a complete understandinc."
493
Thicriot said. "Scott knows exactly how I
think." Pates, who had worked under Scott
at Tliis World and advanced with him
every step of the way, described him as
"an intuitive thinker. We are a good com
bination; I handle the practical end, he
takes the imaginative side." Mellinkoff
had been a cub reporter when Scott was
working on the paper as a cameraman.
"We used to cover stories together," the
fifty-five-year-old City Editor recailed.'Td
trust him with anything. He knows words
and has a good, impeccably English,
tongue-in-cheek style. But he paints too,
you know, and I think he sees things
differently than most men. He often
characterizes people as an artist would, as
if he were sketching them."
ext. I asked Templeton Peck and Al
Hyman to describe the editorial meetings
that took place every morning in a con
ference room next to Scott's office. "Scott
doesn't always come in," Peck told me.
"Like every other department, we know
how he and Charles Thieriot think. When
he does come, quite a lot of our time is
spent on the latest crises in his life. Scott
will go on and on about some problem he's
having with a '57 Chrysler, the ticket he
got coming over the Bridge, and pretty
soon we're into the complete history of
the automobile.
"But he does have something to say on
almost every subject, and I often take
complete notes. He only writes two or
three editorials a year now, but the mate
rial we write is often his words. He has a
dead eye for the jugular, a complete scorn
for phonies and a real sympathy for people
in trouble. For example, he saw the
hippies not as criminals, but confused
youngsters." Al Hyman agreed: "He has
an encyclopedic style. You might think
he's an intellectual, but he's a practical,
physical man. He speaks in the concrete,
with specific metaphors and analogies."
I then talked with the Chronicle
columnists. Herb Caen, who was originally
hired by Paul Smith in 1936, described
Scott as "a father figure and very compas
sionate ... but has this quality of being a
'bad boy.' He's a great editor in my book
because he leaves me alone. He's the
reason I came back from the Examiner; I
liked what he was doing and was bored
with the other paper."
Art Hoppe. who was given a choice of
becoming a sports or political columnist
by Scott in 1959. characterized him as "a
collector of peopie. the zanier the better. I
think the secret of the Chronicle's success
is that Newhail makes people mad."
Hoppe told me. They complain about the
paper, but they can keep complaining only
if they buy it every day.
"Newhail likes to cast people too. I
remember when McCabe left the paper a
few years ago, I suggested to Newhail that
Jessica Mitford Truehaft take his place. I
told him: 'She's a woman, a Communist, a
member of the British aristocracy and
she doesn't know a damn thing about
sports.' Newhail said, 'Fine, let's go'.' Then
Jessica had to go to her island for a while.
Newhail asked her: 'Can you be back by
baseball season?' 'When's that?' she asked.
I guess that was carrying things too far."
Of all the Chronicle columnists, how
ever, Charles McCabe had the most to
say about his boss. The Fearless Spectator
was working as a re-write man in 1959,
when he was asked to do a story about a
battle in Virginia City between Lucius
Beebe, then Publisher of the Territorial
Enterprise, and a local, reform-oriented
clergyman. The story became a series, en
titled "The Priest and the Plutocrat," that
delighted Scott. "He had Gordon Pates
come to see me," McCabe recalled for me
over lunch at Sam's in Tiburon. "Pates
asked me if I would write a sports column.
I said no. Then Pates returned and asked
me if I would write a sports column in
which I could say anything I wanted. I
said I didn't like sports. Pates said: 'That's
exactly what Newhail wants.'
"Then Newhail went out and hired
Beebe as well. Count Marco was a former
hairdresser working for Charles Thieriot
as a producer on TV in the early days. He
had gone to Alaska alone in a Rolls Royce,
then came back broke and tried to see
Thieriot for another job. Thieriot asked
Newhail to interview him. Marco wanted
to write a column on beauty tips for
women, but Newhail took one look at him
and knew what he wanted Marco to be."
M.cCabe agreed that Scott enjoyed
casting people. "He gets quite petulant
when you don't live up to casting, though.
For example, he wants me to hate ail the
time. But he's a real impresario that may
describe him better than any one word. He
is impossible 10 get a raise from over the
years we've had a series of long, incon
clusive interviews. He is Mephistophelian:
he brings you up and shows you the cities
of the world, then he withdraws."
"What would you call the piece I'm
writing?" I asked.
"Well, when things get rough at the
paper. Scott's always told me wants to go
down to Vera Cruz and die to the sound
of marimbas. It's all called: The Road to
Vera Cruz.' Or, maybe: The Poor New-
hall.' You know, he comes from an old and
once-wealthy family. That ranch in '-.
hall could have belonged to him. Noi
only a stopping place on the way to
Cruz,"
After seeing McCabe, I tried to Ij
someone who knew Scott when
young man, before the Chronicle t
Finally, I talked with Harry Johns
local insurance agent who grew up
him in Marin. "I remember their ho-
Johnson said. "One was the largest
county. They had another in Bolina \
used to have the greatest times. Sco
a great prankster, with lots of cai
wasn't mechanical then, though. .
lost his money in the Depressio:
bought a load of sacks I think in Ii
and couldn't unload them whe1
market fell. The whole family mod
Berkeley, on the north side of camp .'
"What were the Newhalls lil'"
asked.
"Aimer was a pleasant mar b 1
heavy, generous. His wife was inte ;et
with a great insight into human frail i :
was extremely flexible and could de w
any emergency and remain calm." ;
"Scott mentioned a brother to :."
"Yes, he had two. Hall, the y DI ;
boy, ran away to sea. Scott's older b tht:
Aimer, was a brilliant mathematici a
became an engineer. But Scott stayiBc
the family; he carried on his parent:
"Which parent did Scott m
semble?"
"His mother. She had the fac
saint. But both the Newhalls were
They gave to several charities ar
ported half a dozen people witho
saying a word about it. They we:
inely humble people."
One of the men Scott has "ca:
recent years was Karl Kortum, a Pi l
:
,
chicken rancher who had sailed w H .
Newhail before he met Scott
anci^.
quently became Director of the K Hi.
Museum. After meeting with Harr'ol
son, I spoke with Kortum and asMh;
.
who he thought Scott Newhail wa .,
"In one word." he said. "the cot i :
of San Francisco. Dave Nelson I
s
that Scott should have been Seer
State. He has that genius of brin;
the best in people, of cutting to t:
of a situation. You notice he uses t
'effective' a lot. He sees San Fran
a city-state. And he rules it his wa\
H_ave you ever come ac
Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Cor
your researcn of the sailing fleets
Kortum laughed. "Oh thai.
guess that's just Scott's way of sa
is a game.
"
494
"Yet he seems to be deeply serious?"
"Scott can t help but react to calls for
:lp. Just imagine the number of people
jith problems who talk to him every day.
jut
he never has had the newspaperman's
irmal defense, cynicism. Instead, he has
iveloped a kind of detachment; he sits
ick, listens and doesn't talk much. But
: knows exactly what's going on. He's
ppiest. I suppose, in his own thoughts.
lit he can't stop caring, and caring will
jl
him some day."
|
After visiting with Karl Kortum, 1
cided to talk to Scott's detractors, many
whom have been burned by Chronicle
(itorials through the years. Most insisted
:y "still had to do business in San Fran
co" and refused to let me use their
ijmes. Their charges against Scott ranged
m "using the paper to settle his dislikes"
'blocking the proper commercial de-
ipment of the waterfront," whatever
entails. Their criticism of his person-
y centered around the feeling one local
ker expressed: "Newhail is an ego-
ic. He's power-mad: an overgrown,
ulant child."
At the same time, many people were
ical of the course of the Chronicle
ing the Thieriot-Newhall days. Time
gazine. for example, apparently thinks
paper is a joke, and a bad one at that,
a similar, yet warmer tone, columnist
il Coates of the Los Angeles Times
:.ed the Chronicle "the most remarkable
T ropolitan daily in the nation." In a
tint column, Coates said that "instead of
lining wirephotos showing the trouble in
3
is, the Chronicle usually runs a page
picture showing leg and bosom art.
v I'm not complaining, just explaining,
nact. with all the trouble in the world, a
fll crumb of cheesecake is not too un-
'3 table."
Since the Chronicle has no major com-
*.ion in the City these days, I was hard
tjsed
to elicit criticism of the paper from
(cal publisher. However, Bruce Brug-
nln of the San Francisco Guardian did
It
1
ide a critique many Chronicle readers
n it agree with. "Here is a major news-
p:r," Brugmann said, "that spends
sands for promotion, yet operates
out its own Washington or Saigon
aus. With a foreign service extending
beyond Ferris Hartman and Anguiila.
a news policy more concerned with
set a bottle of Haig and Haig on the
room table then calls a press con-
ce, than with the Candlestick Park
3al, the capture of the P.U.C. by the
... ui es or by shenanigans in City Hall.
'ou recall when the Chronicle last did
d investigative story? The will to put
great newspaper, what Ken Stewart's
13
ftr
sc;
study of journalism history called 'easily
the worthiest paper on the Pacific Coast!
ended with the going of Paul Smith and
the coming of Scott Newhail. The will to
put out a good competitive paper ended
when the de Young heirs decided to kill
their independent paper of one hundred
and four years and merge it with the Ex
aminer into the San Francisco Newspaper
Printing Co."
H.
aving heard from his detractors. I
\vent to interview Scott at the Chronicle
again. As in my first interview. I was more
interested in his character than the charges
against him. He had on the same blue suit
and was sitting at his desk, eating an
orange, when 1 came in. Between bites, he
asked me:
"Why are you doing this piece? Do you
need a job?"
"No." I answered, sheepishly. "I think
you're an interesting man. that's all. Now
I'd like to ask you about music."
He looked me in the eye. "You really
want to know about music?"
"L'h huh."
He smiled and slipped into an inter
view mood.
"Well, let's see. Music has always been
a source of great solace and pleasure to
me. I play the piano badly: I'd even hate
to call it piano playing. While I was at
Lawrenceville. I used to go to New York
on weekends and sit in with the Negro
combos at the Orpheum Dance Palace at
42nd and Broadway."
"Who are your favorite musicians?"
"Well. I like all music. But the three
greatest musicians who ever lived, bar
none, are Louis Armstrong. Earl Hincs
nnd Art Tatum. In every horn that's blown
today, there's a little Louis. In every piano,
there's a little bit of Art Tatum."
'Is that why you helped promote the
Cannery deal for Earl Hines?"
"Yes. I'm trying to set a pattern so
musicians who get old and their fingers
won't work will have a place to go. I
never wanted to see it
happen to Earl as it
did to Fats Waller, who died in an upper
berth, alone."
"What about your painting?"
"I was a lousy painter, so I
bought a
camera and went into the newspaper busi
ness. I'm doing nudes now; I
guess I'm in
my Freudian stage."
"Who are your favorite authors?"
"My favorites are all dead. I have
shelves of historical novels. After World
War II, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny
was the last good novel, except Catcher
in the Rye. That was one of the best
American novels ever written. I don't read
much now. though, but when I do. I like
Evelyn Waugh and Bernard Shaw."
"How about politics?"
"I have none. I hate politics. I'm just
trying to leave the world a little bit better
than I found it. I'm a registered Repub
lican, if that means anything. But. I don't
vote a party line."
"Religion?"
"It's
something you live or you don't.
I
only go to church in foreign countries,
where it's part of the culture. Here, it's
deteriorated into such hyprocrisy. I don't
pay much attention. We're trying to de
velop a religion writer at the Clironicle
who will write about religion. Unfortu
nately, he's all hung up on Christianity.''
Scott started to riffle through some
papers in a drawer of his desk. He seemed
totally preoccupied as he continued talking
to me:
"You know, I went to Presbyterian
Sunday School when I was a child: I joined
the church at my mother's request. My
great-grandfather, a minister, founded the
Seminary at San Anselmo. I don't regret
one moment of it now because I learned a
great deal from the experience."
Do you write many editorials
these days?"
"No, not at the Chronicle. I used to at
the Signal; one was to impeach President
Johnson. And I offered to pay Senator
Murphy's expenses to North Korea when
he said we should take the Pueblo back.
No, I like writing editorials about airline
stewardesses or whatever bugs me. They
wouldn't fly flags at half mast in a Newhall
school for Martin Luther King, so I
chewed their ass on that score I really
chewed their ass for the bad manners."
"After the Chronicle and Signal, Scott,
what are your favorite papers?"
"Well, the Washington Post is fairly
self-conscious, but a good paper. They get
carried away with their importance. The
LA Times, if it didn't have the problem of
trying to find enough copy to string around
its ads, shows signs of being a good paper.
The Midwest papers are living thirty years
ago. Unfortunately, most papers are get
ting mechanized, boring. And papers don't
intrigue me as much as writers do."
Scott stopped rummaging through the
drawer and began to thumb through the
magazines piled on his desk. I assumed he
was still listening, and asked him about the
many pets he has always had.
"Yes," he answered, into a magazine.
"I love ail kinds of animals. They're all
different. As a child, I was particularly
fond of cats because nobody else seemed
to want them. I could always talk to cats.
Pancho is a very real person, with delight
ful momems of aberration. One pet I
really enjoyed was a mongoose we had.
But as I get older. I don't have time to
give the animals all the affection they need
and deserve."
"Other tnan San Francisco, what cities
do you like?"
"Well. Hong Kong. Canton, Rangoon,
Peking. Denver it should be our capital
Singapore. Calcutta. New Orleans,
lower Manhattan, parts of Boston. Flor
ence. Copennagen. London. Edinburgh,
Oaxaca. There are few great cities left in
the world: they're all Terra Hautes with a
Hilton and a pancake house."
"You mentioned several cities in the
Orient. Is it a ravorite part of ihe world?"
"Yes. I'm convinced the Orient will
inhabit this planet in a due length of time.
I've never been treated ungraciously there,
or been spoken to rudely. The people are
ladies and gentlemen.''
"I hate to use the word, but dd you
have a mission?"
"I want to see the newspapers con
tinue. They're the only guarantee of a free
communication in our English society.
Great newspapers have taken the place of
the pulpit; a great newspaper is the con
science of a people."
Scott sat forward and scowled. His
eyes became bluer, his face sadder as he
concluded:
"You know, my life has been dedicated
to watching people screw up because they
refuse to listen. We have to educate the
American people gently, with compas
sion to the fact that they are not in
fallible. There's going to be a lot of trouble
in this country; we are on the brink of
what may be a complete disaster. There's
an absolute lack of motivation: ask most
people what they want and they'll say a
new Mustang. The country is in desperate
need of a leader with the charisma of
F.D.R. People are trying to make sense of
a senseless world . . ."
His voice trailed off. After several
seconds, he looked at me.
"God. you've caught me in a pessi
mistic mood. But I do have hope. I'm so
impressed by the young; they are much
smarter than we, so much better educated,
better grounded. I have hopes . . ."
s.
"cons biggest hopes, I knew, were
Skip. Tony and Jon. After I left his office
for the second time. I decided to see the
twins. A week later, I flew to Burbank and
met Jon at the Signal building in Newhall.
The Signal offices showed Scott's
handiwork everywhere. In the reception
area was a long, wooden bar and two silver
cash registers from a gold rush saloon. The
paper itself was a Chronicle in miniature,
with local news sandwiched between
Count Marco. Adeline Daley. Hoppe.
McCabe. Dr. Miller, Art's Gallery and
Tiffany Jones. Above the masthead was
"Our Amazing Planet.
"
a column written
by Ruth, highlighting the day's absurdities.
Jon's office was crowded with old
desks, some covered with silver coins. On
the wall was a painting of a nude woman
with orange hair, sprawling seductively on
a red. velvet couch. A fan served as her
<.ache-sexe. In her left hand, she held an
orance. An ocelot played at her feet.
Through an open window painted behind
her, orance groves stretched tc
distant mountain.
According to an inscription on
canvas, the woman was Dona Roxa ;
Scott y Del Valle. 3rd Duquesa de Va i
cia. A bronze plaque, in Spanish, told :
story. I asked Jon to translate it for mi
"She was a great, great, great cr;]
mother on my father's side," he said.
"When was she painted?"
"Well, as you can see, the paintin i
very, very old. It was done. oh. I'd t
about 1 965. The story behind it was rr i
up two days earlier."
"Did your father paint it?"
"No, it was done by Bob McClay, i
did the portrait of Lucius Beebe in i
father's office."
"It looks like your father is tryin \
impart a little historical consciousnesi
the Santa Clarita Valley," I said. "Fr
the tract houses and bowling alleys I <
on the way in, it could use a sens*:
history."
"Yes," Jon said. "He's trying to iii
with Spain. But we don't call it the S t
Clarita anymore: its Valencia. The id
are convinced my father is a carpetba <
and that the name-change drive is i
because the Newhall Company cr
Valencia. But we attack the develop! t
when they compromise on their plans.
"So the townsfolk don't like the \
city editor?"
"A lot of them don't. Art Evans is
he ran the Sentinel here when my f; (
bought the Signal. Evans took out (
our editorials, which were desicne i
challenge the concept of this as a
"
community. Our philosophy was to ic >i
him, but Evans cot more and more i
ous. Finally, my father wrote a front :
editorial challenging him to a 'duel -i
repeat his allegations in public."
"What happened?"
"Well. Evans didn't show. He fc t
three weeks later, in January. 1966."
then. Jon told me. the Signal had cha s
from a 'controlled circulation' w. ;l
given away free to a combination i
trolled and paid newspaper with '
1 2.000 readers. Jon. who had ai }
physically and mentally resemblec i
father. \\ns clearly carrying on S t
fight. I was amazed by the parallel
n
tween the generations of Newhalls:
had been the middle, favorite son an, 3
stayed \vith his family: Jon. the mi
son by ten minutes, was doing the :
'
Knowing that he had not seemed
ested in the newspaper business at C <
Stanford. I asked him if his role c <
Signal was Scott's idea.
..
He never pushed me." Jon said,
"but I do seem to have his same sense of
mission. I can't help thinking he had me
in mind when he started the paper. Hell,
I had nothing else to do."
"One more thing, Jon. I have been
trying to decide what the most important
event in your father's life was. Losing his
leg seems to be quite significant: I could
see him roaming the world if that hadn't
tied him down. Do you agree?"
"Yes, I think so. He was a good
athlete, a baseball and tennis player, when
he was young. I know he developed his
mechanical knack after he lost his leg. But
I think the most important event was in
the Depression, when he realized he wasn't
going to have any money. Before that, he
only wanted to be a playboy. You remem
ber me at Gate? Well, my father was twice
as wild when he was my age. He had a still
at one school and was selling whiskey. The
vay he describes it. he wasn't kicked out
|
for having the still, but because his prices
r.vere too high. I remember another story,
|I think he was at Webb or Lawrenceville.
lAnyway. there was a student assembly, for
(readings, after dinner. My father came late
tone night; his seat was in the first row, and
ihe had to walk down the aisle. The kids
i;n the front had their legs up, blocking his
way. So he just stood there, in front of
everybody, and bellowed, 'Make way for
King Newhall.'
"
I stayed in Newhall that night, and
went with the twins to a church meet-
rig called to discuss segregation in the
:ommunity. The next morning, Jon asked
|ne to write a Signal story under the byline
pi Nigel Rigsby. religious correspondent,
urging local whites to confront their grow
ing racial crisis.
Tony Newhail drove me to the airport
n one of his mother's cars. On the way, he
sked me what I was going to write when
ended my odyssey. I told Tony I thought
[is
father was a real artist who, instead of
xploring the world as he might have
j-ished
had instead created a world of his
|'.vn.
He could have handled any profes-
ton if he took life, and himself, seriously.
ie reminded me of Konchis in The
\fa%us. who was a brilliant psychologist
jnd puppeteer. Fortunately, I said, he
:emed to channel most of his manipuiat-
e energy into words and into his hands.
Tony agreed: "Yes, he's usually got
mething in his hands. Lately, when he
ks with people in his office, he fixes up
ffany Jones' cleavage with a white paint
ush and black pen. It's an English strip.
u know, and the American distributor
nsors the originals. But the Chronicle
d the Signal show her as she was meant
be."
I told Tony of my research into the
rawaddy Steam Navigation Co. He
Jghed. then said:
"The Irrawaddy seems to be getting
t of hand. In the past few years, my
in his office?"
"No, my mother did that. She's in the
painting, too. You know, Waldo is her
maiden name. Lovelock is a town in
Nevada where they used to hunt arrow
heads. And Scott is my father's mother's
family name."
"What's that animal in the painting?"
"That's Pancho, our coati-mundi."
"And that cannon in the corner of his
office?"
"Oh, that. My father tells some people
it came from the 'Burma Queen.' Actually,
a friend gave it to him. It was last used to
hold up grave markers in a Chinese
cemetery in Manila. Say, is Sir Waldo the
star of your story?"
"He was going to be. Then I saw the
Duchess of Valencia . . . Now I can't de
cide. Do you know who he really is?"
"No, I guess I really don't. If you find
out, you'll have quite a story."
Tony dropped me at the airport, and I
boarded my plane. I thought about the
Newhalls during my flight home, and
when I reached the City, I decided to stop
my search for the "real" Scott Newhall.
Wherever I went, whomever I talked to.
I saw yet another facet of the man.
Besides, my approach was wrong. It is
Scott's nature to keep the world, and per
haps himself, guessing who he really is.
Furthermore, he isn't any one human
being. He seems to have become and to
have lived through many people. For
example, he is Emperor Norton and Clif
ford Prout, Jr. He is Herb Caen, with his
love and plans for San Francisco. He is
Art Hoppe, hurting while he laughs, a pro
at popping balloons. He is Lucius Beebe.
haughty and non-conforming. He is Count
Marco, ribbing the women he needs. And
he is Charles McCabe. a Fearless Specta-
:or to an often-absurd world.
Scott is also his son, Jon. He is his
creat-grandfather, Henry Mayo Newhall,
.vho made it big in a state that knows fesv
bounds. He is Dona Roxanna Scott y Del
Yalle. seductive and sly, with a woman's
ability to make men perform. He is Sir
'Valdo Lovelock Scott, proud, impeccably
English in morals and style as well as
grammar, born to control the city-state of
San Francisco, if not Rangoon.
As citizens of this city-state, we are
perhaps lucky that Scott Newhall couldn't
arford to be a playboy and that the Mer
maid never made it
past Acapulco. Her
skipper and the newspaper he steers have
given us some wondrous, if not always
newsworthy, fantasies over the years. And
he has been a father-figure to quite a few
writers, including me.
Now that much of his fight with the
Examiner is over, the lack of competition
:ould drive Scott to move permanently to
his Southern California domain. In fact.
he and Ruth have just sold their Berkeley
home and are spending more time between
:r.eir City apartment and Piru.
But 1 doubt that Scott will ever make it
to Vera Cruz and the marimbas. There s
bound to be some trouble to start or to
496
Appendix D. 497
BERKELEY FELLOWS AT U.C. SATHER GATE MEETING
MAY 23, 1969
Inevitably, the hour comes when those who have been nourished
by a great university must do all in their power to return in kind
the gifts which were bestowed upon them.
All of us are Berkeley Fellows of the University of California.
This we all regard as a singular honor, granted us by one of the great
universities of human history. We are here as individuals to help and
to heal. Our lives were immeasurably enriched by our association with
the University when we were students or young professors. This campus
opened new windows in our minds and souls so that for all our lives
we must live in gratitude and debt to this greatest of universities.
I think first of all I should introduce myself. My name is Scott
Newhall. I am the great-grandson of the founder of the San Francisco
Theological Seminary across the bay in San Anselmo; I am also the
great-grandson of a young man who came to California to look for gold a
hundred years ago. Our family has been distinguished by going bankrupt
in each generation. I assure you, I have carried on this noble tradition
in very good style. I could mention some other miscellaneous facets of
my life. I have been a working newspaper man, for example, for 3^ years
and shall probably die with a pencil or at least an eraser in my hand.
Incidentally, three years ago, I held the Pacific Coast drag race
championship in C Class dragsters, and I am currently the holder of
the San Francisco Bay steamboat race championship. Both of these last
two endeavors I
hope will continue for some time to co.ne.
I should like to introduce my colleagues, all of whom are Berkeley
Fellows. Some of them are Bay Area businessmen and professional men
-2- 498
of international repute. Some of them are the men who help sustain
the University of California as faculty members and who taught us all
we know. First of all, -there is
CLAUDE HUTCHINSON, former mayor of Berkeley and emeritus professor of
Agriculture, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Vice President of
the University.
DANIEL E. KOSHLAND, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Director
of Levi Strauss and Company; Member of the Board of Directors of
American Trust Company; National Ice and Cold Storage Company; member
of the Industrial Welfare Commission; graduate of U.C. in 1913. A
long-time San Francisco philanthropist.
JEAN CARTER WITTER: Partner in Dean Witter and Co., investment banker;
Director of I. Magnin and Co., Yosemite Park and Curry Company;
Campaign Chairman of the San Francisco Community Chest; Chairman of
the Red Cross War Fund campaign (19^5 to 19^6); past president of the
Investment Banker's Association of America; past president of the
California Alumni Association; former Regent of the University;
graduated from California 1916.
RAYMOND JAMES SONTAG: emeritus professor of History, U.C. Berkeley;
B.S., University of Illinois, 1920, A.M., 1921; Ph.D., University of
Pennsylvania, 192^; Litt.D., Marquette U., 1959; former instructor
and professor at the University of Iowa, Princeton University; at U.C.
Berkeley 1925-65; chairman of History department there 1939-M; Sidney
Hellman Ehrman professor of European history at Berkeley 19^1~65.
Chief of German War Documents Project, Department of State 19^6-49; author,
editorof several books, mostly on modern European history.
GEORGE R. STEWART, historian and author; A.B., Princeton 1917; M.A. ,
U.C. 1920; Ph.D., Columbia 1922; author of numerous books from 1922:
on: Sheep Rock, 1951; U.S. 10, 1953; American Ways of Life, 195*+;
The Years of the City, 1955; The California Trail, 1962.
STEPHEN C. PEPPER, former chairman of the Department of Philosophy
at U.C. and of the Department of Art; Mills Professor of Intellectual
and Kcral Philosophy and Civil Polity, Departments of Art and History;
former professor of c;-sthet ics; specialty, aesthetics.
-3-
499
DONALD H. MCLAUGHLIN, U.C. 1914; University of California Regent 1951-66;
Dean, College of Mining, U.C., 19^1-^2; Dean, College of Engineering,
19*42-43; director, Western Air Lines, Wells Fargo Bank; director, International
Nickel Co. of Canada; chairman, Horcestake Mining Co.; director, San Luis
Mining Co; Emeritus Professor of Mining at U.C.
CHARLES L. CAMP ,
emeritus professor of Paleontology, U.C.; former curator
of amphibians and reptiles at the Museum of Paleontology, U.C.; world-
famous authority on fossil amphibians; zoologist; African explorer.
JOEL HENRY HILDEBRAND, chairman, Dept. of Chemistry, U.C., 19^1-^3; dean
of men, 1923-26; dean, college of Letters and Sciences, 1939-^3; dean of
the college of Chemistry, 19^9-51; called the dean of American Chemistry
teachers; noted authority on the chemistry of solutions.
JOHN L. SIMPSON, retired Vice Presdient of Finance, Bechtel Corp.; alumnus
of U.C. Berkeley, 1913; active in Belgium American Fund, Counsel on Foreign
Relations, World Affairs Council, and the Foreign Policy Association.
EWALD T. GRETHER, Dean of U.C. School of Business, 1947-1961; director
of U.C. survey group, old age research; appointed director of the U.C.
Institute of Industrial Relations in 1952, succeeding Clark Kerr;
economist (19^8) of the National Security Resources Board; a professor
of economics at U.C. 1939; acting dean of the college of Commerce there
in 1936 and selected the most popular professor of Economics there that
year.
RAYMOND T. BIRGE, Emeritus professor of Physics at Cal, and long time
chairman of the department. Birge Hall at UCB is named in his honor.
Not present but endorsing this statement was Mr. GARRET McENERNEY II,
attorney, McEnerney and Jacobs; U.C. Alumnus '31, Boalt '3^.
500
As all the world knows, these are not tranquil days on the Berkeley
campus. There has been violence and bloodshed. Military troops and
weaponry have convinced most of the world that a state of anarchy
exists unchecked in the shadow of Sather Gate.
The picture of a helicopter spraying tear 'gas on our campus is
a thoroughly repugnant scene. That is why we are standing here today.
The pictures of rioting students, their friends and disciples,
are equally damaging in the eyes of the world. It is true that a major
part of the provocation has come from non-students. The Berkeley
Campus of the University of California has become a political battle
ground of considerable magnitude. Goodwill, learning and the rule of
reason have become battle casualties.
We are here today to plead for the honor and integrity of the
University of California.
What we seek is peace. No University is ever tranquil. In the
long history of education of civilized man, the universities of the
world have constantly been the seat of change. What we ask, however,
is that the change take place not by violence in the streets but by
reason in the classroom in the minds of students and professors.
A University such as California represents an unbroken thread of the
expanding human mind which began centuries before the Golden Age of
Greece and has continued through Athens, Rome, Bologna, Padua, Crakow,
Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Princeton and other centers
of the intellect too numerous to mention here.
It represents the power of the human mind as exemplified by the great
men who have used logic, reason and thought to build a better and a
richer world for all.
-5- 501
The University of California must be removed as an arena in which
students, faculty and political administrations alike are the implements
of self-centered factions.
The students should be heard but v:ithin the academic walls of
reason not by angry shouts.
The administration, in turn, should continue to listen to the faculty
and should be given a chance to establish here in Berkeley the most gifted
teaching assemblage ever gathered together, in any place at any time.
There should be a sensible and continuing colloquy among the students,
faculty and the administration.
As Berkeley Fellows, we have no administrative power, we have no
public purse with which to threaten or cajole.
We ere here to ask that the students, the faculty and the administration
protect their own priceless University. We are here to ask that non-students
do not use this great institution as a whipping boy, and to ask the same
thing cf any and all citizens of the state of California.
We pray that the University may be spared from further depredations
and that we. may humbly assist our great school in rebuilding the fire of
reason and intellect that, curing recent months, has been flickering.
Appendix E. 502
She was fat. She was thin.
Now what is she?
SYMICHAEL ROBERTSON
CHRONICIE STAFF WRITER
Where
is the Fat Venus?
Do you know her? Has
=he taken you into her confidence
>nd shared the poignant memories
if the women who envied her and
: he men who desired her? Will you
:uide us to her?
There are so many questions
e would like to ask.
Thirty years ago the cities by
;he bav thrilled and then despair
ed as the saga of the Fat Venus
playeo. itself out on the pages of
this newspaper. A kind of modern
Cinderella, she was singled out to
realize her dream of escaping the
cocoon of flesh that enveloped her
beauty. She was bullied and re
warded, coaxed and cosseted, de
nounced and celebrated. At last,
-ne was triumphant. And then sne
disaupeared into anonymity, the
corn 01 her creator ringing m her
ears.
To beein at the beginning,
ince tnere was a Chronicle colum
nist named Count Marco (original
ly Marx Spinelli of Pittsburen. Pa.,
and not. in fact, what you might
ail a Genuine count) who earned
ime ana fortune bv pointing out
he manv things that were wrone
vuh tte women of San Francisco.
He wrote columns advising
vomen on how to undress in front
i their nusbands and how conce
unaresseai to share a frisky bath
with mose same husbands.
Women were not precisely
:ure tnat Count Marco was their
1
rue. cear friend. (He was. of
ourse.i One ot the things he did
as to DICK out a woman of whole-
erne i: plain appearance, put her
nstaee at a local theater ana dress
.^r UD ana paint her up until she
-err.ea the acme 01 fashion.
A Professor Higgins
But Count Marco was a kind of
artist. He asked his editor why he
should stop at the surface of the
skin. Why couldn't he take a wom
an fully, perhaps even exuberant-
1
v. fleshed, and wring her down m-
o the penect woman.'
On Oct. 16. 1960. the full-page
newspaper ads announcing the
contest appeared, illustrated by a
drawing of the Venus di Milo con-
;
iderably inflated around the hips.
Entries poured in. Count Mar
co selected "3.563 pounds of over
weight beauties . . . from a field of
entries whose weight totaled a
magnificent 41% TONS!"
In November 1960. 18-year-old
San Franciscan Mary Anne
McGrath was chosen to be the Fat
Venus. She weighed 253 pounds.
Actually, she had gone on a crash
diet and scaled down from 275
:nereiv to eive her the courage to
enter the contest on its last day.
Today, exclusive to the Chron
icle, Mark Spinelli, the quondam
Count Marco, reveals the secret of
Mary Anne McGrath's selection: "I
liked her legs."
She was the prototvpicai fat
5irl with a pretty face. A high
school dropout, she lived at home
and cared for her half-brother and
half-sisters. It was the prize at the
end of diet that attracted her: A
Columbia Pictures screen test in
Hollywood.
The pounds dropped from
Marv Anne McGrath s body as the
months dropped from the calen
dar. In late April, she broke the
JOO-pouna barrier. In May. she be-
~:an voice and dramatic training.
During the summer she was offer
ed tutelage in the art of womanly
:narm from top ban Francisco
models. Each week, she repaired
o the Chronicle for measurme
.no. weighing.
Impugning Womonnood
The city, agog at the count's
latest caper, held its breath. In
deed, for a Fairy Godfather. Count
Marco delighted in sowing the
seeds of skepticism. He doubted
that an American girl could sub
mit her willful self to his strict reg
imen. Give me a daughter of Eu
rope, he had said. Give me an Ital
ian, and you will see something.
But each week the press ac
counts boasted of the Fat Venus
weight spiraling ever downward.
Then, in January, the scandal
broke. "What Shall We Do With a
Female Judas?" the headline de-
clarea.
"I believed, and I was be
trayed." the Count's story began.
"I have no liking to admit it. but
see what the Fat Venus has done to
me and vou. See how she has re
paid my kindness and patience
with feminine guile. Are all you
American women alike? Can not a
one of you be trusted?"
It was a tale of horror. Some
time in November the Fat Venus
had slipped from her diet into the
swamp of lies and deceit. Girdles
and brassieres cinched so tight
they arew olood concealed her
failure from the tape measure.
The abashed personnel of "the spe
cial office of the Fat Venus pro
ject" (as the count described it)
were torced to admit the truth.
Zach thouent someone else was
weighing Mary Anne McGrath.
The count was not inclined to-
vard mercv. "Mary Anne was
weak." he wrote. "She had not the
trength to resist what you call
.rench tries and strawberry mait-
ds. And word comes to me sne
: neakeu canay bars. So I decree
that because of this weakness the
liet ana Mary Anne are no more.
'
But pernaps the door was not
losed so tirmly as it seemed! A bal
lot appearea in the newspaper asK-
:ng Chromcie readers whether or
not the Fat Venus should be civen
:nothercnance.
Mary Anne McGrath beg^ea
iie puolic to understand. She aa-
nitted she was a "traitor, a real
Jeneaict Arnold." Ballots nourea
.n. The count announced that the
ublic had 5no<?en. iTodav. the
ount is mere than a little evasive
nmif incr u.-nat t ho nnhlt^ cmn ,
PHOTOS er THC CHKONICLE
Former Chronicle columnist Count Marco and
his Fat Venus, Mary Anne McGrath. He liked
her legs.
Spirited away to a mountain farm, Mary Anne
McGrath reappeared as 'whistle bait' a few
months later, new dress size 1 2 from 26.
Again, the battle was joined.
In late 1962, the moment arrived
when McGrath had no more to
Jive, though a good deal more to
lose. Gagging on the act, the count
'vas forced to beg a woman."
With her consent, the newspaper
spirited her away to a mountain
larm and posted a 24-hour guard.
On Jan. 7. 1963. the astonish-
ing photographs consumed the
pages of the Chronicle. There was
Mary Anne McGrath in a low-slung
bathing suit of the purest white,
basking poolside, accepting lustful
homage from a blond-haired
beach boy.
"Whistle Bait," the caption
read.
A Greet Loss
Her measurements had man
aged the precipitous descent from
47 :
z41-52Vz to a provocative 38-26-
33. Her dress size had dropped
from 26 to 12. She weighed 145 Ibs..
t he perfect upholstery for her stat
uesque 5-foot, 10%-inch frame.
In December, the Fat Venus
had flown to Hollywood. In her
own words. Mary Anne McGrath
described her feelings. "I was born
..earn.
"
she said. "Suddenly and
miraculously I was Cinderella.
i ressea all in gold, and steeping on
to a Hollywood sound staee tor a
Count Marco's comments at
his moment of vindication had a
dour tone. Rather than exulting,
he fretted. He seemed unable to
forget the betrayal of the previous
year, "a betrayal that by compari
son would make Delilah's look like
a friendly gesture toward her poor
Samson."
The words he finally uttered
were terrible: "I hereby predict
that within six months Mary Anne
McGrath will be as fat as ever, if
not fatter. For you see. I know you
American women all too well. But
I
hope in this one instance Mary
Anne will prove me for the first
time to be wrong."
The predicted six months lat
er came the final chapter in the sa-
?a 01 the Fat Venus. Mary Anne
McGrath had sued the Chronicle in
imall claims court, contendins
that she was owed $200 for the two
veeks she was confined to her
.oumrv hideaway dunne the final
effort to pinch the weight away.
;an rrancisco
Photographers were waiting
as she left the courtroom.
"She covered her face with a
scarf when her latest pictures
were being taken." Count Marco
reported, "but as my experienced
eye roved over the coat I perceived
that she is once again fat, fat, fat."
There, abruptly, this peculiar
variation of the old story of Pyg
malion and Galatea came to an
end. Count Marco, now a plump
old gentlemen in his 70s. says his
greatest creation seemed to drop
off the edge of the world.
So, there it stands a bril
liant promotional gimmick that
may lor may not) have been a
small-scale tragedy. Only the Fat
Venus can tell us that. During her
two-year odyssev. which words
were hers and which were drawn
from her? What is her side of
things? What was truly gained,
truly lost?
Where is the Fat Venus.'
cia. f-ibruarv -12. l?v
HOB Angeles 3ft
Appendix F. 504
8 Part II / Sunday, August 14, 1988 / F
'I am scared to
death that the
editorial side of
that paper will
become
secondary to the
advertising side.'
Attorney Daniel Hon
Even Enemies Mourn
Exit of the Newhalls
From Namesake Paper
By STEVE PADILLA and MAYERENE BARKER. Times Staff Writers
Word traveled quickly when the
influential Newhall family an
nounced last week it had quit the
Newhall Signal, the scrappy news
paper that has recorded life in the
Santa Clarita Valley under the
family's reign for 25 years.
Jim Ventress. executive director
of the local Boys and Girls Club,
recalls his telephone jangling the
morning the news hit "I got five or
six phone calls." Everyone asked:
"Did you hear about the New-
halls?"
The fuss is understandable. With
the Newhalls at the helm, the
paper had become the local voice of
the valley as it grew from a
suburban outpost to a growing,
bustling extension of Los Angeles.
Consider: Santa Clarita might not
have become a full-fledged city in
1987 had the Signal not blazed the
trail with persuasive editorials,
cityhood proponents say.
Consider: A plan to put a hazard
ous-waste facility near the valley's
drinking water wells might have
gone through in 1970 if the feisty
paper had not rallied opposition.
Consider: Everybody who is
anybody in the Santa Clarita Valley
has had a coming out in the paper's
longstanding gossip column. As one
devoted reader says. "You really
hadn't arrived until you got your
nameln Mimi's column."
But all that is gone. Last Tues
day, chief editorial writer Scott
paper's editor and anonymous au
thor of Mimi's column, and their
son Tony. 47, the publisher,
abruptly quit the Signal. The resig
nations came after a long- festering
conflict over finances and stock
ownership with the paper's absen
tee owner, Morris Newspaper Corp.
of Savannah. Ga.
The changeover shocked a com
munity where, one recent survey
showed, 88% of the residents
polled read the Signal, even though
some said they took its information
with a grain of salt With outsiders
overseeing the newspaper's transi
tion, many are concerned that the
Signal will no longer be able to
cover local issues knowiedgeabiy.
Others are certain the Signal will
lose the edge that in the past has
galvanized the valley's residents.
Questions About Future
Few know what to expect from
the Signal's new management, but
former editors and executives of
Morris Newspaper Corp. said the
company's papers elsewhere lack
the brand of chutzpah that has
been the hallmark of the Signal.
Like many small newspapers try
ing to avoid alienating advertisers,
they sometimes play it safe.
Moreover, the former employees
said. Morris Newspaper Corp.
brings ttHHt- InwMBMf known for
its consistency a history of frequent
staff turnovsr. both ;
-. its executive
Continued from Page a.
and reporter ranks. For the first
time in a quarter of a century, the
local paper will not be run by
locals.
"It's another reminder that we're
not a small community anymore."
said Barbara Okromck. a Valencia
resident
"I am scared to death that the
editorial side of that paper will
become secondary to the advertis
ing side." said Daniel Hon. an
attorney and longtime friend of
Scott Newhall. '.'It will become a
'great loss to the community if that
is allowed to happen."
The Moms chain operates 39
newspapers nationwide, the largest
of which is the Signal, with a
circulation of 40.000. In California,
the chain also runs the Cares
Conner. Willows Journal and Man
tes Bulletin.
A former executive who worked
for the company for nine yean. Bill
Camp, said the newspapers are not
flashy and suffer from high turn
over that ha attributes to low
wages.
"It's a chain that had a tendency
to go through their people rather
quickly," agreed James 0. Mar
shall, city manager of Ceres, a town
Of 18.000 near Modesto. Marshall
said the Ceres Courier, one of two
Morris papers he is familiaf with,
covers local issues well but does
not stir much debate.
Of the Willows Journal, 26 -year;
old editor Jae Hudon said, 'We're
nothing real special:" The Jourhal
circulates 3,000 newspapers week
ly ID Willows, a Northern Califor
nia town of 4,900 residents: A
three-member staff puts' Bui the
paper. Uudon said. .
Darell Phillips, publisher o; the
chain's three Northern California
papers, is not surprised by such
assessments. "You've got to re
member this is a chain of small
newspapers," he said. "The papers
act as training grounds for young
reporters, and low salaries for i
rookie reporters are to be cxpect-
-v
ed."
Phillips, who will assume duties
as interim publisher of the Siunai
On Tuesday, said there al'e
1
ho piati*
to reduce the staff or chattge the
?7-year-old paper's editorial pos-
tllre, as some have feared.
If that's the case, reporter haf -
ori Hormel predicted, the RiBhal
will remain mUefi as before
'^ihgs will stay the same.
;
i'he
Newhalls have hired a sulff tit
Pl**i H SIGNAL* r*i ( t 14
Continued from Page 13
reporters who think as they do."
Hut readers agree there is no
way to duplicate the highly per
sonal voice of the Newhalls. who
edited their paper in a manner
befitting the highly opinionated
ana rubble -rousing publications of
the 19th Century.
Fulminating Editorials
Gone, it seems, are fulminating
editorials under banner headlines
such as "Sugar and Spice and a
Knee in the Groin" or "Big Rigs
Won't Stop/Throw the Bastards in
Jail."
Family patriarch Scott Newhall.
who formerly was editor of the San
Francisco Chronicle, had become a
legendary curmudgeon in Califor
nia journalism with those outspo
ken front-page editorials. He once
called the slate Legislature "a
whining, lying, groveling gang of
sneak thieves."
"I would imagine the paper
would continue but be a little more
conservative," said Santa Clarita
City Councilwoman Jo Anne Dar-
cy, whom the Signal once called
"the handmaiden to the Ayatol-
lah." It was the paper's way of
saying she serves as an aide to Los
Angeles County Supervisor Mike
Antonovich.
"I think the paper will lose a
certain spirit that pervaded the
whole group out there that was
engendered strictly by the New-
halls." said Jim Foy. executive
director of the Greater Los Angeles
Press CUib. In March, the ciuu
honored me Signal for best overall
news coverage by a weekly or
semiwecKly newspaper.
Friend Worries
Connie Wordcn, a longtime
friend of the Newhalls and a Santa
Clunla planning commissioner, said
she worries about the future of the
Signal.
"I think one uf the strengths of
this valley has been the Signal."
she said. "Because of its colorful
nature, everyone reads it. Scott has
had the most provocative editori
als. As maddening as some of his
editorials have been, they are al
ways thought provoking. They've
punctured a few of our balloons,
but it was good for us."
Joseph 11. Sdullaci. who as presi
dent of Magic Mountain has come
under occasional attack of the
editorials, called the Newhalls "an
integral part of the valley's person
ality. Some people will miss mem,
and everybody will rcmcmovr
them."
506
But for all its fans, the paper has
plenty of detractors.
"There are probably a lot of
people who are glad (Scott) New-
hail walked." said Camp, the for
mer Morns executive and now
general manager of Live Oak Pub
lishing Co. in Northern California.
Okrontck said she. like many
readers, enjoyed the paper and
editorials but found some coverage
overly dramatic.
"We enjoy the Signal." Okromck
said. "We say, -Read the Signal,
and then discard about 50% of
what it says as far as being factu
al.'
"
Her remarks echo findings of a
recent public opinion poll of valley
residents that waa commissioned
by the Santa Clarita City Council.
The poll of 400 households, con
ducted randomly by telephone,
found the Signal was the valley's
most widely read newspaper.
About 88% of the respondents said
they read the paper often or some
times.
But the Signal also has received
the lowest marks for quality. Al
most 50% of those polled said the
paper was poor or fair, and 11%
gave it an excellent rating. The
poll, released last month, had
quizzed Santa Clarita Valley resi
dents on subjects ranging from
newspaper readership to traffic to
the City Council's performance. It
had a margin of error of plus or
minus 5 percentage points.
Uied to Critlciim
Scott Newhall was used to such
criticism. He once said the Signal
helped unite the Santa Clarita
Valley's diverse communities by
being the kind of paper everyone
hated.
Despite its enemies, the newspa
per always has been able to rouse
the community into action and
sometimes change the course of
events.
Wordcn recalls that in 1975 a
group of residents began mustering
support for cityhood. Ruth Newhall
convinced them that instead ol
forming a new city, the Santa
Clarita Valley should break off anc
form a new county.
Tho drive tc create C.inyor
County made it to the ballot twice,
but waa rejected both tunes by
voters in other parts of Los Angeles
County. Eventually, the paper
backed cityhood. and Santa Clarita
became a separate city in 1987.
Now, many credit the Newhalls for
throwing their support behind the
idea.
"Our valley will be much poorer
without them. They have been
sLrnnr rnntnhiitnr<! In lhi vallnv "
New Editor
Against thai backdrop, interim
publisher Phillips said his first
concern is to find a new editor.
Editorial control of the paper will
be local, not dictated from corpo
rate headquarters in Savannah, he
promised.
"The only thing I'm not allowed
to do is change the masthead and
raise the price," he said.
As for the Newhalls, local lead
ers and readers are sure they have
not seen the last of the family,
especially Scott. After all, this is
the man who. when threatened
with a libel suit for describing the
local trucking industry as the
"Southern California Panzer Di
vision of Murder Incorporated."
brazenly reprinted the editorial in
full.
"In the back of my mind, I just
can't sec them stopping," Darcy
said. "If they don't come back
quickly, it'll be the biggest loss this
community has known."
Scott Newhall. great-grandson
of pioneer land baron Henry Mayo
Newhall. said that after spending
about 50 years in journalism, he
plans to slay in the business but has
no definite plans. When asked
whether he had considered starting
another newspaper, he said, "Now
that's an idea."
"I wouldn't be surprised if Scott
doesn't decide to start a newspa
per," said state Sen. Ed Davis
(R- Valencia) whose wife's family
initially sold the paper io the
Newhalls in 1963. "They'd better
worry about Scott coming in and
competing with them."
When Newhall sold the Signal to
Morris in 1978. Davis said, there
"was a clause in his contract that
he could not start another paper for
a certain number of years . . that
clause ran out three years ago."
Angry Newhalls Launch Own
By STEVE PADILLA and MAYERENE BARKER, Times Staff Writers
Anewspaper war is brewing in the
Santa Clarita Valley and a legend
ary California editor and his wife,
both in their 70s, are preparing to fire the
first shot
Scott and Ruth Newhall. descendants
of pioneer valley settlers, confirmed
Monday that they plan to launch a
weekly newspaper to compete with the
Newhall Signal, the paper they edited for
25 years until their surprise resignations
last week. The family quit after a
long- festering conflict over finances and
stock ownership with the paper's owner.
the Morns Newspaper Corp. of Savan
nah. Ga.
"At my age, I must be crazy," said
Ruth Newhall, 78, of starting the yet -un
named weekly.
As she did at the Signal, Ruth Newhall
will edit the weekly. Her husband, family
patriarch Scott Newhall, 74. will serve as
publisher and editorial writer. Their son.
Tony Newhall. 47. who was oublisher of
the Signal, plans to go into the computer
business and will not join his parents at
the new paper.
Their announcement means that Scott
Newhall, a legendary figure in California
journalism, will continue with the dis
tinctive, fulminating brand of newspa-
penng he practiced for 20 years at the
San Francisco Chronicle before he be
came publisher in Newhall.
Colorful Editorials
Newhall. for instance, has written
front-page editorials calling the Legisla
ture "a whining, lying, groveling gang of
sneak thieves," and characterizing the
San Fernando Valley as "a heaven on
Earth for winos, dog poisoners, child
abusers. husband swappers, wife beaters,
porno stars, bill jumpers, street racers,
defrocked priests and street -corner bor
dellos."
The paper's banner headlines were no
less provocative: "Sugar and Spice and a
Knee in the Groin," said one. "Big Rigs
Won't Stop/ Throw the Bastards in Jail."
said another.
During the turbulent 1960s, the Signal
was the only newspaper in California to
run a DPI wire photograph of then-Gov.
Ronald Reagan discreetly making an
obscene gesture as protesting students at
UC Berkeley booed and hissed at him.
"The Signal has not been bashful."
Ruth Newhall said.
Word of the Newhalls' intention to
start a competing newspaper in Santa
Clarita. a fast-growing city north of the
San Fernando Valley, was no surprise to
Moms Newspaper Corp. officials.
"We thought they probably would."
said Darell Phillips, a Morns employee
who will supervise the management
changeover at the Signal, which expand
ed in June from three days a week to five.
"They had mentioned that possibility.
"The Newhall Signal does a good job,"
said Phillips, publisher of the Manteca
Bulletin, a Morris newspaper in Northern
California. "Basically, with competition
from the Newhalls or without, we'll just
do the best job possible in the area."
Ruth Newhall said she and her hus
band have already rented office space,
have begun interviewing prospective
reporters and circulation and advertising
personnel and hope to have their first
edition published in three or four
weeks.
Scott Newhall is the great-
grandson of Henry Mayo Newhall,
a pioneer land baron who put
together the 37.000-acre Newhall
Ranch on which the planned com
munity of Valencia is being devel
oped. Independently wealthy,
Newhall served for two decades aa
editor of the San Francisco Chron
icle, where he became famous for
his colorful and uninhibited prac
tices.
Ruth Newhall also is a pioneer
journalist. More than 50 years ago
she was a police reporter for the
Chronicle a rare beat for female
reporters of the day.
The Newhalls' return to jour
nalism does not surprise loyal read
ers. After all. this family, when
threatened with a libel sun for
describing the local trucking in
dustry as the "Southern California
Panzer Division of Murder Incor
porated." brazenly reprinted the
editorial in full.
What did surprise Santa Clarita
residents was the Newhalls' resig
nation from the Signal, which they
purchased in 1963.
Jim Ventress. executive director
of the local Boys and Girls Club,
recalls his telephone jangling the
morning the news hit. "I got five or
six phone calls." Everyone asked:
"Did you hear about the New-
halls?"
the brand of chutzpah that
been the hallmark of the Sig
The Morns chain operates
newspapers nationwide, the larges
of which is the Signal, with
circulation of 40.000.
Phillips said there are no plans t
reduce the staff or change th
77- year-old paper's editorial pa
lure, as some have feared. Editon;
control of the paper will be Iocs
not dictated from Savannah, h
promised.
"The only thing I'm not allows
to do is change the masthead ar
raise the price," he said.
But for all its fans, the Sigi
under the Newhalls had plenty
detractors.
Valencia resident Barb;
Okronick said that she, like mi
readers, enjoyed the paper ;!
editorials but found some cover:
overly dramatic. "We say, 'Ri
the Signal, and then discard ab t
50% of what it says as far as be?
factual,'
"
Okronick said.
Few know what to expect fn
the Signal's new management, i
former editors and executive: f
Morris Newspaper Corp. said e
company's papers elsewhere in
If that's the case. Signal repor
Sharon Hormeil predicted. "Thi ;
will stay the same. The Newh i
have hired a staff of reporters v )
think as they do."
But some change is inevitable
"I would imagine the par
would continue but be a little IT e
conservative," said Santa Claa
City Councilwoman Jo Anne [
cy. whom the Signal once ca d
the "handmaiden" to the "Aya
lah." It was the paper's wa; i
saying she serves as an aide to s
Angeles County Supervisor f e
Antonovich.
Appendix G.
Santa Clarita Vallev Citizen
&
-J 2 I
* *
S -||
lie
g | o ?f
el *m &.S5
09
C
O
a
to
V
P*
WD
S
-2
C:
o
LU
rr. s
yj ;
Cfl ?
i
U
= i
CJ I
tin,- ;ij *^
= S s
2 r s = S
f || | |
El-Sw s
3 ? a O o
*:= 5
jj a .2 = r ^
*Q ^ >.
~ u > ~
-
lU* 11 1* xi ^
5-*
z i J : s
F i ^ 8 e -
5 - 5
J
o
f
5
I
c
u
i|
* a
Is
M
"K.
z Q.
*
'!*-
'
U -
V =
S J
< II
?
llll -iili
- a;
- <
^
~ 5 a e -
s g o 2 'u
i> * u * fj
^ y 1 ~- I
i
IB 1 c 1 1 =
.2 5b 2 S - c ^
y
x
' m *C U ^"
~ *s i
w 5
811 M*
!|!!|I
- (5.-- > _
>-2..s E 3
I 14 Jvf
= M H v 2 =
M \J
c n =
'> >*
51
I s
* S
|1
d "
^ J!
I
2
s? *
*
- n Z s
- "3 F H ' 'H
2 C c ^*
- 5 c ^
1
i
1 ". i =
JS.^lS
: S> s .s
^ a 3 te
Msl
o
;
.3 S =
l^|
= a
g i
ill
-s o. 3
til
M
H
u
x
i U
e 2.
2 a
~
3 l>
~ -S
C E w c.
S = 3
5 * ^
ill
4 c I"
ir |
; = *e-l
^ =
M o
I S 2 t
-
1 frll I
il
--3
i
= "3
-
i X
=
1-1*1
* 5 > i S W
=
|| S
|.S
=
*
1 *
g*
|
*
| E | V.
f a E."E i
-=
i ^ s
- a ^ ^
SBps*9%<B
||js"i|
= H x il-I.I >-^
V = n 5
Ms
is
r K G P*J
^r H Q.-O ij u;
- - t 8 g z
3 i- -5 Hi
- i g-.i H
'=..
|_^ z
B V &V
Sunday, September 11, 1988 Page 19
508
Appendix H. 509
A RAZOR'S
EDGE
Icott
Newhall's pale
blue eyes blaze like
an acetvlene torch.
He leans forward. "I
wish vou wouldn't
get involved in this," he
begins, his aristocratic
tenor rising like mission
bells before a gathering
storm. "Because it's
going
to be a bitter one." he says,
"and we're going to kick
hell out of vou."
Hell hath no furv like
this scion of wealth and
privilege, to whom the
grand sweep of California
BY ELLIOT BLAIR
SMITH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MRKHANAUER
brand of journalism
against contemporary
standards of profitability
and objectivity "the clat
ter and clang," he savs, "of
today's branch-office style
newspaper publishing."
To be decided as well
tnav be the fate of the sur
rounding Santa Clarita
Vallev, the immense dry
riverbed just 30 miles
north of Los Angeles,
whose ancient tributaries
cut deep canvons into the
earth and which are
filling rapidlv anew with
history belongs. At issue this eve- the furthest outreaches of Southern
ning, over an elegant dinner in the
shadow of the Tehachapi and Santa
Susana mountains, amid the tnan-
zanita. oaks and desert scrub, is an
California's urban sprawl. In his
thundering front-page editorials.
Scott Newhall often boasted that the
bloodlines of Tombstone. Abilene
old-fashioned newspaper war that and Bullfrog. NY. ran through this
pits a landed familv against powerful
corporate interests: Scott Newhall.
74, and his crusading San Francisco
"grand and noble vallev." But it is no
longer the Old West's final outpost.
Now. he fears. Santa Clarita is becom-
California Publishing s Brilliant Barnum
510
ingjust another enclave for the wealthy and comfortable.
"I thought there was a chance we could work things out."
sighs a pained Dareil Phillips, a representative of Georgia-based
Morris Newspaper Corp. who is the unfortunate bearer of
Newhall's wrath. Phillips. 53. is a burlv. bearded man who ac
cepts the angrv outpouring because he owes his position with
Morris to Newhall. And because he makes it his business to get
along wherever he goes. Phillips publishes Morris six Northern
California newspapers in Manteca. He is
strong, competent,
conciliatorv. But amid this electrical storm, he is lost.
Scott Newhall is angrv because 1 1 \ears ago he was forced to
sell a controlling interest in his small
countrv newspaper, the Newhall. CA. .S'/p-
naL to Charles Morris, a soft-spoken
Southerner he has come to revile. Deep
operating losses and a familv dispute cut
him off from the funds he needed to
carrv The Signal through to its hevdav
now. As his newspaper s most visible
asset. Scott Newhall slaved on over the
vears to run the show, his baroque
front-page editorials appearing in
their customarv place above the fold.
But a 10-vear non-compete clause has
finallv expired, and he has redis
covered the source of his ire: If Mor
ns does not sell roughlv 20 percent of
the newspaper's stock back to his son
Tonv New-hall. The Signal's publisher,
he will walk out and perhaps launch a
rival publication. As the grand, ele
gant old man rails on. Phillips and
Tonv. 47. the earnest but devoted son
listen in silence.
SCOTT NEWHALL'S HELL
AND HAIL MARY'S
For
mer 100 vears. Scott Newhall's
famii\ and its
corporate interests,
the Newhall Land and Farming
Co.. have controlled this beautiful
il mosiiv barren land, which was
known to the Mexicans as Rancho San
Francisco. California's first gold claim
was registered here on March 9. .1842.
Mexican outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez.
before being captured and hanged in
1875. took retugi- in the nearbv Vasquez
Rocks. To the northeast. Chinese coolies
carved a mountain passage tor Southern
Pacific (,o.. which in 1876 connected l.os
Angeles with Oakland bv rail. Later. Cal
ifornia s first oil refinerv arose on
Newhall oropenv as did some ot the
Golden Mate s most abundantlv fruitful
citrus orchards.
An enterprising auctioneer named
Henrv Mavo Newhall Scons great
grandfather acquired the Rancho San
Francisco s duscv 47.000 acres tor
S90.000 in Januarv 1875. The Saugus.
MA. panhandler arrived in California
with the Gold Rush. and. though finding
no fortune in the hills, lucratively em-
ploved his fast-talking skills in auctioning
"As our beautiful valley buna with new life
we dedicate thu newspaper to the ultimate
challenge of the American Free Press. It
will fight your fights...and shed your lean."
OCTOBER SI. I 96S
"
Lot Aneeles Countv u a vampire, gorging
iuelf on a banquet of blood from wearv
and desperate taxpayers ..."
JANUARY It. I 97S
"We have excoriated U.S. Senators for too
little legislation and too much fornication:
and scolded Los Angeles County Supervi.
son for too much leguiaoon and too little
fomicaoon: and cursed Sacramento A.V
sembtvmen tor too much of both.
1*
SEPTE MB ER 10. I 986
"Just a brief reminder that ... nothing has
changed in (hat Babvlon of middle class
aieak thieves, loafers and forrucators
known ai theUnited States Congress."
JANUARY . 1989
"For 25 vears this writer served The SifnaL
It is a painful experience to sit bv and
watch I it I
degenerate into just another
chain-owned journalistic vam plantation..."
JAN UARY . 1 98*
"Newspapenng a m pleasure and a prmlete
... the beat and brightest world of all."
MAY 3 . 1 9 8 *
the precious cargoes of ships that had rounded the Horn. The
rancho was a remote speculation, at the time, but Newhall ex
pected Southern Pacific's new railroad to fill the Santa Clarita
Yallev with settlers. Henrv Newhall was. in fact, a visionarv. But
he miscalculated bv roughlv 100 vears. When he died in 1882.
the vast plain still lav emptv.
Now the enduring traditions of Mint Canvon. Sand Canvon,
Canvon Countrv. Newhall, Saugus and Valencia are at iastgivmg
way. From the imposing Magic Mountain amusement park to
the fast food restaurants on nearbv "Hamburger Hill." a new
order is
taking hold. To better direct these forces of change, the
old frontier towns incorporated them
selves into the citv of Santa Clarita. popu
lation 147.225, in December 1987, and
citv fathers are busilv wringing their
hands now over the rapid pace of
development, the densitv of traffic
and the scarcitv of affordable housing.
"We see this vallev becoming one of
the great cities of the United States.
We think we have a tremendous op-
portunuv to create that here." savs
Thomas Lee. 46. ihe slight, soft-
spoken but powerful chairman of
Newhall Land and Farming, which
controls much of the region's
development through the vast re
mains of Henrv Newhall's estate.
Familv members still own 38 percent
of ihe companv. including a small
stake held bv Scott Newhall, a Newhail
Land director. But, in recent vears. the
fragmented heirs have ceded control of
their companv and its vast domain to pro
fessional management. "We have a verv
strong economv. related to Los Angeles,
which is clearlv the most dvnamic citv in
America todav. Lee continues. 'We can
benefit from that great economic
strength |iisi over ihe hill. Yet we're sepa
rate trom Los Angeles and the San Fer
nando Vallev. and can create something
separate and unique."
Alreadv. while nianv Santa Claritans
drive over the Newhall pass each morn
ing to work in Los Angeles or the San Fer
nando Yallev. mam newcomers are at-
iracted to the growing local employment
base. Roughiv two new corporate offices
relocate in the massive Valencia In
dustrial Center each month. But as else
where in Southern (. .aliforma. the cost ot
housing is
prohibitive, threatening to
turn Santa Clania into a moneved re
treat. Newhall Lund, which built Valencia
to its exacung standards, has just
em
barked on the second phase of its master-
planned communitv. But. even though
the price of entrv into us paseo-stvle
neighborhoods ranges up to S450.QOO.
entire developments are often complete-
Iv sold verv shortiv alter the first space
of din is turned.
511
Sum
Newhall. dashing and handsome, is. with his wile
Ruih. 78. almost alone at the top of the old order. For 25
\ears.aseditorand publisher of The Signal, he represented
the contrarv forces of law and disorder in a land he called
Jackass Gulch. Before that, as editor of the San Francisco
Chromcie. he buried William Randolph Hearst s famous A'.x-
aminrr. "He's Mencken with manners." a protege savs admir-
inglv. In Santa Clarita. Scott was powerful and iconoclastic
enough to oiten ult against the family land companv. which at
times ran roughshod over the community. And he brought to
the backward canvon country a bold, outlandish stvle of leader
ship pertected in the gilded corridors of old San Francisco.
But the crusading front-page editorials that made Scott
N'ewhall loved and feared over a career spanning 50 vears ulti
mately felled California publishing s brilliant Bamum. The
beginning of the end came more than 20 vears ago. when
Newhall famiiv patriarch Athol! McBean withdrew support tor
a S 1 25.000 loan that Scott needed to keep the leaky Signal afloat.
McBean. chairman of a Newhall Land and Farm predecessor.
\\Tiite Investment Co.. concluded he'd fell the sting of The Sig-
nai editorials too often and vowed to make his nephew pav.
Scott tned to maintain the publishing venture out of his own
pocket. But his fortunes were ued to famiiv interests, and those
interests were tightly controlled bv the ancient McBean. Not
coincidemallv. after the crusty patriarch retired in 1968. the
Newhalls took the land companv public through a limited stock
sale, forever removing it from the whims of hot-tempered
mavericks the family had in seemingly endless supply. Unfor
tunately, tor Scott, the damage had already been done. In 1972.
a newspaper broker introduced Scott N'ewhall to Charles H.
Moms, the publisher ol small dailv newspapers in Augusta and
Savannah. GA. who agreed to advance him a 5125.000 loan con
vertible to a five-year option tobu\ 81 percent ol the newspaper.
.V> tate would have it. ihe Signal turned its first profit five vears
later and Morns took control.
Ol Morris Newspaper Corp. s .!9 newspapers, which are pub
lished in seven states and vieid annual revenues of SI 08 million.
Thf Sienai is now the flagship, with annual revenues ol S7 mil
lion and a pre-tax profit marein last vear "in the 20s."
Charles Morns liked and admired Scott Newhall when he
met him in 1972. Over the vears. however, their relationship
in which Scott plaved the surrogate father grew strained. The
Newhails chaled at Morris's pennv-pmchmg. contending it de
stroyed sialf morale. And thev believe Moms cheated Newhall's
512
Mjn Tom wnen in 1983 he acquired Tonv's 19.2-percent stake
in the newspaper, which represented the familv's oniv remain
ing shares. Scott Ne\vhall does not much like Charles Moms
now. and doesn't mind saxing so. Morris responds: "I like Scott
Newhail. Let s lust sav I would not put mvself in the position of
reiving on mm in the hmire.
Scon
Newhail 's swashbuckling m.inner derives from a life
ui romance and arixenture. He marned Ruth in 1933. at
the age ol 19: then lost a limb chasing torgotten Aztec
ruins on horseback in Mexico lour vears later. During
\\urld\Var 11. hew,us
appointed the
C.hmnirie Swar correspondent in Europe. .
And in 1952 he was named Chronicle edi
tor, making him oneot California s most
powertui voting men. Then in November
1963. looking tor new challenges, he
acquired Thr \i<rjiai tor 560.000 and
returned to the horse trails of his
\outh.
Looking to save the dustv \alle\
irom its backward wa\s. Newhall
railed against ihe corruption ot
elected leaders, mvopic views ot com
mon tolk and the steelv fist of his own
tamilv businesses, contesting the "en-
jovable mvthologv that this writer is
nothing but a stalking horse for a big
bad farming companv that is
plan
ning to take over the whole region.
"
For reasons more economic than
editorial in a town that could support
onlv one newspaper. Scott Newhail chal
lenged a rival editor in December 1965
toadueion Main Street. "I'm Calling You
Oui. An Evans.
'
he cried in a mocking
front-page editorial. The nval never
howcrt ;uiri the town was NewhallV
'
her me vears. as his newspaper grew
:rom a >mali weeklv to a 42.000<ircuia-
ion daih. he zealouslv guarded his
domain, t.uling the competing Loi.A/igrfrs Taws that gangling,
^haggv. era\ mastodon ot printed oatmeal porridge." and refer
ring to tne e:u roacmng countv se'at as the great, hopeless, biob-
benng super metropolis ot Los .Angeles." 'He's a \isionarv." savs
Thomas Lee. Newhail Land's present chairman. 'Of all the
people I know, he has the greatest vision ol what the cit\ can
he." But the sun is at last setting over >cott Newhail s shouider.
^f list before ihe end came on Tuesda\ morning. August 9.
19*!*. Uareil Phillips shouldered his tnend Tonv Newhail
I a>irie at 1'iif Signal otRces and asked once more: '[esus. are
II \< "i Mire \'iu want to do this?"
^J"No." Tonv said.
"'Well. 1 don't think Charles wants von to do this, either.
"
Phil
lips sam emphaticaliv With icon Newhail busv elsewhere. Mor
ris's representative sull hoped to reach a compromise with The
^iignat\ respected \oung publisher.
Phillins telt Scott Newhall's viiriolics were one obstacle to ne-
;' .uaui ms .Another was Tonv Newhall's insistence that Morris
sell the stock back at its 1983 value. Under the onginai agree
ment. Morns nad paid 1-1 2 times ihe Signal j gross revenues
:o buv the newsoaoer. Five vears later. Morris bought Tonv
\fwhaU. 1919. A town of noble blood-
lints. A final outpost of the Old West. The
lawn of Scott Newhall's youth.
He takes a moment,
then sighs,
"The
future has nothing
to do with us.
'
Newhall's shares under the same formula for S779.186. The
\ounger Newhail needed the monev to setde a debt wuh his
brother and to buv a house. Bv Phillips's reckoning, that stock
was now worth SI. 8 million.
"Charles was not against letting him back in." Phillips ob
serves. "But he didn't want to give him the original deal. So I
said. AVhv don't vou split the difference SI. 3 million"''
"
"N'o," Tonv replied reluctantlv. "It
just isn't going to work.
[At] 3 o'clock I'll announce mv resignauon to the staff."
Evervone who was there that dav recalls the meeting with
great anguish. But thev also believe it was a watershed for a com
munity that had grown up under the
Newhalls' benevolent despotism. "It was
a verv emotional scene," savs Phillips,
who took over as interim publisher. "I
came back here into mv office, closed the
door and called Charles. I didn
'
t know
what I was doing here." Over the next
fewdavs. Phillips received 17 staff res-
ignauons. a number that later grew to
20. "Every half-hour, somebodv would
come in and there d be another resig
nauon on mv desk." he savs in quiet
disbelief. N'o one knew that just four
weeks hence, the Newhail familv and
a dozen departed Signal professionals
would inaugurate the competing,
twice-weeklv Santa Clarita Citizen. Its
rallying crv was the Latin "Illegiumi
non Carborundum." to which Scott
Newhail delighted in saving: "It means
don't let the bastards gnnd vou down."
S
cott Newhail launched The Citizen
on September 11. 1988. its hap
hazard pages produced bv a hand
ful of The .Signal's former top stat-
fers who competed fiercelv against
their old colleagues. Their resources
were limited, their desks pressed tightlv
together. But thev followed the Newhalls
out of unswerving lovaltv. taking svmbolic pav cuts of SI a week
and no guarantees as to how long the 40.000<irculauon Citizen
would survive. Leading the charge. Scott termed himself a
"simple, inoffensive newspaper man who goes to work late of a
morning with a spelling book close at hand and a flask of Gen-
toi on his hip." But he also plunked down SI million to make
the venture work. .And for a ume it did.
Ruth Newhail. a legendarv former .vjn Francisco Chromciepo\-
ice reporter who tor manv vears ran The Signal'while Scott tilted
against windmills, held forth in the makeshift Citizen newsroom.
.And Scott himself, after winding down tor most of the past de
cade like an old clock, labored with renewed vigor. In a tront
page farewell to Morris and Thr Signal, he wrote: 'How sweet to
be bevond the reach of booted and spurred bookkeepers w-ho
cannot distinguish between mixed metaphors and split infini
tives, and who cannot recognize a dangling participle unless it
"is reposing a tew inches immediately below the belt buckle." But
son Tonv. sull bound bvthe terms ot Morris's 10-vear. non-com-
pete clause, could not follow them. -And without Tonv s abilitv
to combine the pracucaJ resources ot his motner and brilliance
of his father. TheCttnenyrew hard-Dressed over the next months
to attract advertisers or readers. That's the single most impor-
513
tarn problem we're faced with." Scoit acknowledged one cold
morning in January, shortly before his 75th birthday. And for a
brief midwinter moment, the Newhall family's golden bov re
flected every one of those 75 vears.
:onths
later, one dav in Mav. Scott Newhall abruptly
walked awav from his upstart newspaper, in the town
named for his great-grandfather, finally accepting that
his proudest hopes, his vainest ambitions and much of
his wealth had been consumed bv age and the flames of
passion. The proud phoenix that rose from The Citizen 's mast
descended again into ash. "We decided that after a six month
start-up period, we could detect the flavor of success or failure,
and read the omens of the future." the grand old editor de
clared in his farewell. "Well, after six months the omens were
not favorable. Yet as a matter of pride we earned on for two
more months. ... But today, if we continued, pride would have
turned to simple vanitv and vanitv is not an attractive virtue.
"
For Scott and Ruth, who have withdrawn to a picturesque
Victorian mansion amid the surrounding mountains and
orange groves, the prospects are less certain. Dressed in a finelv
tailored blue serge suit that could be. and probablv is. an an
tique. Scott Newhall still likes to tell of surviving that perilous
horseback ride across Mexico, a steamship transit across the
stormy Atlantic, the proposed duel with a rival newspaper edi
tor, even the foiled attempt of a hired killer and the burning to
the ground of his graceful mansion, which the Newhalls rebuilt
even lovelier than before.
But even a life so rich in experience cannot defend itself
against the impress <>t time. "Don't get to be mv age and start a
newspaper.' Newhall warns. "Just don't." He takes a moment
for himself, then sighs. 'The future has nothing to do with us."
"At mvage. vou can't think or the future or make anv prom
ises." continues Ruth, whose narrow shoulders remain the iron
bedposts around which Scott drapes himself. But if the Newhalls
appear somehow uncertain ot themselves now. not entirely con
vinced of their nghthil places on the rugged western skvline. ail
thev need do is look back at Santa Uarita s brilliant 20th cen-
turv. which thev themselves have chronicled. Until the vervend.
the Newhalls plavcd leading roles in that great pageant. And
even at the end. thcv did not go out without raging against the
dving light.
Elliot Blair Smith n n mninbuting editor.
Appendix I. 514
April 12, 1990
Dear Scott
It wa nice of you to comment that I saved the waterfront, and it may be true
(north waterfront) , but the three big ones that Jean participated in have to
be added to the equation.
These are, first and foremost, the Golden Gate Freeway defeat and two others.
I was not involved in Golden Gate which Jean pulled off. She worked for months
organizing the merchants in its path. Not easy, Walt Zolezzi of O'Brien,
Spotorao & Mitchell and other difficult and suspicious people, not used to
working together . .
Virginia Fusco for the Marina residents, the Russian Hill
Improvement Association, Nancy and Bob Katz of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers
a monumental task ending finally in the 6 to 5 vote victory with the Board of
Supervisors.
The Golden Gate Freeway, in my opinion, was the most destructive thing to hit
this city (if it had hit) since the 1906 earthquake.
The other two big ones were Ferry Port Plaza and International Market Center.
Ferry Port Plaza was an island a third larger than Alcatraz that Castle &
Cooke of Honolulu proposed building alongside the Ferry Building. The pro
ject would cost $110 million in early 1960's dollars. Your friend, Marion
Conrad, had it nicely rolling until in a sweet, quick victory I got Herb
Caen to run an item. (I had not been following it closely; Jean and Bob Katz
developed the facts). The item named the room at City Hall, the date, and the
time that the public could come to oppose this monstrosity. The Bay Conser
vation & Development Commission was conducting the hearing, but there was
reason to believe that the pressure on them was making them a little shaky.
Upshot: Thanks to the Caen item not twelve or twenty disgruntled old ladies
in tennis shoes showed up at the public hearing. but instead three hundred
angry environmentalists. It was the first time that a waterfront constituency
had gathered. 3.C.D.C. took heart and killed the island.
I was always impressed that you knew I was going to get going on keeping the
red bricks under Telegraph Hill before I did. The immediate threat to them
was the International Market Center, said to be the third largest building in
the world (floor space, I assume). It was financed by Joe Martin, head of the
Republican party here; that consummate horse's ass, Rober Lapham, Jr. and
others. Projected cost: $120 million in early 1960's dollars. Henry Adams
was the promoter. It was to be a vast wholesale furniture, furnishings mart.
You will remember how these with-it fashion types foregathered for cocktails
at the temporary office of the project, across Sansome from the venerable
Sewall Warehouse. After cocktails the decorators were given gold-plated
hard hats and picks and led forth, across the street, to peck symbolically
at San Francisco's finest surviving Gold Rush building the real work to
be done later by bulldozers. The press release outlining this ceremony you
said was the most tasteless thing you'd ever encountered in this city.
Jean and I were called in, by this time with a reputation as the Saul Alinskys
of the waterfront, by the people living on Telegraph Hill who didn't want
to see the damned thing jammed in between them and the Embarcadero and
neither did Jean or I.
This was a tough one; the Int. Market Center had political wallop, they had
unveiled their plan at a sieek reception at the Mus. of Modern Art (traitors!)
and we had our work cut out for us.
You will remember Fort Seawall, which was your idea, but they finally got the
idea that if they sufficiently injured this 1854 building, our last clipper
ship warehouse, we might go away.
So we harried then. I flew balloons on 84 ft. strings (the height limit
there) on different street corners simultaneously, took a photograph, and
later on an enlargement drew lines between the balloons. The result was in
corporated in a set of oversized tabbed brochures that gave a foretaste of
how this mother was going to completely shut out the view f Telegraph Hill
. . much less from it.
Sent to the Board of Supervisors, sent to Mayor Alioto. Alioto used to de
plore the "nut house brigades" who blocked such improvements "in the name of
ecology and social progress." When he learned that 1 was mixed up in it he
tried to get me dropped from the city's civil service rolls.
"You ate all my rice
and my stewed beef.
"And tried to have me cut off
the Home Relief."
(From a 1930s song sung by Louis Armstrong, "Do You Call That A Buddy"
favorite record on your brother's wind-up phonograph in the fo'c's'le of
the bark KAIULANI.
I was only saved by a change in administration at City Hall, Moscone in,
Alioto out.
Jean got Roger Kent to go after the Market Center on their proposed street
vacations, which were numerous and blatant. This legal approach was telling.
Roger debating Roger (Lapham) on T.V., etc.
So . . we wore them down. They collapsed and it cost them millions. The
land was sold and Levi Plaza got the idea . . red bricks.
We lost the Seawall but two superb structures were saved Italian Swiss
and the Lombard and Greenwich Dock building, now called vl Lombard. Also
a small brick sailor's boarding house on Battery.
I appreciated the remark you made one time to John Portman: "In this city it
is more important to have the Kortums on your side than the Planning
Commission."
P.S. Jean went to Sacramento and got San Francisco's representatives
George Moscone, Willie Brown, John Burton, and Leo McCarthy
to eacn write a letter saying that they would not support legi
slation that weakened B.C.D.C. in any manner or form. (John Foran
refused to sign up). Later, when U.S. Steel/Ford Motor Co. wanted
to build a skyscraper on the south waterfront, Jean and I did not
cake part in the opposition. They had already been blocked.
Appendix J. 516
CHRISTINAS 1985
When "Prancer" Ran Amok
Christmas Eve 1859
Krnm the archives o! ihe Irrawartdv Sleam Navigation Company
517
From The Rangoon Times
December 26. 1839
A Rogue Elephant
Scatters The Monks
From Our Correspondent
Our metropolitan police correspondent informs us
that a rogue elephant was sighted in Rangoon on
Christmas morning.
The Reverend Kip Soon. Abbot of the Pithaya
Buddhist monastery in South Ship Street reported to
the magistrate s office last night that early morning
prayer services in the Golden Pagoda yesterday
were interrupted and then abandoned when a
stampeding elephant forced his way into the
monastery compound.
The beast managed to breach the temple's outer
wall and ran amok in the courtyard, trumpeting
with fury, flailing his trunk and stabbing at the
sanctuary walls with his enormous tusks.
According to the Reverend Soon, the monks were
at their devotions inside the pagoda when the ex-
trordinary disturbance began, and tried to continue
with the rituals. But when the great tusks began to
penetrate the tiled walls of the temple the brothers
fled into the courtyard directly in front of the
elephant.
.All witnesses report that the unexpected and un
wanted invader was weanng a most extraordinary
harness. On his head were lashed a pair of what
seemed to be banyan tree branches lopped off in the
manner of the antlers of a large northern
hemisphere mammal - perhaps a moose or an elk.
A rope harness also trailed behind the brute and
was attached to the mangled remains of a sledge of
some sort. The animal did not seem to be in pain, but
had obviously taken a terrible fright.
When the elephant saw a crowd of monks in saf
fron robes streaming out of the pagoda, he turned
and galloped around behind the kitchen wing of the
monastery where he upset the outhouse in which at
least a dozen monks ha,d sought refuge. He crashed
his way to freedom through the kitchen gate and
was last seen headed for the Irrawaddy nver at a
fast trot, bellowing and snorting as he went.
The illustration of the mysterious rogue elephant, which we
are able to publish, was composed from descriptions given
our correspondent by the Reverend Soon and his terrified
monks.
Report of Sergeant Boome. Rangoon Metropolitan Precinct
December 24. 11:21 p.m.
Mr Momat Smqn. chief bodyguard and household steward to H H the Nizam of Lashio. called in person to complain ot the thefc of
His Highness iavonte hunting elephant, which he described as an ugiy oeast with a roving eye ana shifty temper Plamtitf Singh stated
:nat when ne made his regular iate evening round of the elepnant stockade he noticed the gates had been torced and the comiortable
stall assigned tne missing brute was empty On being questioned Singh claimed that the Nizam is a popular individual ana has no Known
enemies. The eiepnant he says is a very valuable animal". worm tne 'ransom of the younger son of a Maharaia
'
As of this aate mere
are no clues or oovious motives for such a tneft
Report of Inspector R. Youngblood. Rangoon Waterfront Detail
December 25. 5:15 A.M.
Apprenended and detamea a gang of 12 male Europeans a no were sighted by the harbor police in a ship s lifeboat rowing erratically
n circles off Queen s Deck. When hailed by the ponce they toon thght ana attempted to hide in the tule bank on tne far side ot the nver
They have been icentified as tne deck crew of the Irrawaady Steam Navigation packet boat Bengal Princess. All of them reexea ot strong
drink.
Suspects were unwilling or unable to make any statement except to repeat in slurred phrases something like: Shanta Caus -
:
sn
coom ta ina town God Shave Shaint Nick
An informant 21 tne dockside told one of the arresting officers tnat earw in the evening he had observea these men dnnkmo neaviiv at
3ombav Jim s So;m Shop, across from tne Strana Hotel. They were engagea in a ioua argument among tnemseives as to wnetner a
i.ngie eiepnant cou.a haul a t'jilv-ioaded sieigh faster tnan eignt re:nceer
The 12 susoects are currently lodged unaer guard in tne strong room of tne transient seamen s barracks next to the H M s Customs
End of arresting officer s report
518
CHRISTMAS 1986
A Pair of Stage-Struck Virgins
Enliven Christmas Eve Rangoon, 1865
519
Fragment of a letter home from Midshipman Arthur Cleve, who had
been posted as an armed guard to the Irrawaddv Steam Navigation Co.
transports during the recent native uprising above Pagan.
The Irrawaddy Christmas Season is an awfully jol
ly affair. Mother, but the festivities are not always ex
clusively dedicated to peace on Earth and good will to
men. In fact, the sense of impending social disaster
hangs over all the splendid holiday balls, masquerade
parties, and the annual hunt breakfast at one or
another of the plantations upriver from Rangoon.
The crowning climax of the Rangoon season has
always been the Colonial Club's annual .Nativity
Pageant, a sentimental diversion sponsored by Sir
Waldo Lovelock-Scott of the Irrawaddy Board of
Governors. This Biblical drama has traditionally been
directed and produced by the Very Rev. Percy
Wintergreen. who is the Episcopal Bishop of Mandalay
and a widely-acclaimed choirmaster, whose fruity
baritone rendition of "Knock Softly at Heaven's Gate"
is reputed to soothe the very bowels of Burmah's King
Mindon himself.
The pinnacle of social distinction, which is greatly
coveted by the female members of Rangoon's smart
set, is to be chosen by the Bishop for the role of the
Blessed Virgin. Every unattached maiden in Burmah's
colonial colony is dead set to gain this exalted post,
particularly since the theatrical skills expected of the
lucky Virgin are not of an exhausting or sophisticated
nature. The chosen lady is simply required to settle
herself sidesaddle on the back of a smallish water-
buffalo heifer, which is then led back and forth across
the stage of the Royal Concert Hall by "Joseph", who
pauses from time to time to knock at various inn doors,
seeking shelter for the night
Well. Mater dear, it came to pass during our recent
Christmastime jollification that the aimiable Bishop
selected a certain Miss Agatha Runcible to be his
reigning star. Lady Agatha is the second daughter of
Sir Archibald Runcible. Bart.. QBE. KGB. and has
come over to Rangoon from Delhi for the Irrawaddy
season. She has been particularly attentive to the
Bishop during the entertainments and diversions of the
year's end.
And it also came to pass that, upon hearing the
news of Miss Runcible's elevation, a certain Miss
Daisy Mae O'Leary. the lead soprano in the Bishop's
cherished cathedral choir, and a secret devotee of the
prelate himself, exploded with hellish fury. And. when
the identity of this year's Virgin was announced at the
cotillion ball at the Strand Hotel, Miss O'Leary march
ed up to the Bishop and charged him with "favoritism"
and "creeping senility", and further accused His
Reverence with having been seduced by an adven
turess with neither the spiritual nor gynecological
prerequisites to such a divine dramatic endeavor. Miss
O'Leary then turned to her rival, who was standing at
the Bishop's elbow, and screeched: "Gorblimey,
Duckie. if you're a virgin then I'm the bloody Queen of
bloody May !
"
Miss O'Leary then made a lunge for the
Virgin's awesome decolletage and the fisticuffs
started.
The ensuing hostilities I can describe only as
"historic", and second in intensity only to the thirty-
five-round bare-knuckle encounter between Paddy
Tarn O'Shanter, the Welsh Tomcat, and Hogshead Bill
Kilgrew on board the barge off Cheapside in 1842.
Miss Runcible recovered in time to make her
Christmas Eve debut to great applause. She was
costumed, however, in a veil and flowing headdress in
order to draw attention from her lacerations. They say
that Miss O'Leary has been transported upriver for a
spell of missionary proselytising among the hill tribes
along the Siamese border.
My friend, Bobby McClay, the society columnist,
staff artist, and roving correspondent of the Rangoon
Tattler, happened to be attending the cotillion ball and
managed to sketch the encounter. Bobby tells me that
he sold his account of the free-for-all to the Tattler for
three guineas and a season pass to the Imperial Calcut
ta Opera Company's pre-Lenten tour of Southeast Asia.
All is now serene on the Irrawaddy, and I
hope you
and Father made a happy time of it around the
Christmas tree.
Affectionately,
Your dutiful son.
Arthur
A note from the Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company secretary:
A copy of Bobby McClay's on-the-spot illustration of the embattl
ed virgins was presented to the Company and is republished
herewith for our readers' enlightenment.
520
The Raj Quartette
Christmas Day Champions
From the Archives of the Iirawaddy Steam Navigation Co.
Rangoon 1874
Raj Quartette
Sponsored by the Irrawaddy
Steam Navigation Company
43
Four Horsemen of Islam
Sponsored by H.H. the
Sultan of Johore
CHRISTMAS 1988
521
The Raj Quartette
The sporting group pictured on the cover of this holiday
greeting was recently unearthed in the discard files of the
Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company's corporate records.
It is the official portrait of the undefeated polo team fielded
by the Company during the Christmas round robin games
on the parade grounds on the outskirts of Rangoon.
This famous team was mustered by Sir Waldo Lovelock-
Scott, himself an avid sponsor of this great equestrian sport,
so enormously popular throughout the Far East. The 1874
Rangoon Quartette suffered no defeats during the whole
1874 season. Their final and most brilliant play occurred on
Christmas Day, when they demolished the Sultan of
Johore's formidable four horsemen with a lopsided victory,
running up 43 goals and holding His Highness's team score
less. This feat was never equalled on any polo grounds east
of Suez.
The muster roll of the Rangoon Raj Quartette was indispu
tably the most remarkable group of polo stars ever to have
saddled up during the glory years of Empire. Taken together
they were rated at 38 goals'. They can be identified from the
cover photo as follows:
Seated at left Sir Jonathan "Blind Jock" Perkin, O.B.E.,
(10 goals), for many years Colonel of The Queen's Own
Rangoon Rifles. "Blind Jock" was a legend in the Burmah
polo clubs. His left eye was glass, and his right eye was
almost totally useless. Yet his friends swore that because of
his perfectly developed sense of hearing and his sensitive
nose for moving hickory balls that, when ahorse on the play
ing field, he could wield his stick with the ferocity of a caval
ry sabre, and from the far end of the field he could crack out
goal after goal with the accuracy of a field artillery rifle.
The Colonel was finally retired blind in both eyes, and
passed his final years comfortably ensconced on the front
verandah of the Colonial Club, polo stick in hand, taking
swipes whenever possible at the passing street beggars and
mango sellers.
Standing at left Brigadier the Hon. William Barrett,
Bart. (8 goals). Sir William was a younger son of the Fourth
Earl of Swansdown. His career on the playing field was
meteoric, and he was famed along the Malabar Coast for his
splendid string of ponies. Unfortunately, shortly after the
historic Rangoon championship matches in 1874, Sir
William was dropped from the sporting scene following
bazaar gossip that he had been involved in an irregular
assignation with his favorite mare. Princess Poona.
522
Standing at right Young Billy Butterfield (10 goals).
Lieutenant Butterfield had been posted directly from Sand
hurst to Burmah, where he served as a Guards Captain of the
Irrawaddy River Watch. Billy, whose light weight and even
lighter complexion earned him the title of "Galldping Ghost
of Rangoon", was actually high scorer during the Christmas
championships. Following the breakup of the Quartette he
was gazetted to the 22nd Royal Sappers stationed along the
Pathan frontier.
Seated at right Major Watkins (10 goals), who was
something of a mystery figure in the purlieus of Rangoon
society. This person was never addressed by any given
name, being known throughout the Orient only as "Major
Watkins". The Major was a great favorite with the ladies,
and was always ready, when pressed, to oblige the diners at
the Colonial Club weekend dinner dances with a spirited
performance of what he described as the Mandalay Two-
Step, during the execution of which he would take off the
boot on his left foot, wave his red toenails high in the air, hop
about the ballroom on one foot, and finally make his exit
backwards through the pantry doors.
Major Watkins departed Rangoon immediately following
the Christmas championships. He was last heard from
riding on the back of a very large parade elephant, heading
upriver along the banks of the Bramaputra. He told a pass
ing spice merchant he had been invited for some grouse
shooting and a jolly good chinwag with His Holiness, the
Dalai Lama of Tibet.
ANOTHER SPLENDID YEAR
on the
LOWER IRRAWADDY r life, and
e .
on the topic
een certainly
personal life.
c, I should
.sic, how it
period, as far
.t. My
six or seven,
had was being
.ng" or "I'm
r
ere World War
r
hat many
'orties. In
ie summertime,
inds ,
you know,
'ally?" and all
Annual Report
Submitted by direction of
The Board of Governors
Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company
home in San
:. We had
posed to learn
in Rafael, to
lyway, I guess,
: I had to
ler called "Sur
;
rench, and I
: like it. I
impatient.
. :arned to cope
with music.
Foreword
It would be unrealistic of us to suggest that
the Irrawaddy Steam Navigation company has been
completely untouched by the political tumult and
corporate travail that have afflicted the world
during the past twelvemonth. This has been a
year of astronomical public debt, soaring
international trade deficits, and crumbling national
frontiers in Europe. We have suffered global drug
wars, revolts and rebellions in once-peaceable
nations, oil spills in the virgin wilderness, guerrilla
skirmishes in the inner cities; devastation by the
terrible forces of Nature, and, in the home, tighter
household budgets and looser family morals.
Yet we are proud to report that your
company, continuing its fine tradition, has been
steadfast hi adversity, implacable in integrity, and
relentless in its pursuit of economic amenities. We
have not flinched in the face of continuing
corporate mergers, unfriendly takeovers, leveraged
buyouts, and government meddling both here and
abroad.
Therefore we the governors, officers, and
thousands of staff members of the Irrawaddy Steam
Nevigation Company are able to assure you that
your Company is steaming full ahead into the
twenty-first century with its flags flying and its
cargo of cash flow continuing at acceptable levels.
With satisfaction we hereby submit our annual
summary report of operations.
The Irrawaddy
Tule Cat
AGRIBUSINESS
The ISN growing fields and consequent crop
pro- duction in the delta farm reserves produced a
satisfactory, but certainly not record-breaking,
harvest this last season. Tiger moths and an
invasion of vegetarian wide-mouth delta sand dabs
accounted for the light harvest of both goose grass
and Bengal palmetto nuts. In addition, some
middling-to-severe damage to the downriver oyster
beds is chargeable to the continuing fecundity and
resultant overpopulation of the mischievous
Irrawaddy tule cats.
These small and amiable animals were
originally confined to Ladyship Island on the west
side of the river. But their affectionate nature and
conjugal habits have recently led to such a crisis of
overcrowding that they have been forced to
undertake the most arduous escapes. Some of the
more athletic cats have successfully swum across
the delta channels and resettled on other islands,
where they promptly relapse into their
intemperate voluptuous life style.
our life, and
ape.
k on the topic
been certainly
y personal life.
sic, I should
nusic, how it
y period, as far
ant .
My
2 six or seven,
I had was being
ling" or "I'm
were World War
what many
forties. In
the summertime.
Dunds ,
you know ,
Sally?" and all
ar home in San
ns . We had
ipposed to learn
with music.
3an Rafael ,
to
myway, I guess,
:r I had to
:her called "Sur
French, and I
)t like it. I
)
impatient,
.learned to cope
TRANSPORTATION
We regret to inform our shareholders that
river traffic, in terms of both freight and passenger
service, has been at a relatively low ebb. However,
our passenger agents have experienced some
gratifying success in offering attractive downriver
fares to young upcountry women who, with
increasing frequency, are abandoning the rigors of
field work and household chores around the family
paddies in favor of more opulent employment along
the Rangoon waterfront.
It is also a disappointment to report that our
widely-admired flagship, the Burmah Queen, has
been decommissioned and is currently tied up
along the Karl Marx Quay (formerly known as Her
Majesty's Dock). On the other hand, it is most
pleasant to advise you that plans are afoot to
recommission the Queen as a floating luxury hotel.
Our Executive Vice President for Passenger
Marketing, a man who had served an
apprenticeship with the Club Med group, is
currently traveling through Central European
capitals offering Berlin-to-Burmah tour packages
for distinguished retired executives of the newly-
democratized Warsaw Pact member nations.
FOREIGN TRADE
Your Company has severed relations with the
Republic of China. This action was taken after
learning that Taiwanese entrepreneurs have
seriously undercut our feather export business by
manufacturing plastic counterfeits of our own tried
and tested Lower Irrawaddy Goosedown Mattress
Stuffing. This historically successful product has
long been favored by insomniacs everywhere.
Guardian of the Goose-Pens
our life, and
ape.
k on the topic
been certainly
y personal life.
sic, I should
Jiusic, how it
y period, as far
ent .
My
e six or seven,
I had was being
ding" or "I'm
were World War
what many
forties. In
the summertime.
Dunds, you know,
Sally?" and all
ar home in San
us . We had
apposed to learn
with music.
San Rafael, to
anyway, I guess,
sr I had to
ther called "Sur
French, and I
Dt like it. I
D
impatient,
.learned to cope
REAL ESTATE
The land development division of your
Company has been particularly active.
We have sold, at a substantial profit, the old
Polo Club grounds situated just north of Pukka
Point. The purchaser is a consortium of Japanese
shipping magnates. The new owners have
announced that they are preparing to develop this
prime waterside property into a 21-hole golf
course and driving range, but will maintain the old
Polo Lounge and trophy room as a sushi bar.
Our forest and harvest division recently
received a most intriguing communication from a
foreign gentleman in Latin America. This
correspondent suggested that for the purpose of
introducing soil amendments and instituting
modem reclamation techniques into our hardwood
farms, we might be interested in his proposal to
interplant our maturing teak trees with cocaberry
seedlings which he would supply by air shipment
on a cost-plus-royalty basis.
This provocative offer comes to us from a
Senor Narcotico Blanco, whose world headquarters
are Postoffice Box 1101, Medellin, Republic of
Colombia.
And finally, with the utmost satisfaction,
your Company is now able to disclose that we have
negotiated a 99-year lease on the old Viceroy's
palace, which has stood empty and deserted for
these many decades. Our lease, which was closed
at the most favorable terms, was made with an
American partnership of Motel Six and the
International House of Pancakes. Under terms of
this rental agreement the old Palace will soon be
humming along as the Uncle Sam Fat Boy Round-n-
Round Pizza Pagoda.
As a special 1989 Christmas bonus, the
terms of this lease include the condition that upon
the presentation of proper identification, every
bona fide Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Company
shareholder shall be entitled to a complimentary
Uncle Sam Bullockburger and a large-size
macadamia or mangosteen milkshake.
The Home Office
Celebrates a Good Year
with music.
our life, and
ape.
k on the topic
been certainly
y personal life.
sic, I should
music, how it
y period, as far
ent .
My
e six or seven,
I had was being
ding" or "I'm
were World War
what many
forties. In
the summertime,
ounds, you know,
Sally?" and all
ur home in San
ms. We had
upposed to learn
San Rafael, to
anyway, I guess,
sr I had to
ther called "Sur
French, and I
Dt like it. I
D impatient,
learned to cope
MERRY CHRISTMAS
1989
nnb ;g>tott
HAPPY NEW YEAR
1990
523
Appendix K.
On Music
[An interview conducted April 25, 1990]
Early Sounds of Music
Riess: You've said that music has always being part of your life, and
yet we don't have that part of your life on the tape.
Newhall: I'm amazed that I didn't forcibly somehow get back on the topic
earlier in these conversations, because music has been certainly
one of the most important elements or forces in my personal life.
I suppose since we're going to talk about music, I should
try to explain where I fitted into this world of music, how it
grew. I don't remember any period in my life, any period, as far
as my memory goes, where there was not music present. My
memories go back to when I was a little kid, maybe six or seven,
after World War I. The first musical experience I had was being
taught to sing "There's a Long, Long, Trail A-Winding" or "I'm
Forever Blowing Bubbles" or "Over There." Those were World War
I songs. Out of that came the great flowering of what many
people call jazz in the twenties and thirties and forties. In
those early days I'm thinking of, people sang in the summertime.
They would sit down and sing these songs, these rounds, you know,
"The Old Mill Stream" or "I Wonder What Became of Sally?" and all
that kind of stuff.
When I was a child, we had a music room in our home in San
Rafael. We had a piano, we had a set of trap drums. We had
mandolins, banjos. Everybody in the family was supposed to learn
to play something. There was always music.
I was sent, as everyone was in our group in San Rafael, to
take music lessons when I was quite young. Ten, anyway, I guess,
or younger. I was not a good performer; I remember I had to
learn to read enough music to play something or other called "Sur
Le Glace," which I assume means "Over the Ice" in French, and I
imagine it was a waltz. It was easy, but I did not like it. I
could not learn, really, to read music. I was too impatient.
But I loved music, and as I got a little older I learned to cope
with music.
524
Riess:
Newhall:
When I was a little bit older I had a radio, and I had my
own room, finally. That was after the "I'm Forever Blowing
Bubbles" period when I was a child. We had a Swedish nursemaid
called Katie. She was this blonde girl- -I call her "girl" now
but she looked like a sort of a woman to me then, older, probably
all of twenty or twenty-one. And there was a big song, "K-K-K-
Katie, I'll Be Meeting You by the Kitchen Door." So I learned to
sing that. That was one of the first musical things I ever
learned, and I always associated that with Katie.
I had my own room, and I had a radio. And I would go to
sleep at night- -this was when I was still here in San Rafael, not
going away to school --and I'd leave the radio on all night,
listening to music. These were little combos and bands and jazz
and disk jockey, sort of. I'd wake up in the morning listening
to it and I'd go to sleep listening to it.
When I got to be ten or twelve I went to the assemblies.
There you learn to dance a little bit; get to be about thirteen
or fourteen, you begin to live the good life. Socially, it was
the thing to go out and dance to the music of Anson Weeks up at
the Mark Hopkins Hotel in Nob Hill, and Carol [?] Lofner and Phil
Harris down at the St. Francis, and somebody or other down at the
Palace. That was when they were playing "Me and My Shadow."
a couple
Slow dancing?
Well, they were all right. Actually, they'd always play
of pretty fast jazzy numbers during the evening.
At the same time I was just living off of records, too. We
all had wind-up gramophones or phonographs. I would go down to
buy records at the San Rafael record store, and I'd look at the
shelves. They had one group over there; they were segregated. I
said, "What's that music? What are those records?" They said,
"Oh, that's race music. Those are race records." I said, "What
do you mean?" They said, "They're made by blacks- -Negroes ."
Well, I began to buy those. This was very important to me.
There I found the music I was looking for. There were these
records made by these black jazz bands- -Duke Ellington, I think
he called himself "The Jungle Band" then- -and it was all this
kind of strange African stuff, really. I remember "When Erastus
Plays the Old Kazoo." I can't remember who the artist was. But
anyway, I used to buy race records. Nobody could understand
this. Basically the music I loved and grew up with and knew as
jazz was black music as tempered by some whites or Caucasians,
and white music tempered by the blacks. It was a fusion.
525
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall :
My Aunt Mildred, my mother's sister-in-law, a nice, big-
hearted Swedish woman, but not too bright, she lived over in San
Francisco, and I used to go see her because she and Uncle Will
had no children. They had a terrible little dingy ground- floor
flat or first-floor apartment out by Golden Gate Park in the
Panhandle, but they had a player piano.
I would have nothing to amuse myself - -she' d take me out to
pony rides once in a while in Golden Gate Park, but I'd be there
for a long weekend or something- -so I would sit at that player
piano and pedal it, and I'd play the piano rolls. I would do it
by the hour. And I remember Fats Waller and James Johnson or
Meade Lux Lewis were some of the piano guys who was cutting the
rolls, and there was all this honky-tonk sort of American- -not
even Tin Pan Alley- -American jazz played by blacks. I think
probably they were all black, the fellows who cut the rolls. I
used to sit by the hour, and I would play them faster, and then
you make them sound like a ukulele and so on and so forth.
Somehow that music got into me. So when I was still a
little older now, in my teens, I would go out on dates and try to
get into a speakeasy or something. I remember coming over from
San Rafael , driving down San Pablo Avenue ,
because I heard on the
radio --on this radio I said I played all night --that "Fuzz Duncan
and His Gang" or something were playing at a little roadhouse up
on a hill in El Cerrito, on the side of San Pablo. So I went
down there and cased the joint, and then a couple of us went out
and took our girls and went up and sat at the bar. Aye, aye
aye, I can't remember the name of the place. Fuzz Duncan? Is it
Fezz or Fuzz? I'm not quite sure. Duncan. That would have been
about 1928. Yes, I'd been about fourteen.
And they let you into these places?
Yes, sure. They were illegal. But it was just as illegal to
have a minor in as it was an adult. That's the wonderful thing
about Prohibition.
What did you have to do to get in?
Oh, sometimes you'd say, "Joe the waiter sent me," or something.
I never had trouble getting in anywhere, ever. Because I think I
looked as if I was good for five bucks or something, I don't
know.
Then we went broke in San Rafael. We moved to San
Francisco, and the old Checkering piano we had came over there to
the attic with us at 2950 Pacific. I used to sit at the piano,
526
and I'd just bang it like a two-year-old with a certain rhythmic
sense. My mother said, "Look, you've got to go down and take
some more lessons."
So I went downtown while I was working at the wholesale
drugstore, and I took some lessons from a good-looking woman. (I
thought she was older, but my mother said, "Oh, boy, she's pretty
good looking.") She was Ann Skurich, and she taught me to play
modulation around the circle, as she called it. You know, you go
from the tonic to the subdominant and go all the way around.
She'd sit and play, and taught me to play "Nobody's Sweetheart
Now" in F, and "Somebody Stole My Gal" in the key of E-flat. So
I got along a little better so I could play a few numbers.
I think it was about that time I went back to Lawrenceville
Academy in New Jersey, and there a fellow called Lerake taught me
to play the drums a little bit. And I got a sax somehow, and I
learned how to play a few scales on the sax and so on. I
listened there to radio, all these little jazz bands that were
playing in New York and Chicago. They'd have all these late
night shows, a little band of about five or six guys, and they'd
be playing along. By this time the music was getting a little
more interesting.
Riess: Why was it more interesting?
Newhall: It was getting a little more sophisticated, and there was more
black influence and style and rhythm creeping into the popular
all -American bands. You see, there was beginning to be this
fusion between the black whorehouse piano-player and a white band
that would play up at the Ritz Hotel for the debutantes .
They
were beginning to fuse, and they did fuse eventually, in my
opinion, with what was called the swing era, which was Benny
Goodman and Glenn Miller and some of those guys. Which was
essentially a kind of a white ethic with a black rhythm. I'm
oversimplifying, and I know a lot of musical experts will sneer
at what I'm saying, but this was my experience.
At Lawrenceville I used to sneak out on the weekends after
dark; got a guy to either sit or lie in bed for me or something.
I'd go up to New York and get there in about forty minutes or
something on the train. There was the Orpheura Dance Palace at
42nd and Broadway, and it had gained a certain amount of
notoriety among the prep schools. It was known as the
Lawrenceville Club because people in Lawrenceville used to go up
there or something; the prep school kids, would go up there. It
was a ten-cent-a-dance hall. They had all these nice girls
there. You'd get a roll of tickets and you'd give a girl a
ticket, and you dance with her.
527
Well, in this place they had a little combo; it was a piano
and I think a trumpet, a sax, and drums, if I'm not mistaken.
They'd play right around the hour; there was no taking a break.
So every hour or forty- five minutes one of the guys in the band
would sit down and take a rest or have a drink or something, and
they let me in. I played a little piano by this time, and
terrible, but a little piano, and the drums. When I'd go up I
got to know the guys .
I didn't care so much about dancing with the girls. They
were very nice kids, but--. I remember a girl called Sally and
another called Angie. Angie and Sally. We were pretty good
friends. You'd buy a roll of tickets and you'd dance. The
dances only lasted about a minute, two minutes maybe, something
like that, and there would always be a bouncer who had a cricket
in his hand, you know, one of those little metal jimcracks that
you make a little noise with. And if he saw a fellow's hands
beginning to stray or something, he'd snap the cricket and the
customer would have to get back to safe harbor or something.
Anyway, it was a great experience because these were all
black guys. This was some of the happiest times of my life, in
music. Joining in with the black fellows.
Then there were the proms. The big bands would come to the
schools and universities for the proms. One year I asked a
Vassar girl. That was a big deal; nobody else had a Vassar girl,
but she was a friend of mine. Somebody else would pick her up at
the prom and take her on and dance with her, and I'd stand and
listen to the bands. These were early pre- swing bands. There
was Ted Weems and Peter van Steeden and Johnny Hamp, some of
those earlier big American bands. I'd wander over and sit next
to the sax section and I'd talk to the fellows, because I really
did love music.
Then what? Then I came to Cal. And at Cal there wasn't
that much music at the time. I mean, I'm sure we would all
listen to records then. That's when I met Ruth and married here.
Now, Ruth's a good musician. She's a good piano player. Sort of
an old-fashioned Dixie piano player. We always listened to what
was then popular music. This was the beginning of swing, almost.
This was '34, '35, in there. Ruth and I tried to write the score
for the annual Cal musical extravaganza, but there was a
political thing- -we wrote some songs, but we didn't win it.
Somebody else put it on and it was terrible. But anyway.
528
Riess:
Newhall:
Jazz Aficionados
Now, one of the men who came to work on the Chronicle before
the war was a fellow called Peter Whitney, and he'd come from
Yale. Peter was a friend of mine. He'd been at Tamalpais School
with me. He was one of the early jazz aficionados who began to
collect records in the early thirties. He had amassed quite a
collection.
American jazz can be a very esoteric subject. You'll find
good academics at Cal and so on that really follow it and they
know the personnel of all these different old bands. Jelly Roll
Morton got to be very big by this time. He was a black pianist.
Bix Beiderbeck was the idol of the whites- -a trumpeter. There
was a whole group, as I say, of jazz aficionados; I don't know
what else to call them. It was their life. Some of them were in
themselves not terribly musical, but they had good ears and they
began to amass indexes and records and all of this kind of thing.
And what do you think the attraction is?
is it the exoticness and the blackness?
Is it to the music or
Oh, I think it's to the music. I cannot explain it. Every man
is an island, but there is a great group of people who I think
respond to this kind of black-white jazz theme. I really do. I
mean, gee, they know the name of the drummers, you know- -Joe
Jones and Lionel Hampton, who later became a vibraphonist, I
think. Did he die or not, do you know? They're almost all gone,
by the way. Almost, if not all. And Jonah Jones, the trumpeter.
And the Hawkins brothers, Erskine and Coleman Hawkins.
I should interject somewhere that I have absolutely a deaf
ear to what is called classical music. I admit it. I'm sorry,
it just leaves me totally behind. I can listen to a symphony or
two but I've had it after a while.
Riess: Is it boring?
Newhall: I just don't get it. Honestly. It may be that I am reacting
against my early music lessons when I had to sit down and learn
the names of the composers and look at their pictures and read
their histories and try to play their music. Once in a while in
a ballet I could pick up on a theme and try to find out what the
composer was doing. I think the greatest music--.
I will not argue about it, because obviously some of the
classical masters--! think particularly Mozart and Beethoven, I
suppose, and maybe Schumann- -some of them were marvelous, but
it's just not my bag. Furthermore, there is nothing I can hear
529
or appreciate about jazz music after about 1960. I just can't
hear it. I just dismiss it cold. From the days of Thelonious
Monk and Miles Davis, I'm dead. I can go through Fats Domino and
Elvis Presley, and then I've had it. But Presley didn't mean
anything to me because it was this sort of return to the womb,
and so was Fats Domino.
Riess: Why?
Newhall: I don't know. It just--. Elvis Presley and Fats Domino lived on
about three chords, and I was going to get into the harmonics a
little later if you wanted, because there's a very important
thing about the harmony in all of this, too.
Riess: You were talking about these people, these university people who
were amassing collections of records.
Newhall: Some of them. I mean, it was the Berkeley Hills crowd. Peter- -
his mother lived over there. It was an old San Francisco family
who moved up to Inverness finally. Peter Whitney. He was an
intellectual. I'm very fond of him. I think he's still alive.
He grew a beard. He went to work in World War II with the New
York Times as a correspondent. He started at the Chronicle.
incidentally; he wrote the paper's first jazz column, called
"Jive."
There was a whole cult of fans in San Francisco and I assume
in Berkeley probably even more, a cult built around a renaissance
of what some people called Dixieland. It was this strange
intermingling of the races in this case. There was the Yerba
Buena Jazz Band and Lou Waters--! guess Lou Waters has died- -Lou
built up around him some remarkable musicians. There was Wally
Rose, who's still alive. He was a pianist. Bob Scobie was one
of the greatest trumpeters. He was a good friend of mine, Bob
was. That was right after World War II, Lou Waters and that
crowd.
I think World War II was probably a fantastic milestone in
the history of American popular music. In World War II, the
whole world, the whole Allied side of the world, was dancing to
the jitterbug music and singing the songs of both Tin Pan Alley
and the black rhythm- -in other words, the Benny Goodman, the big
band numbers. "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" was very big.
Musically World War II was something like a Roman Catholic
Mass: it was the same all over the world, no matter where you
went. And you would hear the same music and see the same people
dancing in every country of the Western world, only they had
different names, of course. In World War II music and jazz was a
530
tremendous force in bringing people together in a language they
could understand. No matter what they spoke, they could
understand music. It still is a very solidifying and unifying
force. I think music is, aside from sex, the greatest force in
getting people together in the world. I really do.
Riess: These were the bands that entertained the troops?
Newhall: Yes, they entertained them in Korea later, and all the South
Pacific.
Riess: And they were more integrated?
Newhall: Benny Goodman started the integration, I think. In my opinion,
anyway. At least it superficially got started when Benny put
Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson in a quartet that he had.
The Duke, and Louis, and Earl "Fatha" Hines
Newhall: I want to say, the two greatest forces in music I have ever
encountered were Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Duke, of
course, was I think the world's greatest composer--! am sorry
about these superlatives, but I do- -and Louis, I think, is the
greatest instrumentalist who's ever lived. I've always felt that
Louis and Winston Churchill and Pope John XXIII and Franklin
Roosevelt were the greatest four men who ever lived in this
century, and I just want to mention that.
Riess : Did you know any of them?
Newhall: I never met the Pope. I met Roosevelt as a kid, and saw him.
Churchill, I never met him, but I've always venerated him. I
mean really venerated him.
Louis I met, of course. A little bit; he would never know
me. But he was the greatest human being, possibly, in my eyes I
ever met, ever saw. He was kind, and he was gifted beyond
belief. I don't think he had any snobbishness or hate in him, I
really don't. I've always had this funny picture, Suzanne, in my
mind for many years, that Louis Armstrong could be sailing in a
ship and wrecked on any shore in the world, and if he waded
ashore with his trumpet in his hand, he would be surrounded by
friends within an hour. This man was unbelievable. Some people
sit around, some professionals, and say, "Oh, Louis was an Uncle
Tom" or this, that, and the other, which is nonsense. He was
Superman.
531
I listened to Louis- -I've got a picture I'll show you later
--when I was at Webb School in '28. He was playing at a place
called Frank Sebastian's Cotton Club in Culver City. He had a
little band there, about six or seven guys, and this was during
bootleg days again, of course.
I collected pictures of band leaders. At Webb I had a
little band and I used to lead them. I wrote to Louis --and to
Ted Weems ,
Duke Ellington, the whole bunch--! said, "Dear Mr.
Armstrong, I am a fan of yours. Will you send me a picture
sometime?" He sent me a picture of himself and his band standing
in front of a great big sixteen-cylinder Cadillac convertible
phaeton out there at the Cotton Club. It blew my mind, as they
say in these days. I've still got- -not that picture, but I have
a copy of the same photo. I lost the one he sent me. But Frank
Sebastian, thirty years later, or forty years later, rehired
Louis at a place he had in Sacramento and he sent me a picture.
Anyway, Louis was great then, and then he went into an
eclipse. Then after the war, in about 1955, he came out with his
version of "Mac the Knife." I think it was '55. That made Louis
forever. He started in again with "La Vie en Rose," "C'est ci
Bon" --he would take all these little sweet, popular tunes.
"Blueberry Hill," you name it. Louis was still the greatest.
I'll tell you a story about Louis. Earl Hines comes into it
too. I knew Earl pretty well later on, and he'd tell me the
story of early Louis. You know, everybody knows the story of
Louis Armstrong. But he started out in his Chicago days playing
second trumpet in a popular black nightclub, and Earl was around
town then. Earl did a lot of playing in Chicago.
He said one night he was in this nightclub, and a fellow
called Jimmy Dunne--. He was a big white trumpeter at that time.
I didn't know Jimmy Dunne at all, but I guess a lot of musicians
would. He was sort of like Doc Severinson; I think he was a
fancy white trumpet player. Jimmy Dunne came into the nightclub
and everybody stood up and clapped and wanted Jimmy Dunne to play
a number with them. (Earl told me what the number was; I've
forgotten.) So he said, "Okay."
"Boy," he said, "lend me your trumpet." He got it from this
young fellow sitting there with the second trumpet. Jimmy played
a big chorus and everybody cheered and Jimmy took his bows and
gave the trumpet back to the black kid. The black kid picked up
his trumpet and he played about four choruses of the same thing,
going higher each time, and that was the beginning of Louis
Armstrong. That was Louis. Jimmy Dunne turned around and slunk
532
out of the club. Earl tells that story with great pleasure.
Anyway, all these fellows knew each other. I admired Earl
Hines and his piano-playing for many years. He had rather an
intricate earlier style, but he got awfully good and he began
winning prizes from Downbeat and things like that. Then Earl got
a little older. (Now I'm really jumping around; I'm going up
almost to the sixties, seventies, in there.) I began thinking,
here are all these black guys who have brought so much beauty and
so much harmony and so much happiness to so many people
regardless of color or race. And what happens? They blow their
brains out or play their fingers off, and then they end up broke
and on drugs or something.
I admired Earl so much, I flew back to Washington one day.
He was playing there in a basement somewhere. He and Charlie
Bird, a guitarist, they were taking turns on the stand. So I got
hold of Earl and his sax player, Bud Johnson, and we went up to
the bedroom there in the Carlton Hotel. I said, "Look, Earl,
there's a fellow called Leonard Martin who is starting a shopping
mall called The Cannery here in San Francisco. I'd like to make
a deal for you to play at The Cannery. He should pay you as much
as you are now earning in a good year. This would be a steady
job and you'll have enough to eat and everything else."
He thought it was a pretty good idea. So he came out, and I
got Dave Nelson, and Karl [Kortum] maybe, and we talked to
Leonard Martin and met there at the old Cannery before they
actually built it. Leonard did, in fact, hire Earl, but then it
got all screwed up later and it blew apart. I remember I gave
them each a twenty-dollar gold piece to seal the deal, and it
blew apart. Leonard never sent me back the twenty- dollar gold
piece.
But anyway, it was an idea. That's where I got to know
Earl. I sponsored a few little performances for him to put on, a
few little jobs down at the Palace Hotel. Did you ever see one
of those menus? I had big, fancy, Palace menus printed up with
all the songs he was going to play, and so on. [See end of
appendix] Then I had him play for the American Society of
Newspaper Editors.
Earl lived in Oakland and I got to know him pretty well. He
came down to our house in Piru, and I'd go see him and listen to
him when he was playing different places.
Riess: This, I understand, was sort of like the second coming of Earl
"Fatha" Hines?
533
Newhall: Yes, he had a renaissance, and so did Louis, of course. Louis
then played until he died, literally. The people whose names I
truly revere were the Duke and Louis, Count Basie--he had a
tremendous impact on my own personal little style. He just died,
and the Duke ,
and Louis .
Johnny Hodges ,
all these guys , until
you get into what they'd call bop or progressive. And then it
left me; I just couldn't continue into that era. I'm sorry about
that.
Thoughts about Bop and Cool Jazz
Riess :
Newhall:
Bop? That was kind of an East Coast thing?
was something else- -cool jazz?
And West Coast jazz
Well, cool, whatever it is. It's a totally different harmonic
experience. In my opinion it's totally different. Now, if I may
talk about harmonies for just a minute. The black contribution
to American jazz, I think, was the twelve -bar blues. Are you
familiar with all these terms? Do you know what I'm talking
about?
Riess: A little.
Newhall: The twelve-bar blues is basically three chords. It's the tonic,
the seventh, and the subdominant, and then you go to a minor
subdominant if you want. Then back to the tonic and then to the
dominant. In other words, you go back to the tonic. Four bars
each. So you've got four bars.
What do you want to play it in? In F. You've got four bars
in F. And the last beat, you hit the seventh, which in F would
be an E-flat note. And then you hit the subdominant chord, which
is a B-flat major. Then you play that for four bars, and then
you go back to the tonic for a bar, which is back to F, and then
down to C- seventh, which is the dominant. (C is the dominant, B-
flat's the subdominant.) Go back to the C- seventh and then back
to F.
Now, that's all it is. Some of your experts with their
records and indexes will disagree with me, but that theme, three -
harmony scene, I think takes care of about 30 percent of all jazz
which you listen to. Now, there are certainly some variations on
itmany, many variations- -and sometimes some minor or diminished
chords and such. W. C. Handy kind of popularized it, started it
off with the "Memphis Blues" or "St. Louis Blues." [See final
section of appendix, A Letterl
534
Riess: What's the effect of having such a prescribed form?
Newhall: It's something that's magic. I can't explain it. To me it just
stirs your soul. You can sit and listen to a blues--. I've
played them all night with people sometimes, literally. It's
ecstatic, almost.
And the infinite variations on the mood, on the rhythm- -
sometimes it's very fast; then it can be very slow. And then
there are certain harmonic dissonances that people will put in.
You get a Chicago-style blues, and it's powerful. It's just
powerful, the Chicago is. Every musician in the world, white,
black or whatever, plays the blues. Ted Lewis used to play it.
It's all built on sometimes a minor third note. I can't explain
it. I'm sorry, because I'm an idiot in terms of harmony. But
this is the soul, and the soul and the guts of American jazz.
Riess: Do you actually have what you would call influences on your own
style?
Newhall: I used to play a lot of piano, but lousy. Lousy. But once in a
while I'd have a good time and I'd get to playing. I can talk
about that later when we get into drugs and jazz. If you want.
I'm trying to think what else. I guess I should try to explain
my feelings, I don't know why, about this cool music and bop and
whatever the hell they call it. This got off into progressive
music with the flatted fifth.
The old American- -from about 1930 to 1950- -system of popular
jazz music, a big band or a combo, they'll play the song,
whatever song it is, straight through. They'll give you a chorus
of it. Then from then on they're all improvising five, six,
seven, eight choruses, whatever you want. In other words,
they're getting away, in a sense. Not harmonically, but
certainly as far as the melody goes, melodically away from the
original version. And then they come back in the end; they all
do it together and come out. And that went on for years, all
these songs, you know. You'd have these jitterbug numbers and
everything else; half of them were just the straight blues, but
they all took on different patterns, different rhythms and
vocals .
Well, you get into the late fifties, early sixties, and you
had two or three things happen. The old system began to pall on
the younger generation, I guess, the old music that we listened
to. Perhaps it had just run its course; there was nothing new
that we could come up with. So there was a little bit of what
they call rock 'n' roll with Elvis and Fats Domino. That was
535
just a straight blues, just one, two, three, four rhythmic chords
for the adolescents. But it was okay; it was legitimate.
Then something was happening racially. The black musicians,
some of the performers, were so gifted. They were perhaps more
gifted than some of the white performers, or they had something
there that the whites couldn't quite do. So the blacks went
their own way with their--! don't know what terms to use. Bop or
cool music or progressive, whatever. Maybe the whites were
progressive and the blacks were bop, or something. But I could
see it. I could hear the parting of the ways and the conflict.
I used to go out to supper clubs sometimes after regular
hours. We'd go out to Bop City--that was Jimbo's on Post Street,
I think it was, out by Fillmore- -this late-hours joint where the
cops would let you drink. I knew Jimbo; John Edwards, his name
was. He was born the same day I was, same year. I gave him a
pair of gold cufflinks.
They'd all jam after hours. The black guys would get up
there and they would play things so intricately, they would
improvise in areas that my ear could not reach. Or at least I
found it boring. And found what the whites were trying to do at
the same time also exceedingly boring. That was the era of sort
of "How High the Moon" in flatted fifths. They'd go through it,
and then they would take off, and harmonically I don't know what
the hell was going on.
I asked Earl about this one time. I said, "Hey, Earl, I was
listening to a saxophonist, a guy with a plastic saxophone, a
fellow called Ornette Coleman." I said, "What the hell's he
doing?" He said, "I don't know." He said, "I had to sit in with
a bunch of those fellows one time." He said, "We all started in
and we began to play a number." He said, "I don't know. I
suddenly just sat back and put my hands on my knees. I didn't
know what they were doing." He said, "I didn't want any part of
that."
I'm trying to describe my puzzlement and concern. I just
couldn't get with it. I never followed it. Louis Armstrong made
a great record in which he took on bop. It's called "The
Bopinpoof Song," and it's a straight take-off on the "Whiffenpoof
Song" from Yale. I think every musician should sit down and
listen to that about once a month. It's the cleverest thing.
Oh, Louis just takes it on.
And Dizzy Gillespie. This is the Dizzy Gillespie era I'm
talking about. Louis and Dizzy got together at least once and
played a little bit for a TV show or record or something, and I
536
saw them, and I still think Louis's the greatest.
Riess: When they went off on these flights where you ended up being
bored because the harmonics were so impossible, was that a kind
of drug- inspired music, or was it just a little bit tougher and
harder to understand?
Newhall: I don't know. I cannot understand it. I can't hear it. I can
hear anything by Benny or any of those guys, or Louis or any of
those guys who ever played.
Riess: Who can hear it if you can't hear it?
Newhall: I don't know. Honestly, I really don't. I am not putting it
down. I just can't hear it. They're doing something that I find
either totally tedious, or a lot of it is just virtuosity with
the fingers, I'd think. But I don't want to put it down because
I don't want to put Beethoven down.
Drugs
Newhall: You mentioned drugs. And I guess I better talk about that. I
don't think there's ever been any great music anywhere in the
world, probably, that is not tied in with drugs. And I don't
mean just Western music, I mean anywhere. I have no way of
proving this, but I think music and drugs are almost inescapably
intertwined. I do know that so much of the beginning, I'm sure
the black early music, I don't know what they would be drugged
on, whether it would be wine or some kind of marijuana or
something. The whites, at least, were drugged on marijuana and
gin all during the Prohibition era. And during the war
everybody's drugged, in all wars.
All the great musicians that I have ever known, with maybe
one or two exceptions- -I know there were, but I don't know
exactly whom- -have used drugs. Or drug-users have used music. I
think they are, I repeat, inescapably welded together. Most
performers have played their best, they will say, if they have
something in them, to relax a part of their nervous system.
Whether you would call it your stagefright or whatever.
I have played sometimes when I'd have alcohol or have some
barbiturates in me, and it's been a much richer experience for me
and for any audience. The audience themselves find more pleasure
in a lot of music if they have a couple of dollops of something
or other in them.
537
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
That's why when I get into this whole business of America
and drugs , I just throw up my hands. This is a drug- laden
society. It is now and it always has been and it always will be.
Western civilization has always been under the influence of
drugs, certainly in any history I've ever read of it. So now- -I
mean, I'm totally off the subject of music just for a moment- -
you have this whole culture, this whole establishment of drug
czars, of police officers, of presidents, who are making billions
of dollars out of calling us a drug-laden society, and they're in
it for the money. They're not doing anything about the drugs.
I'm sorry, it's a whole new subject. But music has always been
interwoven with drugs, I can guarantee you.
And music and religion too.
I was going to get into choral music in the black churches.
There is nothing to me more beautiful than a good black choir.
Did you ever hear them?
Yes.
They're fantastic. They're marvelous.
But they're not drugged.
What's the difference between religion and drugs? How do you
know they're not drugged? It's all opiate, and the music itself
may be the opiate. Some of them maybe never touch it. But all
the great artists that I have ever known--! don't know, I never
asked, but I think they've all been involved one way or another
with marijuana.
The police frequently used to run these innocent people in.
Billie Holiday, my god, she was out here singing and they found a
little capsule of heroin she was trying to hide in the toilet
tank, and the federal agents ran her in to jail. I mean, this is
so awful. What harm is this woman who used to sing beautifully
doing, and yet the guys who are running her in depend on doing
that for their paycheck. It's a terrible thing, Suzanne, and I
feel very deeply about it, but anyway, it's a fact.
You're linking the drugs and the music.
You say all great artists?
What about other arts?
I don't know, I'm sure a lot of painters use drugs, including
alcohol and so on, but I don't know. I'm not qualified, and I'm
really not qualified to even talk about music. But it's meant so
much to me. It saved my life. When they amputated my leg at St.
538
Luke's Hospital in 1937, I remember I went down for a number of
operations. When they finally amputated it, they stopped in the
middle or something, and I came half out of the anaesthetic and I
heard myself singing "The Love Bug Will Get You If You Don't
Watch Out." Now, that was a little jingle. But music, it saved
my life.
Riess: Give some more examples of what you mean by that.
Newhall: Well, without music I think I probably would have dried up and
died long ago. A world without music is a world you can't
believe.
Riess: Is it a substitute for something else?
Newhall: No, it's an experience all of its own, I think. It's an
extrasensory or an additional sensory experience.
Riess: You're saying that without this kind of music, without jazz--.
Newhall: In my life. I'm sure that classics or opera or symphonic music
has saved other people from desperation.
Riess: I think that jazz tunes in to a different set of brain waves than
classical music does, and that it really is an escape different
from classical music. I think physiologically, it's a really
different thing.
Newhall: I don't disagree with what you're saying at all. I was not going
to make a postulate of that nature, but I don't disagree with you
at all. There is something about the rhythmic and harmony of
jazz that to me is just an extra experience. It's very personal,
and maybe in your case it's the same, I don't know.
Going Where the Music Was
Newhall: I have listened to music in the strangest places. One time we
were coming home from a week in Guaymas in Mexico ,
and we were
driving, coming down the Gila River in Arizona. Here we were in
a little town about the size of Lovelock, Nevada, small, one
street. Paul Smith was with us. Ruth and I went out and we hit
this little saloon that served meals, and there was this black
guy banging away at the piano, playing perfectly good jazz as far
as I know, like a scene from a John Ford movie, kind of, out
there in the middle of the Arizona desert. As far as I was
concerned, I could always relate to those people. I went over
539
Riess:
Newhall :
Riess:
Newhall:
and I put a few dollars In his glass and I talked to him. He
played for us, I guess, for four of five hours, and we had a
wonderful time. People can communicate with music in a way
that's to me very exciting and quite unbelievable.
There's also a lot of misery and unhappiness associated with all
of that.
Yes, but you can alleviate a lot of it, let it out, if you play a
blues routine. You can. It's the funny thing about those chords
I was trying to describe. You go to a minor third or play that
blues formula, and it's amazing. Duke Ellington, I understand,
gave a performance in Westminster Abbey, some kind of sacred
music, and I've always tried to get a tape on it and I never
could, because I've heard it was one of the greatest things that
was ever done. Was it ever released? I really don't know. I've
asked Dolly [Rhee] to try and find it. Dolly has the most
fabulous collection of jazz. Oscar Peterson is her particular
idol.
By the way, I did mention, I think, two of the greatest
musicians, and of course pianists who have ever lived. Earl is,
I think, one of them, and the Duke is a hell of a lot better
pianist, than a lot of people think. A lot of experts will put
him down and say, "Oh, he's a great composer," but he was the
most marvelous pianist harmonically, almost, I've ever heard.
But the greatest single one is probably Arthur Tatum. Tatum is
to the practicing professional pianist what any great god is to a
mortal. And the other one, of course, is Oscar Peterson. Now,
Oscar has survived all this bop and that stuff. He surmounts it.
Did you follow musicians, or did you just let it come to you
here?
No. Just wherever I went, I could find it. I was back at a
Sunday editors' conference in 1950, in Colorado Springs. With
some friends of mine, Ruth and I were driving up to Denver, and
there was this place that looked like a wigwam on the side of the
road. I said, "Let's go in there and get a sandwich or
something." We go in there, and there's a sign at the door
saying, "Red Nichols." The rebirth or something of Red Nichols.
Well, Red Nichols was a big name in the late twenties and early
thirties, and this was 1950.
There was Red Nichols and his band playing regular
standards. So we got to know Red Nichols pretty well. He was
staging his comeback, you know. All these guys all have a
comeback. He came down and played here in the Palace Hotel on
the corner there of New Montgomery and Market, what they call the
540
Tudor Room, and I saw a lot of him. He was a regular white guy,
but he was all mixed up and knew everybody in the black world
too.
My music has always gone toward black combos or quartets or
trios or something. I love them. Ruth and I got Eddie Haywood,
who was an old friend, to come out and play at our fiftieth
wedding anniversary. He came all the way across with his side
men and he played for us down in Piru there.
Then there's the other school --and there's an immense and
growing school --of white Dixieland music here in California, and
I guess all across the country. They have these enormous
conventions in Sacramento and San Diego and Pismo Beach. There
are some wonderful musicians there. When I say white, every one
of those whites who's any good, they know all the blacks, but it
is sort of, at least superficially, kind of segregated. Maybe
once in a while a couple of black guys will sit in. But there's
not--. I can't explain it. But that's Dixieland, and that is a
very, what is the word? Not contrived. Disciplined. It's a
very disciplined sort of music that they come up with. Once
again, they start out with a melody and then they all take off
and do their laid back choruses and personal interpretations.
Riess: Where did you go to listen to music?
Newhall: I liked three or four places, particularly Pier 23, the Tin Angel
and the Black Sheep, and the Club Alabam.
In the fifties and sixties I used to go out to the Club
Alabam. That was on Post out there toward Fillmore. There was a
quartet that played there. Wilbert Barranco on the piano, Jerome
Richardson on the sax, Bob Barfield on the trumpet or trombone.
Vernon Alley on the bass fiddle. They were friendly, infectious,
hardworking fellows. They just played whatever they felt like,
or you asked for. They did the numbers you wanted, in their
style. It was a regular kind of black combo. It was very
friendly.
Now, Barfield died of drugs. Jerome Richardson, I used to
drive him home to Berkeley at night afterwards. He played the
sax. Wilbert Barranco was a good piano player, and he played for
years out at the Tunnel Inn in Lafayette, and then he went and
played at the Claremont Hotel, solo- -solo at the Tunnel Inn.
Vernon Alley has played with every band in the country with his
bass fiddle, and now he's a member in very high standing in the
Bohemian Club in San Francisco. I see him around every now and
then. They were San Francisco guys. We listened to them a lot.
541
Riess:
Newhall:
Riess:
Newhall:
There was another place out in the Fillmore called Jack's.
I used to go there. They'd play what they called viper songs
[another name for marijuana] . There was always marijuana in the
air. I mean, nobody showed it all that much, but it was always
there. Now, I'll go on record: I never had a puff of marijuana
in my life. I've had barbiturates once in a while, when I got
out of the hospital, and I got into alcohol very deeply
sometimes ,
but I never got into any of these later and more
fashionable drugs .
Did you never smoke cigarettes?
Oh, yes.
Well, why didn't you try marijuana?
I didn't want to. I thought it was bad for you and I didn't want
to get involved. I think I am a naturally addictive person, and
so I steered clear.
Riess: Who did you listen to music with?
Newhall: Ruth. And my friends. A lot of people wouldn't go down there;
they'd ask me, would I bring them down? I'd say sure.
I mentioned Jimbo's earlier- -Bop City. Jimbo was up the
street from the Club Alabam. The Club Alabam was wiped out
early. We spent many nights and hours there. Then there was a
place called the Longbar in San Francisco. There was a fellow
called Sunny who ran that. It was on the other side of Fillmore,
on Fillmore Street itself. The Longbar had a long bar, and I've
only been there a couple of times. I went out there to listen to
Errol Garner, the pianist. He had quite a style.
While I was there one night, up on the bar itself as you
went in was Slim Gaillard, who was the "Slim" of Slim and Slam.
They had a duet, you know? Do you remember them at all? They
made a couple of really bigtime records. They were very big.
Slim Gaillard. At the Longbar he was working out his bar bill,
literally. They weren't paying him anything, but he'd drink and
he'd play his guitar whenever Errol took a break.
We went over to hear Errol Garner in Berkeley one time at
the community theater. Errol was playing and Sarah Vaughan was
also singing. This was quite early. Ralph Gleason was then the
music critic at the Chronicle . Errol didn't show up. He was
supposed to come on first, and then Sarah was going to sing. But
Errol had not shown up yet, so Sarah came out and sang. She was
singing very beautifully then. I think she's marvelous.
542
Then the curtain closed and it was the time when Errol was
supposed to come on, and by golly there he came. He sat down and
he played beautifully for about an hour, an hour and a quarter.
Afterwards we went up to him, and Ralph said, "Hey, Errol, why
were you late? What happened?"
Errol said, "I was coming down from Seattle on the train,
and when we got to Portland I remembered I hadn't picked up my
laundry. So I got off the train in Portland and picked up my
laundry, and I got the next train." I can't tell you what he was
really saying. I mean, that's what he said. [laughter] You
figure it out.
Riess: When you say that your friends needed you to take them down
there, they didn't want go down by themselves?
Newhall: Some of them, they were afraid to go down to Fillmore. You get a
girl from Hillsborough in a mink coat, you know, and she doesn't
feel exactly at home in the Fillmore at, say, Webster or Buchanan
Streets. I loved all these guys; I never had any problems.
Riess: The music got better after midnight?
Newhall: Well, then they'd all jam. You know, just anybody who was
around, they'd get up, and I'd watch sometimes. The blacks
outplayed, outjammed the whites. It got to be kind of a little
race war in a way, it really did.
I think there was a lot of dissension, and if not hate, at
least dislike, that grew up in the music. I have always
perceived music as a totally unifying force. I thought, "Here is
the language with which we can all get together." In the sixties
I suppose mostly the blacks, but both blacks and whites were
beginning to use it as a divisive force for a while, and I think
that's tragic.
Riess: So does the audience cheer for one or the other?
Newhall: Oh, no. It was far more an undercurrent. More sophisticated.
Nobody said anything. Nobody clapped much for anybody. When the
cool music came on, or bop, or whatever the words you're going to
use, it was an intellectual exercise and it was an exercise in
expertise or virtuosity. You don't ever hear anybody whistling a
tune that came out of that. You just don't.
Riess: What about this tradition of applauding after each person's riff?
Newhall: It was different with different artists. With Art Tatum you
543
never applauded except when he was finished. You never applauded
a chorus. With Earl Hines it wouldn't matter. With the Duke,
when his band played everybody would applaud a Charlie Barnett or
a Johnny Hodges solo or something like that. It depended on the
band, on the mood of the people. I've applauded twice in my life
when I shouldn't have, but I was so carried away I just did.
In the Blood
Riess: I've read about a jazz group at the California School of Fine
Arts. Painters, like David Park, who also played some jazz in
their studios. Were you in on that at all?
Newhall: I went up one night to- -I don't know whose house, up on the hill
there, with Mark Schorer. Mark was a good friend of mine; I
don't know if I mentioned him earlier or not. He was a very good
friend of mine. He and Ruthie and I went to listen to some
music, because they used to come out with us and go one place or
another to listen, the Schorers did. As I recall now, it was
David Park on the piano --he was smoking a lot- -and Hilliard
Wilson, who was the husband of an English girl who'd come over
during World War II.
Hilliard Wilson, he was a really nice person. I mean, I
really admired--! liked him. He was a very warm person. He died
shortly a little after of cancer. He was playing the trumpet; he
was a damn good trumpeter. I don't know who was on the drums or
sax or anything. But they were playing perfectly good music. It
was sort of intellectually contrived a little bit, because all
these guys were either in the faculties or academics or building
laser beams or something. You know, up the hill there. But it
was good music.
Riess: Why "because"? They couldn't have really been doing it out of
their deep -down?
Newhall: They were doing it out of their soul just as much as I would, and
they needed to express something. Oh, I'm not belittling it in
any way. They were very good, I thought, and they enjoyed it so
much. These Dixieland guys really love it. Usually they have
another occupation or preoccupation, maybe that's what I'm trying
to say, because they have to eat.
I wanted to be a musician and go on the road when I was a
kid. I mean, I really, really loved it. But it didn't work out
and I guess I'm lucky because too many of them have died too
544
young .
Riess: I think it's the second love of a lot of people.
Newhall: Yes, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. I guess you never get it
out of your blood. I remember one time we were sitting around
one night just talking after World War II, and everybody was
saying- -we were all in the newspaper business or something like
it- -"What would you really do now if you had your choice? You
could be anything, do anything." They all wanted different
things .
I said, "I want to be the world's greatest guitar player,
because I can carry my instrument with me and I will be welcome
wherever I go." That was my feeling. I said that because I knew
Earl had arrived to play a date one time down in the Southeast,
somewhere down in the Mississippi basin. When he got to the
platform where they were going to hold the concert, in a tent or
something, the fellow who was running it looked at him and said,
"Hey, where's your piano?" [laughter] I thought, "I don't want
to be a pianist because I can't carry the piano with me." They
had to send out and get a piano for Earl; the guy didn't even
know it.
Riess: What about Ralph Gleason? Was it unusual to have a jazz critic?
Newhall: Ralph was a jazz critic, and Ralph was into it very seriously.
He was a good friend, and I respected him.
Riess: Did you bring him to the paper?
Newhall: Oh, maybe Gordon Pates did. It was when I was there. I don't
know. I think Gordon arranged it. Gleason appeared there.
Ralph was very black-oriented, no matter what he ever says
or wrote. It was at that period when the cool stuff was coming
on. He had a very big problem with his kidneys- -diabetes . He
couldn't eat anything when we'd go out. We went out quite a lot;
we'd listen to it. I thought he was very black-oriented in a
sort of impatient way, if you know what I mean. But I was always
very fond of him and admired his compassion.
Riess: What's that mean?
Newhall: Well, all things being equal, some people insist that the black's
always going to be better than the white. A little bit. I think
they're equal, but anyway. Except I think the blacks have been
the greater instrumentalists on the whole. On the whole.
545
Riess: Is this a discussion that comes up- -these racial issues --around
jazz?
Newhall: Not really.
Riess: No?
Newhall: Never. I am just laying out what I have observed. It is purely
personal, and I'm afraid a lot of people, if they ever bother to
read this or listen to this, it will offend some and shock some,
and I don't mean to. But this is the way it looks to me. I
speak of the racial problem because I'm so sorry that there has
to be a racial problem. As a practicing messiah I have not been
able to resolve it, to cure it. I don't know.
Riess: You mean the racial problem generally?
Newhall: Generally, and also in music. It disturbed me deeply to see
people using music as a weapon rather than as a healing agent.
Riess: Do you think that there was some point along in there when black
music was supreme, that more could have been made of that for the
sake of these racial issues?
Newhall: I don't know, but I do know that blacks have made this marvelous
contribution. Some blacks, I'm sure, will resent in a strange
way when you say a black is better than a white at playing
something, or creating, or something, and I don't want to get
into a lot of heavy grass there.
You were asking about places we used to go in San Francisco.
I 've mentioned Bob Scobie, haven't I, already? There was a
fellow called Eddie Smith who played for a while, around. I used
to go down to Pier 23- -it's still down there, a little place- -
and that's where Burt Bales used to play. He was a nephew of the
managing editor of the Call-Bulletin. Burt got to be a very
close friend of mine; I saw a lot of him.
A trumpeter wandered in there once. Burr Curtice, his name
was. Oddly enough, he was a Lawrenceville graduate. He
committed suicide because he stuttered badly. A trumpeter.
Anyway, we all got to be very good friends. He and Burt made
some records. And we'd go in there, and then we'd go out all
night, go out to, I guess, what was it? Bop City. Burr would
get up and play the trumpet. Burt knew--. Everybody sort of
knew everybody else there.
Riess: During the war years and postwar years, when there was a feeling
that you might not survive anyway, jazz had an important escapist
546
aspect, didn't it?
Newhall: Wherever I went, I would always seek out the tinkle of the piano
or the wail of the horn, and you could find it in London and down
in the Caribbean. Wherever the army set up, there would be
saloons in the outskirts where they'd fly women of ill repute in
to give solace to the troops. There was always a lot of music
and dancing.
Riess: These are desperate hours, and so you go and listen to music.
Newhall: Well, they're also boring. Both. They're desperate, but if
you're on a base somewhere and there's nothing to do, music will
help chew up the time. In London during the war, you know, when
the Germans were still bombing, there was always a nightclub
here, there, or everywhere else, and there was usually an
American black guy playing somewhere, even on a piano. I don't
know, I guess it's the way people buy marijuana and cocaine now;
if you're into it you know where to get it. I don't know how
else to describe it.
Newhall in Performance
Newhall: For whatever it's worth, there were three occasions on which I
participated in performances that were totally exciting and
satisfactory to me. One of them was on a trip around the world
with the Valley Forge. Flying home, we stopped off at the
Azores. There was an Army base there, and there was a band of
enlisted men playing along. I remember they were playing "I'm
Confessin' That I Love You" when I walked in.
I had the mood on me, and I said to the fellow, "Hey, can I
sit in here and play a few bars of this?" Well, I took his place
at the piano and I guess we must have played with the band there
until about four in the morning. We got going in playing the
blues once, I know, for more than an hour.
I used to play the blues with a piano for J. P. Cahn. He
used to have a voice, a big bass voice, and would sing the blues.
He was into kind of the Jewish end of it. I didn't get into Tin
Pan Alley; you know, there's a big amalgamation of Jewish
culture, too, if I may use these terms. Please forgive me. It's
had a tremendous impact on jazz. I didn't mention that.
Riess: But that was New York. Was it also out here?
547
Newhall: Well, all the big bands. Weren't they all Jews, American Jews?
The Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman? I don't know about Glenn
Miller. Most of them. Think about it, think about many of your
opera singers, and Previn, Andre Previn. Hollywood, it's just
loaded with people from the Jewish culture. They are marvelous
musicians. Yehudi Menuhin, he was my age, I guess. He was
always held up to me as the great god of wisdom.
Riess: We're talking jazz, right?
Newhall: But jazz is the same thing in terms of performance.
Riess: So you were playing, you said, for J. P. Cahn.
Newhall: Oh, we played all the time. The blues, we'd just sit down,
everybody would sit around, like your Berkeley groups, and play a
little blues.
And another time down at Costa Rica, in the big theater
across from the Grand Hotel there, there was a tour of editors
put on by the United Fruit Company. We all drifted into this
theater, and there was a piano up on the stage. Roger Ferger,
who was the publisher of the Cincinnati Post- Inquirer .
said, "I
can play the drums!" I think there 'd been a band up there, you
know, playing "God Bless America" or something. He got the
drumsticks and he began to drum on a chair, so I sat down at the
piano, and we played Americantile popular jazz for about four or
five hours there. I enjoyed it so much. We had a good audience.
It was a lot of fun.
I had another time when I got drunk up in Lovelock. God, I
played all night with a Spanish- -Mexican guitarist. And it's
fun. But it helps if you've got a couple of drinks in you. At
least it helped me.
Riess: What about this picture that I showed you, of you playing the
gutbucket?
Newhall: That's a machine I made, yes. Some guy showed me how to make it,
and I still play it. Ruth played the piano and I played the
gutbucket at a fundraising banquet for the special children's
school down in Valencia about six months ago. I've still got one
in the basement.
Riess: How much music can you get out of that?
Newhall: A lot. If the listener has a tin ear, you get a lot of music out
of it. It's a one-string bass fiddle, that's all. But it has a
certain charm if it's used correctly, or at least with
548
enthusiasm.
Riess: Did your kids all play something?
Newhall: No. They all, like me, got a few lessons, and they sort of
rejected it, but they cannot stay away from a piano. When they
walk in--. Oh, by the way, a grandson is a hell of a good
pianist. Classical. He's a hell of a good pianist. I don't
know how he did it.
Riess: What's his name?
Newhall: David. He's Skip's, my oldest boy's, son. But he's a graduate
MIT engineer, and he's in engineering. I've been trying to teach
him to get into this jazz thing, and I send him records with
Count Basie and Earl Hines. If I had his skill, I'd be on the
road today. I'm all thumbs.
Riess: Do you have a big record collection, or was it burned?
Newhall: Well, I lost a lot of old records, 78s. I do have a collection
of tapes that you wouldn't believe. Much of it came from a
friend of mine called Ted Lamkin, and from Dolly. Dolly, she
comes in with an endless supply of tapes for me. She goes out
and buys disks [CDs] now. Most of the stuff is from the people
of whom we've spoken.
[Interruption] [music playing in background]
This is just the Count fooling along. I can't tell what
they're playing. It's the rhythm that's going, you see, here.
And the Count weaves his little pattern in the blues. It's just
straight blues they're playing. Now they're going into
subdominant. Now they're going to come back to the tonic. Now
they're in the dominant. Want me to turn it up?
Riess: No, but it'll be fun for the transcriber.
Newhall: They'll go through it once more. I don't know what key they're
in. Now they'll go around again. Now this is the tonic. To the
seventh. Now the subdominant. Back to the tonic. Now it's part
of the dominant. And wrap it up. See, they just keep going
around. Twelve bars after twelve bars after twelve bars, and
they're all having a ball. If the musician aren't loving it,
forget it.
The Duke, his music was so great. He was such a great piano
player. He had chords and harmonies that nobody's ever touched.
And Oscar Peterson, he's got juicy chords you can't believe.
549
Dave Brubeck's a white guy; he's fantastic at times,
great.
Brubeck is
[Listening to the music] I don't know, I love it. I'm no
Count, but I mean, I could sit down and play with those guys all
night. He's going to knock it off now, I think. No, he's going
to go around again. Yes, he is. Yes, he knocked it off. There
you go. [music ends]
[Music begins again] Count Basie, he can do it with two
fingers. He was great. He does one- -I don't know if this is the
right tapehe does "I'll Always be in Love with You." I don't
know if you know that song. You know, it's the embroidering on
the old Tin Pan Alley songs that's so great. Good old Count.
[Listening to new tape] The first time I heard this was at
the end of the Winter Olympics in 1968. You know Ray Charles?
Riess: Yes. [Ray Charles is singing "America."]
Newhall: Is that too loud?
Riess: No.
Newhall: Isn't that nice? It gives me a thrill. Every time I hear it, it
just makes my spine tingle. I used to play it every Fourth of
July when we put on the fireworks in Newhall ,
and we were
criticized because we had "nigger music." How do you like that?
You see why I get so sensitive about all this stupid business of
race. I mean, this guy is participating in America. [music
continues] Isn't that lovely? It'll make you cry. It's the
greatest salute I've ever heard to America. But it's a long way
from "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," I'll tell you that. It just
builds and builds and builds.
You wonder why people blow each other's brains out, you
know, when you listen to this. It's pretty.
-
EARL
MINES
549b
I'll See YoumC.U.B.A
Day By Day
I've Got The World on a String
Sunday Kind of Love
Do Nothing 'til You Hear From Me
Blue Moon
Moon Glow
It's Only a Paper Moon
Moonmare
Speak Low
Tangerine
It Happened in Monterey
Lollipops and Roses
Sometimes I'm Happy
Mr. Hints will continue his
concert after
a suitable pause
so that refreshments may be
secured by the patrons.
West Side Storv
Chefs mixed guitar greens in season
with percussion dressing
Why Was I Born
I Wish You Love
Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime
Mandy Make Up Your Mind
I'll See You in My Dreams
It's a Pity to Say Good Night
Garden Court, Sheraton-Palace Hotel
July 26, 1969
550
Appendix L.
Piru CA 93040
April 27, 1990
Dear Suzanne:
As may have been expected, our conversation on the subject
of music inspired a lot of memories of my sometimes casual,
sometimes orchestrated, adventures in the wonderful world
of jazz. Please forgive me, but as a brief addendum I am
compelled to forward to you these few episodes from past
years, none of which was significant, perhaps, but all
of them were, to me, specially poignant.
1. In 1938 I made a trip to New York on an assignment
for This World, the news review section of the Sunday
Chronicle. I stayed, I think, at the old Commodore
Hotel. I was still on crutches; I had not got a wooden
leg yet, but was very nimble. At night I would go
out of the hotel down to Fifth Avenue, hail a cab, and
ask the driver where a passerby might find some good
musical action.
The first night he drove me down to the Village, to a
joint called Nick's, wfricft was a sidewalk street-corner
saloon near Washington Square. I spent the whole evening
listening to Bobby Hackett's band. This was a cheerful
deluge of jazz standards of brassy stuff, and Bobby
Hackett who is still very highly regarded among white
horn players played a delicious Dixieland trumpet (or
cornet I don't know which). With Bobby on the bandstand
were Eddie Condon on the guitar and Peewee Russell with
clarinet. I am hazy on the names of the other fellows.
Naturally, before Nick's closed its doors for the night
I had met and spent most of the evening with the band.
This was one splendid evening of paleo-Dixie music. I
think Bobby died a few years ago, but I recall there was
a good article about him in the Sunday magazine of a New
England or east Canadian paper in 1970 or '71 or so. It
appeared in the same issue alongside a piece about the
voyage of the Eppleton Hall. This might have been in the
Hartford paper.
2. The next night (in New York) I asked the cab driver
what was going on in the musical world up in Harlem.
He drove me up Fifth Avenue to a place on the west side
of the street the name of which unfortunately refuses
to come back to me. This was downstairs (off the sidewalk)
-2-
with a small dance floor circled with supper tables with
white linen tablecloths, and with a little raised stage
at the far end opposite the entry door. The place was
almost deserted. I sat at the table, drinking ginger ale
or some other sickly concoction. There were a couple of
customers at another table, and up toward the front sat
a single elderly gentleman listening to the small band.
Of course everybody in the joint the help, the customers,
and the musicians was black. And I was this young kid
with one leg sitting by myself and drinking 50 or 60 cents
worth of sugar and carbon dioxide.
Suddenly the waiter came over to me and said: "Young man,
you look as if you might want some company. And Mr. Handy
wants to know if you would like to come over to his table
and join him." Well, this was about the most unexpected
and tempting invitation I had ever received, and, indeed,
I did quickly hop up and moved over to join the old guy
at the front center table.
This turned out to be my great evening spent in the company
of W.C. Handy Bill Handy who was, even then, the
legendary composer of the St. Louis Blues, Memphis Blues,
Beale Street Blues, etc. etc., father of the great popular
American blues movement.
Mr. Handy was one of the sweetest men I have ever met.
He was totally gracious or chivalrous actually
unassuming and somehow compassionate. And I recall he
was having trouble with his eyesight. He asked me why I
was there and why I seemed so pleased to join him, and
I told him obviously and truly: "Because I love your music. 1
He then said, "I'm here because I am interested in giving
this young trumpeter up there on the stage some support.
"
He gestured toward the bandstand, where the fellows were
playing "After You've Gone" or "Lady Be Good" or "Tin
Roof Blues" or something like that. Then Mr. Handy
continued: "That young boy is a fine horn player. But
he has experienced some difficulties because he lost
his regular playing arm in an accident, and now he's
learning to play all over again with his other hand.
And I want to give him all the support I can." And for
the first time that evening I suddenly realized that we
had been listening to a one-armed trumpet player.
Well, that's the end of that musical vignette. Then the
band, the young horn player and all the rest sat around
at our table until the club closed its doors. They played
every request I could come up with. I have always treasured
that happy evening.
552
-3-
3. While discussing earlier some of the local San Francisco
Bay Area gin mills where we used to go for musical nour
ishment, I think I neglected to mention Slim Jenkins 1
place
in downtown Oakland, fronting on that big street that
used to run parallel to the Alameda estuary and ended
up at the old Oakland Ferry Mole.
Slim's was a fine oasis. The customers were pretty
much black, but I savored Slim's like the Club Alabam,
Bop City, and the Longbar on Fillmore in San
Francisco. Slim's was a kind of tabernacle of the bottle
and the blues for any wayward music lover. Slim's was a
friendly, hospitable, musical lodging house featuring
outgoing, middling-stride Black Jazz, and I always loved it.
Our greatest night at Slim's occurred one evening when
Ruth and I were hosting a casual al fresco party at
our place in the Berkeley hills Charles and Jessie
Camp (he was a first-chop UC paleontologist) and three or
four other couples decided to top off the evening with
a pilgrimage to Slim's. We drove down through Emeryville and
arrived about a half hour before closing time.
What made the evening so remarkable was that about
a minute before closing 2 a.m. , I think all the
lights in the house went out. The place was suddenly
pitch black all the voices died out into a kind of
startled silence. There was absolute quiet, and then,
slowly at first, and softly, a woman's voice came
through the blackness. She began to cry, or sob,
accompanied by only a few simple piano chords:
"It's quarter, to three There's no-one in the place
except you and me So set 'em up, Joe I've got a
little story you oughta know" and so forth.
Then, as the crooning continued, a deep pink-purple
spotlight picked out a woman sitting on a tall bar
stool, hunched over, with her back turned to the audience.
She continued to sing throatily, with growing volume,
then plaintively and excruciatingly, that great ballad
"One For My Baby and One More For the Road", which song
was, I think, the collaboration of Harold Arlen and
Johnny Mercer.
The effect of this showmanship and haunting music was
indecribable. It was both painful and majestic. I did
not know then, and do not know now, who the lady was.
I don't think it was Billie Holliday because she may have
died by then. It might have been Dinah Washington.
553
-4-
Well, Suzanne, there's only one more for the road.
4. In the middle '50s J.P. Cahn a man from Stockton,
Montezuraa prep school and Stanford University was
promotion manager of The Chronicle. He was an enormous
fellow with a deep and compelling voice and was an
accomplished blues singer.
For some reason or other, J.P. was convinced that some
of the lesser primates in general, and an old chimpanzee
named Bimbo in particular, had a native sense of jazz
rhythm and could be taught to play the drums. And so
I decided to research Cahn's theory and bring this
quasi-scientific theory to a conclusion, once and for
all, and then we could get on to more: traditional jour
nalistic investigations.
Consequently, one early morning J.P. Cahn, and a friend
of his named Hal Mclntyre who was, I think, a San Francisco
disc jockey, a professional magician and an accomplished
clarinetist, and I the three of us drove out to the
beach and took up a position immediately behind Bimbo's
cage on the ocean side of the Fleishhacker Zoo's ape
house.
The weather was scrofulous, foggy, with mist dripping
from the tree branches. Bimbo was already up and swinging
around in his cage. This particular Fleishhacker suite
was furnished with a rubber tire swing, an old tree trunk
with some worn and desiccated limbs , and a gathering of early
ape house decor items. Bimbo swung back and forth; he
did in fact seen to bang on the pots or his walls in a
kind of random rhythm or despair I am not sure
which.
I don't think I shall ever forget this bizarre scene the
three of us naked apes standing there, cold and uncomfortable
in the miserable low-hanging San Francisco fog, with Bimbo
rattling the furnishings and knocking around morosely
in his lodging house. It was a somber moment when Hal
Mclntyre finally managed to fit his clarinet together,
and in the misty shroud of inclement Golden Gate fog began
to tootle not play, but tootle about five choruses
of the "Tiger Rag". Not another sound out there in the murk
but the godforsaken strains of "Hold That Tiger!", the
drip, drip, drip of the fog, and an occasional thwack,
crack, bump, and thump from poor old Bimbo, swinging back
and forth in his cell.
554
-s-
I cannot to this day state with any conviction that the
lesser primates are qualified for employment in an
American jazz band.
Suzanne, please do whatever you think best with these
afterwords. I shall close this unsolicited elegy with
a restatement of my abiding conviction that, and to wit:
Among all classes and all professions of human endeavor
with which I have been associated in my lifetime,
professional jazz musicians are the most gregarious,
enjoyable, and generous of all God's children.
Thank you for your patience.
Appendix M: An editorial by Scott Newhall:
Newhall Signal, June 26, 1987. 555
Garbage From
The LAFCO Trough
Editorial
Today this newspaper is pleased to
nominate and elect by acclamation Mr. Hal
Bernson as Ignoramus of the Week. Our hero
is a small businessman from the San Fernan
do Valley who graduated from hustling T-
shirts to teenagers to his present exalted seat
on the Los Angeles City Council.
For those among our readers who may not
be immediately familiar with Mr. Bernson,
suffice it to report that this gentleman is just
another one of those fumblers, mumblers
and misfits who are so frequently en
countered feasting at the public trough in
Greater Los Angeles. Specifically he is Coun
cilman for his city's 12th District, which
gangling municipal plantation includes ma
jor portions of hamlets like Canoga Park,
Northridge and Chatsworth.
Councilman Bernson's brief appearance in
the news spotlight this morning is a result of
his bizarre performance during the Local
Agency Formation Commission meeting last
Wednesday morning.. The substance of the
LAFCO meeting is reported in detail on the
front page by Miss Sharon Hormell, one of
The Signal's team of investigative reporters.
--'';<>.- .
r
:'-*v-
Actually, these paragraphs are not :con-
cerned with the cityhood committee's grand
design for future civic splendor. Instead we
are impelled to take public note of Mr. Bern-
son's asinine remarks charging, in effect,
that the Santa Clarita Valley is being vic
timized by a conspiracy among a trio of rich
and powerful local villains, to wit first:
Senator and Mrs. Ed Davis; second: The
Newhall Signal, and third: The Newhall
Land and Farming Company. Mr. Bernson's
intemperate statements, transcribed from a
tape of the meeting, are printed below.
Normally these editorial paragraphs ig
nore the ordinary oracular garbage that pro-
filerates among the palm trees, passion fruit
vines and poppy fields of the San Fernando
Valley. But Mr. Bernson's claptrap is a
dreary continuation of the purple legends
that persist here in the Santa Clarita Valley
and are kept alive by local gossips who would
frighten your children with tales that the
Newhall Farming company is a gang of
agribusiness vampires who fertilize their or
chards with the blood of innocent babes. And
these same verminous loudmouths befoul the
good name of this newspaper with the
malicious story that its editor is a Judas goat
for these selfsame Newhall farmers.
These libels must necessarily be put to
rest. Therefore, breaking a quarter century's
vow of silence, and in order to stuff the coun
cilman's cheeky slanders down his throat, we
are publishing hereunder a brief but unex-
purgated account of the relationships bet
ween The Signal, its editor Scott Newhall and
the elephantine Newhall Land and Farming
Company. And so, for the record:
Scott Newhall is a great-grandson of Henry
Mayo Newhall, the perspicacious California
pioneer, auctioneer, railroad builder, and
rancher who in 1875 acquired the Spanish
land grant properties of the Del Valle family
here in the Santa Clarita Valley. Newhall's
grandfather was a successful San Francisco
importer and exporter. His great uncle
Mayo, a notable Bay Area boulevardier, was
once apprehended by the authorities in the
San Francisco Tenderloin for caning a
passerby who addressed him with lewd
remarks.
555a
Editor Newhall's father was a jolly San
|
Francisco businessman, part financier, part
| poet, whose passion for pie-in-the-sky gold
:
mines, sailing yachts, leaky trading
schooners and fictitious Hawaiian pineapple
plantations ended in disaster during the
Great Depression. Mr. Newhall's mother
was a gracious Marin County hostess whose
legendary Sunday luncheon table included
among its guests a constant procession of
Korean missionaries, visiting Chinese
scholars and actors, Presbyterian divines
and impecunious university professors.
In his greening academic years Newhall
was discharged from the Tamalpais School
for Boys for majoring in afternoon golf in
stead of conjugating irregular Latin verbs.
He was subsequently dismissed from the
Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey for
promoting, for profit, bare fist boxing mat
ches between the hbuseboys. He was releas
ed from the Webb School of Southern Califor
nia for providing his classmates with genuine
imported London gin.
Newhall eventually continued his studies
at the University of California as an art stu
dent and campus political tout, but retired/in
his senior year because he was able to woo
and win as a bride one of his concupiscent in
structors. They lived happily ever after for
the next 53 years and have managed between
them to raise three complicated, but
reasonably dutiful, sons.
Deserting the academic cloisters, Xewhail
entered the marketplace as a photographer
for the San Francisco Chronicle, and after 46
years in the service of that august journal, he .
retired in 1971 as editor.
In the course of his journalistic crusades.
Editor Newhall encouraged news readers to
respect the natural modesty of animals, and
provide clothes for the naked beasts. His
papers also fought tirelessly to improve the
quality of the swill that was once served as
coffee in the cafeterias and chop houses of
San Francisco. His p pers mounted a cam
paign, this time successfully, to rescue a
handsome yourg topless waitress, known to
her fans as the Persian Lamb, and save her
from deportation back to her native Iran.
Newhall's war record was comfortably
brief. For approximately a vear he served as
a war correspondent, mostly with the British
Royal Navy, but abandoned that activity
when German torpedo boats interfered with
his tranquil evenings in the wardroom. He
hurried home to San Francisco to spend the
rest of the war tending the anti-submarine
net in San Francisco Bay, working as ship's
cook aboard patrol boat 90061 of the U.S.
Coast Guard Temporary Reserve Afloat,
Auxiliary Flotilla No. 11. No Japanese sub
marines were ever caught in this horrid
marine contraption that stretched across the
Golden Gate entrance into San Francisco
Bay. However, Patrol Boat No. 90061 was
constantly entrapped in those vicious steel
coils.
During his career Newhall has enjoyed oc
casional triumphs and, rather more fre
quently, wretched disasters. One such
triumph was his public recognition as, "The
editor who has contributed most to Northern
California drag racing in 1966." On one occa
sion he was declared a public enemy of the
revolutionary government of the Caribbean
island of Anguilla.
One of this editor's more illustrious com
munity contributions occurred when he serv
ed as track steward at the annual Virginia Ci
ty camel races in Nevada, a glorious sporting
milestone at which John Huston and art con
noisseur Billy Pearson rode the two
miserable beasts, and the elegant Lucius
Beebe, Esq., started the great contest with
his pearl handled Colts 45.
Newhall was once apprehended by
Scotland Yard investigators when he tried to
hijack a paddle wheel tugboat that had been
consigned to the British Naval Museum at
Greenwich on the Thames. Fortunately he
was released when Baron Runciman, a pro
minent marine antiquarian and chairman of
the Greenwich establishment, declined to
prosecute him for piracy on the high seas.
Newhall purchased The Signal, which had
earlier belonged to the distinguished
Jrueblood family, in 1963. After 15 years of
555b
,d-to-mouth publishing, he sold The Signal
'to Mr. Charles Morris, a visionary Savannah
jmedia tycoon. Mr. Morris has kindly allowed
Mr. Newhall to remain on the premises and
he continues to comment from time to time
on the passing Santa Clarita Valley parade.
Newhall is editor of The Signal by profes
sion, a machinist by compulsion and a direc
tor of the Newhall Land and Farming Com
pany by genealogical descent. In this last
capacity he is privileged to sit, upon occa
sion, among his far more illustrious cousins
and outside directors when the Fanning
Company deliberates the finer points of fami
ly ranching. In terms of his very modest port-
'
folio of Farming Company securities,
Newhall is but one of approximately 3000
.'stockholders. His interest is a matter of
^public record, and he enjoys less than a one
tpercent participation in the company.
'^Despite Mr. Bernson's idiotic charges of a
.vast conspiracy among the Farming Com-
i?p*ariy7 The Signal and the Davis family, no
rsuch triumvirate of plotters actually exists.
'
.
. Bobbie Davis, wife of our standout
^State Senator, was born Aileen Nash in the
K$est of England, in Devonshire to be exact.
. AC the end of World War II she became the
ttbride of young Fred Trueblood of Newhall,
California. The Trueblood family owned The
^Signal, and years ago Bobbie worked on this
'
paper,-both during its Trueblood era and the
later Newhall years, as reporter and society
feditor. Later, after Fred Trueblood's death,
*
Bobbie went to work for Senator Davis dur-
Ting one of his successful campaigns and
^subsequently granted the Senator her hand in
.^marriage. Neither Scott Newhall nor any
'other member of the Newhall family is
*
related to Mrs. Davis in any genealogical
sense. Furthermore Mr. NewhalTs occa-
sional attempts to establish even closer ties
*with Mrs. Davis have been completely
*
unsuccessful.
So, in conclusion, it is stated flatly herein
that there exist no clandestine or otherwise
conspiratorial bonds among the Davis fami
ly, the Newhall Signal and the Newhall Land
and Farming Company. Senator Ed Davis is
a great reforming California legislator. The
.Newhall Land and Farming Company is a
large, profit-oriented, occasionally confused
:
publicly-held agribusiness enterprise that
has devoted thousands of hours and millions
of dollars developing, and sometimes enhan
cing the Santa Clarita Valley countryscape.
Newhall is not a power broker for the rich
and famous. Nor is he the Lieutenant Colonel
Oliver North of the Farming Company feudal
empire.
It was a gross canard for Mr. Bernson to
suggest in opprobrious terms that Senator
Davis has been abusing his high office to br
ing pressure on that rollicking gang of bam-
boozlers known as the Local Agency Forma
tion Commission. And it was most un-
chivalrous of Mr. Benson to summon Mr.
Gary Cusumano to the witness box and cross
question him about a supposed incestuous
relationship between the Newhall Signal and
the mighty Newhall Land and Farming Com
pany. Mr. Cusumano, executive vice presi
dent of the company, who is a true pillar of
the Santa Clarita Valley community and a
widely admired and successful dirt farmer,
could be only embarrassed when he- was urg
ed to disassociate himself publicly from the
curse of the Newhall Signal.
vMr. Bernson should understand that far
from being the Svengali of the Santa Clarita
Valley, Newhall is occasionally perceived to
be a natively generous, compassionate man.
Certainly, if Mr. Bernson himself, or for that
matter any other passing vagrant, with a
heavy heart and a hungry belly came knock
ing on the Newhall family front door, he
would be welcomed and cheered and
straightway sent round to the kitchen door to
be received by the cook and nourished with a
bowl of good hot soup, a loaf of bread and a
carafe of wine from the household cellars.
/ i s.
Furthermore our hero for this week would
be well advised to stop gabbling about Santa
Clarita Valley conspiracies and implying
that here behind the battlements of 24000
Creekside Road there lurks a crafty
newsmonger who would confound the honest
public servants of sweet Los Angeles.
And finally, the councilman should be
aware, however, that there does reside
within these hallowed journalistic corridors
a staff of reporters and editors who have
sworn an oath to rid the public offices of
America of trashy politicians who pass their
days slandering honest newspapermen and
gentleman farmers who would build a better
future for all the world.
555c
Appendix N.
Herb Caen's Return to the Chronicle
Incidentally, I think that when we were discussing Chronicle
columnists and Chronicle circulation promotions, I'm afraid I neglected
to tell the story of Herb Caen's return home to the Chronicle. This was
a marvelous, rewarding moment for me personally, and it was a unique
chapter in the annals of San Francisco journalism. I think Herb's
arrival back at the Chronicle was the single most spectacular episode
during our battle with the Examiner.
Herb had come to the Chronicle from Sacramento shortly before World
War II. Paul Smith was building up his staff of young men-with-a-mission
and he was in a hurry. Paul had read Herb's column in the Sacramento
Bee- -or in the Union. I'm not sure which- -and Herb came to work as our
radio columnist. My wife Ruth's first job at the paper was acting as
Herb's secretary and taking care of the Chronicle' s daily and Sunday
radio logs. This was 1937 or '38, I think.
Herb became very close to Paul- -he idolized Paul, in effect. There
was a group of us who used to float around town after work, Herb and Paul
and Ruth and I and some others who would hit the night clubs, or listen
to jazz- -Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong. We used to listen together to
the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler,
or Jack Benny or Charlie McCarthy or W.C. Fields, and so forth. We were
dancing and drinking and waiting for a war. Well, World War II put a
stop to all this-- it was like hitting the pause button on your VCR
machine. Some of us went to war, and some of us kept on writing at the
Chronicle. But after the hostilities were over, we all started up again,
doing the San Francisco rounds, and preparing ourselves to set the
journalistic world, or at least the San Francisco division of the
journalistic world, on fire.
Anyway, Paul came back from the war, and Herb went ahead with
writing his general column about San Francisco. And since Herb was, and
still is, a genius, his column "It's News to Me" became the hottest
feature in town. It became by far the most widely- -and wildly- -read
column in any local newspaper. Then after a few years it all blew up and
the roof fell in.
Back in 1950 or 1951, during those final, somber chaotic months
when Paul Smith's time was running out as editor and general manager of
the Chronicle. Herb and Paul found themselves face to face in what was
inevitably a difficult and bruising confrontation. No one else knew for
555d
sure what had transpired, but I think that the Examiner had made Herb a
fat offer to jump ship from the Chronicle . and that Herb brought it up
with Paul and probably asked for as much money- -or more- -than the Ex was
offering. I think that Paul took some personal affront or suffered from
some ego pains. The confrontation ended up with Herb's departure from
Fifth and Mission and relocating himself down at the old Hearst building
at Third and Market.
The Chronicle' s circulation at that time- -1950 or '51, I think- -
was around 145,000, and the Examiner was the top gun in the Bay Area with
about 212,000. (I am not positive about these figures. However, they are
a matter of ancient and infamous record.)
At the Chronicle newsroom, during the restless aftermath of this
upheaval, Paul tried to shrug it all off. He took the public posture
that columnists, including Herb, could be discovered and developed by
brilliant editors. And Paul insisted that columnists should not be tails
wagging the newspaper dogs. He also tried to brazen out the circulation
impact of Herb's departure, posting on the staff bulletin board the daily
circulation reports from both the Chronicle and the Examiner.
Unfortunately, this tactic was not particularly successful since, as I
recall, the Chronicle circulation remained static, or slipped a little
bit, and the Examiner probably gained a few readers.
I was Sunday editor when all this happened. And the paper was
really in the doldrums. However, I was very fond of Herb. He had been
the hotshot first baseman on the Chronicle' s softball team, of which I
was the manager and catcher. I knew him well and admired him. And I
knew instinctively that historically Herb would always belong on the
Chronicle . Herb had signed a four-year contract with Hearst. When I
took over from Paul, I knew it was terribly important to keep the door
open for Herb to come back someday. Our relationship was really too
close, too personal, and I would have been embarrassed to crowd him and
tug at his sleeve to come back.
.
But at some point during Herb's first four-year tour of duty at the
Examiner I did send him a brief note, one sentence, more or less: "Dear
Herb, I just want you to know that there is a first baseman's mitt
hanging up for you in the Chronicle window." And that was that.
Herb renewed his Examiner contract for another four years . But the
Chronicle was plugging along with all our promotions and the development
of our great writers- -Delaplane , Hoppe ,
0' Flaherty, Art Rosenbaum in
sports, Charles McCabe, Count Marco, and Frances Moffat in the women's
section. And then, seven or eight years after Herb's blowup with Paul
Smith, we really began to catch up with the evil Hearst empire.
It was at about this time that one morning after the daily
Chronicle editorial conference in the meeting room next door to my
office, Al Hyman--he was one of our greatest editorial writers- -followed
555e
me back into my office, and with tremendous, badly- suppressed excitement
told me, "Jerry Bundsen has told me that Herb is tired of the Examiner
and wants to come back to the Chronicle! "
(Jerry Bundsen was Herb's
longtime secretary and assistant. He lived down the Peninsula, and had
talked to Al as they both rode to work on the old Southern Pacific
commuter train to Third and Townsend.)
Well, this was colossally important news, because, since the
Chronicle was very hot on the heels of the Examiner, if Herb Caen
actually could be welcomed back into our fold, that would mean the
Examiner was really suffering its final convulsions. With Herb back
home, the Hearstian fortress would be dead, dead, dead. And this was not
just exciting, it was a very tricky business.
I never mentioned a word of it, it was such a big, big potential
victory. I didn't mention it to Ruth, or for that matter even to Charlie
Thieriot, because in the newspaper business people talk. And Charlie
Thieriot and Randy Hearst and Charlie Mayer, who was then publisher of
the Examiner, were all very good friends, socially. I was terrified that
if one word of Herb's possible changeover slipped out, the Hearst people
would ducksnap him with such a big, fat, juicy offer that he would not be
able to turn it down. Dolly knew about it because she had been in the
office when Al Hyman broke the news.
Oh yes, incidentally, I forgot to add that at some point, after
Herb had been at the Ex for six or seven years, Dolly had run across him
at some party or other and Herb had said, "Doll, I want to give you my
private telephone number. Scooter might want it some day." (Herb had
always called me Scooter.) So when I got the word from Al Hyman via
Jerry Bundsen, I told Dolly to dial Herb's private phone number.
At this time Herb was living in a handsome house on the steep north
slope of Russian Hill, on Hyde street, where the cable cars drop down to
the pier and Aquatic Park. Herb was married to Sally Gilbert--! think
that was her name- -a pretty blonde girl. She had been very visible
around town as a photographer's model, and had been queen of the Columbus
Day festival or something like that. I remember a scene when she was
rowed ashore in Queen Isabella's barge and landed on the beach at Aquatic
Park, to be greeted by North Beach Italian fishermen dressed up in
fifteenth century costumes.
Anyway, I called Sally myself and she invited me over to talk with
Herb. I still couldn't believe that Herb was actually ready to come back
to the Chronicle . But he seemed perfectly casual about the whole affair.
He told me that still, after almost eight years, he simply could not feel
at home at the Examiner .
Obviously, he was homesick and lonely. At our
first meeting Herb seemed perfectly relaxed, but I recall I was still
very excited at the prospect, particularly when Herb suggested that we
should meet again and that he would bring along a copy of his Examiner
contract. When I warned him that we must be very clandestine about it,
555f
Herb agreed, and then suggested that the safest place to engineer the
changeover would be Bernstein's Fish Grotto, over on Powell street.
Now, I can't explain my astonishment perhaps, but, to my mind, if a
couple of plotters wanted to meet in secrecy somewhere in San Francisco,
the last place in the world that seemed sensible would have been Moe
Bernstein's seafood palace in the center of downtown San Francisco. This
place was a real, genuine San Francisco tourist trap. The restaurant
fronted on Powell Street a block or two north of the cable car turnaround
on Market Street. The front entrance of Bernstein's was built like a bow
of a ship, a kind of replica of Christopher Columbus 's flagship Santa
Maria. And the tourist customers would come lurching up Powell Street
and enter the grotto through a couple of doors that were cut into the
galleon's bow, about where the anchor chain hawse holes -are normally to
be found. Bernstein's was a popular tavern; the food was good.
Anyway, Herb and I did indeed keep our clandestine assignation at
Bernstein's, and, as I expected, this meeting was about as secret as a
World Series ball game. Moe Bernstein, the dapper proprietor, was
obviously excited and honored to have Herb Caen on his premises, and he
greeted Herb as if he were King Ferdinand himself coming on board to
inspect Columbus 's flagship after he had discovered America. So much for
top secret negotiations. (However, Moe Bernstein wouldn't have known me
from the King of England.) Herb and I started working out the future of
San Francisco journalism in the belly of Moe Bernstein's Grotto.
Herb had his Examiner contract with him, and gave it to me. Both
Herb and I knew instinctively that he would not- -and absolutely could
not- -make his change and come back to his home on the Chronicle simply
for the taste of money. Herb was ready to leave the Examiner because he
was homesick- -it was as simple as that. However, I was still petrified
that something might go wrong with this grand undertaking, and I told
Herb we would match his salary, and that would also include a good
salary for his assistant, Jerry Bundsen.
You must remember that I was still thrilled with it all. I still
had not mentioned all this to anyone else --Ruth was up at Lake Tahoe with
the kids, and Charlie was also up at the Lake with his family at their
summer cottage. So, I told Herb that I would have Dolly copy his
Examiner contract exactly, simply substituting the word "Chronicle" for
"Examiner" and changing the dates. And at lunch I tried to press Herb as
to exactly when he would sign this magic new contract. I was still
somewhat nervous that somehow this projected Chronicle contract might
land in Charlie Mayer's lap and the Examiner might outbid us and the
whole affair could blow up.
I said, "Well, Herb, when can I pick up the contract?" And he
casually stated, "Hey, Scooter, what are you worried about? I'm coming
back. I'll just mail the contract to your home address," which was One
Hill Road, Berkeley 8, California. So we slinked--or slank or slunk- -out
555g
of Bernstein's Grotto with waitresses and cigarette girls and bus boys
flowing like lemmings out onto Powell Street in Herb's wake. And I had
to sweat out the arrival of Herb's beautiful new contract for the next
few days .
I remember I flew up to Reno to join Ruth at a cabin we had rented
on Carnelian Bay on the Tahoe north shore near the Nevada state line.
But I flew back very early Monday just to get to our Hill Road mailbox
for the morning mail. And one of the most pleasant and rewarding sights
of my life was to see Herb's Chronicle contract inside our Berkeley
mailbox, sandwiched in among the regular junk mail. And I must confess
that this particular package was just about the greatest early Christmas
present I could give to Charlie and the de Young family.
So that is the long and rambling tale of the single most
spectacular demonstration of the Chronicle' s recovery during the
Examiner -Chronicle war. All of this transpired in late 1957, and by then
the Chronicle . I believe, was hot after the Examiner- -we were running
about 215,000 daily and I think they had about 250,000 or maybe slightly
more. The return of Herb Caen was not only a spiritual victory for us;
his column was also a really significant circulation bonus.
By the end of his first year back at the Chronicle. Herb wasn't
playing first base on the old softball team any more, but his column
worked some comfortable wonders . He probably had brought the Chronicle
20,000 or 30,000 new readers, and this more or less meant that the
Examiner lost a relatively imposing number of customers. Adding the
Examiner' s loss to the Chronicle's gain meant something like a difference
in a neighborhood of 35,000 to 45,000.
Now, in finishing this long story about Herb, I wish to state
emphatically that Herb is the most gifted newspaper columnist I have ever
met. He is, I think, unique. He is a beautiful writer. He is far, far
different from the old-time gossip columnist. Herb- -or I should say
Herb's column- -is, in itself, possibly the most remarkable daily
newspaper column in America, or perhaps the world. His column is
actually a miniature newspaper, all by itself. Herb is the town crier of
San Francisco. He has choreographed this great city for fifty years. In
terms of his own two-column daily paper- - "It' s News to Me" --he reports
the news of the world, he is sports editor, drama reviewer, music critic,
and he writes the editorials, and he is still the arbiter elegans of San
Francisco cultural life. Herb has not only a brain, but also a mind, and
as far as I am concerned, a soul. He cares very deeply about things.
And- -although I am well aware that many people may not agree-- Herb is
vulnerable, and, although it may not always show through, he can be a
courtly and humble person. Sobeit.
Scott Newhall
8/29/90
INDEX- -Scott Newhall
556
A Region's Press. 243-245
Akins, Zoe, 289
alcoholism. See Scott Newhall, on
drinking.
Alioto, Joe, 268, 269, 311
Alvarez, Luis, 229
American Society of Newspaper
Editors, 158
Anderton, Gayle, llOd
Anguilla, liberation of, 202-207
Anspacher, Carolyn, 109, 260, 302,
421, 451, 452
Antonovich, Mike, 438
Argonaut. 283
Arnold, Stanley, 209, 211-213, 263,
264, 388, 402, 409, 429
bacanora, 476
Bagdikian, Ben, 132, 133, 168, 169,
356ff400
Bakersfield Californian. 368, 369
Baldwin, Carey, 199, 200
Banducci, Enrico, 196
Bank of California, 318, 321
Bank of America Building, SF, 256,
257
Barrett, Ed, 384
BART, 221, 253, 404
Bay Guardian. 238-243
Beebe, Lucius, 158-161, 199, 392,
404
Behrens, Earl, 191
Bender, Albert, 61, 446, 447
Benet, Jim, 224
Berkeley Barb. 236
Berlin, Dick, 171
Bird, Remsen, 5, 289, 403
Boeing, Bill, 37, 40
Bolinas, CA, 7-9, 40
Booker, Barney, 276
Boreta, Voss ,
202
Boyd, Bud, 209-215, 218
Bradlee, Ben, 379
Brier, Royce, 185
Brooks, Ray, 337, 338
Brown, Edmund G., 220, 245, 246
Brugman, Bruce, 207, 238-243
Buel, Hubert, 283, 409
Burns, Jerry, 385
Burton, Phil, 190, 201, 285, 462-
465
Bush, George, 351, 374, 375
Bushell, George, 325
Bynum ,
Dave ,
338
Caen, Herb, 93, 94, 147, 165, 191,
215, 222, 413, 414, 428, 449,
450, 555c-g
Cahn, J. P., 402, 546, 547, 553
Calhoun, Pat, 323, 324
California Newspaper Publishers
Assn. ,
243
California State, income withholding
tax, 245, 246
California Water Plan, 250, 251
Cameron, George, 84, 92, 117, 119-
122, 125, 137
Cameron, Helen deYoung, 92, 248, 249
Camp, Charles, 230, 270, 271, 428
Carter, Amon, Jr., 298
Catledge, Turner, 134
Cauthorn, Joe, 283
Champion, Dale, 221
Chandler, Bill, 61, 100, 227
Chandler, Otis, 180, 359
Chapin, W. W. ,
283
Chesebrough, Elizabeth and Arthur,
325
China, 1948, HOa-llOe
Christopher, George, 190, 219, 220,
275, 276
Churchill, Randolph, 116
CIA, 352
Clark, William, 397, 398
557
Coffin & Redington, druggists, 34,
42
coin collecting, 205, 206, 287, 297-
299, 302, 303
Concours d' Elegance, Pebble Beach,
CA, 211, 290, 295
Cook, Jack Kent, 359, 365
Cooper, Sheldon, 171
Count Marco, 137, 149-155, 196-198,
261, 404. Appendix.
Craib, Ralph, 185
Gushing, John, 284
Cypress Lawn Cemetery, SF, 305-310
d' Angers, Yvonne, 201, 202, 472, 473
d'Angulo, Jaime, 60
Davies, Louise, 314
Dear Abby, 262-265
Denny, Al, 122
deTristan, Marc, 451, 452
Dewey, Phelps , 388, 402, 409
deWitt, John, 226, 228
deYoung, family, 6, 92, 124, 125,
173, 182, 218, 224, 225, 310,
315, 335, 381, 386, 395
deYoung, Helen. See Helen Cameron,
deYoung, Michael, 6, 310
deYoung, Phyllis, 315, 335
Dickason, Jim, 335-337, 342
Dobbs, Harold, 190
Dollar, Stanley, 2, 44
Duskin, Alvin, 258
Eden, Anthony, 116, 117
Eloesser, Leo, 82, 83, 101
Embarcadero Center, 254-256, 466-
471
Embarcadero Freeway, 221, 275-277
Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt, 144-
146, 193, 402
Eppleton-Hall. 286
Exploratorium, SF, 310-315
Fanning, Larry, 92, 119-122, 126,
225, 262
Farouk, King, 298, 299
Fat Venus, 196-198. Appendix.
Feigen, Gerry, 205
Feinstein, Dianne , 249, 250, 252,
269
Finley, Teddy, 70, 81
Fisher, Steve, 224
Foster, Arthur W. , 9, 10, 28, 323,
324
Foster, Louisiana Scott, 9, 10, 323
Francis, Kenneth, 62, 63, 83
Frederick, Wally and Christine, 50
Free Speech Movement, 114, 115, 230-
234. Appendix.
Friend, Dorothy, 311, 313
Friend, Ted, 311
Frost, Robert, 116
Fuller, Palmer, 312
Gannett Newspapers, 184
German, William, 93, 121, 155, 224,
388, 402, 429
Getty, Gordon and Ann, 116
Ghirardelli Square, SF, 469
Gilliam, Harold, 221
Gilroy, C. E. ,
122
Gladding-McBean Tile Co., 321, 325
Gleason, Ralph, 544, 545
Golden Gateway, SF, 254, 255
Gossage, Howard, 204-206
Gould, Charles, 171-173
Graham, Phil, 380
Great City Drinks Swill. See San
Francisco, coffee.
Greene, Felix, 234
Grieg, Michael, 215, 223, 410
Griffin, Phil, 142
Gruen, Victor, 438, 439
Hall, Aimer Ives, 318
Harlow, Nellie, 322, 328
Harms, Eddie, 284
Harrah, Bill, 292, 295
Harris, Michael, 221, 253, 410
Hart, Henry, 54, 60, 61, 446
Hart, James D. , 141, 143, 237
Hearst, Randy, 169-172, 176, 283,
387
Hearst papers, 96, 114, 115, 123,
150, 169-184, 187, 188, 218,
387. Also see San Francisco
Examiner .
558
Hearst, William Randolph, 19, 123
Hearst, William Randolph III, 388
Heizer, Bob, 296
Herman, Justin, 259, 468
Hewlett, Bill, 312, 315
Hill, David, 317
Hill, Fentress, 325
Hill, Marion, 325
Hills, Lee, 383
Hinckle, Warren, 153, 154, 166, 223,
267, 269
Hines, Earl, 530-533
hippies, 235
Holmes, Emory, 418, 419, 423
homosexuality, 249, 250, 260, 261
Hoppe, Art, 154, 155, 162, 410, 450
Hu Shih, 115, 116
Humphrey, Hubert, 464, 465
Huston, John, 199
Hyman, Al, 185, 186
Inman, Bobby, 313
Irrawaddy Steam Navigation Co., 299,
300. Appendix.
Jackson, Joseph Henry, 97, 111, 450
Japanese relocation, 225-228
jazz clubs, musicians, 525-554
Job Corps, Newhall, CA, 462
Johanson, Gary, 412
Johnson, Bill, 29
Johnson, Harry, 24, 25, 42, 59
Johnson, Lyle, 171
Johnson, Lyndon B., 464
Johnson, Walter S., 311-314
Joint Operating Agreement. See San
Francisco Chronicle.
Jupiter, Harry, 215
Katherine Branson School, San
Rafael, CA, 21, 22
Kay, Dorothy. See Dorothy Friend.
Kilgallen, Dorothy, 150, 151
Kleeberger, Mr. and Mrs. Frank, 448
Knight, Goodwin, 220, 221
Kohr, Leopold, 204, 205
Kortum, Jean, 282, 284. Appendix.
Kortum, Karl, 152, 258, 268, 277,
279-286, 430, 468-471.
Introduction, Appendix.
KRON-TV, 124, 125, 170, 173, 183,
386
Lake Tahoe, CA, 44
Landers, Ann, 262, 263
Last Man on Earth, 207-215
Laurel Hill Cemetery, SF, 305-308
Lawrenceville Academy, NJ , 26-28
Leibert, Larry, 191
Lewis, Al, 391
Lindner, Clarence, 283
Little Gray School, San Rafael, CA,
21, 22
Los Angeles Times. 180, 189, 347,
359, 390, 425
Lowe, Tom, 334, 344
Luce, Henry, 117
Luce, Clare Booth, 117
Luce, John, 300
Macy's, SF, 248
Mahoney, Vince, 116, 185
Mansion, Piru, CA, 402, 440
Marco, Count. See Count Marco.
Marin County, CA, 2-10; schools, 21-
24; 38-40; families, 2,3,6
Maritime Museum, SF, 258, 279-286,
314
Markinson, G. D., 171
Masonic Order, SF, 219
Matthews, Tom, 150
McAteer, Eugene, 464, 465
McBean, Atholl, 321, 323, 325, 333,
463
McBean, Peter, 317, 333, 334
McCabe, Charles, 148, 161, 162, 410
McCarthy, Leo, 190
McCarthy, Joseph, 188, 189
McClatchy, C.K., 183; McClatchy
papers, 227
McEvoy, Nan. See Nan Tucker.
McKnight, Felix, 383
Mellinkoff, Abe, 93, 121, 155, 195,
262, 385, 402, 429, 451
559
Mencken, H. L. , 392, 431
Milk, Harvey, 114
Miller, Frank, 193, 194
Mint Building, SF, 272-274
Mitford, Jessica, 223, 307
Moffatt, Frances, 452
Montgomery, Ed, 212-215
Moore, Dukie, 30, 42
Morris Newspaper Corp., Charles H.
Morris, 183, 340-342, 347, 359,
363, 364, 367, 368
Moscone, George, 114, 190
Mt. Tamalpais Military Academy, San
Rafael, CA, 22, 319
Mumford, Lewis, 133
Nahl, Perham, 52
Naked Animals, 193-196
National Park Service, 285
Nelson, Dave, 253-255, 282, 283,
285, 311
Neptune Society, 307, 309
Nethercutt, Jack, 292
Neuhaus, Bud, 52, 227
Neuhaus, Eugen, 52, 56, 57, 442, 443
New York Times. 180, 187, 206, 394,
395, 459; West Coast edition,
133-135, 156
New Yorker magazine, 156-159, 392-
394
Newhall Land and Farming Co., 16,
44, 46, 316-322, 360; ranches,
318, 319
Newhall Signal. 133, 134, 333ff442
Newhall, Alice. See Alice O'Meara.
Newhall, Aimer Mayo, 3ffl8, 21, 29-
31, 36-41, 46-49, 287, 319
Newhall, Aimer Mayo, Jr., 10-12, 288
Newhall, Anna Nicholson, 6ffl8, 29,
33, 34, 38, 39, 46-49, 59, 80,
82, 327, 328
Newhall, Barbara Falconer, 455, 456
Newhall, CA, 462, 463
Newhall, David, 548
Newhall, Donald, 326
Newhall, Edwin, 1, 48, 287, 334
Newhall, Fanny Hall, 1, 318
Newhall, George, 18, 44
Newhall, Hall Mearns , 10, 12, 38,
41, 59, 280, 281
Newhall, Henry, 326, 327
Newhall, Henry Mayo, 4, 16, 18, 316-
319
Newhall, Henry Mayo, Foundation,
316, 462, 463
Newhall, Jane, 334, 463
Newhall, Jon, 271, 338, 427, 441,
454-456, 466, 474-476
Newhall, Leila, 326-329
Newhall, Marion. See Hill, Marion.
Newhall, Penny, 456
Newhall, Ruth, 31, 32, 56-63, 69-
83, 109, 110; loyalty oath
reporting, 141-143; 145, 146,
188, 207; UC Berkeley beat, 229,
230; 237, 260, 293, 296, 297,
311-313, 324, 328, 329, 333,
337, 340, 364-368, 390, 394,
395, 401ff460
Newhall, Scott: American culture,
disappearance of, 349, 350, 395-
400, 431, 432; art, 35, 36, 52-
56; by-lines, 98, 99, 124, 371,
372; cars, 12, 20, 30, 44, 286-
296, 303-305; cemeteries, 305-
310; children, 304, 432ff456;
Chinese, Asian friends, 54, 55,
67, 68, 113, 114, Also see
Japanese relocation; coins, 205,
206, 287, 297-299, 302, 303;
computers, 388-391, 414-418;
development, San Francisco, 246,
251-259; drinking, 21, 29-33,
60, 63, 405, 406; drugs, 536-
538; editorial page writing,
138-141, 185-189, 346, 352, 382;
family, 1-18, 317-332; free
speech, 114, 115, 230-234;
freeways, 246, 275; getting
first newspaper jobs, 34, 60-
65, 74, 84, 96; hippies, 235;
hobbies, collecting, 286-299; on
homosexuality, 249, 250, 260,
261; inheritance, 321ff339;
journalists, admired, 90, 155,
156, 392-394, 406, 407; loses
560
leg, 80-93, 86, 448; marriage,
31, 32, 56-63, 432-435, Also see
Ruth Newhall; music, 28, 30, 53,
56, 523-554; newspaper readers,
127ffl32, 151-153, 192, 193,
236, 237, 265, 266, 369-374;
photography, 60-65, 446, 447;
politics, 12, 50, 65, 66, 90,
91; polling, 178, 179; on
preservation, 272-274, 466-468;
promotions, importance of, 132,
143ffl47, 192ff216, 456; on
reading, 19, 156, 157; religion,
4, 5, 20, 21; resignation, 266,
267; retouching cartoons, 473,
474; Royal Navy, 100-106;
running for mayor, 103, 267-270;
on San Francisco -Camelot, 112-
114, 127-132, 235-237, 245-247,
251-259, 265, 266, 272-286, 314,
315; San Francisco Magazine
editor, 103, 267; schools
attended, 21-29, 35, 36, Also
see University of California;
teaching journalism, 356, 421-
426; television, 157, 158, 348,
349, 361, 370-374, 396, 397;
tennis, 26, 31, 32; travels, 37,
38, 40, 41, 56-58, HOa-llOg,
Mexico, 69-83, China, 67, 103,
llOa-llOe; unions, 341, 408,
409, 412; on war, 99-108, 187,
188, 233, 234; in World War II,
99-111; writers, admired, 222-
224, 421-426. Also see
newspapers .
Newhall, Skip, 441, 453-456
Newhall, Tony, 207, 292, 293, 327,
330, 340, 364-368, 409, 441,
453-456
Newhall, Virginia Whiting, 1, 48
Newhall, Walter, 322, 326-328, 333
Newhall, Walter Scott, 462
newspapers: advertisers, 248-250,
366; circulation, 363, 364; and
columnists, 409-414; community
newspapers, 376-379; corporate
takeover, 357-359, Also see
Morris Newspaper Corp.; and
developers, 362,366; and
drinking, 405, 406; editorial
page, 138-141, 185-189, 346,
352, 382; hiring policies, 419-
421; investigative reporting,
360-362, 371, 372; journalism
schools, 371, 382, 425;
kickback, 407, 408, 427, 428;
killing stories, 270, 271, 426;
photography, 60-65, 416, 417,
429, 430, 446, 447; profit. 339,
357, 365-368; staff leadership,
356, 357; and television, 348,
349, 361, 370-374, 396, 397;
unions, 341, 408, 409, 412
Newspaper Guild, 408, 409, 412
Nixon, Richard, 374
0' Flaherty, Terrence, 142-149, 450
O'Meara, Alice, 326-329, 331, 333
O'Meara, Kenny, 326-333
Oakland Tribune. 125
Oakland Post-Enquirer. 87, 125
Obata, Chiura, 52, 227
Obata, Kimio, 52, 57, 227
oil, 323, 324, 325, 333-345, 435-
440
Okubo, Mine, 227
Oppenheimer, Frank, 310-313, 315
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 188, 189,
310
Orgell, David, 296
Owings, Nate, 276
Pacific Union [P.U.] Club, SF, 18,
169, 194, 308, 309, 312, 401
Packard, David, 312, 315
Packard, Emmy Lou, 65, 66
Palace of Fine Arts, SF. See
Exploratorium.
Palace Hotel, SF, 186, 252, 253
Park, David, 543
Pates, Gordon, 224, 225, 388, 402,
409, 429, 472, 544
Pearson, Billy, 199, 200
Peck, Templeton, 166, 185, 275, 277,
388
561
Pegues, Jack, 92
Perlman, David, 223, 224, 230
Persian Lamb, 201, 202
Peterson, Margaret, 53
Phelan, Bill, 122
Philby, Sir John, llOg
polling, 178, 179
Portman, John, 254, 255, 461
Prohibition, 2, 7, 29
Prout, Clifford, 194, 195
Pulitzer Prize, jurying, 146, 382-
384, 411
Quayle, Dan, 351
Question Man, 260
Rand, Chris, llOd
Raudebaugh, Charles, 219, 274, 410
Raymer, Bob, 466, 472
Reagan, Ronald, 300, 374, 381, 397,
398, 464
Reinecke, Ed, 269
Rhee, Dolly, 67, 68, 159, 195, 243,
274, 290, 291, 401, 403-405, 429
Richardson, Bill, 91, 450, 451
Ridder, Joe, 426
Riley, Lewis, 81
Rivers, William L. , 243, 244
Robbins, Mildred Brown, 452
Robinson, Elmer, 219, 283, 284
Rockefeller, David, 466, 467, 470,
471. Also see Embarcadero
Center.
Rolle, Andrew, 317
Roosevelt, F.D. , 107, 226, 228
Root, Jonathan, 146
Roth, Lurline Matson, 315
Roth, William Matson, 238, 258, 267,
268
Rowell, Chester, 85, 86, 227, 415
Rubicon Bay, CA, 44
Ryder, Worth, 52, 53
Sacramento Bee. 182, 183, 385, 386
Sacramento Union. 182, 183, 385, 386
Sailors' Union Building [Fink Hall],
SF, 467, 468
San Francisco: Camelot, See Scott
Newhall; Cathedral, 245;
cemeteries, 305-310; Chinatown,
273; coffee, 146, 147;
development, 246, 251-259;
freeways, 246, 275; ethnic
groups, 112-114; Irish
Catholics, 218; society, 30, 33,
42, 43; tourism, 277-279. Also
see Mint Building, Maritime
Museum, Embarcadero Center,
Exploratorium, Pacific Union
Club, Sailors' Union Building,
SF Landmark Preservation
Advisory Board, SF Police
Department, Bank of America
Building, Golden Gateway, Palace
Hotel, Ghirardelli Square.
San Francisco Call-Bulletin. 125,
263, 272, 283
San Francisco Chronicle, columnists,
409-414; criticism of, 379-388,
See Ben Bagdikian, Also see A
Region's Press: editors, 402,
403; Joint Operating Agreement,
169-184, 241, 242, 339, 386,
387, 466; layout, 136-140;
library, 85, 86; photography,
60-65; political position, 90,
91, 140, 141, 165, 189, 190,
225, 233, 234, 252, 275;
promotions, 143ffl67, 192-216,
456; reporters, hiring
practices, 259-262, 419-421;
Sacramento coverage, 385; San
Francisco community, 217-222,
238ff286; science writing, 223,
224, 229, 230; strike, 1968,
408, 409; syndication, 262-265;
This World. 94, 96-99, 103, 109-
111, 116, 118; UC Berkeley, 229-
237; World War II, 99-110. See
Scott Newhall, Paul Smith,
Charles Thieriot.
San Francisco Examiner. 19, 123,
127-130, 169ffl87, 200, 201,
213-215, 386-388, 470, 471; and
SF police department, 217-219
562
San Francisco Landmark Preservation
Advisory Board, 274, 275
San Francisco Magazine. 103, 267,
300
San Francisco Police Department,
217-219
San Francisco Progress. 177
San Francisco Theological Seminary,
San Anselmo, CA, 4, 318
San Mateo Bridge, 245
San Rafael, CA, 2, 3, 8, 9; schools,
21-25
Sandburg, Carl, 116
Santa Clarita Valley, CA, 343-347,
352-355, 400, 435-440
Santa Clarita Valley Citizen. 353,
363, 364, 367, 375, 411, 412,
418, 419
Schorer, Mark, 543
Scott, Louisiana [Mrs. Arthur
Foster] ,
323
Scott, Mildred, 15, 16
Scott, William Anderson, 3, 4, 318,
323
Scott, William Anderson, Jr., 15
Scrugham, James G., 40, 41
Seaborg, Glenn, 229
Shawn, William, 394
Sheer, Robert, 243
Shell, Jonathan, 394
Shelley, Jack, 189, 190, 274, 275,
464, 465
Sheraton Hotels, 186, 252, 253
Sherman & Clay, 248, 249
Shor, Franc, llOb, llOc
Silver, Carol Ruth, 252
Silverman, Milt, 223, 224
Smith, Paul C., 84-97, 115-121, 124-
127, 139, 156, 181, 185, 191,
248, 249, 270, 283, 336, 386,
413, 448, 449
Southern Pacific Railroad, 253
Spinelli, Mark. See Count Marco,
spiritualism, 13, 14
Spreckels, Glaus, 302, 303
Spreckels, Alma, 284, 315
St. Francis Dam, collapse, 47
Stevenson, Adlai, 397
Stewart, George, 141, 142
Stewart, Seta and Roy, 39, 40
Stull, Carolyn, 111
Tamalpais School for Boys, San
Rafael, CA, 23, 24
Taper, Bernie, 156
Task Force 38, 110
Temko, Allan, 166, 221, 245, 253,
259, 273, 276, 277
Thieriot, Richard Tobin, 409
Thieriot, Charles deYoung, 120, 121,
124-126, 131, 136, 137, 140,
149, 166, 169ffl91, 219, 233,
248, 250, 267, 387, 401, 409,
426, 461, 466
Time magazine, 393
Tobin, Pat [Mrs. Sheldon Cooper ],
171
Tower, John, 351, 352, 382
Tucker, Nan, 395, 410, 411, 422
Tucker, Phyllis. See Phyllis
deYoung.
Union Oil Co., 324, 325
United Nations, San Francisco
Conference, 1945, 103, 394, 395
University of California, Berkeley:
Academic Senate, 143; Art
Department, 52-56; Berkeley
Fellows, 237; Free Speech
Movement, 114, 115, 230-234;
journalism school, 371- , 382,
425; loyalty oath, 141-143, 458;
Occident magazine, 50, 51
Val Verde Canyon, CA, 474, 475
Valencia, F. Scott, 207
Valencia, CA, 342-345, 353-355, 361,
376, 377, 400
Vallev Forge. HOa-llOc, LlOf-llOg
Van Buren, Abigail. See Dear Abby.
Vietnam war, 187, 188, 223, 234,
381, 458, 459
Vietor, John, 267
Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise. 159, 160, 199, 200
Virginia City Camel Races, 199, 200
563
von Beroldinger, Linton, 92
Wade, Larry, 199, 200, 206, 210,
388, 402, 403, 466, 476
Waldo, Ruth. See Ruth Newhall.
Waldo, Mimi, 414, 443
Wallace, Kevin, 156
Ward, Baxter, 438
Washington Post. 180, 187, 379-382,
384
Watergate, 188
Watson, Don, 284
Webb School, Claremont, CA, 25, 27
Weismuller, Johnnie, 62, App.
White, Lynn Townsend, 13, 14, 37,
White, Stewart Edward, 13, 34, 35,
41, 73
World War II, 99-110; women, war
work, 109. See Japanese
relocation.
Wren, Bill, 61, 115, 218
yuppies, 152, 153. Also see Santa
Clarita Valley.
Zilke, Ezra, 334
Suzanne Bassett Riess
Grev up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Graduated from Goucher College, B.A. in
English, 1957.
Post-graduate work, University of London
and the University of California, Berkeley,
in English and history of art.
Feature writing and assistant woman's page
editor, Globe-Times, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Free-lance writing and editing in Berkeley.
Volunteer work on starting a nev Berkeley
newspaper .
Natural science decent at the Oakland Museum.
Editor in the Regional Oral History Office
since I960, interviewing in the fields of
art, cultural history, environmental design,
photography, Berkeley and University history.
2037 52
tf. b. f*