Editors: I Couldn't Get Anyone to Arrest Me

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Even though some of his crusades seem outrageous, Newhall is no Don Quixote. When he and Publisher Charles Thieriot took over the Chronicle in 1952, the paper was sobersided and international-minded. Circulation was 155,000, behind two mediocre competitors, and profit-and-loss figures showed only losses. Newhall de-emphasized foreign affairs and accentuated a breezy—and sometimes banal—mixture of splashy local stories and columnists, including San Franciscophile Herb Caen and Art Hoppe, the West Coast's answer to Art Buchwald. One of the paper's series, probing the police department, went so far as to lead with the old saw about the dumb cop who found a dead horse on the corner of Guerrero Street and dutifully dragged it a whole block to Valencia Street because he couldn't spell Guerrero. "We got a new chief out of that series," says Newhall.

Two-line Editorial. Newhall's flamboyance and humor nearly always have a point. When the rival paper, Hearst's Examiner, got overrighteously indignant about topless bathing suits, Newhall ran a two-line editorial: "The problem with San Francisco is not topless bathing suits. It's topless newspapers." Mixing up a concoction of baking powder and alcohol and selling it to friends as Spanish fly, he helped finance a small scholarship fund for Mexican students at the University of California. During the Pueblo crisis, when Governor Ronald Reagan was urging a 24-hour ultimatum to the North Koreans, Newhall offered to finance the deployment of a battleship —on the sole condition that the Governor be in the landing party.

Though Newhall's Chronicle is frequently criticized as lightweight intellectually, the paper's circulation has climbed to 492,000, ahead of the Examiner (220,000) and the paper has been profitable since 1962. Newhall takes great pride in survival and dismisses the criticism. "It has been my opinion that the only way we could stay alive was to make the paper at times a seemingly frothy, purely enjoyable experience, beneath which is a strong, serious, liberal viewpoint about world affairs."