The Beehive

"I am content," says Eleanor McClatchy of Sacramento, "to have people think I live in a cave and wear horns." Nobody thinks that, but few know that Miss McClatchy, 51, is one of the richest and most powerful newspaperwomen in the U.S. She is president of California's Sacramento, Modesto and Fresno Bees (combined circulation 247,000), and the boss of six western radio stations. In all, her empire is worth an estimated $30 million. Yet Eleanor McClatchy is so publicity-shy that she seldom permits her picture to be taken, will not even say where she went to school.* "I was taught that newspaper people should never push themselves forward," she explains, "but should stand on the sidelines and report the doings of others."

Last week Eleanor McClatchy's own doings were well worth reporting. With circulation of all three papers at new peaks, she has installed the Modesto staff in a new $850,000 building, with music in the city room, is putting the finishing touches on a $2,500,000 modern building for the Sacramento staff (it is already being printed there). Next month she will move Fresno staffers into a new million dollar building. But like other publishers, the queen of the Bees has been hit by rising costs; last week she raised the papers' newsstand price from a nickel to a dime.

Public Power. That is just what the Sacramento Bee cost when Eleanor's grandfather James McClatchy helped found it 95 years ago. An Irish immigrant and forty-niner, McClatchy flopped as a miner before he went into journalism and struck gold. When he died in 1883 and son Charles Kenny McClatchy took over as editor, the Bee was flying high.

"C.K." crusaded for public power and arbitration of labor disputes (still favorite Bee campaigns), exposed corruption in state and local government, lashed out at the political power of the Southern Pacific railroad, a big advertiser. "The ship of journalism," said C.K., "is too often steered from the countinghouse and not from the editorial office." At one time, he had 19 libel suits on his hands.

Once C.K. ran a headline which said: THANK GOD THE LEGISLATURE IS SOON TO ADJOURN . . . SACRAMENTANS SHOULD ALL BE JOYFUL. California's legislators were so mad at the Bee that they tried to shift the capital from Sacramento. Roared back McClatchy: "When it shall come to pass in this seagirt, sun-kissed and mountain-embraced State of California that a newspaper shall not open its lips against a gang which a misguided public have molded into legislators, then it is time that we make genuflection before them and lay our bellies low in the dust as they pass."

Political Punch. As the Sacramento paper grew, McClatchy bought a paper in Modesto and named it the Bee and founded a Bee in Fresno (both now monopoly towns). His son became general manager in 1923, but he died ten years later. When old C.K. died shortly after, his daughter Eleanor, 32, was left to carry on. She had no journalistic training, but she grimly set to work to get it. Now she spends most of her time on the business side, lets able Editor Walter Jones, a 33-year Beeliner, make most top editorial decisions for all three papers.

The Bees are still liberal and staunchly independent. They still crusade, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1935 for exposing political corruption in Nevada. Four years ago, the Sacramento Bee was largely responsible for passage of a lobby-control act after it exposed California's most notorious lobbyist, 300-lb. Artie Samish.

The powerful Bees were responsible for electing a Democratic state attorney general, Edmund G. Brown, in 1950, the only Democrat to win a high state office. Republican Governor Earl Warren is grateful for their support. But in the last presidential election, the Bees could not make up their minds, so they supported neither Truman nor Dewey. "If you don't know yourself who the best man is," says Eleanor, "you can't tell others. You just turn 'em loose and let 'em vote."

Though commonplace in appearance and style, the Bees appeal to their predominantly agricultural readers with farm supplements and close coverage of their area, referred to by the papers as "Superior California." Says Editor Jones: "We're neighborhood papers on a regional basis." And Publisher McClatchy keeps busy as a bee watching her neighborhood. Says she: "A newspaper is a delicate and intangible thing that could easily go gaflooey."

* She went to Bennett Junior College in Millbrook, N.Y.

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