Valley of the Bees

In California's mountain-bordered Central Valley, a green, 450-mile finger veined by rivers and stretching half the length of the state, nothing buzzes quite so persistently as the Bees. Last week the industrious hum of the three Bee papers (combined circulation 284,755), issuing from hives in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto, rose louder than ever. For the first time in its 102 years of publication, the Sacramento Bee came out with a Sunday edition.

To 150,050 readers, the new Sunday paper was an unexpected treat. Long accustomed to dull makeup and stodgy writing, they raised eyebrows at the generous use of color, white space, and sprightly features in the 174-page edition. "We haven't been able to featurize our papers much over the years," said Managing Editor Myron Depew. "Now maybe on the weekend we can entertain our readers, maybe charm them a little."

Guided by a Codicil. The Sunday Sacramento Bee had another purpose: to meet the threat of San Francisco's Chronicle and Examiner, which have recently pushed brisk Sunday circulation sorties into a jealously guarded newspaper preserve. To the custodian of the preserve--which also includes five radio stations and a television station--such poaching is intolerable. Valley residents seem to feel about the same way. In the 18,000-sq.-mi. domain, one of every two doorsteps is daily crossed by a Bee; in Sacramento so many people take the paper that a new carrier boy is handed a route list, not of subscribers, but of those few nonconformists who do not subscribe.

Custodian of the Bees is a 61-year-old spinster so shy that none of her papers have ever printed her picture. "Newspaper people should stay on the sidelines," says Eleanor McClatchy, president of McClatchy Newspapers since the death in 1936 of her father, C. K. (for Charles Kenny) McClatchy, who took over the Sacramento Bee in 1883 on the death of his father, James McClatchy. Eleanor McClatchy's guide is a codicil to her father's will: "I want the McClatchy newspapers ... to maintain ever their freedom of action and their absolute independence."

"It's Scary." Times have changed since the days when C.K. helped sweep California government free of railroad domination and armed his reporters to cover the Ku Klux Klan. But the Bees hum every bit as independently now as then. C.K. leaped party lines to endorse Warren Harding in 1920 and old Bob La Follette in 1924. Although Eleanor has been more consistently Democratic at the national level, she makes endorsements on the state ticket with an impartial disregard for party. Last fall she supported Democrat Pat Brown for Governor, but the rest of the Bees' state ballot went to Republicans. Bee readers expect thorough news coverage as a matter of course. The Sacramento Bee, biggest of the three, maintains a city-room staff of 70, and keeps a full-time squad of six newsmen on the state legislature beat. A string of 238 correspondents services all three papers.

Carrying on the family tradition, Eleanor McClatchy seems acutely aware that only the untimely death of her brother Carlos of pneumonia in 1933 put her in charge. "It's scary," she says, "when you think how much the people rely on us."

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