After the Earthquake

In 1952, a city-room earthquake rocked the morning San Francisco Chronicle, and 38 staffers disappeared from view, including Boy Wonder Editor Paul Smith (TIME, Dec. 22, 1952). Before the shakeup, the Chronicle had a studious and often dull international bent, a slipping circulation of 155,205 (down 20,356 in five years), and an annual deficit of $1,000,000. Last week, edited as though the world began at San Francisco Bay and ended at the Golden Gate, the Chronicle was proudly--and accurately--calling itself the nation's fastest-growing major daily both in ads and circulation.

Prime shaker of the quake that started the Chronicle rolling was energetic Assistant Publisher Charles de Young Thieriot, who later became editor and publisher. A descendant of Charles and Michael de Young, teen-age brothers who founded the Chronicle in 1865 on a borrowed $20 gold piece, Thieriot gave the job of blowing a fresh breeze through the Chronicle's fogbound pages to suave Scott Newhall, also a member of a leading San Francisco family. As executive editor, Newhall scrapped the Chronicle's old makeup of sober type marching row on row for a blaze of bold, black headlines, launched syndicated Lovelornist Abigail Van Buren (TIME, Jan. 20, 1957), assembled a cast of 20 home-town columnists. "International news," declares Thieriot, "is not what people want to read at breakfast."

But Thieriot and Newhall still lacked just the man to turn the liberal Republican Chronicle into a breakfast treat instead of a treatment: curly-haired, puckish San Franciscophile Herb Caen (pronounced Cane), 43, the columnist who defected to Hearst's morning Examiner in 1950 for a doubled salary of $30,000. In 1957, Prodigal Son Caen decided to return (for $38,000 a year), leaving the Examiner (circ. 257,251) with little humor to perk up its somber pages. "The day I knew we had come around the corner," says Publisher Thieriot, "is the day Herb Caen decided to come back." Looking over his figures for 1958, Thieriot had good evidence that he, Newhall and Caen, and a fired-up city-room staff had done a good job of boosting the Chronicle: in a recession year, the paper gained 1,248,313 lines in advertising, soared 31,029 in circulation to reach a new high of 225,429.

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