King Storke

Tucked snugly between Southern California's Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific coast, the expensively attractive city of Santa Barbara (pop. 60,000) is a natural harbor for old bones. There, under a gentle sun, the retired well-to-do live out their twilight years, nourishing a vehement conservative concern for the state of the nation. It was a natural place to organize an active cell of the radical right-wing John Birch Society. But less inevitable was the fact that it was the leading citizen of Santa Barbara who first peeled the bark off the Birchers. The man who did it was Thomas More Storke, 84, crusty editor and publisher of the city's only daily, the News-Press (circ. 31,466).

When word of the Birchers' fulminations first reached Tom Storke's ears last year, he was more bemused than angry. Their secret meetings, their talk of using Communist cellular methods to fight Communists, their indiscriminate character assassination he did not take seriously until, centering their attack on U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Birchers offered $2,300 for the best college essays on why Warren should be impeached. This attack on a man who happened to be a lifelong friend of Storke's touched a nerve.

The Whole Town Listened. The News-Press ran a two-part series exposing the Birchers and burst into editorial flame: "How can anyone follow a leader absurd enough to call former President Eisenhower 'a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy'?" To counter the society's "impeach Warren" contest, Storke offered $1,500 to the students of law or psychiatry who could best explain the behavior of the society's founder. Retired Candyman Robert Welch. As the News-Press pressed its anti-Birch crusade, the whole town listened. For Tom Storke is more than publisher of Santa Barbara's only daily. He is the ruddy, irascible, benevolent tyrant who has played king of Santa Barbara for 61 years.

Picking Fights. Even Mayor Edward Abbott consults Storke daily. The telephone company is shamefacedly rushing a corrected directory into print because Storke found a few errors in a new edition. After a devastating 1925 earthquake, Storke and his paper ordered the city rebuilt in Spanish style, and it was. Having assisted Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House in 1932--by helping California's William G. McAdoo (later U.S. Senator) deliver the California delegation at convention time--Democrat Storke got his expected reward: $22 million in federal public works, including an armory, a reservoir, nine tennis courts and a public bathhouse.

Son of an Easterner who migrated to Santa Barbara to teach college Latin, young Tom Storke went to work as a $6-a-week cub reporter. After three years, with $2,000 borrowed from a retired druggist, he bought the Santa Barbara Daily Independent, a listless newspaper only 300 subscribers from extinction. Steadily, Storke not only stifled--by sale or merger --all the local newspaper competition but picked editorial fights up and down the California coast. He took on the Southern Pacific Railroad, which then ruled the state as Storke now rules Santa Barbara; he beat down enemies of his plan to dam the Santa Ynez River to provide Santa Barbara with water.

God & Constitution. Today Tom Storke has things so much his way in Santa Barbara that he has little left to fight. Few men dare oppose him: "If I was ever quoted as saying something against T.M.," said an understandably anonymous Santa Barbara businessman, "I'd lose my job the next day."

One night last week, Tom Storke's subjects crowded into the ballroom of the neo-Spanish Santa Barbara Biltmore for a testimonial dinner for their cantankerous king. For his "defense of civil liberties," for being the first to raise an editorial fist against the Birchers. Editor Storke received the Richard E. Lauterbach Award from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. He heard congratulatory messages from all over the U.S.. among them one from an admirer named John Kennedy (who praised Storke's "sturdy conviction and judgment''). "For 61 years I've been dodging brickbats." said Tom Storke. "Tonight it is a little difficult to accept these orchids. What I did was not a courageous gesture. It should not be considered courageous to stand up and defend what God and the Constitution have given us."

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