The needle on my dashboard’s voltmeter gauge dropped suddenly like a tossed rock, and the VW shook to a halt on the upper deck of old Cypress freeway, the one that would collapse eight years later in the 1989 earthquake. With cars and trucks flying by and no shoulder, the first of several serendipitous events, miracles perhaps, occurred. A CHP car appeared behind us and pushed the Rabbit to safety. An Oakland gas station charged the battery enough to make it to Los Gatos with a fried alternator.
The passenger, a carpenter we’d picked up at a Berkeley freeway entrance holding a “Santa Cruz” sign, knew a lot more about automobiles than me. He explained that the battery was powering the spark plugs and that I’d have to turn on my headlamps going over the hill as the sky lost light. That would cause the car to die somewhere in the mountains on Highway 17. Why don’t we stop in Los Gatos, where he knew a lawyer who he’d been helping restore a Victorian? We could use his phone to call my housemate and wait until he arrived.
Pat O’Laughlin appeared at the door of his Tait Avenue home, invited us in and chatted with us while we waited for Roger Sanford to make it from Aptos to collect us. Roger had been encouraging me to start a weekly newspaper in Los Gatos, a town as familiar to me after four years on the coast as the dark side of the moon.
Nonetheless, I conducted some impromptu market research. “What’s the newspaper like here,” I asked the young lawyer as he stood on a ladder and stuck his head up some hole in the ceiling.
“Oh, it’s terrible,” he said, without missing a beat. “An out-of-town corporation bought it and there’s no coverage of the town anymore.”
“If a new newspaper started, would it get support?” I probed. He assured me it would.
We made it back to Santa Cruz, and I mentioned the idea to my boss, Lee May, who revealed that he’d grown up in Los Gatos. This proved useful because his brother, a dentist, became our first investor, but warned us not to tell anyone “because I wouldn’t invest in anything a dentist invested in.”
Lee’s father, who owned an appliance store in Alum Rock, gave us some old desks and telephones and broken office equipment, which we used to stage a movie set-style office at 114 Royce Street. We held an open house and poured white wine. No one noticed that the phone cords were tucked under the desks instead of plugged into the walls.
When I needed to incorporate the business, I called Pat, who referred me to a local attorney, Jim Emerson, who connected us with a CPA who helped bring in a few more investors. O’Laughlin also introduced us to Peter Carter, who helped us raise a few more dollars. It would be a newspaper owned by members of the community challenging one owned by a big media corporation based in Des Moines, Iowa.
Graphic designer Rick Tharp created a logo, and the first issue was published on March 10, 1982, exactly 40 years ago this week. In it, Lee wrote, “I had nightmares of the Los Gatos I once knew becoming a suburb of San Jose and spit out like a silicon chip on an assembly line.”
Roger became the ad director and later went on to co-found the KCAT public television station and an advertising agency. Emerson became a well-respected judge.
The Weekly fought hard and acquired the Times-Observer eight years later. The combination proved to be a good move for the two small, struggling publications in a town that had been hobbled by a powerful earthquake. The Weekly-Times won the state press association’s top award for newspapers of its size twice, and the merger marked the beginning of a group that purchased other nearby community newspapers and thrived until the dotcom implosion and financial necessity forced its sale.
Editors Dale Bryant and Dick Sparrer maintained journalistic quality through subsequent ownership changes, but Dick retired in 2016 and eventually forces from afar stripped the remaining local voices.
Some odd cosmic cycle conspired this past September to allow Lee, Roger and I to launch the Los Gatan, a local newspaper for Los Gatos, once again.
The new Telefèric Barcelona restaurant sits where we threw our opening bash when the Weekly first appeared. Anyone up for a toast on Thursday?
