How to Retire in Santa Barbara

At 72, Robert McLean, publisher of the Philadelphia Bulletin, plans to spend more and more time in California. Not that McLean is thinking of retiring; he has just paid out some $8,000,000 to buy the Santa Barbara News-Press (circ. 35,000) from its longtime owner, Thomas More Storke, 87.

From Jan. 1, 1901, when Tom Storke began publishing in Santa Barbara on the strength of a $2,000 loan, he held to his faith that the paper would prosper through "advancement of local interests." Over the years as Storke bought or merged with the competing local papers, the News-Press became Santa Barbara's one voice, and the boss became the town's benevolent despot.

No Dynasty. More often than not in recent years, News-Press editorials have championed Storke's own unpredictable, irascible opinions. When California's controversial School Superintendent Max Rafferty was attacking the Dictionary of American Slang, the NewsPress castigated Rafferty roundly, only to reverse its stand overnight after Storke was shown a list of dirty words from the book. When the John Birch Society moved into Santa Barbara, it roused no visible opposition from the News-Press--until the Birchers had the temerity to attack Storke's close friend Earl Warren. That move provoked an angry series of News-Press articles and a front-page Storke editorial that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Sale of the paper marks the end for Thomas More Storke of his cherished vision of founding a newspaper dynasty. Storke's father, who had founded the Los Angeles Herald only to be squeezed out a few months later by the panic of 1873, wrote signed editorial columns for the Santa Barbara paper until his death in 1936. Storke's son Charles, now 52, joined the News-Press in 1932, and he was clearly heir apparent. (Another son has been a lifelong invalid.) But Charles got impatient; the old man simply refused to retire. Besides, Charles's wife was bitterly opposed to all suggestions that their own son work on the paper. In 1959, Charles quit the News-Press for good and moved his family to Mexico City.

No Absentee Owners. As the only daily in a burgeoning town, the News-Press had no lack of hopeful buyers. The Ridder chain, the Los Angeles Times, British Press Lord Roy Thomson were all said to have made bids. McLean overcame Storke's objection to absentee ownership by purchasing the paper for himself, not for the Philadelphia Bulletin Co. He also promised to live in Santa Barbara part of each year, and he has already moved his nephew Stuart Symington Taylor, 50, a cousin of the Missouri Senator, from his job as Bulletin vice president to fulltime publisher of the News-Press. McLean and Taylor have tactfully asked Storke to stay on for life, perhaps as advisor and editor emeritus.

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