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Published on 09/08/1997 All articles from this issue

Ownership of the Town Crier: Chronicling a 50-year history

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By Dave MacKenzie

The Town Crier was started in 1947 by Warren Goodrich and David MacKenzie. The original offices were at 225 Main St. in Los Altos. In 1950/51, Goodrich departed for New York City leaving MacKenzie in charge.

Bill Norton piloted his plane into Palo Alto from Susanville in 1954, where he had just sold the Lassen Advocate paper and a couple of satellite publications. He and MacKenzie formed a corporation called Foothill Printing and Publishing. Norton brought with him a 17-inch by 22-inch Webendorfer sheet fed press that printed the Town Crier for several years.

After a landlord refused to have the press located on his State Street property, it found a home in an old apricot drying shed located close to where Bandera restaurant is today.

I worked mostly on advertising agency projects while Norton managed the Town Crier and printing jobs. This changed between 1958-68 with expansion. The corporation bought the Cupertino Courier and moved the press to rented quarters in Cupertino.

Finally, we purchased land on Blaney Avenue, built a headquarters building and bought an e-unit Goss roll fed offset press. The Town Crier staff stayed in Los Altos in a house on Second Street converted to offices. The corporation put out another weekly, the Sunnyvale Scribe, to cover parts of Sunnyvale.

Then Norton, always the wanderer, bought the Carmel Valley Outlook in Carmel Valley, leaving me in charge of Santa Clara operations.

In 1972, Foothill Printing and Publishing was sold to Mort Levine and his partner, Los Altos Hills resident Larry Dawson. Under the name Suburban Newspaper they went on a buying spree, buying papers in Los Gatos, Saratoga and Campbell, adding to the Milpitas Post, which they already owned. They ended up with 16 papers.

In 1979, Suburban Newspapers sold its entire chain to Meredith Publishing of Des Moines, Iowa, owner of a large media empire.

Meredith decided that it did not understand how weekly papers operated and sold to Terry Donnelly, a Meredith executive, in 1986.

In 1988, the Chicago Tribune bought the Palo Altos Times, Redwood City Tribune and the former Meredith holdings, including the Town Crier.

More errors in judgment, like combining the Redwood City and Palo Alto operations into one paper, led to losses. The Tribune gave up and put every paper on the block. some were shut down and ceased to exist, like the Palo Alto/Redwood City paper.

But saved from this disaster is the Town Crier, purchased by the current publisher Paul Nyberg on March 15, 1993.