The Los Gatos Weekly's first year of publishing was celebrated in 1983 by founding staff members (counter-clockwise from upper right) Steve Friedman, Lee May, Roger Sanford, Dan Pulcrano and Corinne Asturias.
By DAN PULCRANO
I sometimes muse about the random and unlikely events that led me to plant myself in the Santa Clara Valley, and the dominoes that tumbled in the wake of that accident of fate. Something as ludicrous as a fried alternator changed my life and a few others, and probably Los Gatos as well. Then again, it was equally Pat O'Laughlin's fault.
Somehow the ludicrous and improbable add up to the mundane--the fact that I am still involved in putting out a newspaper in Los Gatos each week in my middle years, something I could not have foreseen when as a recent UC-Santa Cruz grad I picked up a hitchhiker on a Berkeley freeway ramp in 1981.
Had there been a car close behind me, you would not have loaded this web page into your browser and Pat wouldn't have become mayor of Los Gatos.
I don't remember his name, but he was standing there on ice planted cloverleaf with a sign that said "Santa Cruz," and since I was headed right there, I stopped and offered a lift. A few miles south, my Rabbit lost power and the needles on all my gauges dropped like I'd been hit by a SCUD missile. The VW came to a halt right there atop the shoulder-less Cypress overpass.
A CHP unit, luckily, was there within seconds and pushed the car and its three passengers to the ramp ahead. The Oakland gas station we rolled to knew little about German alternators, but after an hour of battery charging, we were headed southbound on 17 again.
Only problem was the needles were going down again, as was the sun, and turning on the headlamps would have drained what battery power that the spark plugs hadn't sucked. So the hitchhiker, a carpenter, said he had been helping an attorney in Los Gatos restore an old Victorian. We could probably park the car there and borrow his phone.
So that's how we all wound up at Pat O'Laughlin's house on Tait Avenue, my first time in Los Gatos. Pretty nice town, I thought to myself, and remembered my Santa Cruz buddy Roger Sanford suggesting once that I think about starting a paper in Los Gatos, since the hometown journal had been bought by a chain and was losing the community's support.
"What's the paper here like?" I asked Pat.
"Oh, it's terrible!" he said, and launched into details about how the out-of-town owners didn't care a lick about the town.
I asked him if the community would support a good local newspaper, and he assured me it would. That was good enough market research for me.
As we left Pat's house, I repeated his name--O'Laughlin, O'Laughlin--so I wouldn't forget it, thinking it might one day come in handy.
A few months later, Los Gatos native Lee May and I were running around with the Los Gatos Weekly business plan, which was not exactly turning out to be the hot IPO candidate of 1981. I called Jay Levin, a mentor who I'd watched raise money a few years earlier to start the L.A. Weekly, after which the Los Gatos Weekly was named. "No one wants to invest," I complained. "What do I do now, Jay?"
"Dial another number," he advised.
So there from the pay phone at the Town Plaza, I started scanning the O's in the phone book until I hit the name I remembered.
"I could give you 10 names," O'Laughlin offered when I called out of the blue. "But I'll give you one who's as good as ten."
Peter Carter took the call at his local ad agency and was kind enough to think the project might actually stand a chance. He helped us pull together a few investors.
The next time I called Pat it was to see if he could recommend an attorney. He suggested James Emerson, a business lawyer who's now a judge, and who was instrumental in incorporating the company and completing the financing.
After the paper began publishing, I was not too shy to ask Pat for more help. Perhaps displaying an inability to say no to anything that was community spirited, Pat joined the board of directors.
Economics of small town publishing being what they are, the original company didn't make it. The Times Observer, our competitor, was sold to new owners who showed competitive vigor. Following two years of particularly bad losses, a controlling interest in the struggling paper was sold in 1988 to companies run by Joe White and Joseph Shulman, owners of downtown real estate and Old Town, respectively.
After another two years in the war of attrition between the newspapers and the devastation of Los Gatos' downtown in the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Weekly was on the ropes again and the Times-Observer was ready to sell as well. Metro Publishing, a spin-off of the Weekly that I'd started with David Cohen in 1985, purchased both newspapers and merged them into the Weekly-Times in August 1990.
Metro had incorporated in the same offices as the Weekly at 114 Royce Street and had strong ties to Los Gatos, so the fit turned out to be good one. As part of the deal to buy the Times Observer, Metro took an option on the Saratoga News, which was the beginning of Metro's transition from a one-newspaper company to the Winchester Mystery House of local publishing: eight offices, 150 employees and 10 newspapers stretching from Santa Cruz to Sonoma.
Meantime, when Pat O'Laughlin ran for town council a few years ago, it would have been impossible for the paper not to support someone who had so selflessly given to the community every time he'd been asked, so he easily won the Weekly-Times endorsement. His opponent credited that endorsement with tipping the election to O'Laughlin.
There are others who contributed generous doses of encouragement, labor, business help and financial sustenance along the journey, but to start naming names would risk overlooking someone. Suffice to say that you know who you are, and each time the paper is selected by our industry's trade association as the best paper of its size in the state, I hope you'll take some pride in having contributed to that honor, because we could not have done it without you. We're grateful for the opportunity to publish a newspaper for Los Gatos.
Thanks to those who have helped, 15 years later, the Weekly-Times has survived the odds, and 15 years to the week of our first issue I'm holding the deadline up with a late addition.
My advice: always take your car in for regular servicing.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, March 5, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.