The newspaper scene in Los Angeles changed mightily the first week of 1962. Prior to that, we had two major morning newspapers — the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Examiner. And we had two major afternoon papers — the Los Angeles Mirror and the Los Angeles Herald-Express. The Times and the Mirror were published by a company called The Times-Mirror Corporation and the Examiner and the Herald-Express were published by the Hearst Corporation.
That was how it worked Monday through Saturday. On Sunday, the Times-Mirror folks put out a Sunday edition of the Times which included comic strips, columnists and other features from both of their papers. And the Hearst people put out a Sunday paper which featured the best of both of their papers.
On 1/5/62, the Times-Mirror company announced that it was discontinuing their afternoon paper, the Mirror. Almost simultaneously, Hearst announced they were stopping their morning paper, the Examiner. The Hearst afternoon paper was thereafter known as the Herald-Examiner.
The timing, of course, caused everyone to assume a deal had been made between the two publishers…and I think it's still taken as fact that one was. But there was some denial of that at the time. A Congressional inquiry was held to determine if any laws — anti-trust ones, perhaps — had been violated by this apparent collusion but I don't think anything came of it.
Still, there was much shouting and wailing as each organization dismissed a great number of employees. Kids who delivered newspapers on their bicycles complained that their incomes had been halved. Subscribers to the discontinued papers were not all happy with how, for example, a subscription for a year to one paper suddenly became a subscription to the other, and if you took both of one company's papers, you now had twice as long a sub to the remaining one.
That was the case in our house. My father loved newspapers but he hated the Hearst operation for a lot of the same reasons that some people now despise Fox News. Thus, we just got the Times and the Mirror. He took the Mirror largely because he played the stock market and didn't want to wait until the next morning to see how his stocks had closed. When it went away, he overcame his Hearst aversion and subscribed to the Herald-Examiner.
At the time, being not quite ten years of age, what concerned me most was the comic strips. I did occasionally read something not on the funnies page but none of that was as important as the comics. Each of the four newspapers had one page of comic strips with a few other strips scattered elsewhere around each edition.
Prior to the downsizing, I had not been fully deprived of the many fine comic strips that ran in the two Hearst papers just because my father wouldn't have them in the house. My Aunt Dot and Uncle Aaron got them and they'd save the Examiner Sunday pages for me. Sometimes, if they remembered, they'd save some of the daily pages for me. I liked visiting Aunt Dot and Uncle Aaron.
I imagine that at each of the two firms, there was much discussion about what to do about the funnies when they each dropped one of their newspapers. At the newly-rechristened Herald-Examiner, they had a glorious solution: They ran two pages of comics! They ran the entire page that had appeared in the Examiner and on the facing page, there was the same full page that had run in the Herald-Express.
That made me very happy but, alas, it didn't last for long. A few weeks later, they announced that for budgetary reasons, they'd be dropping enough strips to get down to one page. I vaguely recall that they ran some sort of survey to ask their readers what should stay and what should go. I might be wrong about that but I do vividly recall my disappointment one day when I opened to the funnies pages and there was just one of them.
The Times-Mirror folks got down to one page of comics immediately. They kept the Times comic strip page mostly intact but dropped about eight strips from it to make room for what they must have thought were the eight (or so) most popular strips from the Mirror. They included Dennis the Menace, Mr. Mum, B.C., Peanuts and Pogo. Not long after, I believe — and remember, these are unconfirmed recollections from when I was pretty young — Walt Kelly's Pogo disappeared from the Times and therefore from Los Angeles. That didn't bother me as much then as it would have a few years later when I was finally old enough to start understanding some of it.
The Herald-Examiner went out of business in 1989. The Times continues to publish but I don't think I've touched a copy in ten years. I took delivery of it when I first moved out of my parents' house in the mid-seventies because, well, a daily newspaper was something you just had to have when I was a kid. But increasingly, they were piling up unread and on days when it didn't come (or got stolen off my porch), I didn't notice. When I finally noticed that I wasn't noticing, I took that as a sign to cancel my subscription. This was well before there was an Internet as we know it.
Unlike some friends a decade or two older than me, I do not miss the daily comics. I miss certain cartoonists and characters but I vastly prefer to read them in book collections. I am very proud that I am now involved with bringing Pogo to the world in that format. It was my favorite newspaper strip long before I ever met anyone related to Mr. Kelly. I enjoy my current favorite comic strips online and I pointedly do not check them every day. I let a few weeks go by, then I read many at a time to catch up. I still love comic strips. I just don't like loving them one day at a time.
