About Pacific Sun

Pacific Sun

The Pacific Sun is an alternative weekly newspaper serving Marin County, California, founded in April 1963 in the back of a Stinson Beach grocery store by Merrill and Joann Grohman. In 1966 it moved to San Rafael and was bought that year by Steve McNamara, a former Sunday editor of the San Francisco Examiner, who published it for nearly four decades. It is described as the longest-running alternative weekly in the United States, published on Wednesdays. Its history includes two years in the 1970s when future United States Senator Barbara Boxer was a reporter there, winning a Press Club award for a 1973 story, and the origination of the newspaper series that became Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. McNamara sold it to Embarcadero Media in 2004; Bob Heinen bought it in October 2012, and Metro Newspapers acquired it in May 2015, restoring circulation and commissioning Jim Parkinson to redraw its nameplate. Daedalus Howell became editor in October 2019.

Few American papers pack so much cultural history into a county weekly. The Pacific Sun began three years before the alternative press is usually said to exist, employed a future senator, launched one of the most beloved serials in American fiction and passed through a series of owners into its seventh decade still publishing in San Rafael. Its claim to be the country's longest-running alternative weekly rests on that unbroken line from a grocery store back room in 1963 to the present.

Founded in a Stinson Beach Grocery in 1963

Merrill and Joann Grohman founded the Pacific Sun in April 1963 in the back of a grocery store in Stinson Beach, the small coastal village on Marin County's Pacific shore. The date is remarkable: 1963 predates the underground and alternative newspaper explosion of the later 1960s, making the Grohmans' paper a precursor of the form, a locally owned weekly of independent temper serving the artists, surfers, ranchers and commuters of coastal Marin before there was a movement to name it part of. Stinson Beach, with its artists' colony character and its distance from San Rafael's county-seat formality, gave the paper its founding spirit of coastal independence.

The paper's move inland to San Rafael in 1966, and its purchase that year by Steve McNamara, converted a village experiment into a county institution. McNamara brought metropolitan craft to the venture: he had been Sunday editor of the San Francisco Examiner, one of the West's great dailies, and he applied a professional editor's standards to a county weekly while preserving its alternative voice. Under McNamara the Pacific Sun became Marin's alternative paper in the full sense, covering the county's politics, environment, arts and counterculture for the readership that made Marin famous in those decades.

Steve McNamara's Four Decades

McNamara's ownership from 1966 to 2004 is the paper's long centre. An editor-publisher of the classic independent type, he shaped the Sun's personality for thirty-eight years, through Marin's transformation from a semi-rural county of dairies and small towns into one of America's most affluent and environmentally conscious suburbs. The paper chronicled and contested that transformation: land development, the preservation of Marin's open space and coastline, the county's schools and supervisors, and the cultural life of a county dense with writers, musicians and filmmakers. A weekly owned by its editor for four decades acquires a consistency of voice that readers experience as the paper's character itself, and McNamara's Sun had that consistency in full.

His eventual sale in 2004, to Embarcadero Media, the Palo Alto-based group, began the paper's passage through the modern industry's ownership forms. That a metropolitan professional of McNamara's background chose Marin's alternative weekly as his life's work, when he could have remained at a great daily, says much about the era's journalism, in which the alternative weekly offered an editor freedom that chain dailies increasingly did not. The Sun under McNamara demonstrated what that freedom produced: distinctive reporting, literary ambition and a county paper with a national reputation for quality.

Barbara Boxer's Reporting Years

Among the reporters who worked at the Pacific Sun was Barbara Boxer, who spent two years there as a reporter in the 1970s before her election to the Marin County Board of Supervisors began her political career, which carried her to the United States House of Representatives and then to the United States Senate. At the Sun she won a Press Club award for a story in 1973, professional recognition that preceded her public life. Boxer's trajectory, from alternative weekly reporter to county supervisor to senator, began in the Sun's newsroom, where reporting on Marin's issues gave her the grounding in local government and environmental politics that defined her career.

The Boxer chapter illustrates the alternative weekly's civic function as a training ground for public life as well as journalism. A reporter covering supervisors, planning and community conflict for the Sun learned Marin's politics at the granular level, and in Boxer's case transferred that knowledge directly into elected office in the same county. The paper counts a United States senator among its alumni, a distinction no other county alternative weekly can claim in quite the same direct form, and her Press Club award there in 1973 is part of both her biography and the paper's.

Where Tales of the City Began

The Pacific Sun originated the series that became Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, one of the most durable works of American popular fiction. Maupin's serial, chronicling the lives of a circle of young San Franciscans at 28 Barbary Lane, began in the Pacific Sun before moving to the San Francisco Chronicle, where it became famous, and then into the sequence of novels, television adaptations and revivals that kept its characters alive for half a century. That the serial's first home was a Marin alternative weekly reflects the paper's literary ambition under McNamara: a county paper willing to originate fiction, in serial form, as part of its offering to readers.

The association permanently links the Pacific Sun to San Francisco's literary history. Maupin's Tales documented the city's 1970s with affectionate precision and became a landmark of gay literature and of the serial form revived for modern newspapers. Its Marin origin is a reminder that the Bay Area's cultural production in that era flowed across the Golden Gate in both directions, and that the alternative press, with the Sun among its earliest examples, was one of its principal channels.

The Longest-Running Alternative Weekly

The Pacific Sun is described as the longest-running alternative weekly in the United States. The claim rests on its 1963 founding, earlier than the Village Voice's imitators and the great alternative wave of the late 1960s and 1970s, and on its continuous publication since. Alternative weeklies elsewhere closed, merged or converted; the Sun, through the Grohmans, McNamara and three subsequent owners, kept appearing on Wednesdays in Marin. Longevity of that kind in the alternative sector is genuinely rare, because the form's economics were always precarious and its founding generation mostly retired without successors. The Sun found successors three times.

Its Wednesday publication day and its Marin territory remained constant through those successions, the fixed points of its identity. A Marin reader of 1975 and a Marin reader of today are served by recognizably the same institution: an independently minded weekly paper of the county, mixing news, investigation, arts and opinion, printed in the tradition McNamara established. That recognizability across six decades is the substance behind the longest-running description, more significant than the founding date alone.

Ownership After McNamara: 2004 to 2015

Embarcadero Media bought the Pacific Sun from McNamara in 2004, bringing the paper into a California group known for its Palo Alto and Peninsula weeklies. In October 2012 Bob Heinen acquired it, and in May 2015 Metro Newspapers, the San Jose-based alternative publisher, bought the paper. Metro's ownership brought two documented changes: circulation was restored, and the noted lettering artist Jim Parkinson was commissioned to redraw the paper's nameplate, a signal of investment in the paper's print identity at a time when most owners were stripping print assets. A new nameplate drawn by a master of newspaper typography declared that the Sun remained, under its third owner in a decade, a paper that cared how it looked.

The rapid succession of owners between 2004 and 2015 might have killed a weaker title. Instead each transfer preserved the paper, and Metro's stewardship, from within the alternative weekly tradition itself, Metro's founder being an alternative press veteran, returned the Sun to ownership that understood its genre. The sequence mirrors the alternative press's national story in miniature, founder to group to local buyer to genre specialist, with survival as the thread.

Daedalus Howell and the Modern Sun

Daedalus Howell became the Pacific Sun's editor in October 2019, leading the paper into its seventh decade. Howell, a Bay Area writer and broadcaster with deep roots in North Bay media, took the chair of a paper whose alumni include a senator and whose pages originated Tales of the City, an inheritance he has written about with evident appreciation for the institution's history. Under his editorship the Sun continues its Marin coverage in print on Wednesdays and online, through the pandemic era and the alternative press's continuing reinvention.

The modern Sun's agenda remains Marin's: land, water, housing, the county's famous environmental settlements and conflicts, its arts and food culture and its town and county politics, treated with the alternative weekly's mixture of reporting and voice. San Rafael, its home since 1966, remains its base, the editorial centre named in reference accounts of the paper's present form.

Pacific Sun and Marin County

Marin County's public identity, wealthy, environmentally militant, culturally rich and politically liberal, was formed in the very decades the Pacific Sun covered it, and the paper participated in forming it. Its reporting on development and open space, its cultural coverage and its independent editorial line made it one of the places where Marin argued out its future. A county with a metropolitan daily of its own might not have needed such a paper; Marin, served by dailies from outside and a local daily of different character, found in the Sun the alternative account of itself.

That function explains the paper's survival where hundreds of alternative weeklies failed. Marin's readers are among America's most literate and civically engaged, advertisers value them, and the county's controversies renew the paper's material every week. The Sun's founders in a Stinson Beach grocery could not have foreseen the county Marin would become, but the paper they started, professionalized by McNamara within three years, proved exactly fitted to serve it for the next sixty years.

Legacy of the Pacific Sun

The Pacific Sun's legacy joins three histories. In alternative journalism, it is the longest-running title in the United States, founded in 1963 before the genre had a name. In American politics, its newsroom launched Barbara Boxer's public career, with award-winning reporting in 1973. In literature, it originated the serial that became Tales of the City. Any one of those would secure a county weekly's place in the record; the Pacific Sun holds all three, alongside its primary achievement, six decades of weekly service to Marin County under the Grohmans, McNamara, Embarcadero, Heinen and Metro Newspapers.

Today the paper publishes on Wednesdays from San Rafael, edited by Daedalus Howell, its nameplate redrawn under Metro's ownership as a badge of continuity. The grocery store back room at Stinson Beach is now a founding legend of American alternative journalism, and the paper that began there remains, as it has been since 1963, the Pacific Sun, Marin's own weekly voice, still running longer than any of its kind.