San Diego Magazine at 60

It’s been an amazing journey, all the way from the birth of the first city magazine to our continuing success today. Join us for a look back.

(page 1 of 2)

IT WAS 60 YEARS AGO this month that Ed Self took the profits from the sale of a local newspaper, The North Shores Sentinel, and published the first issue of San Diego Magazine. Self had graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth four months after Pearl Harbor and, following a World War II stint with the Coast Guard, rekindled his passion for journalism by taking a job selling ads for the La Jolla Light. (While at San Diego High he had worked on the school newspaper, The Russ.) He eventually became co-owner of the Sentinel and then, in 1948, with his wife Dorothy, ventured into the magazine world.

Five thousand copies of the first issue of San Diego Magazine, cover date October 1948, were dispatched to newsstands around the city. A yellow-on-red rendering of the old Majestic Hotel, at Sixth and F, was on the cover, and inside were stories on the state of San Diego radio by future San Diego Tribune editor Neil Morgan; the Hollywood movie industry by Craig Noel, founding father of the Old Globe Theatre; and the hot new sport of surfing. Also in that first issue: social news, a four-page fashion spread and ads from La Jolla fashion boutique Sanderson’s, La Cantina bar at the U.S. Grant Hotel and the Hotel Riviera Pacifico in Ensenada.

Few who read the new publication knew what to make of it. It was a far cry from the promotional pamphlet of the same name the chamber of commerce had published years before. San Diego Magazine was an odd beast, unlike anything seen before. Until that time, there were no independent city magazines taking in and analyzing the news, current issues and trends with a fresh perspective. Perspective and analysis—a great way to help people digest what was going on in the city around them and, in San Diego Magazine’s case, a way to balance the often-biased view of the city spun by two conservative dailies, The San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune.

“He just wanted to showcase the city he loved,” recalls Dorothy of her former husband, who was an avowed liberal and champion of the underdog. And showcase the city he did, with remarkable clarity, vision and equal parts insight and foresight. Shortly after the magazine was born, Ed Self shed one wife for another and, in Gloria Winke, a former radio star and Tribune reporter, he found his life partner in publishing.

According to the book Regional Interest Magazines of the United States by Sam G. Riley and Gary W. Selnow, “The marriage of Winke and Self created a fusion of publishing philosophies and backgrounds. Self sought an editorial direction similar to Time but geared to local interests. Winke provided a visual perspective with emphasis on photographic coverage in the tradition of Vanity Fair. The combination of seasoned reporting and slick photography with creative layout and production offered a stark contrast to chamber of commerce competitors intent on self-promotion and society gossip.”

Indeed, the magazine’s heady first decade of existence was marked by Self ’s push and Winke’s shove. There were hard-hitting investigative reports on the city’s quest for a better downtown library, the destruction of Mission Valley, the uncertain future of San Diego’s aerospace industry and the fast-changing political scene. The ongoing debate over Lindbergh Field, many say, was sparked by a July 1949 feature on the airport’s new runway. The story asked, in a subhead, “Have we invested in a white elephant or made the smartest buy in San Diego history?” And yet there also were breathtakingly beautiful photographic essays on TV parties and watermelon picnics, on bathing suits that dared to show belly, on the latest fashion and high-society trends. San Diego Magazine even forayed north to cover Elizabeth Taylor’s first wedding in May 1950 to Conrad “Nicky” Hilton.

But in the fledgling publication’s struggle to define itself, Self ’s nose for local news —and what lay behind the news—always seemed to gain the upper hand. “Ed was a brilliant man,” says Winke Self, Gloria Winke’s daughter (adopted by Ed), who later served as San Diego Magazine’s managing editor. “He was one of a kind; this man could walk into a room, and by the time he left, he would know everyone there. He was truly interested in other people’s stories, in anything he could learn from other people. It was lovely to watch.”

Ed Self was a reporter’s reporter and an editor’s editor. “He taught me what good writing is: clarity, and don’t overwrite,” Winke Self says. “That’s one of the reasons we never paid anyone by the word. It was always for the ideas. Ed had a great deal of trust in the people he hired to write for him, and he basically let them do what they wanted to do.”

Among the maverick journalists who wrote for San Diego Magazine in the late 1940s and 1950s: future congressman Lionel Van Deerlin, architecture critic James Britton and famed mystery novelist Wade Miller (Winke’s father and Gloria’s ex-husband).

1958-1968

In San Diego Magazine’s second decade, it firmly established itself as a liberal counterpoint to the two daily newspapers, the conservative mouthpieces for publisher James Copley, an avid supporter of the GOP. Much of the credit goes to one man, Harold Keen, who in 1962 replaced Lionel Van Deerlin, freshly elected to Congress, as San Diego Magazine’s political writer. Since the late 1940s, Keen had been the leading field reporter and interviewer at TV station KFMB. He had been moonlighting at the Tribune until the paper put the kibosh on its reporters working for competing media. San Diego Magazine wisely had no such restriction, and after Keen jumped ship, he quickly distinguished himself with his in-depth reporting of local issues and thoughtful news analysis. He tackled minority issues; the rising student movement at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego; the escalating battle between the city’s traditional power structure and a new breed of entrepreneurs and visionaries; the controversy over the construction of the Coronado Bridge; and the ongoing debate over the future of Lindbergh Field. In one of his more controversial stories, Keen stuck up for UCSD Professor Herbert Marcuse, who received death threats for teaching his Marxist beliefs.

As former Union associate editor Peter Kaye told the authors of Regional Interest Magazines in the United States, “For years, Harold Keen’s pieces in San Diego Magazine provided the only thoughtful news analysis in town. At one time there was the Tribune, the Union and Keen. He was a one-man competition.”

Another reporter who stood out in the 1960s was Mary Harrington Hall, later editor of Psychology Today, who wrote a series of hard-hitting pieces on such topics as downtown decay and the buildup of UCSD, as well as profiles of such intellectual giants as Roger Revelle, the father of UCSD; Scripps’ oceanographer Walter Munk; and William McGill, the early UCSD chancellor.

1968-1978

As the tumultuous 1960s gave way to the polyester 1970s, San Diego experienced a series of stumbles, from the Yellow Cab bribery scandal that felled Mayor Frank Curran—the last of the city’s small-town mayors—to the abortive attempt to host the 1972 Republican National Convention, which spurred a defiant Mayor Pete Wilson to declare San Diego “America’s Finest City.” Dramatic growth pushed the region’s population past the 1 million mark and led to increasing cries to protect and preserve open space, particularly along the coast. It was an era when no one quite knew where San Diego was going, but everyone seemed to know what we didn’t want it to become: another Los Angeles, blanketed in perpetual smog, or Miami, with a wall of high-rises fencing off the coast.

San Diego Magazine was the town crier during this period, tracking trends such as women’s liberation and the nation’s growing obsession with health and fitness—while continuing to take on the establishment with hard-hitting investigative pieces. A crowning achievement was Roberta Ridgely’s five-part series on the rise and fall of C. Arnholt Smith and his U.S. National Bank empire, in many ways an indictment of the city’s traditional power structure and its “I can do no wrong” mentality. Harold Keen continued to tackle such hot-button issues as the preservation of San Diego’s precious coastline, gay rights, City Hall’s reaction to the growing environmental sentiment among the city’s voters and the controversy over the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park, tirelessly banging out copy until his death in 1981. Meanwhile, architecture critic James Britton took square aim at the unsightly new main post office that sprouted in the heart of the Midway District in a piece titled “The Misbegotten Post Office: Or How the Feds Impose on Us Locals.”

Ed Self, by now one of the elder statesmen of local journalism, popped in every now and then with a provocative opinion piece, including one in which he asserted that preserving the Spanish Colonial buildings in Balboa Park should be a “fundamental priority.” San Diego paid attention.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »