Morris “Morrie” Turner long had admired Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” and mulled creating a black Charlie Brown. At one point, Turner asked Schulz why he didn’t have any black kids in his comic strip, and Schulz told Turner to create his own. At the time of Turner’s death at age 90, “Wee Pals” appeared in 40 newspapers and about a dozen websites. Cal Press presented its Mark Twain Award for Journalism Excellence to Turner’s family in 2016.
During Otis Chandler’s tenure, the Los Angeles Times won 10 Pulitzer Prizes and expanded from two to 34 foreign and domestic bureaus. At the same time, it doubled its circulation to more than 1 million daily and for many years published more news and advertising than any other paper in the country. Cal Press inducted Chandler into the California Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2015.
James McClatchy was an editor for a New York newspaper when news of the gold strike prompted him to go West. He realized the power a newspaper could wield in the public interest, and he worked for several Sacramento-area newspapers before co-founding The Sacramento Bee in 1857. Cal Press inducted McClatchy (1824-1883) into the California Newspaper Hall of Fame in 1959.
