Bad News : Chain’s 20 Community Papers Disappear at Auction

For 101 years it chronicled the comings and goings in its town.

Births, deaths, Lion’s Club meetings, Little League scores. The Alhambra Post-Advocate was witness to just about everything that went on.

But there were few witnesses on hand Wednesday to mark the end as the Post-Advocate and 19 other community newspapers from San Gabriel to Cerritos unceremoniously disappeared beneath an auctioneer’s hammer.

Assets of the country’s largest hometown newspaper chain--the defunct Southern California Community Newspapers group--were sold, right down to the press and the dusty cabinet holding microfilm copies of the 1931 Huntington Park Daily Signal.

“It’s a sad state of affairs. The history of a lot of communities is disappearing,” said Don Algie, who traveled to the South Gate sale hoping to find bargains in office furniture for his own independent paper, the 88-year-old Gardena Valley News.

The Community Newspapers chain, created in the 1980s by an amalgamation of 31 small papers, abruptly shut down in January. About 100 reporters, editors, press workers and advertising salespeople lost their jobs. By then, several of the chain’s papers had been taken over by other operators.

The demise of the final 20 would have made interesting reading in the Post-Advocate, the Monterey Park Progress, the East Los Angeles Tribune, the Downey Herald American and the others in the chain if they had lasted long enough to print it.

But a bank foreclosed on the company when publisher Ric Trent filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after the Fair Housing Council threatened a lawsuit. His offense: printing an apartment rental classified ad that contained the forbidden words “adults preferred.”

“A trial was imminent,” Trent explained Wednesday as he walked through his pressroom for the last time. Even if the company had won the case, legal expenses could have been $500,000, he said.

Trent watched silently as auctioneer Ray Bleau sold the aging, eight-unit printing press for $250,000. The last edition of the paper was still wrapped around its ink-smeared cylinders.

Sitting glumly on a nearby roll of newsprint was Frank Bolton, a Monterey Park printer who had helped install the 25-year-old equipment--the first offset press of its type in California. Bolton looked away during the bidding. “It’s horrible. Every time a newspaper goes, it’s like sticking a needle in your heart,” he said.

Art Aguilar, the papers’ executive editor, stood quietly in the back of his old newsroom as he watched about 85 registered bidders poke around. The strangers peeked into desk drawers and fingered reporters’ well-worn computer keyboards.

But they ignored the California Newspaper Publishers’ Assn. first-place awards hanging on the wall. The prizes honored editorials, reporting and in-depth writing in the Monterey Park Progress, the Pico Rivera News and the Post-Advocate.

“The bank didn’t know what a 101-year-old paper is or what it means,” said Aguilar, whose first newspaper story was printed more than 20 years ago in the Pico Rivera paper. “These were quality little papers. It’s over. This hurts. “

Bulletin boards still bearing thumbtacked staff memos and employee rosters were sold for a few dollars each. Metal microfilm storage cabinets fetched $20--including their contents. The old microfilm copies of back issues of the papers might have been considered priceless to some. Their new owners will decide whether to save them or chuck them into the trash.

Bleau got no takers for the wooden shelves holding stacks of more recent issues of the papers, however. One of the final editions of the Bell Gardens Review carried the front-page banner: “Wishing You a Happy and Prosperous 1993.”

Finally, the newspapers’ mastheads--their names and the logos that appear at the top of the front page--were sold. Investor Ben Slavkin of Huntington Harbour bought all 20 for $18,500.

In the end, the venerable Post-Advocate was worth $925.