Where Medium Is the Messenger

“This paper,” says Shelby Dzilsky, on the verge of tears, “is the glue that holds the canyon together.” Dzilsky is the official greeter at the Topanga Messenger, a staff-owned, cooperative, biweekly newspaper started in 1976 to connect, educate, amuse and mythologize the counterculture that found a home in one of the most beautiful canyons in Los Angeles.

About 1,800 subscribers pay $13 a year to get the paper, which started on a shoestring and continues to operate on a shoestring, even as the pressure for change rumbles and clamors like the ground beneath its funky office in the only mall in Topanga, between the yoga studio and the macrame gift shop.

Lee Montgomery, a highly respected writer and editor who also edits the Santa Monica Review, was hired this year as the paper’s editor when Colin Penno, the Messenger’s editor for the last 20 years, moved to Oregon (perhaps in search of the old Topanga).

“Topanga has changed,” says Montgomery. “[The Messenger is] a tender thing, and it wouldn’t be the same without the children’s drawings and the poems from travelers just back from China, but it’s not always the best work because we just don’t have the resources.

“It has to improve. We need some professional writers and staff members need to be paid for their work,” she says. (There are currently eight people working at the Messenger.)

There is also discussion of selling stock to the public, raising ad rates and generally trying to raise money so the paper can grow.

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Fire and brimstone does not overstate the dread with which old-timers in Topanga like Dzilsky approach change. While sitting in the front room of the newspaper office waiting to talk with Montgomery, who is pasting up the next issue, Dzilsky struggles to compose himself when he talks about the old days. He moved here in the 1960s to be with some musician friends.

“One day,” he confides, as if this were the historic point on which Topanga history turned, “I went out in the morning and noticed a house foundation being built on the corner. When I came home in the afternoon, the house had been built.”

Dzilsky begins to weep openly. “I’m very nostalgic for the old Topanga,” he says. “I’m the resident weeper.”

“Every newspaper should have one,” says Montgomery.

Apparently, you don’t have to be a member of the American counterculture to be nostalgic for the old Topanga.

A local carpenter, Merrick Davidson, originally had the idea that the canyon’s tradespeople needed a place for classified advertising, so that they could work in the canyon and never leave. (“In other words,” says Mary Colvig, one of the originals and to this day a major shareholder and the paper’s business manager, “so that they could starve to death.”)

Flavia Potenza, a journalist at New York magazine who had just moved to Topanga, was the paper’s first editor. “We gave ourselves very lofty titles,” she says of the original group, “and we each brought different skills. I had the typewriter. Sid Francis, a local artist, had the printer, and we’d have huge collating parties once every two weeks. It was very romantic, which, of course, wore off after a while when we all realized we’d have to make a living.”

Ian Brody, an enterprising Englishman with a soft spot for newspapers who was then the West Coast correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, invested $10,000 for typesetting and office space.

Penno, another Brit who came to Topanga in 1976 to shoot some record album covers (“I woke up in a friend’s cabin high up in the oaks and never left”) started as staff photographer but became a classic, apron-wearing editor who gave 20 years of hard labor to the Messenger.

Brody, Colvig and Penno are still the paper’s major shareholders, although Brody lives in Washington state where he is a correspondent for the Times of London.

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About 10,000 people live in the 18 square miles of Topanga Canyon, located between Santa Monica and Malibu, though there are only 3,000 registered addresses. Topanga itself is not a town, it’s a ZIP Code; maybe not as illustrious as 90210, but Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Lowell George all lived there at one time. Lynn Redgrave and other actresses, musicians and such writers as Carolyn See, Al Martinez and Deena Metzger are today’s local luminaries. The average age is 40, and 23% of the households earn more than $150,000 a year. The median household income is $84,000.

Neo-hippies? Perhaps, but in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when the INS was busting day-laborers in the canyon, the people of Topanga organized a group called PATCH, which started a food wagon, a jobs hotline and a living center for them.

“How many communities with a median income of $84,000 a year would do that?” Montgomery asks.

“Soon after the first issue,” remembers Potenza, the paper became the forum for the formation of the Topanga Town Council, which is still extremely active. Canyon residents would come in with grievances; discussion would be recorded in the pages of the Messenger, which traditionally devoted the center spread to local artists.

“Over the years,” says Colvig, “we’ve tried to get away from the millions of neighbor versus neighbor disputes in Topanga. We try to focus on the big picture.”

Everyone is particularly proud of the period from 1980 to 1995, when the paper fought the Montevideo development in the northern part of the canyon. Originally planned as a country club and golf course, the project evolved into a Walt Disney Co. development brainchild.

“The paper came into being just in time to be the vehicle to express the community’s outrage,” says Penno, who wrote many of the pieces that eventually helped defeat the project.

“I really believe that if the paper hadn’t been around, there’d be a development up there. On my deathbed, I can say, ‘I helped save Summit Valley.’ ”

Indeed, although nothing came of it, Topanga resident Martinez, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, recommended that the stories be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, although they never were.

“Of course, there is a romance to owning a newspaper,” says Brody, who is officially the paper’s publisher. “When I’m asked to donate to charity, I say, ‘No, I gave already.’ ”

And by all counts, Brody has been a gracious publisher from the start, respecting both the editor’s and the community’s hopes for their newspaper--never endorsing change for the sake of it.

If anything, he is resistant to change, and while the principals have finally agreed after 10 years to raise the ad rates, Brody and Colvig resist the idea of putting on fund-raisers to aid the paper. “Too open-handed” says Brody. “We are, after all, a commercial enterprise and there are simply too many other good causes in Topanga.”

But this is life in Topanga, where there’s a committee for everything: The Topanga Assn. for a Scenic Community, the Emergency Preparedness Committee, the Equine Response Team, the Pet Rescue Committee and the Topanga Town Council.

Topics covered in the current issue include various UFO sightings and the story of the body of a 73-year-old Topanga woman found on a turnout off Mulholland Highway.

Montgomery writes many of the articles herself. Stories from Topanga residents on subjects ranging from brawls at a Stop n’ Go (called the stop n’ fight by locals) to new plans for development come in on torn pieces of paper and, sometimes, in frantic phone calls.

Montgomery, who was working on community newspapers in Boston, first heard about Topanga more than 10 years ago in Paris over dinner with a student. “She told me about this funky place, where you went up, up, up from the sea.”

“I work for the community and they let me know it,” says Montgomery. “I field calls on everything from El Nin~o to conflicts with Caltrans over traffic lights.”

Like the newspaper’s previous editors, money is a problem for Montgomery and she doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to hold out.

Potenza, the paper’s first editor, left after a few years to make a living. And Penno admits to missing “the absolute joy of pulling all the elements together, but not the zero budget with which to do it.”

Montgomery writes fiction, teaches a writing workshop and has had to sell her car to continue to work for the Messenger.

“We are so lucky to have her,” Colvig says. “I just don’t know how long she’ll last.”

Community newspapers with bigger budgets and larger circulations routinely fold (like the Oxnard Press-Courier just up the road from Topanga) or are sold in bunches to large corporations.

As Keith Love, publisher of the Ellensburg Daily Record, a McClatchy newspaper in Washington state, recently put it: “Few writers have ever figured out how to bring life to the dry business of making money with an advertising sales staff and a printing press.”

“Communities get the newspaper they deserve” says Brody, a sentiment that is echoed proudly by those involved with the Messenger.

“In the beginning, I felt that the canyon was a microcosm of the world,” says Potenza. “The issues we faced here were faced on a larger scale in communities around the world. The newspaper has simply gotten more and more professional without losing touch with the people of Topanga.”