Father Leaves Home

"Scott is the Chronicle. He embodies the spirit, the flair, and the insanity of this paper. It's like losing a father." Film and Pop Music Critic John Wasserman was only putting into words what staffers of the San Francisco Chronicle described as ''non-hysterical depression" over the departure of Executive Editor Scott Newhall, 57.

When Newhall left last month, he took with him much of the flamboyance and fun that has characterized the Chronicle during his 18 years as top editor. Almost singlehandedly, Newhall changed the Chronicle from a dull, gray daily loaded with international news into a paper full of snappy human interest stories, pictures with lots of cleavage and bizarre headlines. Example: "A Great City is Forced to Drink Swill" --followed by an "expose" of the alleged bad coffee in restaurants.

Newhall also had a tremendous drive to be first and constantly left the Examiner far behind in covering the "post teen-age youth world" and watching the radical movement. Nothing pleased him more than scooping his arch rival. His biggest scoop in recent years was the Chronicle's expose of San Francisco County Tax Assessor Russell Wolclen. The paper disclosed that Wolden gave favorable tax assessments to his friends, a crime for which he was later convicted. When the Chronicle and the Examiner merged in September 1965, much of Newhall's competitive drive was diverted into conflict with Publisher-Owner Charles de Young Thieriot.

Ever since Thieriot inherited control of the Chronicle in 1955, he has been slowly shifting to the right. More and more, Newhall was forced into a buffer position between his young liberal staff and the conservative publisher. The feeling among Newhall's associates last week was that the weary editor had left because he was just plain fed up with ideological disputes with his publisher. Thieriot, 56, denies any such division between himself, his staff, or Newhall for that matter: "It's not true that we're poles apart. We get along pretty damn well."

All the same, Newhall has found himself a "first-aid job." Last week he took over as editor of San Francisco magazine, a slick, so-far ineffectual, city monthly with 31,000 circulation.

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