Roy Pinkerton's 'small, hopeful newspaper in Ventura' had a countywide vision
There were newspapers in Ventura County when Roy Pinkerton arrived in Ventura 1925 to start his own. The city itself had two, one of which was already half a century old, for a population of about 5,500 people.
Pinkerton considered the existing papers 'unenterprising,' he later wrote, parochial in their news coverage and lacking any circulation outside their home city.
His newspaper, the Ventura County Star, would be different.
'The key word is 'county,'' Pinkerton wrote in his 1962 memoir, 'The County Star: My Buena Ventura.' The Star would cover the entire county: the booming oil town of Ventura, the four other cities and the farmland between them.
The first issue of The Star rolled off a rented press in downtown Ventura on June 15, 1925. A year later, Pinkerton's paper was delivering its daily afternoon editions as far east as Piru and as far south as Camarillo.
In the first edition's front-page editorial, Pinkerton told readers The Star would 'represent no clique, no faction.' It would be 'the organ of no party; in politics it will be truly independent, but not neutral.'
'We propose to print the news honestly and decently and fearlessly,' the editorial stated. 'We propose to comment upon it with independence. We expect to speak neither in platitudes nor in hokum. We expect to be broad minded and good natured.'
For the rest of the 20th century, Pinkerton's creation grew, buying some of its competitors and driving others out of the market in an intense newspaper war. One hundred years after Pinkerton set up shop in a temporary garage in Ventura, his newspaper remains the dominant local news source for the entire county.
Roy Pinkerton was born in 1885, on a farm in northwestern Minnesota, 100 miles from the Canadian border. When he was 20, he moved to Tacoma, Washington, to take a job as a reporter with the Tacoma Times.
He graduated from the University of Washington with a journalism degree in 1911, a rarity for a newspaperman of the time. After bouncing around to a few papers in Seattle and Los Angeles, he returned to the Tacoma Times as its editor, at the age of 29.
For the next decade, Pinkerton edited newspapers in Seattle, Cleveland and San Diego. In 1923, after his marriage to Flora Hartman ended, he met Aidrie Kincaid, a reporter in Seattle. They were soon married.
By 1925, Pinkerton had caught the entrepreneurial bug. 'I decided I'd had enough of working for a salary,' he recalled in 1963, in a speech to the Ojai Valley Retired Business and Professional Men's Club.
Pinkerton left the San Diego Sun and teamed up with one of its founders and owners, publishing executive W.H. Porterfield. The pair had $25,000 with which to start a newspaper — the equivalent of about $458,000 in 2025 — and no idea where this new venture would be located.
They chose Ventura on a little more than a whim, but not a lot more.
'I consulted with no bankers, I talked with no merchants about how they would regard a new advertising medium. … I took no polls, make no market analysis — did not even know the terms,' Pinkerton wrote. 'I had arrived at the state of mind more through 'falling in love' with the community than by way of a conventional and objective investigation.'
He did talk to as many petroleum geologists as he could, and they convinced him that the recently discovered oil fields in and around Ventura meant the region would grow and prosper enough to support a bigger, better newspaper.
Roy and Airdie Pinkerton moved to Ventura on April 12, 1925, Easter morning. They hired one other employee as a reporter and one as the business manager.
They couldn't find a building to rent, so they had one built, and while it was under construction they worked out of a garage on the property. They rented a printing press and other equipment, hung a sign outside soliciting subscribers, and sold subscriptions door to door.
One afternoon, Pinkerton wrote in his memoir, 'three tall, dour, middle-aged men' walked into their makeshift office. One of them asked 'What's your religion?' and Pinkerton answered, 'That, sir, is none of your damn business.'
They walked out, and that was the end of the Pinkertons' troubles with the small local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
By the time The Star began publishing in June, it had 850 subscribers, paying 50 cents a month for home delivery.
Pinkerton wrote in his memoir that he 'often marveled' that the Star published its first edition just two months after he moved to town and started work.
'Some things were done faster in the twenties than they are in the sixties,' he wrote.
Roy and Aidrie Pinkerton had a daughter, born in 1926, along with two sons from Roy's previous marriage. Airdrie Pinkerton worked full-time as a reporter until she was eight months pregnant.
'In those days a pregnant woman's place was in her home and I had defied local custom, covering my beat in a maternity costume,' she wrote in a chapter of her husband's memoir.
She came back in 1928 and covered court trials and other beats, until she retired in 1936. It was a semiretirement; the couple lived in Ojai but traveled extensively, visiting 70 countries. Airdrie contributed travel articles to The Star to go with her husband's dispatches on politics and military affairs.
Roy Pinkerton remained editor of the The Star until he retired in 1961. By then, circulation had grown to 25,000.
Pinkerton was also the editorial director of John P. Scripps Newspapers. In 1928, John Scripps, then 16 and an heir to a prominent San Diego publishing family, had invested $30,000 of his inheritance into The Star. That got Pinkerton out of some debt he had been left with when Porterfield, his original business partner, died the year before.
The Scripps investment turned The Star into the first link in a chain of newspapers, which later became part of the E.W. Scripps Company. The Scripps newspapers were acquired by Gannett in 2016, forming the nation's largest local news company.
In its early years under Scripps ownership, The Star bought out both of its competitors in Ventura. In 1937, after buying the Ventura Free Press, it renamed itself the Ventura County Star-Free Press. The name was shortened back to the Ventura County Star in 1994.
Both during and after Pinkerton's tenure as editor, The Star either acquired or started smaller newspapers in the rest of the county, including in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Camarillo. At first, those papers kept their original names. In Simi Valley, for instance, the newspaper owned and published by The Star was called the Simi Valley Enterprise & Star.
By the late 1990s, The Star was in the process of rolling those papers into one publication, with one name. On April 30, 1998, the Ventura County Star printed its first truly countywide edition. Roy Pinkerton's vision had been fulfilled.
Pinkerton died in 1974, at the age of 88. Four years earlier, his successor as editor of The Star, Julius Gius, had asked him for some words of wisdom to mark the retired editor's 85 birthday.
Pinkerton said that if he had his life to live again, he'd do some things differently, Gius wrote in his column. But there was one decision he had no second thoughts about: If he were back in 1925, 'I would start a small, hopeful newspaper in Ventura.'
A century of local history and big news stories
Founder Roy Pinkerton's countywide vision
'Bigger than life': The face of the Star-Free Press
100 years, only nine editors
How Star is living up to founder's vision in 2025
The paper's first editorial
How The Star has evolved with the times
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County Star founder Roy Pinkerton's countywide vision
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