Widowed: Archiving My Husband and Zodiac, His Scrappy 1970s News Service

What’s a widow or widower to do with the life history, the paper record, of a spouse whose departure was sudden and unexpected?

Can you archive a dead spouse? Can you stash them away in a secure, temperature-controlled academic repository, to be preserved, if not for time and eternity, then maybe for a century or two?

That’s what I’m contemplating. I’m tidying up the Zodiac News Service archive — ten bankers boxes of it — that represent a key period in Jon’s life, namely the 1970s, when he ran a cheeky counter-culture news service out of San Francisco.

Alongside stories about the weighty issues — the Vietnam war, the Black Panthers, the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility — Jon ran stories commenting on the culture of the day: Bob Dylan’s conversion to evangelical Christianity. The Nevada bordello that refused to serve Iranian customers during the Iran hostage crisis. The male teacher in Tucson forbidden to wear earrings to class.

Before Cable News, Before Influencers, Before X

More on Zodiac in a minute. But first, a history lesson for those too young to remember the 1970s. And a refresher course for those Baby Boomers whose memories are dimming.

Back in the 1970s — before cable news, before the FAX machine, before the internet, before cell phones, before bloggers and influencers, before streaming services and podcasts, before Facebook and TikTok, and waaay before X — most people got their national news from two sources: Their local newspaper and the six o’clock news.

The six o’ clock news came to you via broadcast TV, which was overseen by the Federal Communications Commission. Your choices were pretty much limited to CBS News with Walter Cronkite, NBC News with John Chancellor, and ABC News with Harry Reasoner. 

And when I say six 0′ clock, I mean six o’ clock. Either you tuned in to Cronkite or Reasoner at six o’ clock sharp or you didn’t watch the news that night.

The shows were aired live and there was no way to record them. No VHS, no DVR. If you missed the broadcast news, you had to make do with the evening newspaper, if you’d picked it up on the way home from work.

A Once and Future Shared Reality

The state of the media before cable TV and the internet had its upside. Millions of Americans got their news at the same time from the same, professionally edited sources. Everybody — liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, you and your office mates — shared similar news inputs and thus a shared reality.

But — the 1960s and 1970s were also a time of political and social turmoil. The Vietnam War raged. Social movements advocating civil rights, the environment, and equality for women, gays, Native Americans, the disabled and the elderly were on the march.

Marijuana was smoked. LSD was dropped. The music scene rocked.

Zodiac News Service — An Alternative Voice

Activists protested that mainstream news outlets were ignoring or suppressing dissident voices. As a result, countless underground and alternative news sources sprang up. Zodiac News Service was one of them.

Unlike mainstream services like UPS and AP, Zodiac was not a wire service. It consisted of six — paper — pages of news, printed five or six days a week on a small, back-room press, then stuffed by hand into envelopes and driven to the post office to be mailed.

Mailed!

A few days later, a couple hundred radio stations and alternative print outlets across the U.S. and Canada opened their ZNS packets and picked out stories to share with their audiences.

Jon covered the big political news — Watergate, the Vietnam war — as well as the counter-culture stuff and what he called bizarros — UFO sightings, the Susan B. Anthony two-dollar bill, vasectomy neckties.

As the 1970s drew to end, the political climate changed. The Vietnam War was over, and the various civil rights movements had gained traction in mainstream culture and politics.

Moving On — A Straight Job and a Family

Jon moved with the times. He sold Zodiac in 1981 and taught himself to write code. He became a software engineer with a straight job and a family to support, one that now included me.

Over the years, the Zodiac staff collected the entire Zodiac archive in bankers boxes — 2600-plus issues of the news service plus an impressive index of its thousands of stories. When Jon closed the office on Mint Street in San Francisco, he brought all those boxes home to the East Bay and stacked them chest-high in our garage.

Jon quickly lost interest in his boxes. I did not. I treasured them. I sealed them in plastic garbage bags and checked them every few years for bugs and mold. At one point, I hauled them over to Jon’s side of the garage to make room for the Volvo station wagon I’d bought to carpool the kids.

And there the archive sat for decades, greeting Jon and me every time we pulled into our garage, getting in the way.

Widowed: Archiving My Husband and Zodiac, His Scrappy 1970s News Service

Jon might have been OK with tossing the whole mess out. I was not. Which turned out to be a good thing. A few years ago, I mentioned the boxes to a history professor friend. Those old Zodiacs were more than sentimental memorabilia, she told me. They were historical documents.

I learned that institutions — repositories — like the Smithsonian, the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley, or the super conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University might actually want them.

With that, one more humongous item was added to my already burgeoning gotta-do-before-I-die list — the task of getting Jon’s news service archive safely and permanently included in a repository somewhere.

The trouble is — when I finally lugged those boxes from the garage into Jon’s office, I saw that stashing Jon’s handiwork away in a repository would not be easy. I’d be stashing Jon away along with it.

Jon Newhall — A Journalist Who Cared

Jon took his role as publisher and editor of Zodiac News Services seriously. He cared about politics and the Vietnam war. He cared about civil rights, air pollution, campaign finance abuse, nuclear weapons, corporate monopolies, the First Amendment.

He wanted to tell stories — stories like the one he broke about Henry Kissinger 1n 1972, when Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor.

Jon wondered why Kissinger was making so many appearances on TV — but never speaking into the mic.

During a phone conversation with a TV newscaster back east — was it Dan Rather? Mike Wallace? — Jon learned that Kissinger was keeping something from the American public. His German accent.

Jon wrote the story up for Zodiac, and the news spread. Kissinger was forced to come clean. Soon his heavy Bavarian accent was floating into living rooms across the country.

Jon was serious about the news. But he also wanted to tell you funny stories.

And that’s what’s there in those bankers boxes. Jon’s voice. Jon telling stories. Jon passing along the news. Jon asking his listeners to care about the big — disturbing —  issues of the day. Jon giving everybody a break from the bad news with all those cornball bizzaros.

And so, I ask myself. Am I ready to pass Zodiac — Jon — along to an institution? Or do I keep those boxes parked for another little while in Jon’s old office, where I can pay them a visit from time to time. The same way I keep Jon’s nightshirt hanging on a hook in the bedroom closet, where I can find it if I need it.