The Vallejo Times-Herald is a daily newspaper based in Vallejo, in Solano County, California. As of recent reporting it publishes six days per week (Tuesday through Sunday).
The paper relevant to the Zodiac Killer case for being one of three newspapers that received a Zodiac letter on August 1, 1969. The other two recipients were the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.
Origins and name changes
The lineage traces back to the Vallejo Daily Independent, whose first edition appeared on January 6, 1872, founded by T.L. Thompson and J.F. Linthicum. Linthicum sold his interest about three years later to A.B. Gibson and George Roe, who renamed the paper the Solano Daily Times on September 23, 1875. It subsequently became the Vallejo Times.
A separate strand began in 1916 when Luther E. Gibson acquired a small commercial printing plant in Santa Cruz and took on high school student Kenneth F. Knight as an apprentice. Gibson enlisted in the U.S. military during World War I. Knight launched a monthly magazine, Sanda, covering the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, then expanded it into a weekly, The Mare Island Employee. After Gibson returned from France, the two — along with John “Jerry” Motzko and Leonard King — each put up $500 to buy a defunct Antioch printing plant and restart it in Vallejo. The first edition of the Vallejo Herald was published on January 4, 1922, at a time when the city had three other daily papers.
Mergers and ownership
In April 1922 the Times merged with the Herald. Times publisher Robert W. Walker held majority stock while Gibson was a minority owner and business manager. Five years later Gibson bought the Vallejo Chronicle and merged it with Vallejo News to form the News-Chronicle, which eventually ceased.
Luther Gibson also served as a California state senator from 1948 to 1968, earning the nickname “the senator.” In November 1973 he sold a half-interest to the Donrey Media Group while continuing as publisher. On January 13, 1999, Donrey merged ten of its California newspapers, including the Times-Herald, into Garden State Newspapers, controlled by MediaNews Group, with Donrey holding a one-third share.
Labor strike
On June 20, 1978, five unions representing 88 Times-Herald employees went on strike and picketed the office. Thirty workers from other Donrey papers were brought in to keep the paper publishing. Some strikers founded a rival paper, the Vallejo Independent Press (The V.I.P.), published by Wyman Riley; it ceased in 1984.