South Bay Journalist Continues Job of ‘Afflicting the Comfortable’

BONITA —  Lowell Blankfort has made a career out of, as he puts it, “afflicting the comfortable.”

Few South Bay politicians can claim to have escaped unscathed from the veteran newspaperman’s barbs during the more than two decades he was co-owner and later columnist of the Chula Vista Star-News. Fewer still can claim they didn’t breathe an inward sigh of relief when Blankfort was fired as a columnist for the twice-a-week newspaper by a more conservative management in 1983.

He was not silenced, however, continuing to write a column that is distributed to 14 community newspapers in which he has an ownership share.

In 1961, Blankfort and his partner Rowland Rebele bought the Chula Vista newspaper, and Blankfort’s first editorial--”Goodbye Mr. Utt”--blasting and burying a longtime, well-known conservative Orange County congressman--set the establishment on its ear, an uncomfortable position to which they were not accustomed.

During the turbulent 1960s, Blankfort’s stand against the United States’ intervention in Vietnam earned the little paper the nickname of “Red Star” among the mainly conservative military and blue-collar readers. Yet, to the amazement of his detractors and his peers, the Star-News grew in circulation and advertising even as Blankfort escalated his attacks against the establishment at almost every level of government.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was a Star-News subscriber, too, during Blankfort’s anti-war crusade of the 1960s and, in 1978, shortly before he sold the paper, Blankfort wrote a front-page story headlined: “FBI Spying on Star-News Revealed.” In the article, based on copies of FBI files Blankfort had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Blankfort made the government agency squirm.

“I was shocked to learn that even a small community newspaper like the Star-News was not immune from the Gestapo-like tactics of government snoopers,” he wrote in the article. “The keeping of secret files on newspaper and media people who do not toe the government’s line is a major step toward a dictatorship.”

He used the same sort of frontal attack on local institutions he suspected of wrongdoing. He lambasted the local Chamber of Commerce for using taxpayers’ money, taking credit for reducing the Chula Vista agency’s public funding from $43,000 to zero. He even proposed that the city of Chula Vista buy the venerable San Diego Country Club--private hideaway for the rich and powerful--because he suspected that rising land prices in the area would force the SDCC directors to divide their prime site for sale as housing tracts. The city, not a bunch of duffers, should make land-use decisions--and profit--from any future use of the land, Blankfort argued.

He suffered some defeats in his crusades against major South Bay developments, including a losing fight against development of a regional shopping center on a Sweetwater Valley golf course, but he didn’t stop trying. He’s convinced that if he still held the editorial reins at the Star-News, the massive planned community of EastLake, six miles from Chula Vista’s civic center never would have become a reality.

EastLake, proposed as a 30,000-resident community with its own commercial center and industrial park, is a “perfect example of leapfrogging development and never should have been allowed,” Blankfort said. “No matter how good a development it is, and I think it is a good development, it is premature and will tax the roads, the schools and will harm the life style of the residents already here.”

Blankfort’s journalistic career began in the mid-1940s on the Long Island (N.Y.) Star-Journal and included stints on Stars & Stripes and the Wall Street Journal before he invaded California seeking “what every newspaperman wants--a newspaper of his own--where I could do my own thing, without editors chopping up my copy.” He found it in Pacifica and immediately declared war on a neighboring city that was seeking to annex Pacifica. He was victorious, even though his weekly paper, the Pacifica Tribune, was hardly a powerful voice on the San Francisco peninsula.

Blankfort, now 60, lives in a spacious Bonita home complete with swimming pool and all the trappings of affluence. He travels around the globe--Cuba, India, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Great Britain, South Africa, the Soviet Union--commenting on everything in his columns.

But that hasn’t diminished his local crusades for the underdog and his protests against the “uglification”--one of his favorite derogatory descriptions--of his surroundings. His local soapbox is the Bonita Style, a widely read monthly. Blankfort acquired an interest in the newspaper and has helped its circulation climb this year by writing a column distributing lumps to local politicians and developers over what he considers travesties of justice or violations of good sense.

Blankfort has opinions on everything and everyone in South Bay and does not hesitate to tell them personally or to write them publicly.

National City will never be the same without Kile Morgan as mayor, Blankfort comments. “There’ll never be another Kile Morgan. But Kile thought he owned National City and could do anything he wanted. That might be OK in Chile, but it’s not considered suitable in South Bay.”

Youthful Arizona millionaire Bob Gosnell and his plans to build a posh Pointe resort on the shores of Sweetwater Reservoir raised Blankfort’s hackles and sharpened his rhetoric. In his Bonita Style column, he attacked the plan “to enrich the profitability of its proposed mini-city and luxury resort” by shrinking the Sweetwater Reservoir, “on which depends the water--and thus the very lifeblood--of 150,000 residents of the Sweetwater Valley, Chula Vista and National City.”

He accused the resort developers of trying to appropriate 400 to 500 acres of public land for their private development, “providing a luxury playground for the rich, added profits for Gosnell, some economic crumbs for the Spring Valley-Casa de Oro area . . . and traffic jams for South Bay.”

Blankfort is satisfied that he had scotched any move by the out-of-town developers to appropriate portions of the South Bay reservoir and is turning his efforts toward incorporation of his home community of Bonita into Chula Vista.

Not that he’s all that happy with Chula Vista’s city fathers who, he said, are “3-to-2 pro-development,” but he wants his rural community to have more of a say in its future than the county Board of Supervisors cares to relinquish.

As a curb to Chula Vista’s pro-growth tendencies, Blankfort has joined Crossroads, which he defines as “a government in exile” composed of “an ex-newspaper editor, ex-mayor, ex-city councilman, and a couple of school board members.” And, between trips to exotic places and visits to his newspapers around the country, Blankfort plans to keep up his rapid-fire commentary on the South Bay scene in his “Off My Chest” column because, he contends, “You’ve got to keep zinging ‘em in at the establishment. You’ve got to keep afflicting the comfortable.”