How Sunset Won the West

MENLO PARK —  Steve Seabolt tries to look relaxed. But he’s bouncing around and talking too fast on the edge of a plump, earth-toned sofa in an office that looks like a living room.

Fire crackles in the fireplace. A huge lawn and lush gardens beckon beyond the sliding glass doors.

“It’s the best of all possible jobs,” Seabolt says, waving at his Sunset magazine surroundings--a job so great that even his three kids can’t believe their daddy bagged it.

“If reading Sunset were an experience, you would be sitting in your sun-dappled backyard on a breezy afternoon, sipping iced tea or wine,” Seabolt croons in the smooth voice of the ultimate pitchman. “We’re the Nordstrom of magazines. We cater to the huge middle and upper middle class who don’t need to be flashy, who know how to relax . . . .”

But for this former ad director of Time Inc. magazines, relaxing is not an

option. Named president and CEO of Sunset Publishing in 1994--after two other Time Warner execs briefly tried the job and flubbed it--Seabolt’s task is to fix something that really isn’t broken.

In the 13 Western states where it is sold, the monthly outsells Time, People,

Vanity Fair, Martha Stewart Living, House & Garden and dozens of other stylish publications. In those states, it also outsells all the glossy travel and gourmet magazines put together. In the L.A. area, it outsold Buzz and Los Angeles magazines combined (until Buzz folded on Wednesday).

OK, you’ve got the picture.

Seabolt’s mandate is to take this cherished icon of Western culture, which was purchased by Time Warner in 1990, and tweak it just enough so that future generations of readers and advertisers will support it as much as they have in the past. And he must do so without making changes that will irritate Sunset’s current 1.5 million subscribers, many of whom are second- or third-generation readers.

May is Sunset’s 100th birthday. Its personality and character were formed long ago by the people who raised and nourished it. First, Southern Pacific Railroad, which started it as a promotional tool. Then Laurence W. Lane, who bought it in 1928 for $60,000 and passed it on to his two sons, Mel and Bill. They ran it lovingly until 1990, when they sold it to Time Warner for $225 million.

In the 62 years they owned it, the Lane family created a magazine that is chatty, happy, homespun, easy to understand and positively bubbling over with useful ideas on food, gardening, home improvement and travel. The magazine was never glamorous, witty or sophisticated. In fact, it has always been so filled with maps, guides, lessons, listings, illustrations and checklists that there is no room left for trendiness, opinion, hyperbole or attitude.

But it is virtuous. Readers turn to it, as they would to a relative or friend, for tips on pruning, planting, baking (sourdough bread is a reader favorite), barbecuing, building, camping and touring.

Sandy Sagall, 36, a Simi Valley systems analyst who bought her first home this year, says she had always been interested in the more high-style publications, like Martha Stewart Living. Then she became a homeowner and bought only one subscription. To Sunset. “I decided one year of that magazine would tell me all I need to know about my garden and my house. The others are too way out in terms of time, energy, money and effort.”

This is an exact quote, although it sounds like a paid commercial. But that’s the way Sunsetters tend to talk.

“Way out” is not a phrase that comes to mind with Sunset, unless you look very hard, at such things as pussywillow gender (“Only the male willows bear catkins, so not every plant produces those irresistible fuzzy twigs,” a recent issue informs). And the closest thing to high fashion you’ll ever see on a Sunset cover is a well-dressed turkey. (A cover photo of the Thanksgiving bird was a top-seller at newsstands in 1997.)

“There’s not an iota of style in Sunset. It’s anti-urbane,” gripes the editor of a slick West Coast monthly who does not want to be named. “Yet it’s the most successful publication in the West. Now isn’t that scary?”

Well, no. What’s really scary is that in dozens of conversations with people in the arts, publishing and design--people who consider themselves cool and cutting-edge--we found many who call Sunset dowdy, frumpy and stodgy, and who then sheepishly admit that they, too, subscribe.

Interior designer Carol Poet of West Hollywood calls it “the Betty Crocker of magazines,” then adds: “I have to admit I subscribe. It’s so focused on gardening in this Southern California climate; it has tips I don’t get anywhere else. If a new garden pest is loose, they tell me how to deal with it.”

That heavily researched, climate-specific information is one big reason for the magazine’s success. Instead of one magazine each month, Sunset publishes what amounts to five regional magazines, for Northern California, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Mountain region. For its May centennial issue, Sunset offers a different cover in each zone, which Seabolt calls “a first in magazine publishing history.”

“Sunset is amazingly successful, perhaps the most successful publication of its kind,” says Bryce Nelson, professor of journalism at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. “Sunset has been able to figure out better than the editors of our major newspapers what the readers want. It’s about life’s pleasures, like sitting on the patio and watching your garden grow. It’s not about the rich and trendy, it’s about the real.” One of the most popular projects ever launched in Sunset taught readers how to build an adobe oven in which to bake bread. That was 20 years ago. An updated set of instructions for the adobe oven will be reissued during the centennial year. “People can laugh all they want at this--but we can’t lose when we put Mexican food on the cover,” Seabolt says.

On the East Coast, Seabolt’s competitors aren’t laughing. That’s because they barely realize the magazine exists.

“It’s just not on our radar screen; its not a magazine people talk about,” says David Carey, publisher of the recently revived House & Garden from Conde Nast. People talk about House & Garden, Carey says, especially when it has “cool and different” layouts like a recent one featuring dogs sitting primly on pricey furniture. Such things make the magazine “part of a national conversation,” Carey explains with pride.

But Sunset’s pride is focused elsewhere. It doesn’t want to be talked about--it wants to be useful. And it will apparently go out of its way to avoid being “cool and different.”

One applicant for a job in Sunset’s food department remembers fleeing the premises some years ago, when an assistant food editor told her that a cover showing goat cheese had caused chaos among the staff.

“ ‘They won’t talk to me because I put goat cheese on the cover; they think it’s too sophisticated for our readers,’ ” the job applicant recalled the assistant food editor as saying. The job seeker went elsewhere and jeeringly told her Sunset story for years. Then she got married. Bought a house. And subscribed to Sunset.

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In the late 1800s, the territory west of the Great Divide was still pristine, abundantly graced with exotic flora and fauna, unspoiled rivers and valleys and snow-capped mountains. It was utterly unlike anything most Midwesterners or Easterners had ever seen. But marauders, gunslingers and cads of all types were said to be lurking.

The Southern Pacific Railroad was a major Western landholder and the main link between East and West, with a crack passenger train called the Sunset Limited. To lure more tourists and developers to the West, the railroad started a kind of propaganda magazine extolling the area’s beauties and virtues. It was called Sunset, after the train. It sold for 5 cents a copy.

By 1914, the Western economy was booming and Sunset was sold to a group of its employees, who turned it into a literary magazine. But it did not prosper, and by 1928 Sunset was in desperate financial straits.

That’s when Larry Lane, a native Kansan, stepped in. As advertising director for Better Homes and Gardens, published in Des Moines, Lane had traveled West many times. He adored the topography, the exotic vegetables, fruits and flowers. He moved to California and bought Sunset. It would be for Westerners, not about them, he vowed. It would tell how to enjoy and best use the land. Lane’s Sunset became profitable 10 years later--and it has been profitable ever since, says his son Bill, a former ambassador to Australia.

After World War II, thousands of veterans who had come West while in service dreamed of owning a little piece of it, with a house in which they would raise a family. These were Sunset’s kind of people. By now, Bill Lane, had taken over the magazine from his father. (Brother Melvin took the book-publishing end of the business, which today publishes 120 home and garden titles a year.)

New headquarters were built in 1952 in what is now the heart of Silicon Valley. The Mission-style building, designed by Cliff May, has thick adobe walls, beamed ceilings and red Mexican-tile floors. It is more like a home than an office. “We have freed ourselves of the pressure of metropolitan living and working conditions. That means we’ll get along better, think straighter, and be happier . . .” Lane Sr. said at the dedication.

At age 16, Jerry Ann Di Vecchio visited the then-new headquarters with her grandmother and decided she’d like to work there. Today, 40 years later, she is senior food editor. “Like so many others, my parents came here from the Midwest and immediately subscribed,” Di Vecchio said. “My mother used to say we’d starve without Sunset, because what did she know about artichokes, avocados and persimmons? She’d never seen them until she came West.”

Not all long-timers have been so lucky. When the Lane brothers decided to sell, they had no heirs who wanted to take over. They weren’t looking for the highest bidder, Bill Lane says, but for a buyer “who would make a commitment to continue our policies and our mission of being a magazine for the West.”

The list of would-be buyers was lengthy. “We ruled out [Rupert] Murdoch and several others who were just not the kind of organizations we wanted to be with.”

Time Warner won the contest. And then, according to some accounts, trouble began in paradise. One former employee, Bill Crosby, recalled that 40 days after the takeover went into effect, the purges began. One morning, “everyone was called to the north patio and then told to go back to their desks. There would be an envelope there telling you if you had a job or not. There were security guards in the lobby that day. It was ugly.”

A redesign of the magazine was attempted, but it was apparently disastrous and subscribers, who account for 93% of the readers, let their anger be known.

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When Seabolt came on board, he replaced editor Bill Marken, who’d been in charge for 30 years, with someone who didn’t seem an obvious choice: Rosalie Muller Wright. She had been at the San Francisco Chronicle for 15 years, but in the late ‘70s she had been executive editor of the edgy New West magazine. And it was under her aegis that New West published a Sunset parody called Sunsect, with such headlines as “The Yalta Conference--Unique Theme for a Barbecue.” And “How to Tell and What to Do if Plants, Pets Are Gay.”

At lunch in Sunset’s kitchen the other day, Wright intimated that she might have been a closet Sunsetter all along. “I love cooking. It’s my relaxation. I used to subscribe to Sunset, and then I stopped. So when I heard about this job, I thought this could be fun, lively, interesting.”

Among other things, she has added a column called the Quick Cook--meals that can be prepared in 30 minutes. And more low-fat recipes. And a Wired West feature that reports on new technology for the home. And a television presence in San Francisco, where Sunset staffers offer 10-minute, instructive segments on KRON.

More television is in the works, she says; in fact the dazzling remodel of what used to be a claustrophobic test kitchen “was done with TV cameras in mind.” She wants to “expand the reach of the magazine, to reinforce our presence along the front range, from Fort Collins to Pueblo, Colo. If you fly over the Rockies, you’ll see all sorts of new housing. That’s our reader. They’re waiting to be plucked.”

Wright is mindful that the West keeps changing and tries to reflect that in increased coverage of such things as small-space and container gardens and environmentally sensitive design.

Seabolt and Wright have hired a new art director and a new director of photography. They changed the color of the paper, from yellowish to white. They changed the type fonts, and the look of the pages so the photos are larger and the layouts cleaner. They even modified the cover logo, making the letters sleeker.

The staff has been slashed from about 400 to about 150. Ad sales, which lagged for a while after Time Warner took over, are up 20% over last year, Seabolt says. Newsstand sales, the best way to reach new, young readers, increased 33% last year. Publisher’s Information Bureau reports that estimated ad revenues were up 14.5% in 1997 over the year before.

Bill Lane says that despite a somewhat shaky transition, he and his brother are satisfied that Sunset is now in good hands. And the May centennial issue, with a cover that reads “Great Parks, No Crowds,” “Best Recipes of the Century” and “Newest Plants for Our Gardens,” has just arrived in stores, where it is selling out.