On the easternmost edge of Berkeley, close to the border with Tilden Park, wanderers will find Scott Newhall Path following the contour of Hill Road. To younger walkers, this name will probably mean nothing. But to anyone who was living in the Bay Area in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it will ring a deeply familiar bell.

Scott Newhall, a former UC Berkeley art student, began his career as a fledgling photographer for The San Francisco Chronicle in 1934. By 1952, he’d become the newspaper’s executive editor and grew its circulation from 170,000 to nearly 400,000—surpassing The Examiner, which had long been the city’s top paper.

Among his achievements were rehiring the legendary columnist Herb Caen (“Mr. San Francisco”) back from the competition and hiring a new advice columnist. The Examiner featured a popular advice column written by “Ann Landers”; Newhall hired her twin sister, Popo Phillips, and renamed her Abigail van Buren, or “Dear Abby” as she became widely known.

Newhall’s editorial style included a number of whimsical stories: he wrote op-eds like “A Great City Forced to Drink Swill” to protest what he considered to be the poor quality of coffee served in local cafés and restaurants. He sent a reporter to Mexico to discover where revolutionary Pancho Villa’s head was buried. (The skull is still missing.)

When the more conservative Examiner launched a campaign against topless dancers in North Beach, Scott wrote the shortest editorial of his career: “The trouble with San Francisco is not topless dancers, it's topless newspapers.” He was also strongly against the Vietnam War, insisting (correctly) that the U.S. government was lying about it to the American public. The Chronicle was the first U.S. newspaper to oppose the war.