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On Sept. 8, 1965, the first issue of the Country Almanac appeared in mailboxes all over Portola Valley and Woodside.
The paper was the creation of three Portola Valley women who thought local issues were not getting enough attention from the daily papers of that day, including the Palo Alto Times and the Redwood City Tribune.
A Portola Valley school bond measure had been defeated. Supporters blamed, in part, the lack of coverage in the dailies.
Three young mothers filled the void. Jean Heflin, a member of the Portola Valley Conservation Committee, introduced Betty Fry, who had business experience, to Hedy Boissevain, a former women’s page editor for the Palo Alto Times.
After the trio gathered for an April lunch in a eucalyptus grove on the Stanford campus, their project for a community newspaper took off. The founders held more meetings, made plans, networked, and enlisted the support, including financial backing, of others in the community.
That four-page first issue featured a big picture of Susie Brown getting ready for her first day of kindergarten.
For the first months, the paper was put out on the founders’ kitchen counters and dining room tables, spilling into garages. Their teenage kids enlisted their friends to help tie and address piles of papers. “It was fun,” Fry recalled.
Jane Coladarci, who later became a mainstay of The Almanac’s advertising department, recalls subscribing to the paper when it launched for $2 a year.
By 1966, the paper had moved to an office under the Woodside post office. Later, it occupied the old Spanish-style telephone exchange building at the corner of Woodside and Cañada roads in Woodside from 1974 until it moved to Menlo Park in 1985.
Those first four-page issues featured a major article, at least one big picture, school and church notes, a bulletin board, and a column by a local writer.
Advertising got a big boost in 1971 when Mardell Ward, former editor of the Menlo Park Recorder, took over advertising, a position she held for 18 years. Coladarci, who turned up on the doorstep one day in 1974, became the powerhouse of the advertising department until she retired in 2004.
“I loved it,” said Coladarci, who started as a receptionist. “I answered the phone, took care of the mail and subscriptions, did the shopping, went to the bank, took dictation from Betty Fry and did accounts receivable.”
She was good at it, but had other talents. Ward suggested she try out advertising.
“Well, they turned me loose with no instruction, no territory, but I was determined to make a go of it,” Coladarci said. “I went after anything from Mountain View to Burlingame.”
She met with success and was given a full-time sales job, which she held for 25 years.
“We started getting support,” Fry said for a 2005 Almanac article. “We knew we’d arrived when we were made marshals of the Woodside May Day Parade.”
Starting in 1969, the paper hired more local reporters, including Marion Softky, Marjorie Mader and Jane Knoerle. Pam Jones, who came in 1975 as the first full-time employee in the news department, recalled: “I’ve had city officials tell me they had to read The Almanac to find out what went on at a meeting.”
“The Hedy-Betty years were very special,” Marion Softky wrote in a 2011 obituary on Betty Fry. “I could not imagine a better pair of bosses. Betty, in particular, ran a tight but pleasant ship. She was very sharp, very thorough and very efficient. I am immensely grateful to both of them for starting me on a career that has been of great personal satisfaction, and I hope public service.”
Softky died late that same year.
As the 1970s waned, so did the commitment of the editor, Boissevain, and the publisher, Fry. Boissevain’s husband, Al, had retired and wanted to grow wine grapes in the Gold Country; Fry didn’t want to run the paper alone.
Mort and Elaine Levine, who had built a chain of 16 local papers in Santa Clara County, proved ideal buyers. They had sold their chain, and then found they weren’t ready to retire.
The Levines modernized and expanded the Country Almanac. By 1985, they bought the dying Menlo Park Recorder, expanded circulation to cover Menlo Park and Atherton, and moved offices from Woodside to downtown Menlo Park.
The Levines also modernized production. By the time the paper was sold again in 1993, reporters wrote on Mac computers, soon to be PCs.
As the 1990s surged in, the Levines got ready to retire again. This time they sold the paper to Embarcadero Publishing Company, which was founded in 1979 to publish the Palo Alto Weekly.
“The Almanac was a good comprehensive community paper that people valued,” Mort Levine said. “It was a totally satisfying time in our lives.”
In a sense, the purchase of The Almanac by Embarcadero Publishing represented the closing of a circle.
Palo Alto Weekly publisher Bill Johnson grew up in the Frys’ neighborhood in Portola Valley. “To have the mother of a friend start a newspaper and have it succeed was one of my inspirations for a career in journalism,” he said.
The new management under Publisher Tom Gibboney brought in more modern computers, coordinated advertising and production systems, and put out new publications. The paper dropped “Country” from its name to become The Almanac and began publishing online at AlmanacNews.com.
Over the years, one of the Almanac’s best-known staffers was staff photographer Carol Ivie, who started taking pictures for The Almanac in 1976 and continued, literally, until the day she died on June 5, 2005. She often photographed the children of parents she had photographed when they were kids. Ivie once got knocked over taking pictures at a football game and ended up in the emergency room.
In 1995, The Almanac moved from 855 Oak Grove Ave. in downtown Menlo Park to larger quarters in a new building at 3525 Alameda de las Pulgas in West Menlo Park, where it spent 15 years next to Lutticken’s deli.
In the last week of December 2010, The Almanac staff moved to the new Embarcadero Media building on Cambridge Avenue in Palo Alto, joining the staffers of sister papers the Palo Alto Weekly and the Mountain View Voice in its third-floor newsroom.
By 2015, The Almanac had published 2,600 issues, and over the course of those first 50 years, evolved into much more than a weekly paper. Its news team at the time, headed by longtime Editor Richard Hine and Associate Editor Renee Batti, spent at least as much time reporting for online and the daily email Express, as they did for the weekly paper.
“In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the day after we went to press,” Hine recalled. “We had a whole week to develop stories and take pictures. Today, we’d be updating stories and photos around the clock.”
That was certainly the case in early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the country went into an unprecedented lockdown. With only a skeleton crew coming into the office, most of The Almanac’s staff worked from home to provide readers news they could use about the deadly virus.
As businesses struggled and advertisers pulled back, The Almanac’s parent company restructured and laid off staff. Mountain View Voice Editor Andrea Gemmet, a former Almanac reporter, took over The Almanac newsroom and served as editor of both publications.
“Everyone was working nonstop to deliver vital information as well as chronicle the profound impacts the pandemic was having on every facet of life in our community,” Gemmet said. “To boost morale, the staff held virtual happy hours over Zoom.”
In 2021, a new sister publication launched, the online-only Redwood City Pulse, led by Editor Michelle Iracheta. Almanac and Pulse staff collaborate to cover news in San Mateo County, allowing both publications to serve their readers with expanded news coverage.
The 2020s brought more significant changes for The Almanac and its parent organization. Embarcadero founder Johnson retired from day-to-day operations in 2023, with new CEO Adam Dawes overseeing the modernization of the company’s online platforms and its transition to a nonprofit. The Embarcadero Media Foundation launched in 2025, acknowledging both the increasingly challenging business model for local journalism and the wellspring of support from loyal readers.
Today, as The Almanac’s 60th year draws to a close, Gemmet and reporters Arden Margulis and Jennifer Yoshikoshi make up the full-time news staff.
This history of the Almanac is largely based on accounts by the late longtime staffer Marion Softky, who wrote thousands of articles for the Almanac over 40 years.
Happy birthday to you all!