It was with sadness that the San Quentin News staff learned of the passing of its longtime adviser, Steve McNamara, 92. He was a volunteer adviser to the newspaper since its relaunch in 2008.
In the early years, Steve was the newspaper’s de facto publisher and business manager. To me, he was inspiring. Of all the advisers, volunteers, and other professionals who have worked so tirelessly in our newsroom, Steve was the only one who knew both sides of the newspaper business.
A Princeton graduate, class of 1955, Steve started his early newspaper days as a reporter; he wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal and the Miami Herald. He was a contributing editor in Europe for Sports Cars Illustrated, and the Sunday editor for the San Francisco Examiner. By 1966, he became owner, editor, and publisher of the Pacific Sun.
Steve was one of the four initial advisers of San Quentin News tapped by then-Warden Bob Ayers to revive publication. Steve created much of the newspaper’s design and typography to produce what many have called a “real newspaper.” He did not hold on to his publishing knowledge. He passed it along to many of us in the newsroom, whom he sometimes referred to as his “men’s group.”
I learned a lot from Steve. Some days, he would come into the newsroom or to a Journalism Guild meeting and explain how a printing press worked. He was able to do it because he was a previous owner of Marin Sun Printing, where San Quentin News is printed, thanks to Steve.
I showed up in 2011, the same year San Quentin’s print shop closed. That’s when Steve assumed the role of the newspaper’s publisher. He set up and ran the non-profit Prison Media Project to pay for the paper’s printing and distribution. He also built the paper’s first website.
Steve’s indelible print is on every issue of San Quentin News from 2008 to the present because his training has been passed down to the early staff of four inmates to the 75 who have followed. I am fortunate and grateful to have been one of the men who learned from the 70 years of newspaper experience he brought to our newsroom.
Beyond advising the men at the newspaper, Steve was instrumental in the formation of the first San Quentin News forums with district attorneys, beginning with George Gascón when he worked in San Francisco. That first meeting expanded to forums with other district attorneys, law enforcement, judges, lawmakers, teachers, and others who worked in the criminal justice system.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, this is a tribute to Steve. He was in his mid-70s when he started volunteering to work at San Quentin. Who does that? Steve McNamara.
Steve didn’t have to go inside a prison after retirement. By many definitions of success, he’d “made it.” That wasn’t enough for Steve. Unselfishly, he wanted to give others who were less fortunate a chance to learn a skill beyond writing. In a 2016 profile I wrote about Steve in San Quentin News, he said training prisoners to be journalists was not the point. He placed emphasis on the fact that they would learn all kinds of life skills.
In 2017, The Princeton Alumni Weekly published a story about Steve and the work he did at San Quentin. The very fitting title of that story is “The Altruist.” After Steve’s passing, I read it again and was reminded of a question he asked himself: “What motivates some people to do good things, others bad things?”
After three decades of imprisonment, I understand clearly why people do bad things. But I’m still wondering why Steve did so much good for men about whom society says are undeserving. I think his answer would be “opportunity.” We were forced to be more than writers to keep the newspaper in operation.
By the time Steve turned over tasks he handled at the newspaper, we learned how to ship newspapers to other prisons, coordinate research work for the newspaper, order supplies, respond professionally to letters, maintain text and images for the website, and navigate complicated technical issues.
The San Quentin News was established on December 10, 1940, by Clinton T. Duffy, the prison’s progressive warden at the time. The paper did not publish continuously over the decades. After a 25-year hiatus, Warden Robert Ayers Jr. revived it in 2008. But it was Steve’s hands-on teaching that helped to bridge the gap between the incarcerated and the outside community to provide a better understanding of how to improve public safety.
Among many of Steve’s accomplishments, he was the founding president of the National Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, president of the California Society of Newspaper Editors, and a director of the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He was a visiting lecturer at San Francisco State University; co-founder, owner and CEO of Marin Sun Printing Company; co-founder and president of Marin Community Video; founder and CEO of Sunlight Software Company; co-founder and president of Marin Solar Village Corporation, and a member of the Innovation and Planning Commission of the California Department of Education.
Steve never judged anyone who worked in the newsroom because he came to help us. He wrote me a wonderful letter of support for my parole board appearance because he knew me better than those who are paid to hold me and those who sit in judgment of others. He was the patriarch of San Quentin News, a pillar of Marin County. Steve McNamara. Made in America.
