In the Background section of the online San Quentin News the founding of the paper is traced to December 1940 when it was established by Warden Clinton Duffy. The implication used to be that this was the start of newspapering at San Quentin. It was not true.
To the great surprise of those of us involved with the current S.Q. News, and of San Quentin officials generally, there was a flourishing newspaper at San Quentin before the News – more than 80 years ago. It was named Wall City News and boasted that it was “The Only Newspaper in the World Published Within the Walls of a Prison.”
This revelation came to us from, of all places, Calgary, Canada. Some months ago I received an email from Larry Buchan of Calgary. He said that not only had there been a San Quentin newspaper before the News, but he had a copy of it, dated September 10, 1930. He subsequently sent photocopies of the paper, Page 1 of which is reproduced here. All four pages are viewable on our website www.sanquentinnews.com. Go to the Back Issues section and scroll down to the year 1930.
On the last page are the times of a recent prison track meet and the prison records in each event. Some of the times are startling. For example, the prison record in the 100-yard dash was said to be an amazing 10.2 seconds. The world record at the time, set three months earlier by Frank Wykoff in Chicago, was 9.5 seconds. The current record, set in 2010 by Asafa Powell on his way to victory in the 100 meters, is 9.07 seconds.
How did Larry Buchan come to have this journalistic gem? He got it from his father, who had been on a trip to San Francisco, in September 1930. Larry’s father had picked up five copies of Wall City News, left folded on a bench on a San Francisco Bay ferry.