William Blankenburg was one of the early stars of the Los Altos Town Crier as the paper transitioned from a shopper to include an increasing amount of editorial coverage. The young man from South Dakota did a bit of everything at the paper, and his playful sense of humor fit in with the crew of the time, led by co-founder Dave MacKenzie. Like MacKenzie, Blankenburg still resides in the Los Altos area. The following summarizes an interview conducted by e-mail with Blankenburg last week.

What years were you at the Town Crier? How did you come to join up with Dave MacKenzie and company?

My wife Pat and I moved to California from South Dakota in 1957. I planned to attend Stanford for a master’s degree, so we found a place to live in south Palo Alto.

Pat hiked to Page Mill and immediately landed a job with Hewlett-Packard as a secretary. I drove in the other direction to Los Altos and saw a sign: “Foothill Printing and Publishing.” I walked in and met Dave MacKenzie, who allowed I might be of use. His partner, Bill Norton, gave me a job interview in Mac’s Tea Room, and I went to work the next day. I worked part time during the school year and then full time from 1958 to 1964, when I left to go into the professor business.

What kind of work did you do at the paper?

We didn’t have job titles, but I suppose I was editor. I was trained as a printer, so I spent some time at first in Cupertino, where we printed, and also published the Cupertino Courier, near the old Cali mill. I operated linotype, made up pages, took pictures, wrote stories and sometimes sold ads.

What was the staff size at the TC? What was it like producing the paper every week? How was the paper put together?

In Los Altos I think we had nine full-time and perhaps three part-time workers. Cupertino had a few more, counting the printers.

We printed by the offset process then as now, but this was before computer composition, so we had typewriterlike machines that produced passable text, plus another machine that made display-type images. Our artists designed and laid out the ads. The whole works got pasted onto layout sheets for engraving in Cupertino. The final pasteups went to Cupertino Tuesday afternoons and we circulated on Wednesdays. Driving to Cupertino was hideous during rush hour - this was before the freeways and expressways.

The Town Crier then was mostly advertising, but we did some long features on environmental and social topics. Dave and I wrote columns. We offered free want ads to local people, and these were enormously popular. We anticipated Craigslist by a generation or two.

Name me three town characters from those days and their relationship with the paper.

Ted and Carolyn Baer of Los Altos Hills were museum-quality liberals who were great friends to the inmates of the Town Crier. When John F. Kennedy appeared at the Cow Palace in 1960, the Baers took Pat and me. Ted made Carolyn drive so he could sit with us in the back seat and extol the virtues of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

William J. Greene was an arch-conservative insurance agent who bought a 2-inch ad every week so he could come into the office and tell us about the “pinkos” on the school board.

A mile uphill from Foothill College lived a poet named Carleton E. Sheffield. He occasionally submitted some verse, which we always published. On his shack he installed a windshield wiper operated by a string. The string hung next to his bed. At dawn he would yank it to flick the cooing doves away from his eaves.

What was Los Altos like when you were at the TC?

There were two hardware stores on Main Street and a feed and seed store on First. Bungalows abounded, and McTuscan mansions were years away. After the harvest, the Hills were carpeted orange with the flats of drying apricots.

What did you do after the Town Crier, and have you always maintained a place in town?

I taught for a year at Colorado State (University), then took a doctorate at Stanford in 1968. I taught for nearly 30 years at (the University of) Wisconsin-Madison. After retirement we bought a condo in downtown Los Altos. It’s nice to be back.