The California Coast’s Friend in Deed

Mel Lane likes to brag that he got a good deal on his used Volvo convertible. His wife, Joan, finally got her first new car this summer. Upon meeting a fellow vacationer on the shore of Lake Tahoe, he volunteers that he once worked at Sunset magazine.

And what, the vacationer asks, did he do there?

“I owned it,” Lane replies.

Bragging, it turns out, is something Lane reserves for the little things. Otherwise, surely more would know the name of a man who played a major role in preserving open vistas along the California coast, not to mention San Francisco Bay. For while his day job was running Sunset with his brother, Bill, he spent almost as much time as a pioneering chairman of the California Coastal Commission and in other conservation roles under former Govs. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown. A powerful argument can be made that Lane, through the unique combination of Sunset and his preservation work, became a driving force in what California now looks like and how Californians live. He may not have had that goal, but it’s the result nonetheless.

“What can I tell you about my hero Mel Lane?” asks outgoing state Sen. Byron Sher of Stanford, himself a longtime environmental champion. “He was one of the early visionaries in the effort to protect the coast.”

Now in frail health at 82 and suffering from the initial stages of Parkinson’s disease, Lane is being applauded in subtle ways for his role in thwarting rampant development of the California coast. A small table in the corner of his Menlo Park office contains an array of recent awards and mementos, many of them thanking him for his environmental work. And at Whaler’s Cove, south of San Francisco, work will begin soon on a section of the California Coastal Trail that has been dubbed Mel’s Lane.

“His legacy is what you don’t see along the coast--subdivisions,” says Peter Douglas, the present executive director of the Coastal Commission. “People often ask me who was the best coastal commissioner, and the answer is easy. The best was Mel Lane. He’s a national treasure.”

All of which causes Lane to quietly protest that it was no big deal, that all he did was take on a subject or two that were of interest to him and follow them to a natural conclusion.

His work was not without criticism. His tendency toward negotiation was a source of dismay in the early days of the Coastal Commission, particularly by hard-line environmentalists who contended that all development along the Pacific Coast should be banned. At the same time, developers complained bitterly that building regulations set down by the commission were ruinous.

But in hindsight, the most commonly held view is that the commission, charged with writing a preservation plan for the state’s 1,072-mile coast, could well have self-destructed had it not been for Lane’s steadying hand in its fledgling years. In 1998, the California League of Conservation Voters named Lane its conservationist of the year, declaring, “If you look around California, you would be hard-pressed to find a place of beauty that Mel hasn’t played a part in preserving.”

The foundation of all of this was Sunset, which was created in 1898 by the Southern Pacific Railroad as a vehicle to draw visitors and investors to the West. It was named after the Sunset Limited, the passenger train that ran from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The first cover featured the Golden Gate Bridge and the lead article was about the fledgling Yosemite National Park.

In the beginning, Sunset had a literary bent, with contributors such as Jack London, Bret Harte, Sinclair Lewis and Erle Stanley Gardner. When the railroad decided it no longer needed a magazine to attract visitors, it sold Sunset in 1914 to a group of magazine employees headed by editor Charles K. Field. In 1928, the cash-strapped publication was sold again, this time to an ambitious advertising executive from Iowa who had traveled the West and sensed that the region needed its own voice and vision. He thought Sunset might be the right forum. The buyer, who purchased Sunset for $60,000 after putting together a group of six Des Moines investors, was Laurence W. Lane, Mel’s father.

The elder Lane immediately set down a new editorial policy: “The magazine will be maintained as a strictly Western one, designed to serve Western and national advertisers in reaching the substantial homes of the Western states. Editorially, a large portion of the magazine will be devoted to home and outdoor life of the West.”

In short, how the West would live and play. To that end, the magazine focused on the Western lifestyle, which for the elder Lane meant homes, gardens, food, travel and leisure--essentially what it is today.

Sunset has been referred to as both a symptom and a symbol of the West. The 106-year-old publication has made a mission of the notion that Western living is a unique experience that should be savored and embraced--from its bungalows and redwood decks to luscious gardens and out-of-the-way destinations. In the process, the magazine, in tandem with its trade book division, has left a lasting stamp on California. It is not uncommon for an admirer of a house or garden to remark that it looks like something out of Sunset.

Historian Kevin Starr describes the magazine as an encyclopedia of Western lifestyles and values that has chronicled how the region evolved in the 20th century--much of that on the Lanes’ watch.

Mel lane is reading the newspaper in the kitchen of his home in the posh peninsula community of Atherton. He had gone to his office that morning, but in the late afternoon his tie is off as he sips a glass of white wine. His wispy white hair is combed back and his face is thinner than it appears in pictures from his younger years. His taste in clothing runs to casual and his humor leans toward understated and bemused.

The house sits on land that would be worth millions to a developer, but the dwelling itself would never make it into a Sunset spread. The kitchen might, but only as the “before” of a “before and after” article. The ground around the white flat-roofed house, where the Lanes have lived for 35 years, has turned brown with the summer’s heat. The place is spacious and comfortable, but it looks slightly rumpled, right down to the folding card table in the living room where a jigsaw puzzle is a work in progress.

In the course of the day, Lane recalls when he and his brother sold Sunset door-to-door as boys to help keep the magazine afloat during the Great Depression. Then, after stints in the Navy during World War II, both brothers came on board the business side of the magazine, which by then had survived--barely--both the Depression and the war without missing an issue.

In 1951, Sunset moved its headquarters from downtown San Francisco to the sprawling, adobe-style campus in Menlo Park that has evolved into a tourist destination, with its gardens and displays of the indoor-outdoor lifestyle now synonymous with the West.

By 1964, the magazine, then headed by Bill, and the book division, directed by Mel, had become enormously successful. The magazine was one of the national leaders in advertising, despite being a regional publication that eschewed tobacco and liquor ads. It also banned feminine hygiene advertising for fear of being classified as a women’s magazine. On the book side, Sunset was offering hundreds of how-to titles selling millions of copies, including the Sunset Western Garden Book, viewed by many as the horticulture bible of the West.

At the same time, the brothers employed the then-unusual strategy of zoning the magazine--tailoring articles for various parts of the West so that readers in Seattle, for instance, would not have to read about the best way to grow cactus in the Mojave.

The magazine became such an institution that it was the occasional subject of parody and ridicule, including a spoof by New West magazine in 1980 titled “Sunsect: The Magazine of Western Civilization.” Included among the many riffs on the magazine were instructions on how to make an “under counter recess” for used gum. Sunset also was criticized, particularly in the turbulent ‘70s, for being too old-fashioned and stodgy.

Almost by definition, Sunset imbued Laurence Lane’s sons with a sense of environmentalism. It was, after all, one of the precepts of the magazine--that unspoiled parts of the West needed to be protected for others who would follow. But it would take a cause to get Mel Lane into the politics of preservation, where he would remain for many years.

In the early 1960s, a group of women led by Kay Kerr, the wife of the president of the University of California, became concerned when she heard that the city of Berkeley planned to fill in 2,000 acres of San Francisco Bay as part of an expansion program.

The sound of her alarm led to the founding of the Save San Francisco Bay Assn., which, in turn, led to an overall examination of how the bay was being treated by the numerous cities and private landowners bordering it. In the end, and after stiff opposition, the state Legislature created the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a 27-person board whose members would be drawn from both the public and private sector. But there was a catch: If the commission did not come up with a workable plan in three years, it would automatically dissolve and curbs on filling the bay would no longer exist. Gov. Pat Brown, a Democrat, looked around for someone to chair the commission and his gaze fell on Mel Lane.

“We like to joke,” says Joan Lane, “that Pat appointed Mel because he was a respected Republican businessman. If it worked, he’d look like a genius. If it failed, he could blame it on the Republicans.”

Joe Bodovitz, a former San Francisco newspaperman, was the commission’s first executive director. He remembers the many powerful elements lined up against it.

“The conventional wisdom was that this bird would never fly, that it would dissolve into factions and disintegrate,” he says. “What made it work was Mel’s integrity and fair-mindedness, and that he had nothing to gain.”

When the commission finished its report, it emphasized that the bay should not be treated as ordinary real estate but as an asset for future generations, and it recommended legislation to protect it. But there was a huge lobby working against such a bill, while on the other side, a grass-roots army of bay preservationists descended on Sacramento in support. The bill protecting San Francisco Bay eventually passed, and while the bay today is hardly pristine, the danger of its disappearance was halted. A 1970 article in Fortune magazine gave a lengthy account of what happened in those years. The fact that Lane’s name was not mentioned does not surprise Bodovitz.

“Not only did he never seek the spotlight, he consciously avoided it,” he says. “Mel was rarely the source of the quotable quotes.”

As contentious as the bay assignment was, it was only a warmup for the grueling task of guiding the Coastal Commission and devising a plan to protect the thousands of acres of beachfront that were coveted by developers. The commission was the outgrowth of Proposition 20, passed in 1972, which called for measures to ensure the preservation of the California coast. It was written in the living room of Beverly Hills environmental activist Ellen Stern Harris, often referred to as the mother of the coastal act.

Harris recalls times when she and Lane, who was appointed to the commission by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, were at loggerheads about how the coast should be managed. But she also fondly remembers when Lane flew to Los Angeles with a bottle of Merlot as a peace offering after a particularly contentious disagreement.

Harris, a loquacious woman with a tendency to jump from one subject to the next, recounts how Lane responded in the mid-’70s when other top executives in the Bay Area feared they might be kidnapped by radical leftists. “While all of Mel’s friends who were top CEOs in the Bay Area were having their chauffeurs take their limos for anti-kidnap training, Mel didn’t bother with any of that,” she says. “He drove a beat-up old Chevy convertible. It was one that had long been out in the rain with its top down, so its foam had deteriorated under the upholstery. Anyone looking to kidnap Mel would think they’d gotten the wrong man.” (Lane, incidentally, still owns that car, a 1971 Impala convertible.)

Despite their occasional differences, Harris says that Lane was right for the Coastal Commission job because of his experience with the San Francisco Bay project. The new commission also had a five-year deadline for coming up with a plan, or else it would go out of existence. The countdown had begun for the commission, which seems almost ludicrous now that it’s a California institution. But in those days, it was roundly opposed by considerable forces that included oil companies, developers and utilities.

In a 1974 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lane summed up his view: “I think the business world is committing suicide by thinking it can continue to use up natural resources without a day of reckoning. Look at what’s happening right now. As soon as business tightens up, not only do we drop environmental controls but, as a shot to the economy, we drill for more oil and cut down more trees. These are a rip-off of the environment that can’t be done indefinitely. So it’s poor business.”

Such talk hardly endeared him to commission opponents. But Joe Petrillo, a San Francisco lawyer who was the first executive officer of the California Coastal Conservancy, a state agency distinct from the Coastal Commission that works to protect and preserve the coast, recalls Lane’s ability to “stand in the middle of a storm and keep from being washed away.

“During those early times,” he says, “the Coastal Commission had to find its own way and voice at a time when it was subject to a lot of confusion and pressures and misunderstandings and overenthusiasm. He was able to pretty much clear a path through most of that.”

Developers and environmentalists complained that the commission’s plan-in-the-making was too vague and unenforceable. A 1976 article in BusinessWeek was critical of what the commission was costing both business and industry. Lane got into a tiff with Reagan, who early in the commission’s tenure complained that it was “lousing things up” by bringing development to a halt along the coast.

“If anything,” Lane shot back in a letter to Reagan, the regional coastal commissions created under Proposition 20 “tend to be more lenient than the initiative intended.”

After the draft of the coastal act was completed, the politicking began in earnest. Lane says that as the vote approached in the state Senate, they were three votes shy of passage. He says he finally turned to then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who somehow found support for the act, and it was approved in 1976 by a vote of 25 to 14.

Douglas, the Coastal Commission executive director, calls Lane the Michelangelo of the coastal act, the artist who put it all together.

“It represented the single most significant [land use] document in the history of the country,” he says. “There’s been no other planning document with such broad scope that involved so many people in its crafting.”

Lane’s other legacy was allowing for the “power of the people,” Douglas says. “He ran public meetings where people came who had never been to them before, and they were made to feel welcome. He made democracy a living experience. And then they came back because they were listened to.”

In 1986, Lane became the chairman of Lane Publishing, taking over both the book and magazine divisions after his brother was appointed ambassador to Australia. In the late 1980s, one of the recurring topics between the Lane brothers was the fate of Sunset. Both men were in their 60s, and there did not seem to be anyone among their five children who was an heir apparent. Along with that, production costs kept rising and their profit margins were off. For years they had been courted by publishers, but had declined to sell.

When they changed their minds, the winning bidder was Time Warner, which paid $225 million and vowed to give Sunset a more contemporary look. And while that did happen, with some updating and more color, Sunset remains the magazine envisioned by Laurence Lane all those years ago.

With the sale, Mel Lane moved on. He remains on the board of directors of several environmental organizations, including the Peninsula Open Space Trust--the group that will be building Mel’s Lane.

This summer, he’s back as usual at his Lake Tahoe summer home, which has a new pier jutting into the water. Like the Atherton home, the two-house compound at Tahoe is surrounded by grand dwellings, but the Lanes’ place is in keeping with Sunset’s spirit--light, airy and built to accommodate a crowd of grandchildren who just might track a little sand into the living room.

Mel Lane still diligently follows the issues affecting the coast, and his view is that the battle to protect it will always be a work in progress. He points at the effort to develop the giant Hearst property south of Big Sur as an example of how the struggle to protect the coast of California will only intensify as the state fills up even more.

“It’s going to get tougher,” he says. “What mankind is doing to it is more intense than ever.”