"The Swashbuckling, Visionary Entrepreneur"

"What Tower achieved was a sensation. Until the 1960s, there weren't many record stores outside of the Sam Goody chain in New York. Music was sold mostly in the remote corners of department stores. Inspired in part by dad's drug store, which sold a wide variety of goods, Solomon offered music fans a veritable feast, with generous helpings of the offbeat and obscure. Word soon went out: Tower sold records you couldn't find anywhere else."

At The Sacramento Bee, Dale Kasler and Bob Shallit report the death of Tower Records founder Russ Solomon.

As do Ed Christman and Colin Stutz at Billboard.

"And Hand-Loomed Persian Rugs Selected by the Wife of Gov. Earl Warren"

"In 1967, Nancy Reagan spearheaded plans to build a new governor's mansion in Carmichael, northeast of downtown Sacramento.
"The 20,000-square-foot house was constructed on a bluff overlooking the American River, but work wasn't finished until after Ronald Reagan left office. His successor, Jerry Brown, then in his early 30s, called it a pretentious 'Taj Mahal' and refused to move in.
"The state auctioned off the Carmichael home in 1982. Proceeds from the sale, plus interest generated over the years, covered the cost of renovating the historic mansion."

Phil Willon and Chris Megerian in the Los Angeles Times report that Jerry Brown will move into the California Governor's Mansion.

"Where Kids Graduated to Die-Hard Music Fans"

"I was having dinner with a family friend in 2006 when the stores were closing and I was living in New York at the time. My friend walked by the Lincoln Center store on the way to meet me and we got on the subject of Tower Records closing. At the end of the conversation she said, 'Hard to believe it all started in that tiny little drug store,' and I said, 'Excuse me? What are you talking about?' She filled me in on Russ Solomon and how he started selling used 78's out of his father’s drugstore in the '40s and '50s and a light bulb went off. The story starts there and ends with him closing all his stores four decades later. That's a pretty amazing journey for one guy."


Alison Martino in Los Angeles talks with Colin Hanks about his new documentary, All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records.

"They Are Afraid. They Don’t Want to Move"

"Again and again, he said, he has found that approaches that once worked—inviting Republicans to dinner rather than attacking them, offering measured concessions on issues like pension cutbacks and spending, trying to rally public support for what he described as balanced proposals—were no longer effective.
"'He is aghast,' said Jodie Evans, a longtime associate who had recently had dinner with Mr. Brown in Oakland. 'He reports on some of the conversations, like he couldn’t believe the narrowness or lack of comprehending by public officials. He said, "Some of my old tools aren’t going to work."'"

Adam Nagourney in The New York Times reports on Gov. Jerry Brown's attempts at negotiating with the Republican minority in Sacramento.

He Hated It When You Called Him "Big Daddy"

"Much of the resistance occurred in Unruh's Assembly district, which extended west from USC. Most of his constituents were like him, working-class whites. And yet Unruh, who never forgot the depredations of poverty and segregation he'd lived with and witnessed in Texas, despised bigotry. Those days left him with an anger that persisted throughout his life. However, he also understood the need to walk the fine line between his own feelings and those of his white constituents. But when his friend and aide, Marvin Holen, told him about an African American girl being denied admission to a Hollywood professional school, Unruh acted. He had Holen, a lawyer, write the bill that became the 1959 civil rights law."

In the Los Angeles Times, Bill Boyarsky recalls Jesse Unruh, one of California's most important politicians of the postwar era.

And Peter Schrag reviews Boyarsky's new Unruh biography.