"Now why do people still do this?" Vega asks innocently, and then he answers his own question: "I guess I made people real happy or real mad in Detroit."
That would make a fine epitaph, and it's a measure of Vega's business sense that he knew precisely which people to make happy and which to make mad. In Detroit, he behaved no worse than would any other businessman worth his wingtips. That doesn't mean he behaved well; it means he acted within the wide, and ever-widening, boundaries of American commerce, wherein a company under strike is free to spend a ton of money just to say, "Fuck you." (His handling of the strike is fondly presented as a case study in the crisis-management book Dealers, Healers, Brutes & Saviors: Eight Winning Styles for Solving Giant Business Crises, from which we also learn Vega is an eight handicap who one year spent 100 days on the golf course.)
James Sanders
"I'm not your normal publisher," says Frank Vega, here
in his third-floor office.
To picketers, Vega was the face of the Detroit strike --
and its villain.
Related Content
More About
What this augurs here is another matter, and it would be much too simple to merely project Detroit's past on San Francisco's future. At the Chronicle, there is at least an acknowledgment that the paper is sick and in need of some remedy, which no one doubts will be drastic, but which few people -- Vega among them -- think will require the systematic neutering of the paper's unions. His goal is not to shove the unions back into the dark ages of labor, pace just about any Detroiter paying union dues; his goal is to drag a newspaper with a number of anachronisms into the 21st century. "If there are 1,700 newspapers in the country," Vega says, "I guarantee you that probably 1,695 are profitable. Newspapers are profitable entities. ... We should be able to make a profit here, with this newspaper." That's not a simple proposition -- not today, not in this market, not in this economy; it's only natural, then, that the Chronicle turn to a guy like Vega, the kind of meticulous ball-breaker who'd bet a month's pay on his circulation routes, for help.
And so, enter Darth Vega, lightsaber aloft, cape aswirl.
"I had these shirts made up," he says, now holding a pair of postcard-size prints, both of which reference Star Wars. One reads, "Darth Vega, may the DNA" -- the Detroit Newspaper Agency -- "be with you." Another ensures that "good will prevail." The t-shirts were given to replacement workers during the strike. "We went through 2,000 shirts in, like, an hour -- people were grabbing them," Vega says. Earlier, he insisted he wasn't proudto be known as Darth Vega, but at the moment he certainly seems to relish the identity, with all that it implies. And why wouldn't he? Vega smiles. His eyes brighten, and he looks like a guy who just made birdie on 18. In the end, he points out with something close to glee, it was Darth Vader who saved the galaxy.
