In 1957, new owners renamed it the Northern Virginia Sun "and moved the entire operation into a former A&P supermarket" at 3409 Wilson Boulevard.
[5] The four principal partners were George W. Ball, later an under secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations;[6] Philip M. Stern, a grandson of Sears, Roebuck chairman Julius Rosenwald and son of a president of New Orleans Cotton Exchange; Clayton Fritchey, a journalist and Democratic operative who, as a reporter for the Cleveland Press, had covered Eliot Ness's campaign to root out police corruption in Cleveland;[7] and Arnold Sagalyn, who signed on as assistant publisher.
[9] "Their dream was to turn [the Sun] into a suburban success like Newsday on Long Island, whose concentrated circulation and affluent readership had managed to scare the large New York City newspapers," the author Eleanor Lanahan wrote.
The nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson ran an item about Fritchey in 1958 that did not reflect well on the Sun's staff.
Arlington was a temporary stop for airline stewardesses, Pentagon employees and foreign service people who had no investment in the schools as most of their children weren't educated there.
Compounding the problem, in 1960 the newspaper union went on strike for higher wages and selected the Sun, as one of the weaker papers, to make its point.
[the Sun] brought in scabs, which was unsettling for the liberal, pro-union management, who had to cross their picket lines to get to work.
Herman J. Obermayer, editor and publisher of the Long Branch Daily Record in New Jersey, bought the Sun in 1963[15] and controlled it for 25 years.
Obermayer, a decorated World War II veteran who had graduated from Dartmouth College, had begun his career as a reporter on the Long Island Daily Press in Queens, New York.
His family foundation gave reporter Seymour M. Hersh a grant in 1969 when he was digging into the story of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Stern foundation money also went to the Government Accountability Project, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Women's Legal Defense Fund, among others.
Other reporters at the Sun when Stern and Fritchey were in charge included Helen Dewar, later a congressional reporter for The Washington Post;[19] Marianne Means, later a political columnist for the Hearst syndicate; and Shirley Elder, later chief congressional correspondent for the Washington Star.
[21] From the mid-1960s to and the early 1970s, the paper's day-to-day coverage was supervised by Carol Griffee, who was initially city editor, then executive editor, according to an interview with her conducted for a University of Arkansas project on the Arkansas Gazette, where she worked as a reporter after she left the Sun.
In 1971, Griffee arranged a leave of absence and tried politics, campaigning for a seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.
[23] Hank Burchard was a reporter at the Sun before joining The Washington Post, where he worked for more than 30 years.