[2] Lee, who founded the Men's Civic League which purchased the paper, managed the Observer with two others,[2] Eugene "Geno" Gladden and John W. Cole.
Lee sold his thriving real estate business in an attempt to salvage the paper.
He persuade both The Sacramento Bee and the Stockton Record to hire their first black reporters, both Observer alumni.
[4] In the late 1960s, the Capitol Correspondents Association refused to grant membership to journalists from the Observer because the newspaper was a weekly.
The association later relented, and granted the Observer access to cover the California State Capitol in 1973.
[2] A decade later the Observer had 42,000 subscribers, a staff of 35 and had won the John B. Russwurm Award from National Newspaper Publishers Association.