Patriarch Carroll W. Parcher Eulogized : Obituary: ‘Mr. Glendale’ served as mayor, newspaper publisher and columnist. He spoke for many of the city’s longtime residents.

Flags in the Civic Center were lowered and the Glendale City Council adjourned early in memory of Carroll W. Parcher, political and social patriarch of modern Glendale, and a commentator on its day-to-day life for 50 years.

The man revered as “Mr. Glendale” died of cancer at Glendale Adventist Medical Center on Tuesday. He was 88.

“I think he was probably the one man in Glendale that everyone would agree was a man of integrity and honor. And he so thoroughly enjoyed life,” Mayor Ginger Bremberg said. “He contributed more to this community than the community will ever know. He was such a fine, fine man.”

Bremberg defined Parcher’s special character as “his total loyalty, his absolute search always for the best possible way to achieve goals. He was not argumentative. He was not confrontational. He always had the gentleness and ability to take two opposing sides and listen to both and make gentle suggestions that resolved the problem without confrontation and anger.

“And he had the most remarkable sense of humor. He was such a wordsmith. He knew exactly how a phrase should be written in precisely the right words for the occasion. And there aren’t too many of those left.”

Parcher Plaza, the Civic Center courtyard, was named for the man who was mayor four times--all after his 70th birthday.

In a public life that spanned almost seven decades, Parcher wove careers in journalism and politics with a lilting stewardship for the town his father helped to found. Its people were affectionately called “Our Little Group” in columns Parcher began writing for the Glendale News-Press in 1939.

Those Victorian-style essays on the moral, political and commercial tenets of his community ran continuously through Parcher’s 33 years with the News-Press. With only minor breaks, they continued weekly after his retirement as the paper’s publisher in 1973 and, later, through his four terms as mayor.

In both commentary and governance, Parcher sought progress through moderation and conciliation. A lifelong Republican and promoter of conservative values, Parcher nonetheless used his most stinging language on the radicalism of the right and any assault on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Parcher was a friend of both presidents from California--Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. A tall and stately figure with a resonant voice, Parcher traveled extensively as one of the cognoscenti of West Coast publishing. Yet, his life remained inextricable from the turf staked out in 1901 by his father, Wilmot Parcher.

A migrant from Stowe, Vt., Wilmot Parcher settled with his wife, Nannie McBryde, on a 10-acre ranch at Glendale and Maple avenues in a rural valley north of Los Angeles. The elder Parcher worked on the campaign to incorporate a city, succeeding in 1906. He was elected president of its board, the equivalent of mayor, and early on introduced his only son to civic life.

A 1960 profile in the Copley Press reported that Carroll Parcher recalled “his first political activity as riding on the step of a surrey driven by his father and passing out handbills favoring the first water bond in the newly incorporated city.”

Carroll Parcher served on county and state Republican committees and managed campaigns for others. But, in his first race for public office, he lost the Republican primary for the state Assembly in 1936.

By then, however, he was well along in another calling that he had discovered on a trip at his father’s side to the Glendale News. Parcher joined his high school newspaper’s staff and in 1921 became apprentice printer, pressman and stereotyper on the Glendale Press.

The next year, he founded the Crescenta Valley Ledger in Montrose. It later merged with the Tujunga Record. For 16 years, Parcher co-published the Record-Ledger with Wallace M. Morgan, whose daughter, Frances, he married in 1924.

In 1939, News-Press Publisher William Scripps Kellogg asked Parcher, then pursuing big-city journalism as a reporter for the Los Angeles Express, to begin writing columns on a part-time basis. Parcher joined the paper full time in 1940, became associate editor in 1942, editor in 1944 and publisher in 1947.

His column, first called “On the Level,” then “In My Opinion,” became an institution, speaking with the voice of familiarity to an audience that was conservative, white and simple in its tastes.

“Remember last year’s Glendale Night at the Palladium?” he once wrote. “You do, of course, if you are a Lawrence Welk fan, as so many members of Our Little Group seem to be.”

Our Little Group, sometimes abbreviated OLG, was one of several affectations with which Parcher molded a sense of Glendale as a giant family.

Parcher’s wife, Frances, frequently appeared in his columns as The Lady of the House. His son was the Heir Apparent and his two daughters the Heiress and the Princess Royal.

In an early column, Parcher mentioned his “almost perfect paper.” The allusion soon became this “all but perfect paper,” and finally just the “a.b.p.p.”

In the mid-1970s, the 70-year-old newsman retired from publishing, only to become a steward of what it was clear he considered his “all but perfect city.”

In 1975, he was recruited to fill an unexpired term on the Glendale City Council. Two years later, he was elected to the first of two four-year terms.

On the council, Parcher helped shepherd the city’s Downtown Redevelopment Plan, which he had promoted as a publisher. It turned Brand Boulevard into one of the state’s largest financial districts.

Parcher tempered progress with respect for the past. He was credited with striking the compromise--called “The Parcher Plan”--which protected the little-town feel of Brand Boulevard with angled parking and landscaped islands amid the burgeoning high-rises.

He also wrote a hillside open space ordinance he hoped would preserve the slopes he had played on as a child.

In 1985, Parcher left elective office to return to writing commentary on a city by then rapidly changing, at least in part as a result of the policies he pursued.

To a diminished audience of Glendale’s old society, he addressed a new, nostalgic voice, with reflections on the corner market and a cop on his bike.

That is not to say he was all sentimentality. He icily took on the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled that a high school principal had not abridged students’ free speech by censoring the student newspaper.

“Upholding the action of that Missouri principal just lost us another shred of our liberty,” he wrote.

Parcher’s health was failing even before he stopped writing his columns on Dec. 29, 1989. His once frequent public appearances became rare.

Parcher’s most famous column appeared in 1940 and was repeated, by reader request, many times after, always on Mother’s Day, until its final appearance in the Glendale News-Press on Wednesday:

“A star swung low last night to lift my mother from a life of which she had become a trifle weary--with the weariness that comes to every faithful worker at the sunset of a long and well spent day or life . . .

“I knew there was great joy last night in that far, still place among the stars. Because Mother was there.”

He is survived by his daughter Margaret Faulkner, and his son, Stuart Parcher. Funeral services, which will be open to the public, will be at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Glendale First United Methodist Church, 401 E. Broadway.