McCartheys: Carrying the torch?

Salt Lake Tribune employees of the 1970s called it "the touch" or "the squeeze."

Several times a year, Thomas Kearns McCarthey, or "Kearns" as he was known, would get up from his small desk in classified advertising, mosey into the office of then-sports editor John Mooney and ask, some say demand, that Mooney use his influence to procure tickets to the Kentucky Derby. Or to the Rose Bowl. Or to college basketball's Final Four.

Mooney always came through.

"Mooney loved my dad and would have done anything for him," remembers Thomas Kearns McCarthey Jr., known as Tom or Tommy at the Trib , where he holds the title of deputy editor.

"He really hated it," says one of Mooney's colleagues. "You could hear Mooney screaming, 'Who do they think they are?' "

But Mooney and everyone else in the Tribune newsroom knew who the McCartheys were:

They were a branch of "the family" that owned the newspaper, descendants of fabled one-time owner Sen. Thomas Kearns. And relatives, otherwise ignored in the newsroom, were afforded certain privileges. Being an owner has its perks.

Especially for those holding 40 percent of the company stock.

Today, all of Utah is learning who the McCartheys are. Others in the extended Kearns family — scores of them — have fallen away from the senator's newspaper.

Not the McCartheys.

Indeed, the children of the late T.K. McCarthey and his widow Jane, 74, think they have a chance of owning the paper lock, stock and printing presses.

Tom, 50; his brother Phil, 48; and sister Sarah, 46, now control 80 percent of an option agreement that they claim may allow the Tribune management group they dominate to buy the Tribune in August 2002.

The family sold the paper in 1997 for stock worth $731 million. It has subsequently been owned by Tele-Communications Inc. (better known as TCI Cablevision), AT&T and now Denver-based MediaNews Group. The Deseret News, the Tribune's partner in a joint operating agreement, maintains that it must consent to any sale of the Tribune and its half of the two newspapers' publishing and distribution arm, the Newspaper Agency Corp.

Phil, for one, makes no bones about his plans.

Does he want to become the next publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune?