One morning in the fall of 1972, Gene Roberts shambled up to the twin revolving doors at 400 N. Broad St. to begin his first day as executive editor of The Inquirer. As he pushed through one door, the photo editor - who had just quit - was walking out the other.

" 'You've just made the dumbest mistake of your life,' " Roberts recalls him saying. " 'Welcome to The Inquirer!' "

With that, Roberts - more certain than ever that he had come to the right place at the right time - took the elevator to the fifth floor and began what would become a legendary 18-year reign.

"Somewhere along the line, I decided that if I was ever going to run a newspaper, it would have to be one with lots of problems," Roberts says. "At a successful paper, there's resistance to change. If everything is coming up roses, why plant petunias?"

He had mentioned this someday-ambition to his friend Lee Hills, who had a habit of taking detailed shorthand notes of every conversation. In the summer of 1972, Hills, then chief executive officer of Knight Newspapers Inc., went to see Roberts, who was in Miami running the New York Times' coverage of the presidential conventions.

"He whipped out a notebook," Roberts recalls. "And said, 'On such-and-such a date, you said, "If I were ever to leave the Times, it would be to run a paper that was in trouble." ' Then Hills declaimed, 'I have just such a paper.' "

Under Roberts' deliberate, if often inscrutable, leadership, the paper would rise from the ignominy of the hubris and corruption of its previous decade to become one of the most respected dailies in the country. It would grow to be a veritable Pulitzer Prize machine, powered by a staff of young, ambitious reporters who were encouraged, as never before, to pursue stories in depth, undaunted by corporate threats to pull advertising, and undeterred by officials who were used to hiding and lying.

At the time, the Bulletin was the city's paper of record, admired for its encyclopedic coverage of the region, but stodgy and averse to risk. William K. Marimow, who worked there on the business news staff briefly before jumping to The Inquirer in 1972, recalled, "The editorial page always examined issues from both sides and never reached a conclusion."

Roberts, convinced that only one newspaper could survive in the city, resolved that The Inquirer would prevail. He planned to pummel the competition with news coverage that was intrepid and fair.

The ambition seemed preposterous.

In the 1950s and 1960s, The Inquirer had become a vehicle for owner Walter H. Annenberg's personal whims. He would use its pages to marginalize his enemies and bolster friends. For example, he held a grudge against the owner of the Warriors basketball team, and refused to cover the team's games. He disliked Gaylord Harnwell, president of the University of Pennsylvania, and kept all references to him out of the paper. Annenberg's blacklist also included actresses Imogene Coca and Zsa Zsa Gabor, as well as activist Ralph Nader.

And then there was the still-fresh memory of Harry Karafin. Karafin, an accomplished investigative reporter, had developed a lucrative sideline by digging up dirt for stories and then blackmailing the subjects, getting them to pay him off to not publish what he'd found. In 1968, he was convicted of extortion and died in prison five years later.

Donald L. Barlett, a reporter recruited from the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1970, remembers worrying when Roberts arrived. For years, at several good newspapers, Barlett had been stymied by editors who refused to run his investigative stories.

Most papers at the time, he realized, valued their relationships with government officials and powerful businessmen more than their role as public watchdogs.

The Inquirer had been moving in a hopeful direction after Annenberg sold it to the highly respected Knight newspaper chain. Then along came Eugene L. Roberts Jr., this exile from the Times, a rumpled character with a Southern drawl, who set up his desk in the center of the newsroom. Perpetually equipped with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other, Roberts had an odd habit of allowing long silences to plop down like a tuckered-out bloodhound in the midst of a conversation.

No one knew quite what to make of him, and that included Barlett and his colleague James B. Steele. The duo had just completed an investigative series about the criminal courts. "It was written, edited, and ready to run," Barlett recalls.

After Roberts read the series, he told the reporters he wanted to hold it until the new year. "He said he wanted to study it," Barlett says. "And I thought, 'Here we go.' "

It turned out, however, that Roberts wanted the extra time to give the stories the attention they deserved. "He wanted more art. He wanted graphics, something that no one had done. He wanted to make it look good," says Barlett. When the stories ran, he said to himself, "The Holy Grail is complete."

The late 1970s was a time of social and political upheaval in Philadelphia, the nation and the world. Frank L. Rizzo was in his last term as mayor. The Vietnam War had just ended. In Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi, the United States' ally, would be deposed and replaced by the fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The civil rights and women's movements had won critical legal battles, but idealism had outpaced reality. The new equality was still testing its coltlike legs, making unsteady progress in homes and at work. The hippies of the 1960s were graduating from college and graduate school, confronting the buzz-killing forces of inflation, high gas prices, and unemployment.