Who knew that in 2001, just as the fortunes of the Seattle Times Company were really starting to tip, some researchers from the Harvard Business School were allowed to conduct a study of the company's majority-owners, the Blethen family?

Seattle reporter Bill Richards knew—or recently found out—and he shares the results of this study, which involved juicy talks between Frank Blethen and a clinical psychologist, in a fascinating article in the current issue of Seattle Business monthly.

The name of the Harvard study: “The Blethen Family and the Seattle Times Company.” Its findings:

The 24-page report is an unusually detailed discussion of the internal workings of the usually secretive Times Co. and, more remarkable still, of the Blethens themselves. John Davis, a small-business expert and senior lecturer at the business school who wrote the case study, says that Blethen family members, including Frank Blethen, provided most of the case study’s information.

“I thought they were extraordinarily forthcoming,” Davis says, “especially given the sad family history they’ve had.”

According to Davis and Cathy Quinn, a clinical psychologist based in Beverly Hills, Calif., who did most of the interviewing for the study, the fourth generation of Blethens currently managing the Times Co.—Frank and his cousins—set out to use the company as the vehicle to rebuild their own families from what Davis and Quinn call “the toxic Blethen family atmosphere” of the past. Previous generations of Blethens “were physically absent and emotionally remote,” they wrote. Frank Blethen complained that his father, Frank Sr., who had divorced five times, never sent him a birthday card or letter, and never called, throughout Frank Jr.’s adolescence.

Blethen took a summer job at The Seattle Times when he was 21, living with his father in a hotel in Seattle. “During that summer, his father asked Frank what he would like to do at the newspaper after college graduation,” Davis and Quinn write. “Frank explained to him that he had no interest in a career at the paper and that he had only worked there to become acquainted with his father.”

The alleged daddy issues go on, as does Richards's great chronology of how the city's dominant daily won a newspaper war while at the same time losing (or nearly losing) the financial-solvency battle. Media gossipers and other interested parties: read it.

UPDATE: Apparently this Harvard report has been circulating for a few years. My bad. If it's new to you, it's still worth reading about.