coming owner, editor, and publisher. In 1911 he sold the paper to Carl D. Shoemaker, later state game commissioner, and M. J. Shoemaker, who continued to run Republican. After six years the Shoemakers sold the paper back to Bates.
The period of the World war saw the papers running along, the Review and the News, both evening papers, and neither making much money under the intensive competition in a small city. Wimberly and Bates had been partners on the Review, were on friendly terms and not disposed toward mutual throat-cutting. Finally they got together to discuss the question of consolidating the papers. Mr. Bates found himself unable to raise the money his competitor was asking for the Review. Mr. Wimberly, who was feeling less robust than usual, finally, so the story goes, offered to let Mr. Bates take the paper over, with the idea that he would pay for it as soon as he could. Payments proved difficult until one day Roseburg found itself the center of one of the great murder mysteries of recent times—the Brumfield case of 1921. Remember it? The prosperous dentist who murdered a rancher, partly burned the body in Brumfield's car at a dangerous spot in the road where the dentist had been saying he feared he would have a wreck, then disappeared, leaving, he hoped, the impression that he had been the victim of the expected accident. Detectives uncovered the crime. Roseburg became the centre of nationwide interest. Metropolitan papers sent their reporters to the scene. Columns and columns of copy were sent out daily for weeks. The Oregonian sent young Don Skene, even then a recognized clever writer but not yet an experienced reporter. Charlie Stanton, Roseburg newsgatherer, used to coach him on the beginnings of his stories, which were still bothering Don. The story was the beginning of a career for Don Skene which sent him to New York and Europe and landed him among the top-flight newspaper writers of the country.34
Well, anyhow, this story was the making of the News-Review. The circulation went up from 1500 to 24OO while the excitement was on—and it lasted some time, until finally Brumfield, convicted of murder, and awaiting execution, hanged himself at the state prison. The paper was now "paying big," and there was no trouble about the payments to Mr. Wimberly. B. W. Bates and his son Bert G., who had become a partner and conducted "Prune Pickin's," one of Oregon's good columns, had a fine property to sell when they disposed of it to the Frank Jenkins-Ernest Gilstrap combination in March 1929.
Harris Ellsworth, who was acting as the first field manager for the Oregon State Editorial Association (now the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association), was made editor of the News-Review and is now in his eleventh year on the job. The newspaper operates its own radio, KRNR.
