schoolhouse and driven teachers and pupils away from there. The business men didn't relish repeated references to the odoriferous conditions surrounding early education in Eugene, and the taxpayers recoiled from the prospect of putting up a new building. Friends rallied to the support of the paper, and it not only won its school fight but stayed solvent.
Thompson came near deserting journalism for law before going to Roseburg. "Bob Bean" and he studied law together for a year. The Roseburg prospect, however, was regarded as too good to miss. "Bob Bean" is better remembered as Robert Sharp Bean, valedicto rian of the first class to be graduated from the University of Oregon, in 1878, and for many years a distinguished member of the Oregon supreme bench and the federal bench in Oregon.
The man who succeeded Thompson & Victor in charge of the Guard was George J. Buys, who, with A. Eltzroth, announced purchase of the paper December 18, 1869. June 4 of the next year Buys announced the purchase of Eltzroth's interest. Buys continued as publisher for eight years, when he sold to Ira and John R. Camp bell, whose close to 30 years' ownership constitutes the longest single proprietorship in the history of the paper. The Campbells were prominent figures in Oregon journalism, and nine years after they took over the Guard Ira L. Campbell was one of the founders of the Oregon Press Association at that famous meeting on Yaquina bay in 1887. Under the Campbell regime the paper first became a daily, in 1890.
And now came another of the big names in Eugene Guard history, that of Charles H. Fisher, the only man to enjoy more than one period of ownership (or part ownership) of the paper. Mr. Fisher, born in Douglas county in 1866, had been a Roseburg newspaper man.54 After his Roseburg experience, Mr. Fisher went to Boise, Idaho, in 1901 and founded there the Boise Capital News. It was from there that he came back to Oregon to publish the Eugene Guard. Mr. Fisher was prominent in Oregon civic as well as journalistic life, serving for several years as a member of the board of regents of the University of Oregon.
Charles H. Fisher's name as editor and publisher appears in the Guard's masthead July 12, 1907. He remained for five years, then moved to Salem, taking over the Salem Capital Journal in 1912.
His successor in Eugene was E. J. Finneran, who proceeded to parallel in Eugene the meteoric course of Sam Evans with the North western in Klamath Falls. The Guard installed a perfecting press, in a town of 10,000, with a circulation less than half of that number, which would have been adequate for several times the circulation. The pressman, once he had started the machine, had to keep an extra sharp eye on it or he'd find himself with an extra thousand papers on his hands.
