Salem Capital Journal, had purchased the Logue in December 1930, just in time to run into the stretch of hard times which followed the panic in 1929. Mr. Van Dahl had been a co-publisher of the Baker Herald at the time of its consolidation with the Democrat, and he longed to get back into the publishing field. When the meagre field threatened a loss of the firm's working capital, Mr. and Mrs. Van Dahl gradually turned an old hobby of his into account by incorporating a philatelic section in his local paper. Before long this feature had overshadowed everything else in the paper, and the Mill City Logue and Western Stamp Collector was changed to the Western Stamp Collector, with the local news gradually giving place to the philatelic matter. The paper was made a twice-a-week in November 1934. The circulation, starting at a few hundred, climbed to 15,000 after the national scope was attained.
Mr. Van Dahl devotes his time to the extensive correspondence and the editing, while Mrs. Van Dahl handles the circulation. At the time of the move the staff had grown to include a linotype operator, job man, pressman and assistant pressman as well as the two publishers, Al and Arlene Van Dahl. A new press, folder, another job press, and more magazines for the linotype were installed when the move to Albany was made.
Harrisburg.—The centennial year of 1876 saw the birth of journalism in Harrisburg, when O. T. Porter started the Nucleus, a four-page Saturday weekly, Republican, 22×32, for which he charged $2.50 a year.
Like a good many other newspapers of the period, the Nucleus had a mission and frankly proclaimed it. In Pettengill's newspaper directory for 1878 the publisher, announcing a circulation of 400, and proclaiming that "it will soon . . . possibly treble its circulation," declared that "portions of Linn, Lane, and Benton counties are destined, at no distant day, to be separated and form a new county, with Harrisburg as the county seat. The Nucleus will be THE newspaper of Nucleus county. . . . Circulation in six incorporated villages." In Ayer's for the same year Porter asserted that the Nucleus "circulates as the local journal of Brownsville, Halsey, Junction, and Harrisburg, none of which has a smaller population than 300, all incorporated."
The ambitious dreams of Mr. Porter failed to save his little paper. Brownsville and Junction proceeded at once to establish their own papers, and within three years the Nucleus was not.
Then came the Disseminator. Started in Harrisburg by S. S. Train in 1882, it ran for two years when it was combined with the Albany Herald and moved to Albany.
In 1891 came the Courier, a Friday weekly organ of the Farmers' Alliance, with J. B. Morin, editor and publisher. The paper ran three years.
