Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/454

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HISTORY OF OREGON NEWSPAPERS
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five-column folio, ready-print inside. Actually it compared favor ably with a good many of its contemporaries in the smaller Oregon communities. Douglas charged his subscribers $1 a year and gave them in return stories about the potato show, Crook county cows, the young people's association, all the local sport news, covering the minor happenings also in readable style. He carried considerable advertising, one double column of which was on his first page. The young publisher kept his paper going for nearly three years, when he left for the University of Oregon. There he became editor of the student newspaper, the Oregon Emerald.

The Spokesman has continued through the years, since 191 5 with out competition in its field.

Changes of personnel have been many. In 1921 Douglas Mullarky had the satisfaction of returning to the home town as editor and publisher of its only surviving newspaper, the Spokesman, in which position he remained for three years. Then, for the next four years, or until 1927, W. B. Russell, who had purchased the paper from Mr. Mullarky, remained in charge. Edgar Bloom was next, remaining until another Redmond youngster, Joe Colbert Brown, with his young wife, Mary Conn Brown, purchased the paper in the fall of 1931. Both journalism graduates of the University of Oregon, they are actively engaged in producing the newspaper, which has won both firsts and seconds in Oregon best-weekly contests under the direction of the state association.

Mr. Pettigrew, prominent among the Spokesman's publishers, was a real veteran of the West. In the early eighties, when his town was 250 miles from the nearest railroad, he published the Sundance (Wyo.) Gazette. He edited several other frontier papers.

Lapine.—A paper that ran up a circulation of 627 while published in a town with a population of 40 was noted by Alfred Powers in Oregon Exchanges for January 1922. The paper, La Pine Inter-Mountain, established in 1911 by E. N. Hurd, later publisher of the Seaside Signal, and conducted by William F. Arnold from 1912 to 1918, was the only paper in a thousand square miles of territory southeast of Bend, from which town it is 32 miles distant. Mr. Arnold made a good bit of his equipment. He installed a Diamond press and a Unitype machine.

Mr. Arnold carried advertising not only from his own community but from Bend and other towns, and he filled 11 of his 24 columns with paying business. No personal in his paper was worth less than six lines. Between 1918 and 1921 H. N. Lyon ran the paper, but Mr. Arnold was back in 1921. He raised the paper's size to six columns, the price to $2. He sold to Douglas Johnson in 1922. The paper was suspended in 1934.