RememberingTheArgus

A National Guard night attack, bee handling, and the winning race horse Geebung

2011-07-31T11:41:00.001-07:00

The Aug. 31, 1953 edition of The Argus Observer described events to be featured at the Malheur County Fair that week as including a National Guard night attack in front of the grandstands, a demonstration how to handle bees without getting stung, and the return of the thoroughbred Geebung, a winner at the Ontario track the year before.

National Guard Lt. James Cable said the night attack staged by his 35 troopers would include pyrotechnics, rifle flares, parachute flares, smoke grenades, and pyro starch explosive buried in the ground.

W. W. Foster, a Nyssa bee handler, promised to demonstrate how to handle the insects so important to farmers without being stung. When he was not handling the honey bees, they were to be encased in glass so that spectators “can see the bees at work.”

Geebung was to race under the colors of Austin Meyer at the 1953 meet. A year earlier he won while racing for owner Don Frazer. Other owners were bringing in horses that had run and won at tracks in Portland and Gresham, Oregon.

Raising Bobcats

2011-07-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

A 15-year-old Vale girl was raising two bobcat kittens, writer Paula Shunn reported in the Aug. 6, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer.

Shirley Rumsey, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Rumsey, was described as “apparently one of those people whom even wild animals take to instinctively”

The bobcat twins had been found by a nephew of Shirley’s deep in wild horse territory near Council, Idaho. He brought them to his cabin without seeing the mother cat though he thought he heard her prowling around later that night.

After the kittens were taken to her in Vale, Shirley fed them cow’s milk. That didn’t work. Then she fixed up a formula that included raw eggs and they thrived.

At the time of the story the bobcats were frequently set free in the house to play with her large tom cat and her pet Pomeranian dog. But one of the kittens was beginning to scratch Shirley frequently and she conceded she was getting “a little afraid.” That said, the father was reported building a large outside cage for the cats.

How DDT "made summer comfortable"

2011-07-16T21:53:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: When I was young, maybe ten or eleven, we’d stand out in the yard when a small prop plane flew over town dropping DDT spray to kill the mosquitoes and other bugs of summer. We’d look up, let the spray sprinkle our faces and taste it with our tongues, not knowing of course the side effects. It’s possible our mothers urged us inside with some warning that the stuff might not be good for us. But there was no real concern, as this column by my father makes clear.)

From the July 21, 1953 issue of the Argus-Observer

Few things have made me as instantly angered and frustrated as getting switched across the eyes by a cow’s tail.

It was a common experience of this season during my boyhood.

I hated to get up in the morning before breakfast time so my father took the morning shift and I got the evening chore with the family cow.

Then fly spray we had in those days never seemed quite effective. You would tie the cow’s tail to her leg. Then start concentrating on being ready to jerk the pail and jab her leg when she kicked at the flies.

Presently her tail would work loose and slap a stinging blow across your eyes.
Then before you recovered your poise, she would really kick, taking the milk stool, you and the pail all in one good blow.

Times must be different now. With DDT for spray and milking machines I almost every barn, I suppose the tricks in milking in fly season are becoming a lost art.

If modern spraying has done as much for the insect problem in the barn and the milk house as it has in the city areas, summer chores on the farm are much pleasanter than they used to be.

Last week the city of Ontario was sprayed and the mosquitoes and gnats disappeared overnight. The flies never get a start anymore.

City spraying is a service we have come to take for granted during the past five years. It seems only yesterday that there was considerable debate over the inclusion of spraying cost in thecity budget.

One year it was left out of an economy budget and the service clubs went out on a door-to-door campaign and quickly raised $1,000 to finance spraying. It was one of the best supported fundraising ventures of recent years.

The absence of insects is probably the greatest contributing factor to the crowing habit of outdoor living on lawns and patios that are now being furnished like a room in the home.

Today’s summer comfort is a far cry from the hot months of yesteryear when we put fly traps on the porches, strung fly paper from the ceilings, waited until the family was seated before food was put on the table and then shooed flies while we ate. -- By Don Lynch

On landing at Inchon Korea in 1951. What has changed?

2011-07-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: The Argus Observer's issue of Aug. 17, 1953 carried a detailed account penned by Sgt. Jay R. Draper of his impressions upon landing at Inchon, Korea in the fall of 1951. Draper, who had attended Ontario High School, later served in Japan and studied journalism on the side. He wrote these impressions for one of those courses.

As soon as he arrived on shore, he noted, “a loud-voiced captain formed us into ranks and marched us single file to a waiting fleet of canvas-topped trucks, loading us twenty per truck while he counted heads or noses of bodies, whatever he used for a measure.”

Draper described the scene as the truck entered the city:

“Down muddy, rock-filled streets we went, passing box-like houses, surrounded by high board fences and poorly stocked stores displaying a few cans of dusty C-rations, a meager supply of dried fish and pitifully few fresh vegetables.

“Dirty, ragged people lined the road, stared at us in awe or hate or fear and begged for food in high-pitched, sing-song tones. Bombed buildings with gaping holes, armed guards with big guns, an armless beggar in the tattered remnants of a uniform --- all gave mute evidence of war and hunger and death.”

Draper marveled that only a few short months before he’d been walking down the streets of his home town whistling at the pretty girls while Korea was “only a name.”

Although he conceded his service in Korea“was necessary,” he wondered in print two years later, “what politicians had the God-given right to decide that we, out of the masses available, should come to this distant land and kill and bleed and die?”

Luckier that many of the Americans who served in Korea --- particularly National Guard troops -- Draper served 16 months there before he became eligible to come home. He opted to be transferred to Japan and expected, in the fall of 1953, to be released from the service at the end of the calendar year.

Remembering the the Argus of my youth

2011-07-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Following is the one chapter in Farewell Bend the Novel that I think best captures The Argus Observer, my family,and the town where I grew up. This is fiction but inspired by actual events. To learn something of the end of the story, check out the blog entry that's next down. -- Larry Lynch

Farewell Bend Chapter 5

December turned out to be a strange month. It began with my ill-fated hunting trip. It continued with a sad but riveting story involving a new couple in town. Not more than six months after the couple opened the new Westphal’s Funeral Home, the husband went out for a noon walk and never came back. Dad told us what he knew the next day at dinner, after the wife filed a missing person report.

Frank Westphal, short and dapper, always wore a dark business suit, white shirt and tie. He was last seen dressed that way, walking down the left side of Idaho Avenue where it turned into Highway 30 on the way to the Snake River Bridge. Dad said the story going around downtown was he had jumped off the bridge into the murky waters of the Snake to escape his wife. It was likely, my father added, that if that were the case his body would float to the surface somewhere downstream where a farmer would spot it. But if it floated past Weiser and on into Hell’s Canyon, the buzzards would pick over it before any human would come upon it. That might have been what happened, because he was never heard from again.

Despite Westphal’s disappearance, what had become a kind of funeral home war continued, a fight that my father described with a smile and dancing eyebrows. Irene Westphal, short like her husband but a striking middle-aged brunette who always wore a three-strand pearl necklace, had from the beginning run things her way at the mortuary. She came up with unusual schemes for wresting business away from Wainright’s Funeral Home, the only mortuary in town for twenty years. One involved rewarding local housewives with invitations to elaborate Friday afternoon cocktail parties if they had been faithful about attending funerals at her place the week before. Her cocktail parties quickly became such an event that some local businessmen wrangled their way onto her list partially, my father suggested, to have a chance to drink with some of the town’s bored housewives. As for himself, he said he attended to pick up gossip about what was going on in town.

Frank Westphal either stayed away from those parties or drank too much when he showed up, angering his wife and creating problems at home. Neighbors of the Westphals told friends they frequently heard her chewing him out for embarrassing the couple’s twin daughters, who were high school sophomores. On their own, those daughters had developed a reputation for driving their teachers and the high school principal crazy by skipping school. When they did come to class, they liked to impersonate each other so that their teachers couldn’t tell who was who.

When Westphal disappeared, his wife cancelled the cocktail party scheduled for the next Friday afternoon. But that was the only one she abandoned. By the time the second Friday came around, she figured out that her usual guests were inclined to be solicitous. That meant she could lean on them even more heavily to attend services for the average departed Farewell Bend citizen. Big funerals always made the deceased’s family and friends feel good, which was not bad for bringing in future grieving families. Most of the old-time families in town remained faithful to Wainright’s, but the older mortuary felt the pinch.

The Westphal saga turned out to be good for business at The Argus-Observer, because Wainright’s increased its ad lineage to boast of its long service to the community. Mrs. Westphal then countered with a regular ad announcing the scheduled services at her place for the next few days.

The newspaper published only one story of Westphal’s disappearance. Anything more was “inappropriate,” my father said, because of the likelihood he had committed suicide. The Argus-Observer ordinarily did not publish stories about suicides.
Thursday night, a week after Westphal disappeared, I woke up to hear my mother roaring at my father.

“Why call here at this time of night?” she screamed. Then she would repeat the question in slightly different words but no less loud. I couldn’t make out my father’s answer.

The back door slammed. I heard the family car backing out of the garage and crunching up the alley. I lay awake for more than an hour hearing my mother’s sobs off and on, until the car returned. There was more arguing, this time too muffled for me to make out any of the words, before I finally fell back asleep.
In the morning, my mother woke me about 8 a.m. just in time to rush to get ready for school. My father was already out of the house. Kevin said he’d heard the argument, but he and I didn’t talk about it, and neither of us asked where our father was. The thrust of Mother’s jaw was so determined it was frightening. Her jaw was stuck out all the way that morning.

She placed a bowl of oatmeal in front of each of us and then asked if I would drop Kevin by the junior high on my way to school.

“It’s too late for him to walk,” she said. “Your dad had to leave early to shoot some pictures of a plane crash up by Baker.”

“Who crashed? Someone from here?” Kevin asked her.

I kept quiet, certain this had to do with the fight in the middle of the night.
“Tom Brady, a man with a construction business in Nyssa,” she responded. “He flies to jobs all over the West. They say his plane went down in bad weather somewhere over the Blue Mountains late yesterday.”

“They found the plane?”

“Your father said they are going to try to get to his body today. He hopes to go along to take pictures.”

“Is that safe?” Kevin asked.

“Probably not. Now you boys get on to school. And, Jack, you come home right after school this afternoon. I may need to use your car,” our mother instructed.
I was supposed to drive Pete to school, but I knew he’d drive if I asked him.

“You want me to ride with Pete so you can take the car all day?” I asked.

“That’s good. I don’t want Kevin riding with you two.”

The Bradys had no children, and no one mentioned the plane crash at school. I knew Mr. Brady was a big deal, so it was not so strange that my father wanted a picture of the crash scene. But the Boise Statesman would have a chance to publish stories and photos on Saturday or at the latest Sunday. By the time readers got The Argus-Observer’s Monday edition, the crash would be old news. Dad’s pictures would need to be different.

That night, after I spent an hour helping Pete change the oil in his car, our mother, Kevin and I gathered in our kitchen. Mother blew up about the excuse for our father’s trip.

“I told your father it was crazy to drive all the way to Baker to take pictures himself. He knows the publisher in Baker. He would let The Argus-Observer use some of his pictures if your father asked.”

“Was that what the fight was about last night? Him going?” I asked.
“Mrs. Brady called. She wanted him to leave right then for Baker. He drove to her house to talk to her.”

“So that’s where he went?”

“He was honest about that anyway,” Mother said.

“What are you going to do?” Kevin wanted to know.

She didn’t answer for a minute. Kevin announced he was going downstairs to study until dinner, and my mother and I moved to the living room where we sat staring at a blank TV screen.

“Today I was in the office selling ads by phone,” she said finally. “Tomorrow I’m going to use your car and run around collecting the copy. I sold a lot of ads for Monday.”

“And how am I going to make my classified rounds?”

“You can have your car back early in the afternoon long enough to drive to Mr. Ray’s lot out on Highway 30.”

“And Dad?”

“He’s promised to be back in the afternoon,” Mother said, got up, and stalked through a short hallway into her bedroom.

“I’m going to lie down and try to get rid of this headache,” she said behind a half-closed door. “You and Kevin can go to the Toot N’ Tell for dinner. I’ll give you some money.”

Kevin had no interest in my take on what was going on. He was not interested in much that I had to say. I had abandoned him for high school, and he was busy practicing for the seventh grade basketball team. He played guard, and both he and the team were expected to do well. We talked about his team as we ate.

The next day, I got an earful of gossip when I picked up No-Down Danny’s classified ad changes.

Danny Ray was a pinch-faced former mechanic who had turned into a successful used car dealer by catering to the low-price crowd, but he carried a grudge against my father. He made a stink when my father took an aging Plymouth sedan from a dealer who was going out of business instead of buying a car for me from a regular advertiser: him for example.

I explained to him that my father took the car as payment on a bad debt, but that didn’t do any good. Dad drove out to visit with Danny personally, but that hadn’t helped much. He kept his ad running. More than most dealers, it worked for him and his cheap cars. But after the dispute he would make me wait for fifteen or twenty minutes when I showed up at the lot, and then bark at me when he finally decided I’d waited long enough.

That Saturday, No Down Danny’s Used Cars at the edge of town looked to be absent any customers. Windblown gusts of ice-like rain accented the overcast afternoon as I pulled up in the Plymouth. Danny stood waiting on the top step of the stairs in front of the shack he used as an office, pulling his five foot eight inches into an imposing figure in a reddish flannel shirt and green workmen’s pants.

“I hear your Dad is spending a lot of time in Baker,” he shouted as I crunched through the gravel toward his shack.

I studied him, trying to figure out his smile. He reached down and grabbed the proof sheet that I brought for him to mark up.

“Come on in and sit down while I fix this up,” he said disappearing into the cramped 10-by-12 foot shack that was the only building on his lot. He sat down behind his chipped and cluttered wood desk and motioned me onto the broken down couch he used to seat customers.

“Some people are wondering just how much of an accident that airplane crash was,” he said, still smiling and watching me.

“Most people don’t fly into the side of a mountain on purpose,” I said.

I’d read the story of the crash in the Boise Statesman that morning.

The picture at the top of Page 1 showed a team of rescuers on skis heading away from the crash site, towing a sled containing a body down a snow-covered slope. Not much recognizable was left of Brady’s Cessna except one wing and the tail assembly. It looked like the plane had struck the mountainside nose first. Also on the front page was a picture of Nancy Brady, a tall woman with an attractive profile, talking with a man in uniform in front of a search plane sitting on the Baker airstrip.

On an inside page, with the continuation of the story, there was a head and shoulders mug shot of Brady. Showing a wide smile on the rugged face of a construction guy, he wore an open collared shirt. The story said that he’d been flying himself around the Northwest to various construction sites for a decade. As usual, he was alone in the aircraft. He had filed no flight plan, but he had landed in Baker on his way to Lewiston, Idaho, where his company was trying to complete a highway bridge for the state and the job was overdue for completion. Brady told other pilots at the Baker airport that he was waiting for the weather to clear before continuing. He then took off in mid-afternoon when storm clouds over the mountains began to blow away and the prediction was for improving weather through that evening. Nothing changed in the weather forecast, but the storm clouds hung on. They were cold enough that his wings could have iced up. The other pilots said they knew Brady as a gregarious guy interested in whatever was went on around him, but that day he acted pre-occupied. They thought the delay bothered him.

“The way I heard it your Dad spent Friday holding Mrs. Brady’s hand, standing at her side all day, driving her wherever she needed to go even though she had her own car,” Danny Ray said, leaning toward me over his desk as if he was closing a deal.

“And he stayed there to take her to dinner. Looks like your Dad knows Mrs. Brady pretty well. What do you think?”

“How do you know all this?”

“It’s all over town, Jack. I heard it at Andy’s Pool Hall last night. I also got it on good authority from the Baker police. I know some guys up there.”

“You mean you’re the one spreading the story?” I said, getting angry.

I knew my father would not want me to confront Mr. Ray. He would want to keep the guy as an advertiser, but I didn’t know how long I could keep from telling him to shut up. I got up to leave.

“Others had heard the same thing. I guess they are pretty good friends, your Dad and Nancy Brady,” Danny repeated, loud enough for me to hear as I headed down the steps.
“Don’t you want my ad changes?” he called after me.

“I can come back for them in an hour,” I said, hesitating only slightly in my fast march to my car.

“I’ll do them right now. Wait a minute.”

He quickly penciled in three changes to the list of cars and prices and walked down the shack’s steps to where I was waiting, turned sideways so as not to watch him.

“Don’t let it bother you, kid,” Danny said. “You can’t do anything about your old man.”

Then he disappeared back into his shack.

I ran to the Plymouth, glanced for the thousandth time at its torn seat covers and forced myself to drive to the Ford dealership on the other side of the tracks to pick up changes there that had not been ready earlier in the day. When I arrived, the used car manager had gone home, but he left a proof sheet with penciled in changes. Two salesmen who were still hanging around the new car showroom smiled knowingly in my direction and waved from behind a big blue Lincoln sedan as I walked through to the manager’s office. They did not usually pay any attention to my comings and goings. I knew for sure then the story was all over town.

My father had returned from Baker and was alone in the newspaper office when I stopped by to spike the copy changes. He asked me to tell my mother that he needed to work late to catch up and would not be home for dinner. She could call him if she wanted, he said.

I did not want to deliver my father’s message, but my mother just nodded when I did. She had made liver and onions, a dish I knew was not one of my father’s favorites. As Kevin and I ate, she excused herself to take a bath and get into bed.
I didn’t feel much like going out that night. Pete would be off somewhere with Faye, I knew. So I asked Kevin if he wanted to watch TV. We lay on the living room floor with couch pillows and our old black spaniel, Suzy, until our father came in about 9:30. He made himself some soup as we finished watching our show and went on to bed. Nobody felt like talking.

For days, that was the way it went around the house. Everyone silent and on tiptoes. Our dad skipped Sunday dinner but showed up for the evening meal beginning Monday night and tried to make conversation. It didn’t work. On Tuesday, our mother made a chocolate pie, but the crust was tough, and I didn’t eat much of my piece. I told her about the problem with the crust and went down to my room to do some schoolwork. Dad soon followed me to complain that I didn’t show enough appreciation for what my mother did for me. He said that it saddened her and she deserved better.
Still, I didn’t ask about his trip to Baker.

The next Thursday night another argument started between our parents. It began about ten, and Kevin and I couldn’t make out what was said, but our mom stormed out. She was not back for breakfast. Dad said not to worry, he knew where she was.
By Sunday afternoon, Mother still was not back. Dad made bacon and eggs for dinner. I called Pete to see if he could use some help with his car. He said he could. When I got home about eight, our mother had returned, bathed, and gone to bed. Dad was reading in the living room, and I went down to my room. I hoped things would soon get back to normal.

Monday afternoon before dinner, I came home right after school to work on a book report. Dad was still at the office getting out that day’s paper. I asked my mother to tell me what was happening. She was wearing one of her nicer housedresses and had put on make-up for a meeting earlier that afternoon, so she looked good standing at the kitchen counter, making a meat loaf for dinner.

“I’m not exactly sure. You’ll have to ask your dad,” she said.

I decided to push a little further. “Why did you leave?” I asked, thinking she would feel she had to give me an answer to that.

“For the same answers you want. He won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“I know that he was helping Mrs. Brady after the crash. That’s all.”

“More than he needed to, Mrs. Westphal is telling people.”
“She’s a gossip. Dad says she makes things up.”

“She hears what’s going on at those cocktail parties. You can’t keep secrets in this town for long anyway.”

“Mrs. Brady lives in Nyssa,” I said, trying to calm her now.

“And your Dad spends a lot of Saturdays there, supposedly trying to sell ads, without much luck. Funny thing, those days in Nyssa always happened when Tom Brady was out of town.”

“How do you know that?”

“Your dad and I have other friends in Nyssa.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“It’s really up to your father. He needs to be around more, be more honest with us. I don’t know whether he’ll do that.”

“You want me to ask him?”

“You could.”

For a week, I looked for a chance to get my father to talk about it. He avoided me at the office. When he knew I might be there alone, he was gone. When I tried to catch him alone, he left. At least he and our mother began talking at dinner about what was going on at school at the paper. Soon I quit worrying about it. This Christmas would be like any other. We’d open some gifts at home. We’d drive to Caldwell for dinner with Dad’s folks. We’d stop by to see our mom’s mom and O.J., whose asthma was killing him.

Quitting the Argus

2011-07-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

The following column appears in Farewell Bend the novel. It is only slightly altered from what my father, Don Lynch, then editor of The Ontario Argus Observer, wrote it in the summer of 1957 when he separated from my mother. This chapter comes not as the end of the book, but it's close. -- Larry Lynch

The Argus Observes

“Sounds like you’ve got that cabin fever,” Charlie Ambrose said.
That was his response to this column at the end of February when I wrote about having lived in Farewell Bend for almost nine years, a longer period of time than I’d ever lived any place before. And, incidentally, a much longer time than I’d ever been on one job before.
At any rate, I’m taking another job, with the Statesman Newspapers in Boise. And even though I continue the same ownership in The Argus-Observer, what influence I exert will be by remote control.
This change was only possible because Mrs. Kavanagh was willing to assume the rather demanding job of being editor and publisher of The Argus-Observer. She assumes a role often filled by newspaper wives. Country editors often undertake another enterprise (usually writing or politics) while the wife runs the paper.
In this particular case, the wife is better qualified to manage the newspaper than she realizes. She has been close to its problems for a long time and has worked at all of the tasks required—reporting, advertising, and accounting. This is a broader background than my own because I didn’t do any of the accounting.
Because of her natural modesty, she thinks of the places where her knowledge is limited, fails to see how much she really knows about the problems of The Argus-Observer. Actually she knows a great deal, and she will be ably assisted.
Sam Farmer has been at The Argus-Observer for a year. He knows how to handle the advertising needs of our customers and how to deal with a great many general problems.
Terry Randle, although new, has made an excellent impression on many important news sources and has demonstrated that he knows how to develop the news unusually well.
Rupert Zimmerman, new as shop foreman, showed immediately that he was an excellent mechanical superintendent and printing supervisor and demonstrated as good a knowledge of commercial printing as any country printer I’ve ever seen.
New management often improves a venture -- in business, or government, or salesmanship, or education, or a newspaper.
Most of what I could do for The Argus-Observer has long since been done. I expect it to move ahead in some ways now that would never have developed if I stayed in direct control.
Actually, I am much less confident about how effective I will be in a larger newspaper operation. But that’s a different problem.
–—From The Argus-Observer, Aug. 23, 1956

Trout fishing near New Meadows, Idaho

2011-07-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

From the then editor Don Lynch's "The Argus Observes" column
in the August 20, 1953 issue of The (Ontario, Oregon) Argus Observer

Zimm had told me where to fish. And it had worked out all right accorind to my standards, those of a dub who does not require many or very large fish to be happy.

“There’s some dandies right here in the meadow but you have to knowhow to catch them,” he said.

It was his busy season. For two months he had refused the temptation to fish with other summer guests. But he broke down one evening last August and took me fishing in the meadow.

First we worked the pools close to the cabins using a fly and caught half a dozen little squaw fish. They were to be our bait.

Then we drove a couple of miles down the meadow and walked in a little ways to a big deep pool where the water hardly moved.

We skinned the thick meat off the sides of the squaw fish and folded it over our hooks until they were concealed.

We wore tennis shoes instead of boots so we could wade waist deep. We worked opposite sides of the stream. Our lines were pretty well weighted and we threw them in above the deep water letting they work into the holes with the current.

The action started slow. I caught the first two --- nice ten-inch trout.

There was a point and a little brush in my way and the current was wrong. It kept me from getting into the deep hole.

Then after a half hour or so Zimm caught a better one. He motioned for me to come over to his side.

I waded across. My feet found a sand bar and I walked along it close the deep water.

The dusk settled in. I could just barely see my line against the dark water. I thought I had a bite and tried to set the hook. There wasn’t any jerk and I thought the weighted line had just hit a rock or log.

Then it started to move. Clear across the pool, deep. I set the hook a little harder and went to work.

It took all the skill I had. We battled for several minutes before I gained ground and reeled him a little closer slowly.

I didn’t have a landing net and knew I didn’t dare try to lift him. So I walked backward slowly along the bar, and then moved gently to the bank.

Well sir, sliding that boy out onto the grass was a real thrill. He measured just 15 inches but it was the biggest trout I had ever caught and an experience to remember for a long time.

If all goes well, as this is read we will be back in the same region trying to play a repeat performance of the same experience. This coming weekend has been set aside for our summer fishing trip. --- By Don Lynch

The Argus Observes -- Blaming the rain on the atomic bomb explosions in Nevada

2011-06-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes column from the June 4, 1953 edition of The Argus-Observer:

Man is full of curiosity with a penchant for the mysterious and unusual.

I suppose that’s why people like sensational explanations for unusual phenomena.

For instance, at every turn these days you hear people say, “Haven’t you heard, it’s the atom bomb explosions in Nevada that caused all this rain.”

I thought maybe this explanation was one that occurred just in Malheur County, but it must be a fairly general idea, because the (Portland) Oregonian ran a feature story Sunday explaining that there is just no basis for blaming wet weather on the atom explosions.

The weather has been just as unusually wet in Portland as in Malheur County and in Portland that is a lot of rain. The rose city had 28 inches of rain in the first five months of 1953 compared to 8 inches in Ontario.

Is this really unusual? Not at all says the weather man in Portland. Although it is the wettest first five months for any year since 1916, there have been seven wetter springs in the history of recording weather in Portland, and 1879 was much wetter with 39 inches of rainfall in the first six months.

So there you have the official weather viewpoint: “Nothing very unusual about this rainfall. Why it happened just like this only 37 years ago.”

But here in Malheur County where we have been keeping weather records for only ten years, it looks like a wet spring.

Is this blaming of the weather on atom bombs the first time that people have sought to explain away the weather by something new in the atmosphere?

Not at all, according to Col. Eckley S. Ellison, head of the Portland weather bureau office.

He says the ruckus over the atom bombs spoiling the weather is nothing compared to the storms of protest that swept the county when radio stations first began broadcasting. The radio waves were blamed for drought, flood, hail, lightening and rings around the moon. – By Don Lynch

The Argus Observes -- Perils of spring for high school seniors

2011-06-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes By Don Lynch
From the May 13, 1954 issue of The Ontario Argus-Observer

News stories this week have made me glad to be a country editor rather than a high school principal.

A fatal accident on the Nampa senior sneak day and subsequent action of the school board there to abolish the annual senior outing brought back to me painful memories of an accident on a student outing ten years ago when I was principal at Roswell high school in Idaho.

With a student body of fifty we lacked athletic resources and so we’d had a terrible year in school sports. Lost all of our football games, most of basketball; but we had won about half of our baseball games and the kids were proud of finally doing something in sports.

We had a wet spring in 1944 and we had a lot of cancelled baseball games but they were finally all made up except for one game with Marsing.

The game day game, a beautiful May day like we’ve been having this week, and we excused all of the students who wanted to go to the game.

Most of the players and many of the students including a number of girls piled into the back of a farm truck early in the afternoon and left for Marsing.

Agnes (this columnist’s wife who taught at Roswell high) and I stayed with the pupils who remained in classes. It was a warm, drowsy afternoon. We settled down to just marking time until the end of the day.

The team had only been gone a few minutes when the first dazed victims began to stumble in. Agnes met the first of them in the hall

She came running. “Don, the kids have had a wreck.”

I refused to believe it. But when I saw them I realized with considerable shock that it was true.

The effervescent load of youngsters had shifted the truck off balance on a curve a mile from the schoolhouse. It had flipped off the road, smashed through a fence and turned over in a field.

Our wartime Red Cross first aid training paid off that day. We filled our beds and davenport with youngsters suffering from shock and minor injuries. We improvised a stretcher for a boy who apparently had a serious back injury. We carefully transported the injured to a doctor’s office.

I’d have treated myself for shock if we’d had the time. That was about the most unnerving day I ever put in.

However we were lucky. The youngsters all recovered fine except for one girl who had trouble with a leg injury for a considerable time after the accident.

We forfeited the ball game. It was too late and we were too hurt to play it….

In addition to this year’s fatal accident, Nampa’s problem was further complicated by a student beer drinking riot that wrecked some private party at McCall on the senior sneak a year ago. Although it involved a relatively few people it embarrassed and humiliated the entire class, the school and the community.

The Nampa school board has my sympathy. I hope abolishing the senior sneak day solves their problem. But it won’t be easy. Seniors are capable of being pretty headstrong and defiant, especially if they think that they are being treated as youngsters

Argus reports on shootout at Weiser

2011-05-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

One man was killed, another wounded when a service station operator at Weiser Station north of Ontario turned his gun on three armed men who tried to drive off without paying for $2.48 worth of gas, the Argus-Observer reported on July 20, 1953.

Doyle C. Fulton, 23, was fatally wounded the previous Friday evening when he was struck in the back of the head by one of three shots that service station operator Frank Rembert fired into the rear of the escaping car.

Rembert told police that the front seat passenger in the car, John M. Kimball, pulled a gun from his shirt and used it to order Rembert into the service station building after he pumped gas into the car.

Rembert then retrieved a .38 revolver from his office.

According to the newspaper account, Rembert said he’d planned to shoot at the car’s tires but realized he was being fired on and aimed into the car.

Kimball, 27, was wounded by one of Rembert’s shots and the escaping car stalled a few miles down the road. From there, the would-be bandits pressed a passing motorist, C.W. Davis of Ontario, into their service to take Fulton to a hospital in Ontario, where Fulton died.

State police, alerted by Rembert and called to the hospital by hospital authorities, soon arrived to place Kimball under arrest.

Four men total were in the escaping car during shoot-out. Oregon authorities said they were from Los Angeles and that one of the men in the car was AWOL from the Army and another had served time for car theft. But neither the dead man nor the gunman had any kind of police record, according to testimony at a quickly convened coroner’s inquest.

The inquest resulted in Rembert being exonerated of any criminal responsibility in the shootings

The Argus Observes -- Memories of Harmon Killebrew

2011-05-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: Harmon Killebrew was two years ahead of me in high school when he played football for Payette, Idaho, a team our high school usually beat. My sophomore year I was still relegated to JV and never took the field against him. Nonetheless, I remember Ontario's last game against his team. Despite his ability to carry most of our team downfield with him for up to ten yards, we somehow kept him away from the goal line and won 40-0. The next June we all gathered in Payette to watch him hit home runs for a semi-pro team that seemed to be assembled to show him off. The fun didn’t last for long. Before the end of that month he had signed with the Washington Senators and was off to the Major Leagues. Here’s how my father recorded those events.)

The Argus Observes by Don Lynch

From the June 21, 1954 edition of The Argus-Observer

A news story on Father’s Day, yesterday, reported the realization of the dream of a talented and devoted father who died before the dream came true.

It was the dream of Harmon Clayton Killebrew, nationally famous athlete of 30 to 40 years ago, who saw in his own son Harmon the prospect of future athletic greatness and who nurtured that prospect as only a loving father could.

An Associated Press story Sunday said that 17-year-old Harmon Killebrew of Payette had been signed by the Washington Senators for a reported $50,000.

This action overnight boosted the boy into the position that his father had hoped and expected he would some day attain, but it came much sooner than either of them had dreamed it might.

H. C. Killebrew, Harmon’s father, died a little over a year ago of complications resulting from high blood pressure and influenza. That death ended a unique father and son relationship; and although he may not have realized it, the father’s work was done by the time of his death and done superbly well.

Although I do not personally know Harmon and did not know his father, I am well acquainted with an older brother, Eugene Killebrew, editor of the Payette Valley Sentinel at New Plymouth who has told me about the interesting family relationship of father and son.

Big Harmon and little Harmon talked almost exclusively about great athletes and the big leagues from the time the boy was a toddler. By the time he was seven years old little Harmon knewmore about Red Grange and Jim Thorpe than most sports writers know.

The father was a well qualified coach. A great football player at West Virginia, he was given honorable mention on Walter Camp’s All American team in 1916. Later he played professional football for a number of years and became a professional wrestler. Eugene can remember watching his father wrestle for the Pacific Coast middleweight title at Portland in 1924.

When Harmon was just a kid in grade school his father taught him how to run with a football, timing his steps to cross his legs at just the instant that would make it almost impossible for a tackler to nail him, and how to drop his shoulder and roll into a sure tackler to avoid injury.

During this past year young Killebrew was widely regarded as the most powerful and effective backfield player ever produced by the Snake River Valley conference.

Young Harmon had chores to do at home as a boy and sometimes when he was playing sandlot baseball his mother would send the father to fetch the son home for family duty. If Harmon was playing ball his father just couldn’t bear to interrupt. He would come home quietly and do the chores himself so his prospective “big leaguer” could get a few minutes more of precious practice.

It sure paid off.

Oscar Bluege, the Senator’s farm director and the scout who hired Harmon, had lavish praise for Harmon’s batting skill.

He said, “Killebrew swings a bat better than any youngster I have ever seen. He has the best wrist action I have ever seen and looks the most powerful to me of any newcomer since Lou Gehrig. And he seems to have no weak spots. He hits fast balls, curve balls and all kinds of pitches with apparently equal skill.”

No one knows yet how well Killebrew can field, but Bluege who is one of baseball's all time great infielders is scheduled to spend most of his time teaching Killebrew to field in the months just ahead.

Brother Eugene has been Harmon’s business manager during recent weeks when 12 of the nation’s 16 Major League teams were trying to sign him for professional baseball. The Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians were the other clubs who took the greatest interest. The Yankees phoned from New York to make an offer too.

Harmon had about decided to go to the University of Oregon, play football there and later move into baseball. But when the bonus offer got so big, he couldn’t afford to turn it down. He will do his college work in off-season months until he does get his degree.

When Gene told Harmon the amount the Senators had offered, the young ballplayer staggered back a step and almost fell over. At first he couldn’t believe it --- thought Gene was kidding.

Then he said in amazement, “That must mean they expect me to hit Allie Reynolds, Bob Feller and Eddie Lopat.”

He didn’t think he could do it but Bluege said, “Don’t worry about those guys. They just put their pants on in a dressing room the same as you do.”

Harmon, the father, would have been immensely proud of his “big leaguer” for reasons other than athletic talent, if he could have been here this Father’s Day.

The money didn’t mean anything to the youngster for himself.

His first comment in terms of what the offer meant was, “Do you realize that next October I’ll be sitting right there in a box with the ball players and watching the World Series. I never expected to get to see the series so soon.”

And then about the money, “That means I can take good care of mom, and help Bob go to college and maybe even help Gene get ahead faster in the newspaper business.”

That sentiment was in line with an old piece of family fun.

Father Harmon used to say to the family, “We’ll all have a big time when Harmon gets in the big leagues.”

And now, if personalities in the hereafter utilize the power of prayer, H.C. Killebrew, former famous athlete and now famous father, must be saying a little prayer that his son can remain humble and sensible in the face of fame at such a youthful age.

The Argus Observes --- Friday Night Lights Oregon style

2011-05-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Jovial, chunky Dutch Kawasoe takes little credit for the remarkable showing that his state champion (Vale) Vikings have made on the gridiron this year. … After Vale won the (state) title Saturday, Dutch told the excited crowd of fans, “I wish Jerry Cammann was up here instead of me and that he had coached these kids with my help as it was in former years….Jerry knew this would be a great team, and that’s why he was willing to resign and let me to take over this particular bunch of boys. He wanted to leave me in safe hands.”… From The Argus Observes by Don Lynch, November 29, 1954

Today Vale is a still a small ranching town and still the unlikely Malheur County seat. It’s one of those scattered-seeming agricultural communities that cropped up across the West during the first half of the twentieth century. Some died. Vale has hung on. Situated on the edge of the Eastern Oregon desert, it’s not much changed from 1954 when my father penned this column about the able coaches of its dominating high school football team.

Malheur County’s old court house that was built of the same foot-square chunks of jutting grey-black sandstone as my family’s one-time and long-rued Payette home has been replaced by a plastic-paneled building that is equally characteristic of a certain age. The neon lights along A Street still welcome tired cowboys from out Juntura way for Saturday night action. Recent homage to the town’s heritage can be found in the form of a 1900 Sears Roebuck Bed and Breakfast, The Oregon Trail Inn. More typical of the Old West character that still rules in Vale, however, are the Sagebrush Saloon and BBQ and 197 A. St. E and the 7U Hunting Ranch and Sports Clays not far outside the city limits. The population, in the year 2000 census, remained stuck just under two thousand. 2,000. In 1954 it was about fifteen hundred.

The football dominance of Vale’s Vikings over nearby Ontario, Oregon, a town with population that has stayed five times Vale’s, seems to continue largely unchanged since my class at Ontario High graduated in 1956. We expected to break that hold, but failed. That’s a loss most of the class has never forgotten, even those of us who didn’t play in the game. In a way it was only fitting that in September of 2006, while our surviving classmates were in Ontario holding our fiftieth class reunion, the black-suited Vikings traveled to Ontario to power their way to another win.

To attribute Vale’s 2006 prowess to the lingering influence of the men who coached there in the 1950s would seem more than a slight exaggeration. And yet I think my dad’s November 1954 column fell short of aptly noting just how good Cammann was at coaching high school football players and at developing a program that lingered for years. The single tribute he paid Cammann was to note that “Vale has built football into a great tradition and no other person is as responsible as Cammann.”
There was no explanation of why he was so good. Maybe there was no acceptable way to say what he really thought when he had a son coming up through the Ontario football program with a class that everyone in our town expected to end Vale’s nine-year reign the very next year. By reputation, Cammann was a demanding, no nonsense coach who never let up on his kids and never, ever cracked a smile.

I think of myself in relationship to our Vale games as Ontario’s own Dick Nixon. I was fodder at the practices. But I got something beyond more somewhat more humility than Nixon took with him, which of course is not saying much. My humbling experiences as a want-to-be athlete striving alongside the talented kids in my class shaped attitudes I’ve carried through my life, just as their more accomplished victories and significant defeats must have shaped theirs. I learned early to accept that there were a lot of people better than me at baseball, basketball, football, tennis and track, just about any sport I’d decide to try out. And as good as they were, they must have learned that eventually someone would come along who was more adept. That didn’t necessarily mean accepting defeat --- and they didn’t. Not Larry Horyna who went on to play at University of Oregon and become a major force in Oregon’s vocational education programs. Not Jerry Doman who poured his heart onto the field at Oregon State, or Earl and Verl Doman who have nurtured many good players still working their way through the football program at Brigham Young. Not Stanley Olsen who made himself into a leading local architect. Not Junior Evans who became a military aide to the president of the United States, nor Kenneth Osborn who earned a degree in dentistry, came back to town to make his contribution and, the last I knew, was still running the first-down markers when the Ontario Tigers play their football games at home.

For me, failing on the playing field meant learning how to fill the void with other pursuits. That combined with growing up at The Argus-Observer likely dictated my lifelong tie to reporting and writing as a way to be important in the lives of others.

The true benefit of high school efforts is in the player and not in the game. And it can last a lifetime, of course.

My first meaningful sports lesson centered on a home run, or not a home run. The house where I lived in Ontario fronted on a broad, graveled street and was flanked on its south side by a narrow strip of grass. Beyond that strip of grass, a wider swath of open ground ran from the alley to the street. When I was ten, that weedy strip of land made for a passably large baseball diamond through the spring, at least until my parents planted it in summer vegetables.

Most of the pick-up softball games in the neighborhood occurred on that land, with the street serving as the outfield. A home run had to clear the street without getting caught. The foul lines were less distinct, usually running along an imaginary line from home plate to an Elm tree or a fence line across the street.

I almost never hit long balls, not at ten and not at thirty. That was well understood by my nemesis, a big, mean kid with a Huckleberry Finn shock of hair and all the muscles I imagine Huck must have had. He lived in the run-down brick house across the street just behind center field and was playing for the opposing pick-up team that day. When I hit that ball, he announced that it was foul, and I began to scream that it definitely landed fair, inside the tree line.

I would not back down and, since he’d been looking for a good reason to beat on me --- or anyone else younger and smaller --- Huck-personified had no need to give in. With half a dozen neighborhood kids looking on, I weighed in fists flying, struggling to trip him to the ground. Instead, I ended up on my back looking up at a canopy of leaves and the cooling evening sky just outside our kitchen window, unable to move and feeling like I was being choked to death. I looked over to see my mother watching out the window and grimaced hard, hoping to convince her to put a stop to the fight, stalling for as much time as I could. She never showed. I thought I might pass out before I could force got out the words “Uncle! I give up! Let me up!” And I before I was actually freed, I had to agree the ball was foul.

At dinner I asked my mother why she hadn’t helped me out.
“You need to learn to fend for yourself,” she said.

By my sophomore year in high school, I had developed an understanding of my place in the athletic hierarchy of the Ontario High Class of ’56. I thought of basketball as my best sport, but the farm boys that attended country schools came to town for high school, and 6’ 5” Julian Laca was among them. The class behind us had at least five kids who were as good as I was on the court, most of them better, and I knew they’d be the ones the coaches would want to give game experience. Still, when I was cut from the frosh-soph traveling squad as a sophomore, I mooned around the school hallways, hiding out at various unused entrances, all during the lunch hour that the list went up. Nothing much eased the pain: In Eastern Oregon at that time of year, the days were too cold and stormy to turn to tennis, even though I expected to make that spring season’s seven man team. (As it turned out for the next three years I played on the second doubles team, rarely climbing above number six or seven on the boy’s team even though most of the school’s athletes were busy that time of year with track and baseball.)

My most successful sport turned out to be football --- simply because it required 11 players on the field at once. As a freshman, I was assigned to play center behind Larry Horyna. Our sophomore year, he was promoted to the varsity early in the season. From then on, I was a starter for the JV team, and we ran over every team who’d play us but Vale.

Meanwhile, my high school years were premium ones for spectator sports in the Snake River Valley. Some of the athletes who entertained us would have been appreciated anywhere in the country.

In the beginning, the most exciting player in our area was R.C. Owens, who began to redefine the position we still simply called “end” in football. In 1952 Owens came to Caldwell, Idaho, from Santa Monica, California, to play for the College of Idaho football team --- becoming the first black to attend the school.

At the time, my father was beginning to take an interest in the college’s governance problems, and traveling with him to that small city 35 miles to watch Owens play became a special treat.

R.C. would line up well wide of the rest of the line on the right wing of the offensive line and rarely throw a block --- he apparently judged it sufficient that he took a defensive player out of the action just to cover him. By the time he reached his sophomore year, covering him proved extremely difficult at this level of college competition. He was taller and faster than the opposition players, although the College of Idaho’s quarterback sometimes struggled to get the ball to him. When Owens flew down the right sidelines, the pass had to be high and long enough to be catchable but short enough to be within his reach. If the throw was good, R.C. almost always caught it and often scored a touchdown.

Here’s how my father described Owens’ play in a November 12, 1953 column, written after the College of Idaho finished its season undefeated in league play.
“A year ago Owens was sort of a sensational joke. He was a talented pass receiver but he never played any football. He just stood at his end post except on a pass play and then, covered by good blocking, he ran out to make the catch. He never played any defense. He never even threw more than one or two blocks a game. Strictly a specialist.

“This year he has been taught to play football. Now he even pulls back to play linebacker on defense, makes bruising tackles, blocks most effectively, and has learned the ball carriers’ tricky shoulder block to bound off a tackler….

“On (one) play, two Whitman lads had Owens boxed downfield right after a pass reception. Then (he) did something probably never done before on a football field. He held out the pigskin like it was a basketball, teasing the Whitman men, faked once to the right, once to the left and then trotted right between the two for a touchdown.”

When I place a parenthesis around “he” in that last graph I was covering for a grim reality from those days. My father had actually described Owens as “the big colored boy.” Contrasted with the description of the “Whitman men,” it doesn’t sit well. It was not an example of conscious racism on his part, but it shows the way he, and almost everyone who was white, thought at the time.

Owens went on to play in the NFL from 1957 to 1964 and win two Super Bowl rings while with the San Francisco 49ers. Recently --- in the spring of 2007 --- he was still actively working with youth and raising money for charity while living in Manteca, California, just north of Modesto.

One of his major contributions to the College of Idaho was to help lure Elgin Baylor there from Washington D.C. for a single basketball season.

Baylor led the College of Idaho Coyotes basketball team to an undefeated season that school year, 1954-55, scoring a record 53 points in his last conference game of the season, played at Nyssa, just south of Ontario.

Owens played with Baylor on that team, and the two were a major force in a league that had seen nothing like the pair.

Baylor, for the season, was a man among boys. His favorite two plays indicate just how dominant he was. In his Argus Observes column published March 3, 1955, my father described how on a pair of free throws, Baylor’s teammates would try to aim their second shot so that it would bounce Baylor’s direction off the rim. If the bounce was right, he’d leap high to catch the ball and flick the ball through the net.

And when he had a chance to dunk, “he jumped high in the air, shot his wrists over the rim before reaching the peak of his jump and whipped the ball downward into the net with a sharp wrist snap. Then while he completed upward motion to the peak of his jump and appeared thus to hang suspended in air, he quickly brought his hands downward in a parenthetical arc to the bottom the net and caught the ball as it emerged from the net.

“He would return to the floor with the ball having been out of his hands for the barest perceptible instant of time and toss it gently to the referee.”
The next season he went to Seattle, sat out a year, then carried the Seattle University team to the NCAA championship game in 1958, where they lost to the Kentucky Wildcats. By the next year he was playing with the Minneapolis Lakers, and moved with them to Los Angeles in 1960.

It was during the early 1950s that our area produced its most famous locally grown athlete of recent years. That was Harmon Killebrew of home run hitting fame, who grew up in Payette.

My first memory of Harmon is the sight of his bulk carrying half our football team toward the goal line in the fall of 1953. He didn’t have much blocking and never made a touchdown in that game, which we won 40-0. But he went on to be named Idaho’s number one high school running back. A victory over Ontario was about all he was to be denied that year.

The summer of 1954 belonged to Killebrew even though the excitement only lasted about a month.

That June, Payette used a local semi-pro baseball team, the Border League Payette Packers, to show off Killebrew’s hitting talents. Teenagers and their parents from throughout the Valley found their way to the high school field in Payette for the Packers’ home games to marvel at his swing. During one stretch of three games, he batted twelve times and got twelve straight hits, four home runs, three triples and five singles. It quickly became clear he was going to be offered a professional baseball contract.

Before the end of June, Harmon signed to play for the Washington Senators, getting a $30,000 bonus up front and a salary of $10,000 year --- essentially guaranteeing him $50,000 over two years. It was a huge amount for a rookie at that time. He flew east to make his major league debut on June 29, 1954, under a new rule that required major league teams to keep their bonus babies on the major league roster for two seasons, even if they rarely got into a game.

On June 21, the Monday after the amazing youngster signed his contract and eight days before Harmon’s 18th birthday, my father’s column carried an account of the young man’s debt to his father --- stories passed along by Harmon’s brother Eugene Killebrew, editor of the Payette Valley Sentinel, which was published in nearby New Plymouth:

“Young Harmon had chores to do at home as a boy and sometimes when he was playing sandlot baseball his mother would send the father to fetch the son home for family duty. If Harmon was playing ball his father just couldn’t bear to interrupt. He would come home quietly and do the chores himself so his prospective ‘big leaguer’ could get in a few minutes more of precious practice.”

My father noted that his brother Eugene “has been Harman’s business manager during recent weeks when 12 of the nation’s 16 major league (teams) were trying to sign him….Harmon had about decided to go the University of Oregon, play football and then move into baseball. But when the bonus offer got so big, he couldn’t afford to turn it down. He will do his college work in off-season months until he does get his degree.”

My father later recalled talking with Eugene Killebrew during the contract negotiations they discussed whether signing before college was a good idea. One scout, apparently Oscar Bluege of the Senators, had said that the young man could be one of the great hitters in baseball. My father thought that “this is just a bunch of bullshit” and told Eugene “This guy is trying to lead you on.”

Even later, when Killebrew had proven his hitting prowess and won his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Dad maintained his signing so young had been a mistake.

But for all of the interest in Killebrew, no sports event raised the interest of folks around Ontario so much as the annual football game with Vale.

My high school class' pursuit of a victory in that game came to an end on mid-fifties November night. That year it was our turn to travel to Vale for the anticipated match-up. The evening was cold and we had no locker room --- just our school bus --- to use to get out of the weather. As I recall, we were at full strength with four strong running backs in the three Domans and Stan Olsen as well as a high-functioning quarterback in Reed Vestal. The critical center of the line was at full strength with Horyna snapping the ball and anchoring the defense and Evans and Osborn at guards.

We knew that Vale’s team included one of the strongest players in the state in Gene Bates, who worked well with his backfield partner Tater Smith. But we had a strong starting eleven with a half dozen solid back-up players. As my father would write in the aftermath, “before the game sports writers and opposing coaches generally considered Ontario the better of the two teams.”

The Argus-Observer’s story of the game does not, in my mind, quite do justice to the knock-down battle I watched that night from the bench. But most of the details are there in the Nov. 7 account. The game did not start well for us:

“The Vikings received the opening kickoff on the thirty-two and carried to the forty-six. There they failed to break through the Tiger defense and were forced to kick. On their first play the ball was fumbled by Ontario and Vale recovered on the Ontario thirty-seven. From here the Vikings started their drive goal ward. A twenty-two-yard pass from Bates to Derald Swift put the ball on the nineteen where Bates kicked for a field goal.”

Bates started the Vale drive that led to his teams second score by intercepting an Ontario pass at Vale’s at midfield early in the second quarter. Swift and Kay (Tater) Smith pounded out a series of short gainers to put the ball on our ten-yard line. Bates then powered it over the goal line but the play was called back on a penalty. It was a short reprieve. Smith punched in from the three a few plays later.

What followed was our most successful sequence. As the Argus-Observer story described it: “The Tigers put the ball into play on their own forty-nine. With a short pass from Reed Vestal to Norman Olson and a series of short runs by Stan Olson the ball was brought down the Vale 24 where Jerry Doman took a pitch out from Vestal and galloped around the left end to the one. From here J. Doman again took the ball and plunged through the line to pay dirt.”

But then our kick for the extra point failed, leaving the score 9-6 at half time.
For most of the third quarter the teams moved the ball up and down the field without getting close to a score. Then as the quarter drew to a close, Vestal connected on a long pass to Verl Doman who carried to the Viking 18 before he was brought down.

With that play as a jump start, our hopes to turn the game around rose to take the lead rose high in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter. On a series of short runs our backfield punched the ball to the two. There a big hole opened up in the Vale line, but the ball tumbled to the turf and although we recovered the fumble, we had stalled out. On Vale’s first play from scrimmage at the two yard line, he was caught for a touchback. The score stood 9-8 Vale’s favor and another Bates interception later in the quarter sealed the game for the Vikings.

My father felt the loss as keenly as we in the senior class.

He penned an editorial for the paper that aptly described how he felt about some of my classmates. Titled, “These Were Our Boys,” it concluded:

“It was hard to hold back the tears driving home from Vale that night. That was partly because we knew from experience the nobility of these kids in defeat as well as their grandeur in victory.

“You see, they played knothole baseball for us five or six years ago. And they really learned how to take it. They were under-age, playing with a league of older kids in order to fill out the league schedules for summer play. If we ever won a game that summer, it has long since been forgotten.

“We couldn’t help but wonder if we hadn’t given some of these youngsters such adequate early training the philosophical acceptance of reverses on the playing field, if the result might not have been different at Vale on the critical evening this November. No bunch of kids ever wanted more to win a ball game. We know because we’ve listened to them work on it conversationally for the past nine years.
“For all that, w wouldn’t trade away that summer. What a sight it was to watch the Doman kids come in to town, covered with the dust of a day’s work in the field, and then take on an evening’s work on the playing field. And Larry Horyna, crouched behind the bat, whipped the gang in those days to higher performance, just as he has in recent years.

“Another sight we’ll never forget. Horyna eating watermelon --- seeds and all --- at the kids’ picnic in our backyard. That Larry could go through more watermelon in less time than any kid we’ve ever seen.”

In basketball, most of the same athletes with some help from the towering Julian Laca earned some payback. We trounced Vale three times on the hard court that season and went on to take second place in the state A-2 tournament, with Earl Doman and Jerry Doman named to the All-State first and second all-tournament teams.

The Argus Observes: High school basketball, beer and what to do?

2011-05-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

By Don Lynch
From The Argus Observes,
in the Argus-Observer for Dec. 18, 1952

“There was no evidence that the athletes in question actually drank any beer,” high school principal Robert McConnaha told me Tuesday.

He was explaining last week’s incident in which several basketball players were temporarily suspended from the team because of their association with an alleged student beer-drinking episode. I had told him that on the basis of the information we had gained in reporting the news, it appeared the affair had been mishandled by school authorities.

Here briefly is what we knew of what had happened:

School officials permitted police to use an office at the high school to question students in connection with the sale of beer to juveniles. Thus the school became by association entangled in a problem that was not a school responsibility except in so far as the violation of athletic training rules might have been involved.

A few athletes were in the party which was said to have had beer in possession. Members of the team were consulted on their opinion and they voted unanimously, according to report, to drop the players, three of whom were first team basketball men.

Two days later the school officials announced that the players had been returned to the squad and said the incident was “closed.”

Many basketball fans and school patrons were concerned with the appearance of the whole affair. Dropping of the players certainly made it appear that they were guilty of some infraction. Their quick return to the team indicated they had received little discipline.

I was concerned along with other people. Tuesday I told the school principal so and sought a further explanation.

It was then that McConnaha explained to me that there was actually no evidence the athletes had participated in any drinking. They were caught in the familiar and often disastrous situation of “guilt by association.”

He further revealed that the school authorities did not overrule the vote of the team to suspend the players. The team members reconsidered their decision and came to the principal asking that the suspended players be returned to the squad, he said.

It developed, McConnaha reported, that the original decision of the team to suspend the players was based not on the incident in question but on a succession of grievances accumulated over a period of a year or so. On reflection, the voting team members concluded many of them had themselves been guilty of shortcomings similar to those used as a basis for suspending the players. They reconsidered and decided the players should be returned to the team.

This is all a somewhat involved situation and it apparently never occurred to the school officials that any further public explanation was needed. They felt the situation had been satisfactorily solved and the matter settled so no further comment was needed.

Normally they might have been right. They are used to handling similar disciplinary problems that occur frequently and never come to the light of public attention.

The difference this time lay in the fact that this incident had come to public attention by a mere coincidence. There was a story of police investigation of the alleged sale of beer to miners. At the same time a sports story noted that some basketball players had been suspended or alleged infraction of training rules. The two stories automatically fitted together and revealed an incident of apparent involvement of athletes in a beer drinking party.

I hope that this further explanation which completes the information will help to answer doubts as to how the matter was handled.

During our discussion “Mac” and I disagreed on one point. I thought it a mistake to permit police to use a school office for investigating an incident that itself had no relation to the schools.

The principal said he would rather have such an investigation run where he would watch it than under police questioning elsewhere. He thought that within the school the matter could thus be better handled for the youngsters involved. He also thought it might be good for the other youngsters to see how easily an apparently trivial escapade could come to police attention.

I doubt it. An unnecessary police investigation in the school --- upsetting the atmosphere within the school and coluding the reputation of the school through needless “guilt by association” --- seems to me to be more damaging than helpful.

But that is simply a matter of opinion. The important thing is that the public had only half truths for its judgment of the basketball player discipline, and then the incident was considered “closed” by the school men.

The public is entitled to know what goes on it its schools. When chance reveals half of the information in an awkward situation, the full information should be provided in order to clarify public understanding.

In the 50s: Trouble with that “Other Days” column

2011-04-08T09:16:00.001-07:00

Editor’s Note: In October of 1953 my father wrote a column commemorating that year’s newspaper week by enunciating some of the ideals of a Journalistic Creed he’d come across. One stated ideal was that “no one should write as a journalist what he would not say as a gentleman.” What with blogs and the Internet we’re way beyond honoring that principle today. But it was that basic idea that triggered his recounting of a pair of violations in which his reporters had indulged. The stories that slipped by on his watch in the 1950s might get killed today by the editors or publishers of the better community weeklies, if there are any of those left. Today, one hopes that respect means something in “small town” America,though the rancor in the letters column of today's Argus can raise questions whether that is true now in Ontario.

The Argus Observes

By Don Lynch

An excerpt from the October 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer

I remember little violations of these (Journalistic Creed) principles that have been painfully embarrassing to me, although they have probably gone unnoticed by most readers. For instance:

Once when we had a new reporter writing the “In Other Days” column of notes from the files of former years, he picked up and retold some embarrassing crime stories long forgotten about local citizens who had since led exemplary lives.

On another occasion an eager reporter was publishing the lurid details of divorce complaints, which should be reported only in barest facts.

These were cruel, pointless stories. The person who has made a mistake and reformed should be granted the balm of public forgetfulness. Divorce items should only report the brief facts, so that the community knows the changing status of the individuals. No good is performed by broadcasting the miserable circumstances.

The gremlins that haunted newspapers

2011-04-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch
From the Feb. 26, 1953 Argus-Observer

The Oregonian does it too. And so does the Idaho Statesman.

The Oregonian had a classic bobble in Monday’s late edition. Next day the Portland newspaper ran the following editorial explaining its error:

“HATS OFF TO WARRENS

“The gremlins that haunt newspaper plants, transposing lines and words sometimes in extremely embarrassing fashion, hit the jackpot when they slipped a cut of a Victorian architectural monstrosity into The Oregonian’s front page layout in Monday’s late editions.

“The caption said the dwelling, in Salem, would be rented by Governor and Mrs. Paul Patterson after the legislative session ends. Actually the picture was that of the governor’s mansion at Sacramento, Cal.

“We are not trying here to correct the confusion caused by the above mentioned gremlins. The news department is doing its best in that line.

“We wish, however, to put in a word for Governor Earl Warren and his family of California. Many Oregonians were horrified to think that the Pattersons would have to live in such a house and we were inclined to agree with them. But the Warrens have resided in it, besides putting up with a lot of other irritations peculiar to California. The Warrens are even a finer family than we had thought. Imagine smiling so pleasantly , as they all do, while having to live like that!”

This incident reminds us here at the Argus-Observer of the time we mixed up the cutlines between a state official and a visiting concert violinist. And since we didn’t know either guy it was weeks before we knew of the mistake.

The lines most apt to become mixed between pictures here are the captions with wedding pictures. When we have two or three pictures of newly wedded couples, it requires constant watching to keep from mixing either the overlines for the lines under the pictures.

The Boise Statesman has its troubles too. In an edition a week ago, the lead from one story carried this headline deck:

Democrat Agriculture Record
Ohioan Sees Election Defeat
If Republicans Don’t Better

Now the top line could be could be removed to the bottom or the bottom line could be moved to the top and the head would make sense. But as sit ran it was confusing.

In an edition of the Evening Statesman last week, the editorial page cartoon ran upside down.

We certainly have our troubles at the Argus-Observer as the readers much know but probably no more than most other newspapers our size. Just last week I was about to reprimand the news editor because the headline differed with the story in numbers of persons singing and attending at the Snake River Valley music clinic.

Later I was glad I didn’t for the Freshmen won a regional basketball tournament in Boise and I wrote a headline calling them Sophmores.

It’s never funny to the editor when these things happen to his own paper.

But my it’s funny when they happen to the Oregonian or the Statesman.

1953: From aerial photography to a bad news month

2011-03-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch
From the Jan. 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer

Last night Hugh Gale and I looked back over the picture news of 1952. There were some big stories. The Owyhee flood was colorful and we pictured it in considerable detail. We recalled how we rented a plane on an impulse late Wednesday afternoon. The light was just strong enough for us to take aerial photos.

I ran the camera. Hugh handled the film holders and Joe Driscoll flew the plane. It was quite a thrill for me, the one and only time I have ever done any aerial photography, although Gales has been up with cameras twice since then.

The picture of the washout at the railroad bridge at the mouth of the Owyhee River was the best picture of destruction that we got.

The biggest thrill came when we shot the dam. I had no idea of the camera setting needed. It was getting late and I knew that the light in the canyon would be poor. So I opened the aperture on the Speed Graphic clear open to 4.5 and slowed the shutter speed as much as I thought it would stand. Joe flew the plan up along the right side of the canyon, cut back across the face of the dam and turned it up into a vertical position.

We hung suspended there for just a split second with the camera aimed over the edge of the cockpit and pointed almost straight down at the dam. I tripped the shutter at that instant. The result was surprisingly good, an excellent picture when we had hardly hoped to get one at all.

We rushed back to the shop, souped film and printed pictures until almost midnight. I got up early and rushed to the engravers at Nampa Thursday morning and returned before noon in time to get the engravings into the paper. We were proud of the results. The Idaho Statesman, situated just as well for taking pictures and with many times as much news covering strength, didn’t do nearly as well.

We did an extensive job on the new high school which was a top story easily photographed. There were other important stories that produced good pictures: The Owyhee bridge cave-in that killed two workmen, the election, the polio epidemic, and the “Welcome to Oregon” centennial celebration. These events are all noted on today’s summary picture page along with some other human interest pictures.

As we selected pictures last night we recalled Gale’s first month here. I had warned him as he started that sometimes the news was sparse and it took hard digging to get out an interesting paper.

After a few weeks he asked what I meant by dullness in the news. The news seemed plenty active enough for him. In his first month we had the visit of the fabulous nut, Stanley Clement Green, a man burned to death in a trailer house fire, there was a Grad A public row over the failure of the school board to rehire two teachers, the Malheur River flooded and then the Owyhee really flooded all on top of an active situation in school district, city and county news --- plus the regular flow of news.

But in the dog days between the Fourth of July and the county fair Hugh found out what I had been talking about. He almost walked a hole in the tile of the office floor trying to dream up stories good enough for the top front page positions.

That’s the way it is in the news in a small town, in a big city or on an international wire service. It ebbs and flows. It is either feast or famine.

So if we newsmen seem a little crotchety at times, please forgive us and charge our temperament off to the vagaries in the news. We’re either having a terrible time trying to keep abreast of events or we’re tearing our hair out trying to find enough good stories to keep you reading the paper.

Another era -- First graders taught using newspapers

2011-03-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

By Don Lynch

From the Nov. 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer

Mrs. Sylvia Osborn, a capable Ontario teacher, brought her charts and illustrative material and various teaching helps to the weekly Kiwanis luncheon (to demonstrate how) information taught is worked into the child’s everyday living.

Each morning Mrs. Osborn’s class starts with the day’s news. At this time each day, the learning of reading is related to the habit of reading about the news.

First graders, she says, are very observant about the weather. So they keep a record every day and at the end of the year they know how many sunny days, rainy days, windy days, etc., there have been during the school term.

A major teaching effort is directed at making the first graders number conscious. Over and over again they are taught that the same combinations will produce the same results whether they are dealing with blocks, or apples, or people, or animals, or any other units. The little ones have a hard time making the transfer of mathematical reasoning from one subject to another and this is a slow learning process.

Six year olds have a different adjustment problem in getting used to the closeness of school work. The rate that reading is learned is much affected by the youngster’s natural ability to focus his eyes.

Adults who in mid-years have to adjust to bifocal glasses get some idea of what a first grader goes through in learning to focus his eyes in order to read, the teacher said.

The children make up the first stories they read, writing them in simple terms to learn simple words, and then re-reading what they have written. They also illustrate their stories, drawing the characters and situations in a group effort.

One evidence of the relation of education to everyday living is that the children in this year’s first grade classes insist on equipping their houses with TV antennas (Editor’s note: TV broadcasts from Boise began to be viewable by homes equipped with antennas just the previous summer.)

During Mrs. Osborn’s talk I was struck by the similarity of the learning process at all levels.

People starting to do advertising layout work have some of the same problems a first grader has in starting to draw numbers and letters. They have difficulty making their letters uniform in size and shape and in gauging the working space so that they make a balanced use of it. Both first graders and advertising layout beginners are helped by lines that indicate where the top and bottom of the letter should go and where the top of the lower case letters should go.

The whole learning process is one of simplification, like a blowup illustration of the parts of a machine to show how it works and where each part goes.

In 1950s -- Avoiding the "softness" of "New York -- California style of education"

2011-03-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

By Don Lynch

From the Nov. 3, 1953 edition of The Argus-Observer

Ernie Hill, Foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, has made an interesting report on the experiences of his son Jonathon in attending schools in New York, Tokyo and London.

The boy had lacked interest in school in the United States and Japan and had repeatedly been tardy, but has taken a real interest in his work in London.

Hill reports, “I once went this school in New York. When I put my head in the door, someone fired a book at me. All the kids were standing up and were screaming. The teacher was shouting and banging on the desk.

“They’re so spirited this morning,” she told me outside. “Their little personalities are expressing themselves. We do nothing to curb their ego.’ When she went back into the classroom, she was beaned by an orange.

“Then, at the American school in Tokyo six of them gave their egos a workout by pushing one boy through a window.”

Hill says that British schools don’t operate that way. Jonathon was never late for school in London. He started doing his homework conscientiously and even studying ahead. When asked what would happen if he didn’t get his homework done, the boy said:

“Well, the Head would send you down to his study. He wouldn’t talk or beg you to do your work. He would just give you six of the best . . . that’s wallops with his birch cane. And boy do they hurt.”

Asked what would happen if a student threw a book, Jonathon said, “That would be a Monday night detention of three to five hours plus six of the best, plus no more swimming or football for the rest of the term.”

Hill reported that under the British influence Jonathon said, “ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ and ‘No thank you,’ just like a civilized human being.”

Hill said he wasn’t worrying about Jonathon’s personality or ego, but just “basking in the warm glow of an unbelievable transformation.”

Thank goodness the Ontario schools and other schools in this region are not so progressively minded that the kids are permitted to run wild. We have a healthy compromise here between the severity of the English system and the softness of the New York-California style of education.

My father, a lifelong school teacher now retired, made practical application of the birch-cane technique with good results. He didn’t abuse it, but he did require discipline and order in his school.

I remember very well one occasion when he marched all of his ninth grade boys around the room whacking each one across the back with his belt when they came by his desk. They had refused to leave the outside basketball court to return to class after the noon hour. They never did it again.

There was another time I remember better from personal experience. We kids were confined to a playroom in the schoolhouse basement because of severe weather. One boy used a wooden pointer teachers used for blackboard instruction, put it in the furnace until it was charred and then wiped it across the faces of some of the rest of us. I took it away from him and broke it over his head. About that time we got caught.

The next morning I watched the old man cut three good strong lilac branches, and then walked to school through the deep snow of that year with him and the lilac branches.

The three us of who were in that fight stood up before the room and one lilac branched was used on each of us. I was ashamed because I couldn’t keep from doing a little jig while the other boys were tough enough to stand and take it.

However, the old man wasn’t always so stern. He yielded to the idea of progressive education to the extent of spending considerable effort on directing the learning process along lines that appealed to the interests of individual youngsters. Students got a chance to work on projects they liked and to acquire their learning in terms they would understand.

With that background, it’s no wonder that discipline seem to me an essential prerequisite of education. Attention is essential to learning and discipline is necessary to get attention from most youngsters.

From that Era -- U.S. would have trouble ruling world

2011-02-28T12:04:00.000-08:00

From the October 29, 1953 edition of The Argus-Observer

By Don Lynch

Major Malcolm Rosholt, former Air Force officer in the C-B-I theater in World War II and former Shanghi newspaper publisher, debunked the value of the United Nations in his talk to the Knife and Fork club here Tuesday evening.

He told the crowd he had been re-reading Herodotus and was impressed by how little man’s heart had changed in 2400 years.

“Unless man has a remarkably sudden change of heart we will never have peace of much duration during the next 2400 years,” he said.

I asked him if he thought that with the scientific advancement in weapons, man could survive another 2400 years in a world of conflict.

He expressed the opinion that even though millions of people would be killed quickly in an atomic war, the human race would probably survive.

Then he added, “But it would become necessary for one country to rule the world.”
Sometimes that does appear to be the alternative if the United Nations or its equivalent eventually proves entirely futile.

Who would that nation be?

We know the world would be a tragic place if it were run by Russia. But what of the United States?

Could we actually rule the world intelligently? I doubt it. We have trouble enough trying to harmonize the widely diversified interests of our own nation into enough of a common pattern to govern ourselves. We haven’t done that very well. How could we really rule the world except by brute force, even if it was moderated by some awareness of justice as a principle and the Golden Rule as a desirable ideal?

The Romans were just, according to their own standards, and they were intelligent, but they flubbed the job of world rulership when it was much more simple that it would be now. And although they were rugged where we are soft, they couldn’t maintain enough character to handle their responsibilities.

Things are far more complex, travel at a far faster pace in in our world today. If in the decades ahead, circumstances require us to assume the task of ruling the world, the speed of our physical and moral degeneration will probably make the Romans look slow indeed.

Let’s not kid ourselves that we are qualified to rule the world. Far better to keep talking in the United Nations in the hope, however slim, that the world can find solutions and compromises that are at least temporarily acceptable to the diverse interests of its diverse people.

The Newspaper -- The first Argus Observes column from Sept 1, 1952

2011-02-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

By Don Lynch

This is the fifth anniversary of the consolidation of the Ontario Argus and the Eastern Oregon Observer into the Argus-Observer. This consolidated newspaper has now served the Ontario area for five years as a semi-weekly. It has likely run more pages of newspaper per week, on the average, than any other one newspaper in a town the size of Ontario in the Pacific Northwest.

Some maturity must accrue to a newspaper on its fifth anniversary. Therefore this seems like a fitting occasion to begin a personal column by the editor --- an idea we have been kicking around for a long time.

However, your editor doesn’t feel mature. Newsmen must guard against the feeling that they have “arrived” in professional competence.

The need for such humbleness on the part of working newsmen was well summarized by a sign that used to hang above the sports desk in a Washington D.C. newspaper. It read, “As long as you know you’re green you continue to grow, but when you think you’re ripe, you start to get rotten.”

Columns like this one are standard features to be found in a great many newspapers these days. This trend stems in part from the tremendous readership acquired by syndicated news columns during the past generation. Success of the big columnist has caused editors to feel that a more personal touch would increase the readership of their own material.

For the past generation editors have bemoaned the fact that the readership of newspaper editorials has fallen off. In the days before movies, radio and television, frequently the best entertainment readily at hand was the writing of some old-style fire-eating editor found on the editorial page of the local newspaper. Everyone read the editorials. Today editorials are read by a small percentage of newspaper subscribers --- sometimes referred to by editors as a “select” group.

The editor’s personal column represents an effort on the part of the editor to reach a larger general audience of readers. This was part of my reason for starting a column.
Another more important reason is the freedom and flexibility afforded by a column like this. One can write easily in the first person abut something he had read, a movie he has seen, an experience or idea he has had, all with an easy informality difficult to accomplish within the rather strict limitation of editorial column style.

Selection of the name, “The Argus Observes,” is an obvious one taken from the name of the newspaper.

The name Argus comes from Greek mythology. Subsequent columns will deal with a variety of information and ideas. An early issue will tell the story of the Greek Argus. (Editor’s note: Read that column in a coming post.)

Keeping it interesting in 1953

2011-02-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

By Don Lynch
From the April 9, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer

Few newspaper readers can possibly know how much of the newsman’s time and effort goes into trying to keep the news uncluttered and interesting….

The stock in trade of a weekly newspaper is its names in the news. It is expected to carry the news about the everyday doings of the ordinary folk in its home town and region.

This is sound in principle because it is the basis of reader interest in the paper.

But pursued to extremes this philosophy would produce a sheet that was nothing but inconsequential clutter --- tripe that conceivably might hold the interest of a few avid gossips with a insatiable appetite for what their neighbors are doing but be dreadfully dull to large important groups of readers whose interest is needed if the newspaper is to be “everybodys” newspaper as we attempt to make this one.

Therefore we steadfastly refuse to run meaningless lists of names. We frequently cuts lists of names of people who attended parties or who attended meeting. If they won prizes, were elected to offices or made committee reports, they may get mentioned. But lists that run a half a dozen or more names in a lump are taboo in the news unless they are in the news of crime and violence which really has public interest.

One of the most frequent requests for dull treatment of the news comes from well-meaning sponsors of various worthwhile projects, who when the work is done, want to publicly thank the people who pushed the project….Readers just aren’t interested in all these gracious comments of thanks. So we try to avoid them unless they have some real news value.

The good people who want this sort of news printed seem to feel that if a helper is publicly thanked in print it somehow means more to him than if he just receives a personal thank you.

It is quite the other way with me.

I quite agree with “Rainwater” Jones who once gave me the idea in conversation that it is both good religion and good business to keep quiet about the various things you do in public service.
The broad general statement of ethics, the Sermon on the Mount, says something about, “When thy doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”

There is another quite practical reason why many people don’t want a fuss made over their public efforts. They don’t want to be “snowed” with further requests.

There is a premium these days on persons willing to help on public projects and the willing horse is apt to get worked to death. I’d rather not be known as such a horse, and I’m sure many other people feel the same way.

Brevity in Feminine Attire

2011-02-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

(Editor's note: This is another favorite post from some year's back. It's a post taken from a front page column my father wrote for his newspaper.)

From the Sept. 20, 1954 issue of The Ontario Argus-Observer

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch

Brevity in feminine attire has become about as commonplace and unexciting as an old print dress.

The utter indifference often accorded a scantily clad female was brought to my attention last summer by a chance observance.

On one of the warmer days in late summer, I sat in a barber shop getting a shoe shine and watched a junior miss in high cuffed shorts and a scanty shirt wend her way through and past the groups of men that dotted the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

Her blouse may have been what the women call a halter scarf. At any rate, it wasn’t quite as diverting as the skin tight T shirts sometimes seen this past summer which, unfortunately, seem to appear most often on the fat girls.

This girl was strictly a youngster who looked so young in fact that the average man would feel a little hesitant to note that she was a candidate to be quite a woman.

At first I thought that she might be unaware of the rather obvious display of her charm. But not so. After she had walked the block one way she soon came back the other direction and it was plain that she was conscious of her feminine attractions. At least it was plain from where I sat.

Yet not a single one of a couple dozen men standing on the street gave her a second glance. Most of them didn’t even give her a first glance.

Perhaps if she had been dressed in snug fitting denim waist overalls, she might have rated more attention. She would have looked like a more approachable type to her audience.

The contrast in today’s attitude toward women’s dress and that of a generation ago is well illustrated by an incident I remember from my childhood.

My country-school teacher father sent two of his high school girl students home to get appropriately dressed when they rolled their stockings down below their knees and wore short knee-length skirts in the first of the flapper days.

I don’t think he was shocked but he thought the community would be horrified. So he made the girls cover a little more before he would let them stay in school.

Where will we be in another generation? Will it be bikini suits or less on the girls by then?
I hope not. There are still some things I’d prefer to leave to my imagination.
However, I shall try to ride with the times, adjusting to the trends whatever they may be to keep from being separated from the youthful part of society by the devastating attitude generally accorded to disapproving elders.

Was that a flying saucer or what?

2011-01-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

Editor's note:

While I work on another writing project, I'm going to recycle some of my favorite posts of old Argus-Observer stories for the enjoyment of anyone who stumbles on this blog, as folks do from time to time.

Here's an early one:

The Sept. 8, 1952 issue of The Argus-Observer reported the area’s “first close-up eye witness report of a ‘flying saucer’ incident" occurred the previous Saturday.

Mr. and Mrs. Cliff Drinkwine said that about 9:50 a.m. they saw what could be a weather balloon but seemed to be under some kind of control when it moved away quickly.

The flying object sat down on the Drinkwine property a half mile south of Payette and a quarter of a mile east of U.S. Highway 30.

The Drinkwines said the object was about five feet in diameter and looked like it was made of rubber rather than metal. At first, they assumed it was a weather balloon but “decided it was something other than a weather balloon when it appeared to be controlled as it came to rest and especially as it moved rapidly away.”

The Drinkwines decided the object was remote controlled. Cliff Drinkwine said he believes so-called “saucers” are a secret military device controlled by the United States.

DRAT. Here's the answer published three days later.

L. L. Sevlha, manager of what was identified as the CAA weather station, apparently the federal weather bureau, said he was certain the object seen by Cliff Drinkwine and his wife on the previous Friday was a weather balloon.

Sevlha told The Argus-Observer for its Sept. 11 edition that his station released a weather balloon that was two feet by two and a half feet at about 8:50 a.m. on that Friday, and that it drifted in the direction of Payette, near where the Drinkwines spotted their flying object at about 9:30.

Sevlha said the balloon responds to air currents in much the way the Drinkwines reported that the object had moved.

Sevlha added that his organization is authorized to receive reports of flying saucer type objects and pass those reports along to the military.

It's hunting season

2010-11-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

(Editor's note: This is the hunting chapter from Farewell Bend the novel -- hunting and football filled the papers of The Argus Observer. Coming soon -- The Vale Game, 1954 and 1955.)

Pete’s model A plowed through a circle of light ending abruptly fifteen yards in front of the car. A soft blanket of new snow three inches deep lined the country road. A few flakes fell softly on the dark cold countryside, sticking briefly to the windshield and whirling through the cracks where the passenger door on my side bounced loosely against the frame. We had set out before daybreak for our favorite hunting ground where the Malheur River passes just south of Malheur Butte. Pete was silent as he nursed the aging car down the highway to Vale, watching for the gravel road that cut off to the butte. I wondered if he and Faye were having problems. I decided not to ask. Why spoil the hunting?
As we passed the Doran ranch, I was reminded of the hunting outings my father took me on twice each fall. Kate Doran and her husband Keith owned the place, and Dad knew them well because Kate had worked as a reporter for The Argus-Observer before she was married. The Dorans were in their thirties with a young child who had named their hunting dog Jimmy Kavanagh in honor of my father.
On our last outing that fall, as Dad and I walked down a set of pickup tracks to start working a cornfield, shotguns slung over our shoulders, my father actually strutted along, which he’d never do on Oregon Street. I strutted alongside. We talked about hunting, not work or school. And we bagged three roosters, a good result for us. My father was not a great shot, and if I scored a hit, it was mostly accidental. It was important to get five or six good chances during each outing. We usually could, working the cornfields and ditch banks on the Doran ranch. Dad had made it clear, however, that the Dorans’ was not a place I could take Pete. “Two teenagers could easily mess up a good thing,” he said.
Pete and I contented ourselves with a piece of vacant, unmarked land behind Malheur Butte and along the small, slow-moving river. We used it both for pheasant hunting and waiting for ducks to settle in one of the eddies.
As Pete urged his car through the fresh snow, I held out little hope for any success with ducks. The best we would get was a good shot or two. Even then, bringing a duck home was unlikely without a dog to fetch it out of the river.
We had planned to be waiting in a thicket before daylight, at a spot we knew the ducks liked to frequent. But it was later as we closed in on the butte. The sun was beginning to light a streak on the skyline in Pete’s rear view mirror.
He pointed at the reflection and shook his head, smiling and curling his upper lip at the same time.
“If you could get out of the house on time, Jack, we’d already be at the river,” he said.
“Don’t worry. Those ducks aren’t going anywhere. It’s too cold,” I said.
I wrapped my arms around my body. Even with a sweater and heavy coat, the wind blowing into the car worked its way down my neck and through the coat. Pete again drove in silence.
There was no excuse for being slow to get out of the house. It was a habit. I was always ten minutes late for an early morning hunting trip. Pete knew that.
“Is that the reason you’re in a foul mood?” I asked and laughed.
“What?”
“Foul mood. I made a joke.”
Pete looked at me and grinned. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “You are an odd ball. Somebody in FFA class said you’re an intellectual, whatever that is.”
Without warning, he hit the brakes so hard we went into a skid. I looked forward to see the headlights pick up a line of fence posts. We came up too fast on a T intersection that we both knew was there but was hidden by a sudden flurry of snow. Despite the rough surface of the gravel road, a line of fence posts was coming at us too fast. I reached for the dash to brace myself as Pete fought the steering wheel, still hoping to make the turn.
“Ice,” Pete said.
He’d hit a slick spot. A heavy, icy rain earlier that week had left a large puddle that froze over.
The car slid forward with no bite on the steering wheel and no catch in the tires. There was nothing for Pete to do but let it drift toward the near side of the fence.
As the slow-motion action played out, the car ended up straddling the shallow ditch, with its left front fender leaning against a fence post.
Pete hopped out.
“Goddamn it, it’s dented,” he said, looking at the fender.
“What about the post?” I asked.
“It’s bent over, but the farmer will never know who ran into it.”
“Not if we can back out of here. I don’t know, with the ditch and the snow.”
“Get your ass out here and push. We’re going to need all the power we can get,” Pete said, leaning in through the window.
“I don’t mind steering. You can push harder than I can,” I volunteered, keeping a straight face.
Pete did not bother to stifle a laugh.
“You push first,” he said and jumped back behind the wheel, waving his arm at me to hop on out.
The traction of the tires on the snow and dirt where we had come to a stop worked better than we expected. The car started moving backwards with just a little push, scraped its front bumper on the ditch bank but stayed in motion through the dip. The back tires found some solid road. Within minutes, we were once again headed toward the butte.
“So did you hear the one about the ugly farmer’s daughter who was showing the traveling salesmen her dad’s prize bulls,” Pete asked, turning to me and laughing as if he’d just remembered the joke.
“I’m sure I have. Where do you get these things anyway, in FFA class?”
“You got a better one?”
“Not this morning,” I said. I was too cold from pushing the car out of a snow pile to remember any jokes.
“You never know any jokes.”
“What about your foul mood?”
Pete sneered and was quiet for a moment.
“So you going with Joyce to the Christmas dance?” he asked.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Word gets around,” he said, focusing his full attention on the road as he followed a turn to the right to head directly toward the outline of Malheur Butte beginning to take shape against the gradually lightening sky.
Despite going out with Faye Peterson, Pete still carried around a longing for Joyce Earns. It went back to the time, five years earlier, that they rode horses at the same stable. I also knew Pete wouldn’t do anything about his crush. Joyce was the prettiest girl in my class, really kind of Hollywood pretty, a perfect complexion, flawless features, no strand of her out of place. She struck most boys as unapproachable. But we were getting to be friends, beginning to joke around about our lousy history teacher whose idea of instruction was reading out of the text. And with Joyce’s boyfriend out of town, she had talked to me about looking for a friend to take her to the Christmas dance. I didn’t have much luck with the girls I liked, but I was beginning to think I could make something happen with Joyce.
“I doubt it, but it’s up to her,” I said.
“So you were just bullshitting me about having trouble finding dates?”
“With her boyfriend living in Portland, we’re getting to be friends. At least we talk. She might need somebody to take her to the dance, but she isn’t interested in a real date.”
I watched Pete’s jaw muscles work a bit and then relax. He knew she could go out with any of the top jocks, even the Mormons who usually didn’t date anyone but the girls who went to their church. As pretty as she was, and smart, she did not need a guy to help her get out of town.
Pete said nothing more as he guided the Model A across a bridge over the Malheur River. He turned right onto a narrow dirt road that circled away from the river, behind the northern side of the butte, into our usual parking spot. The road’s end there defined the northern border of a pocket of wild land leading to the river.
We pulled our shotguns out of the back, loaded them, and walked in silence, wandering through sagebrush and weed thickets toward a backwater pond. The field was fertile bottomland that had not been claimed for alfalfa. It wasn’t exactly level ground, and it could be difficult to get equipment into.
With pheasant season over, we were stuck scouting the area for ducks. Those sleek birds were difficult to get close to and hard to knock down, at least for me. Pete always insisted it was not that difficult a shot for him. I never saw much evidence of that. We often went home skunked from one of these duck outings. If he hit a duck, it was usually because the bird’s wings were set gliding into a landing. I could knock one down under those circumstances. And I often did.
Pete’s advantage came in the form of a three-shot semi- automatic twelve gauge, and he was sometimes lucky with his third shot. With my double-barreled twelve gauge, I got off just one effective shot. By the time I got my finger on the back trigger, my second shot was slow, an afterthought.
. This morning as the light began to glint off the red thistles peeking out of the snow, we had to search to find our usual path to the river. Tall clumps of slender willows, blanketed in white, were everywhere and almost indistinguishable.
Without warning, Pete’s shotgun went off immediately behind me. Hot air from the barrel blasted my left ear and neck before I could duck.
“What the hell?”
Pete sidled past me through the weeds, grinning slightly.
“Goddamn it, Pete, don’t pull that kind of shit.”
“Scared you, did I?”
“Not funny. What if I moved sideways? Or turned around?”
“It wasn’t even close. The barrel was over your head.”
“It didn’t sound like it. Didn’t feel like it.”
I watched Pete move on ahead, his gun dangling at his side, chuckling to himself, and I thought about bringing up his dad’s death. It felt strange that he could mess around with guns. Could he be taking out his father’s bad luck on me? I didn’t think he would do that. I decided the thing with Joyce pissed him off.
Now I was the one who was seriously pissed. It was stupid to be best friends with a guy who could pull a stunt like that. I liked hunting, but I didn’t like messing with guns. Pete was too sure of his ability to back off at the right time, too willing to take big risks. I made a promise to myself then and there that I’d get away from him if he ever again even looked like he was going to mess with a loaded gun. I’d watch him. The next time anything like that happened, I’d call it the end of our friendship.
He must have been reading my mind.
“Don’t worry. I won’t do it again. You might shit your pants,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear over the sound of our feet crunching on the snow.
“You bet you won’t. I won’t give you a chance to get behind me where I can’t see you.”
“Shhhh. We’re almost at the pool.”
We cut to the left, down river toward where it backed up behind a bend in the bank and a small island. During pheasant season, we had seen ducks land and take off at this spot. We approached through trees at the water’s edge, moving quietly, picking out the trail that led us most directly to a place to peer over the edge of the bank at the target section of slow water. Even with snow on the trees, we knew this place. Its taller willows were more distinctive than the clumps of brush we had just walked through.
I hung back, and Pete took the lead moving to the riverbank, the sound of the flowing water becoming audible above the crunch of our boots on the frozen ground.
“Look!” Pete mouthed the warning hoarsely. “To your right.”
I heard the birds swoosh as he spoke. They coasted in with their wings set, coming over the river in a flying V from the west, fifty feet above the water. Pete pulled up to take a bead on one as I slid to his left and down the bank a yard to get room for a shot. Pete got his off first. The nearest duck flipped over and fell into the river. I pulled the trigger as the ducks began to beat their wings to pull up, veering away to the south. Pete took a second shot. Nothing. We both let go with another round, hoping our shot patterns could still reach the fleeing tail of the last duck. No luck. Four birds still in the sky, returning to formation, darted behind the tree line on the other side of the river.
“Follow me down river. I may need some help getting that duck out,” Pete said, beginning to run along the bank, his feet slipping a bit in the snow and ice.
“You’ve got the good wading boots,” he shouted.
“I’ll get a long branch,” I said as I leaned my spent double barrel against one of the sturdier willows, making sure the shotgun wouldn’t slip into the snow. I searched for a dead branch long enough to help snake the duck out of the current, sturdy enough not to break, and slim enough I could get a good hold on it. The best stick was only about five feet long. And the search took a couple of minutes.
“Over here,” Pete yelled from twenty-five yards downstream.
I struggled through the underbrush to where he stood at the water’s edge and laughed out loud at what I saw.
Pete was ejecting an unspent shell from his automatic while the duck, which had waddled up onto a bit of mud bank, staggered around in front of him.
“I don’t want to shoot it again at this range. It’ll ruin the meat,” Pete shouted, breathing loudly as he worked the action on his automatic.
“Hit him with this before he gets back in the water and swims away,” I said, getting ready to toss my stick down the embankment to where the wounded, staggering bird was about to stumble back into the river.
“I’m gonna use the shotgun,” Pete said and swung it like a bat so it clipped the duck in the head. It toppled over. He then picked up the bird and swung it around, as my grandmother would do with a chicken to break its neck before she chopped its head off.
“One of us needs to get a retriever if we’re going to keep doing this,” I offered as he stuffed the duck into his hunting vest.
We returned to a spot near the backwater pool and found a place to sit on a log behind some willows, so that we were situated in a natural blind.
“You think they’ll come back after we shot at one group of them,” I asked after we had waited quietly for ten or twelve minutes.
“Who knows? You want to walk upriver?”
“Let’s wait a bit longer. But I’m getting cold. I can’t sit here forever,” I said.
After another five minutes of quiet, Pete shifted his feet and, without looking at me, asked: “So when you take Joyce home after school, do you go park someplace?”
“I’ve only taken her home once. Hey, we talk about you, how you had horses in the same stable and used to go riding every weekend,” I lied.
“What does she say about me?”
“You used to have a lot of fun,” I lied some more. We had never talked about Pete. “I don’t think she knows you have a crush on her.”
“Well, I never said anything. Now I can’t. It would screw things up with Faye.”
“Are things getting serious with Faye?”
He nodded.
“So you doing it?”
“No,” he said, looking away so it was clear he was lying. “Just heavy petting.”
“I don’t believe that. You’ve been heavy petting for a long time.”
“She’d kill me if she knew I told you.”
“You using rubbers?”
“Most of the time.”
“When you don’t, do you worry?”
“Yeah. So does she. Mostly we say we’re not going to do it. Then we just get carried away.”
“Be careful Pete, unless you want to be stuck in Farewell Bend the rest of your life.”
“You don’t think I know that.”
He looked at me and smiled as if he was about ready to tell a joke. This time he stopped himself.
We sat quietly another twenty minutes. Sitting still was getting easier because the sun had finally climbed high enough to be slightly warming.
“Let’s walk upriver some. Maybe cross over. See if we can find a few birds,” Pete suggested.
“What about the no-hunting signs over there?”
The farmers with land along the south bank posted their fences right across the trail along the river’s edge. During pheasant season, we had honored those for the most part — making just one or two treks along that side of the river, hoping to scare any pheasants we encountered across onto our favored triangle of land. Late in the season, one of the farmers caught us on his posted land and chewed us out, shouting from atop his tractor, which we hadn’t noticed as it headed our direction.
“Ah, ain’t none of these farmers will be out on a cold Sunday morning,” Pete said.
“Yeah. What the hell.”
Driving in, we had crossed the river on a bridge a half mile upstream. On foot, there was another alternative. An elevated silver irrigation pipe, six feet in diameter, spanned the water with the help of suspension wires that gave us something to hold onto as we worked our way along.
During pheasant season, it usually stayed dry and the crossing proved easy, even carrying our shotguns. This morning, with four inches of snow beginning to melt off the top of the tube, the footing looked treacherous.
“I don’t know about that thing,” I said as we reached the point where we had to climb the chain link fence that protected the irrigation pipe’s mounts at both ends. Climbing was made easier because of wood posts close to the chain link. The posts formed part of a barbed wire fence stretching off to the west, keeping a dozen cows contained in a pasture.
“You going to let a little snow stop us? Just hold on tight,” Pete said.
“It’s my shotgun I’m worried about. I’m going to need both hands to hold onto the cable,” I said. “Same for you.”
“Just move slow. Carry the shotgun in your left hand and lean against the cable if you have to. I’ll go first.”
Pete heaved himself up and started across, keeping one boot well planted against the tube at all times while pushing the snow aside with the other.
“The water’s only four or five feet deep here. Just be a little cold to fall into,” he shouted back as he started across.
“I think I’ll let you have that side, and I’ll walk the road down to the bridge. Meet up with you there,” I said.
Pete proceeded to cross and clamber over the chain link fence at the other end, making it look easy despite his weight. I reconsidered and pulled myself to the top of the fence post, where I could step onto the end supports for the tube and slide easily onto the top of the tube itself.
“Come on. Don’t be a pussy,” Pete shouted.
As I stepped onto the huge pipe with both feet, I let go of my shotgun, catching it as it bounced back at me. Fortunately, I had unloaded it. I stood for a minute thinking how lucky that had been. I did not want to have to climb down after the gun and then back up again.
Once I got my balance atop the tube, sliding across proved fairly easy. Pete had the right idea.
That was until a flight of ducks came in low overhead, gliding into the backwater pool we had abandoned earlier.
Pete swung his gun across an arc that included where I stood exposed atop the tube.
“No,” I shouted.
He held his fire until the ducks were well down river before he let go with a round.
But the sound startled me. My feet started slipping inexorably down the side of the tube. I dropped my shotgun and tried to grab the cable with both hands, reaching across my body with my left arm. I acted too late. I dangled above the water holding onto the cable with one hand.
I couldn’t pull myself back up. My fingers were too cold. They just wouldn’t grip with any strength. I let go, trying to lurch atop of the tube to balance myself there.
That didn’t work either. Over a few seconds, I slowly slid down the shining silver side of the water conveyor, finally dropping in a rush, splashing into the murky, cold water.
The fall didn’t hurt. I covered the distance of ten feet from the top of the tube to the surface still upright, making only a small splash as I went in. The river proved to be only four feet deep as my boots touched bottom, but the mud gave way for another six inches. The bitter cold shocked me as the water penetrated my clothes. That wasn’t the worst part. The mud sucked at my wadding boots. The current pulled at me with more strength than I expected
I leaned into the water, holding my breath, feeling around in the mud at the bottom. On a second try, I located the gun before I came up for air.
“I can’t wade out,” I shouted to Pete. “The mud is too deep.”
“Hold on. I’ll get a branch to reach you. Try to work your way to this side.”
“God it’s cold!”
“I know,” Pete said.
He disappeared and took forever to find a branch to reach me with. It flashed through my mind that he really was pissed about Joyce. Or he thought I wasn’t working hard enough to get him a job as a photog at the paper.
“C’mon Pete, where the hell are you?” I shouted.
Silence.
“I’m going to try to swim,” I yelled and flung my shotgun to the shore, falling on my back under the surface a third time.
When I came back up, I still didn’t see Pete.
“I got to get out of here,” I told myself.
Standing again, I bent forward to work my legs out of the boots that had me anchored. After a frighteningly long struggle, I freed myself. Then I lunged toward the shoreline, ineffectively beating my arms and legs inside my waterlogged wool coat and pants. It took another five minutes while I was pushed by the current fifteen yards downstream to finally make it close to shore.
Suddenly, I saw Pete alongside me. He’d waded in to help the last ten feet.
“Where you been, man?” I sputtered, shaking from the cold and exertion.
“Couldn’t find a branch,” he said.
After I climbed dripping over the side of the bank, he stripped off my wet coat and wrapped me in his dry one, which he had thought to shed before wading in. But there was nothing to do for my bootless feet.
We were in trouble. We were both soaked, and I was so tired and cold I felt unable to move. Without his coat, and with his pants wet now, Pete was freezing as well.
“It will take me an hour to walk around by the bridge. I got to try to cross the tube again, then drive around,” Pete said. “That’s quickest.”
I doubted I could hold out that long.
“We’ve got to find a farm house close by,” I said.
Pete agreed and started up the trail along the riverside, toward the road and some houses we remembered there.
I followed but very soon he was out of sight in the riverside thicket.
My feet were numb. They quit aching, but I could not feel them and I wanted to sit down, though I knew I had to keep moving. I could only feel my hands by rubbing them together. They ached. I trudged slowly up the trail.
I was beginning to get confused and stumble when I heard a shout.
“What the hell do you kids think you are doing?”
It was the farmer we’d seen weeks before on his tractor.
“You are both stupid, stupid assholes,” he said and scooped me up. Pete carried my legs and the farmer held me by my armpits as they staggered a hundred yards across a snow-covered pasture to his pickup, left where he’d been throwing hay bales to his heifers. He raced to his house where he called an ambulance and, I was told later, stripped me and wrapped me in a blanket.
Pete went home, crawled into bed for the rest of the day, and returned to school on Monday.
I spent Sunday night being monitored for hypothermia at St. Mary’s Hospital. I thought the aching in my feet would never go away.
Monday was better. Two duty nuns stopped by my bed with soup and woke me for lunch. They clucked away and tried to sympathize. I tried to imagine what they wore underneath those black and white robes. My mother brought in the latest issues of Time and Life and a radio, and I forgot where I was for a few hours, listening to “One Life to Live” and “Queen for a Day.” I was eight again, staying home from school with the flu. I thought for a while I would be happy to be kept there another night, until I asked the nurse what was for dinner.
“Boiled fish,” she answered.
Late that afternoon, my doctor took my pulse, leaned over the bed, listened to my heart, and said he was happy to let me go home.
“Get some exercise. Play some basketball. But keep those feet out of the cold for awhile,” he warned as he hustled from the hospital room.
That settled, I tried to think what to do about Pete. I wasn’t sure he’d been intentionally slow pulling me from the water. But I was going to make him explain.
That lasted a week. He called to offer me a ride to school. I accepted and neither one of us talked about duck hunting. Pete had a few jokes ready, and it was easy to put the whole thing behind us.
After all, I decided, he had waded in. He could have been in trouble himself from the cold water if that farmer hadn’t come along.

Take a virtual trip around town but you won’t find the old one-room jail

2010-10-28T11:05:00.001-07:00

Take a virtual trip around town but you won’t find the old one-room jail
Google Maps now makes it easy to tour Ontario by computer, and when you want to write about what’s stood up over 55 years and what has not, this comes in handy.
I realize that over 55 years things change. But it was a little disconcerting on my more recent visits to find that the folks who remade downtown Ontario have paved over much of the block that was most important to me as a youth. Last week I wrote at Farewell Bend the Novel about how they made the old Argus-Observer building into a parking lot. I also knew they’d made a parking lot of the old one-room city jail behind the former city hall, just across the alley from the old Argus also into a parking lot.
Now, given Google’s new “street views” for some cities, including Ontario, I enjoy letting readers actually see the sites they are told about from the files of 1950s issues of the Argus-Observer.
So if you want to see the parking lot that’s gone up in the place of the city jail that county Grand Jurors said was “filthy” in 1953, just go to Google maps and plug in the address 248 S.W.1st Street in Ontario, Zip 97914.
Sorry I don’t have any pictures of the old jail, where I passed inmates a pack of cigarettes on occasion after making a run to the Moore Bus Depot a block south. What I could see of the inside through the bars didn’t exactly look comfortable or appealing, as I remember.
(For some of this blog’s readers, I expect what will be even more exciting is the ability to use the street view option to move around town on many streets and look at a lot of the city. Fiddle with it a bit and you’ll figure out how that works. I don’t know whether and where Google has done or is still offering this option, but I’ll find out and soon put up a note about this.)
For now, here’s what the Ontario City Council had to say about the county Grand Jury’s report that the city jail was filthy. The headline in the Argus-Observer pretty much summed it up:
“City Council visits jail and calls it good enough for its purpose.”
The July 2, 1953 issue reported that the Ontario City Council adjourned a council meeting to make a quick visit to the jail.
Denying that it ever received the report from the county Grand Jury – carried in the Argus-Observer on May 28, 1953 -- the Ontario City Council visited the city jail and pronounced it fit enough.
“This jail looks perfectly satisfactory to me,” Councilman Horace Beal said. “Any man in jail should feel damn fortunate to have a jail this good to be in.”
The council members did note that that walls had been recently white washed.
The Grand Jury had called the jail “filthy and unsanitary” because it had no shower or bathing facilities and no mattresses on the beds.
In recounting the council’s response, the reporter for the Argus that year took it on himself to repeat a suggestion that “wet backs” --- the term of the day for illegal immigrants from Mexico who came to the area to work on the farms --- had been incarcerated there just before the Grand Jury visit.

Becoming The Ontario Argus-Observer

2010-10-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

Writer’s note: Here is the non-fiction account of my father’s time as publisher of the The Ontario Argus-Observer. A version of this story appears as background in my fictional memoir, Farewell Bend the Novel.

By Larry L. Lynch
Don Lynch fidgeted in the straight-back chair facing his Royal upright and placed his wire rim glasses on a pile of copy paper to the typewriter’s right. He sat surrounded by stacks of notes, clippings and old newspapers --- saved for story ideas and background.
Lynch leaned forward, closed his eyes and used his long fingers to massage his temples. At thirty-seven, he looked almost handsome despite his slightly asymmetrical cheekbones, a carry-over from the polio he suffered as a youth. He had a full head of wavy hair, a twinkle in his eye and usually displayed a half smile that showed off his dimples.
The other desks crowded into the front office of his twice-weekly newspaper, The Ontario Argus-Observer, were vacant. Lynch had saved this quiet Saturday morning, August 30, 1952, to find the right words to explain to readers why he was starting a personal, front-page column. The simple truth was that he wanted to do it and his news editor, Hugh Gale, was still on best behavior. It would be months before Gale would begin putting the phone down on a particular country cousin correspondent and walking away while she droned on.
The name Lynch chose for the column, “The Argus Observes,” almost selected itself, given the name of his newspaper. The mythological Argus, Lynch would explain to readers, had one hundred eyes, thus its use for newspapers. What’s more, it slept with only two eyes closed. Still, the name had its shortcomings. The Greek Argus failed had failed as a bodyguard, the assignment that made it myth-worthy. Bored by a lengthy bedtime story, the monster fell totally asleep and was slain.
Lynch knew it would be a mistake to come off in his new column as overly impressed with himself, but after five years and nine months as editor and publisher, he’d grown sure of his place in town. He wanted to “write easily” about his experiences and ideas using the “informality of the first person.”
For more than five years, as I passed through high school and on to college, my father did just that, aptly commenting on life in a small western town in the 1950s.
For the previous five years, he had run his newspaper under the close guidance of a veteran partner, Bernard Mainwaring, whose large bald head and vigorous physical presence was matched by a dominating personality and equally impressive intellect. My father once observed that his older partner, who avoided alcohol, had “little understanding of the inclination of others to drink because he was two drinks ahead of the average guy all of the time.”
Mainwaring owned the daily Nampa, Idaho Free Press when my father went to work for him in 1944. The Nampa publisher found something special in the former meter-reader reborn as an ad salesman and sports writer. After two years, Mainwaring decided to stake his salesman to a half interest in a weekly newspaper, one of two then serving Ontario, Oregon, population about 4,200.
Before Mainwaring and my father purchased it, The Argus had settled into a deep slumber that hardly noted the changes going on in town. In one of his last columns, the former editor and publisher made fun of himself in print for driving through a newly installed stop light on which he’d reported the week before. Another sign of the lack of activity occurred one weekday afternoon in the fall of 1946. While my father and Mainwaring sat for two hours in the weekly’s office haggling over the details of the purchase, the phone remained eerily silent. That silence drove Mainwaring to distraction, but it didn’t scare him off.
My mother, my brother Dennis, and I rarely saw my father during the first four months of the new operation. That was the time it took to locate and buy a small, white clapboard house on a tree-lined street of mixed homes with an ample scattering of vacant lots four blocks southwest of downtown Ontario. At first, the three of us were stuck without a car in a massively ugly and cold grey stone rental house in nearby Payette, Idaho. Our wait was only relieved on Thursday afternoon when my father drove us to Ontario to join the madhouse of publication night.
I liked the smell of the mix of old newspapers and ink that pervaded the tiny store-front newspaper plant, but I hated the racket the machinery produced late on the evening of publication day. A printer stood on a platform at the side of a huge roller atop a two-page press feeding sheets of paper into place. To produce a four-page section, the operator turned the paper over, exchanged the forms holding the pages of lead type, and sent the sheets through a second time. On each revolution the press roared as the roller spun on its axis, then groaned when it reversed directions, and roared again. When the press run was far enough along that my father fired up the folder, its sound added exponentially to the cacophony, clanging away, folding and stuffing the printed sheets into something that resembled a newspaper--- when it didn’t shred them.
This was our quality family time. Women enjoyed my father, and he returned the favor. His appeal rested mainly with his ability to flatter them by listening intently. On these evenings, however, he forgot that compulsive diversion of his. And my mother, a short, striking, dark-haired dervish put to good use the work ethic she absorbed growing up on a dairy farm near Caldwell, Idaho. On these nights our parents accomplished something together.
From the outset, The Argus’ new owners planned to convince the publisher of the town’s other weekly newspaper to sell out. Mainwaring provided the operating cash for my father to undercut ad sales for that paper, the Eastern Oregon Observer, by practically giving away ad space in The Argus. They also arranged for The Argus to be delivered to everyone in town, whether paid subscribers or not.
My father’s patience with this approach began to wear thin by spring, however. He’d learned that everyone in town seemed to read the paper even though almost no one would buy ads.
Then, as he tried to keep up the pressure on the Observer, a piece of luck presented itself in the form of an editorial mistake.
Harry Peterson, a town patriarch who ran a furniture store at the other end of Oregon Street from the old Argus plant and also operated a local funeral home. One morning as my father walked through town to make a call on Peterson, he mulled over a new problem. He’d heard that Peterson was steaming because The Argus printed the wrong time for a funeral, and people around town were calling to complain.
“Harry, I’m sorry, that was a mistake,” my father shouted as he entered the store and climbed to the top of the stairs leading to Peterson’s desk, where it overlooked the furniture displayed on the floor below. “But if this mistake is so important to our readers, how is it that we don’t have any value as an advertising medium?”
From that time on, Peterson’s furniture store advertised in The Argus. Other merchants followed his lead and began to buy paid space.
That summer, the competition with the Observer came to a head. Compared with The Argus, which traced its first publication to 1896, the Observer was an upstart. Elmo Smith, an acquaintance of my father’s from Smith’s college days in Caldwell, had started the paper late in 1936 and had made a success of it, becoming a power on the local scene. He served as Ontario’s mayor during part of World War II. But by 1946, he was ready to move on. He sold the Observer that December to Jessica Longston, who also owned the St. Helens (Oregon) Sentinel-Mist as well as a newspaper and radio station in Burley, Idaho. As part of his deal with Longston, Smith had agreed to run the Observer for a limited time. Eight months later, with the competition wearing on both papers, something had to give. Mainwaring offered Longston more money than she could make by continuing to operate The Observer, and she agreed to sell. The Ontario papers were combined into one beginning in September 1947. Elmo Smith soon bought another paper in John Day, Oregon and began a career in state politics.
Through the decade my father operated the Argus-Observer, his biggest business headaches involved how to keep a back shop purring with country printers and unreliable equipment. Press breakdowns were commonplace, even after a refurbished, high-speed eight-page press was installed in a new building. The turnover among printers was even more maddening. They’d walk in the door looking for work, be assigned a stone-slab work table for assembling type, turn out a few weeks of decent ads and printing jobs, then collect their checks and disappear.
And yet the worst problem my father ran into with a printer was quite the opposite.
Before the end of this printer’s first week, the back shop foreman discovered he had to position the new guy at a make-up bench far away from every other employee and especially far away from a particularly cranky linotype operator. The guy smelled so foully of drink and bodily filth that no one could stand to work close to him. This printer required cash for his work on a daily basis. If he was paid weekly, he’d be broke within a day or two. Even so, the foreman wanted to keep him on the job until someone who could replace him walked in the door.
It didn’t work out that way. My father’s patience ran out when the printer missed a day of work but didn’t realize that he hadn’t shown up. He disrupted the entire office with his insistence that he receive the money for two days when he had only worked one.
The odiferous printer came from Yakima, Washington, so my father bought him a ticket for home, packed him a lunch, took him to the bus station, handed the ticket to the driver, and watched the bus pull out with him aboard.
He then called the printer’s wife to tell her that her husband was on his way: “She wailed, ‘Why did you have to send him home?’ She thought she’d gotten rid of him for good.”
At the end of 1952, Mainwaring sold his interest in the Argus-Observer to my parents to help finance his purchase of the Salem, Oregon Capital Journal. My father used “The Argus Observes” column of February 5, 1953 to pay tribute to the man he described as “at least a near genius as a newspaper publisher (and) the nearest thing to a genius of any one I have ever known.”
He noted that Mainwaring impressed people by acquiring a depth of information along specific lines and using it freely in conversation. He never smoked, never drank, and during the war went “careening all over Nampa on a bike, pell mell like a 25-year-old kid....I have seen him take a highball to avoid awkward explanation and then pour it down a sink or set it aside at the first opportunity. However a stranger at a cocktail party might think him the life of the party because his animated voice can be heard above the hubbub of others.”
My father believed in the value of child labor. I began working at The Argus when I was eleven, hauling bundles of freshly inked newspapers to the bus depot, drug stores and coffee shops, and riding my bike to small neighborhood groceries. Downtown I usually covered on foot. I gathered up an order or two and headed out of the back door of the plant, past a one-room cement jail that sat behind city hall. Occasionally, I stopped to jaw with a drunk still stuck inside come late afternoon. By the time I was in junior high, I picked up an extra dollar now and then by making cigarette runs for the guys drying out in the old jail. One day a printer saw me making the exchange, and reported it to my father, who put a stop to the arrangement.
By 1952, my father had fallen in love with the news side and would have been overjoyed to devote himself to it full time. But he knew that the business depended on him to sell the ads that brought in the money that made the newspaper financially viable.
Meanwhile, self-proclaimed news editors frequently walked in the front door without notice to inquire about a job. If one didn’t drop in at the right time, they were easy to procure through a help wanted ad in the industry bible, Editor and Publisher.
The turnover at the editor’s desk came to an end for three years during the summer of 1952. My father hired Hugh Gale, a veteran reporter, as news editor. Gale provided the time my father needed to begin his front-page column. And Gale provided me, at an impressionable age, with an intriguing example of what a newspaperman could be like.
To function well as a country editor, my father reluctantly conceded, it was necessary to have not only a little flair but also to be self assured enough to go your own way, despite what some of the townsfolk might say or think of you. Hugh was maybe the most independent --- certainly the most addicted to hanging out in the local bars --- of those who came along. He also possessed the ability, perhaps too rarely used, to charm most anyone with a gruff compliment. He was a pudgy, gnome-like man with a bushy shock of light, grey-streaked hair hanging over a florid face. When he was going good, he sat hunched over his typewriter at his desk facing a long window looking into the back shop, using the nicotine-stained middle and index fingers of both hands to pound out stories.
Hugh kept his distance from the society editor at one end of his row of desks and from the two women behind him, the bookkeeper and circulation manager who took care of the front counter. But that didn’t stop the women from taking an interest in him. They learned that he was married but had left his wife in Washington, and they began to ask him repeatedly when his wife would arrive.
“My wife is a very, very large woman,” he said. “I doubt that anyone here is going to welcome her.”
When his wife walked into the office for the first time some months later, she proved to be petite and beautiful. Or, as my father used to say, “I’m really not sure how a guy who looks like Hugh and drinks like a fish ever got such an attractive woman to live with him.”
At the time he was hired, Hugh was warned “that sometimes the news was sparse and it took hard digging to get out an interesting paper,” my father wrote in a January 5, 1953 column.
“After a few weeks, he asked what I meant by dullness… The news seemed plenty active enough for him. In his first month… a man burned to death in a trailer house fire, there was a Grade A public row over the failure of the school board to rehire two teachers, the Malheur River flooded and then the Owyhee really flooded --- all on top of an active situation in school district, city and county news and plus the regular flow of the news.
“But in the in the dog days between the Fourth of July and the county fair he found out what I had been talking about. He almost walked a hole in the tile on the office floor trying to dream up stories good enough for the top front page positions.”
As time wore on --- and this was obviously related to why his wife took some time to follow him --- Hugh’s lifestyle began to impinge on his productivity.
“He is always late,” my father complained as summer turned to fall in 1954. Years later, in one of a series of pieces he wrote as part of an effort to syndicate a column about being a country editor, my father recounted the workplace sins of an anonymous “reporter we had once’’ --- who might have been easily identified by readers in Ontario:
“The talented but unstrung reporter came to work so late so often that finally I had to tell him, if he was ever late again I’d expect him to just ask for his check without waiting to be fired.
“After that, when he was out very late at night, he’d park his car in front of the office before he went home. About 9:30 the next morning, he’d come running in the back door with his hands full of notes, as if he’d been on an early morning news assignment at the city hall. He’d rush up to his desk and begin typing furiously, never looking up.
“It was easy to tell that he hadn’t been awake 15 minutes. However, even though he was an hour late, it was earlier than he’d been coming to work. So I let him think he was fooling me.”
Earlier, my father had played a different tune on his typewriter keys when Hugh actually moved on July 21,1955 to run his own newspaper in Kirkland, Washington.
Opening his column with the admission that he hated to see his editor leave “more than I had thought I would,” my father noted that Gale had “worked at the news with the abandon of a volunteer fireman. He was forever getting up at daylight to photograph the blowing of a gas well strike, or flying off to Jordan Valley to a cattlemen’s convention, or taking a rangeland tour to study the problems of range management. He took jaunts of this kind almost every week, generally on his own time.
“And he got around. He lived with the men in the street and the farmers in the fields. He made it his business to know what was going on in the community, what the average citizen was thinking. There is no substitute for this intense interest in society and not many news men have the quality in the degree possessed by Hugh Gale.”
After Hugh’s departure, my father put his column on hold. But he revived it in early 1956, and the timing of its return was less than accidental. A subject presented itself that my father badly wanted to write about --- the rise of his old acquaintance Elmo Smith to the job of governor. On January 31, of that year Oregon Gov. Paul Patterson died of a heart attack. As president of the State Senate, Smith succeeded him.
Less than a month later, my parents visited Eugene for a social event with the Smiths. Returning home, my father published a column describing how “the governor took off his coat and shoes, loosened his tie, flopped on my hotel room bed in Eugene. He looked beat from his first 17 days as governor of Oregon.”
Some of Smith’s friends in the Ontario area were concerned that the man they knew as Elmo would change under the pressures of his new job.
My father suggested they “needn’t worry.” At an evening cocktail party with old friends, Smith had “trotted around the lobby with his hands jammed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward, his coattails flying, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and one hand periodically raising in that ‘hi’ salute, a mannerism that is uniquely his. He looked almost exactly like he did peddling ads on Oregon street ten years ago.”
During the following months, my father threw every ounce of editorial support he could justify, and some he couldn’t, into helping his friend win election to the governor’ post that November. But it wasn’t to be. Smith lost to the Democrat, Bob Holmes, a radio station manager from Astoria.
My father never admitted as much to me, but knowing the restlessness that was brewing in his soul, I’m almost certain he hoped that a Smith victory would mean a job for him in the new administration in Salem, a chance to get away from the newspaper --- and from family demands --- a least for a while.
The next May while I was off at college and my brother was in high school, he announced that he had turned the publisher’s job over to our mother so he could take a position helping to manage classified ad sales at The Statesman newspaper in Boise, Idaho, 65 miles to the east.
“This change was only possible,” he wrote in his May 23, 1957, column, “because Mrs. Lynch was willing to assume the rather demanding job of being editor and publisher of The Argus-Observer….
“In this particular case the wife is better qualified to manage the newspaper than she realizes. She has been closest to its problems for a long time, and has worked at all of the tasks required --- reporting, advertising and accounting. This is a broader background than my own because I couldn’t do the accounting.”
Time proved my father correct about my mother’s publishing skills. She whipped the staff into the kind of shape that increased profits year over year until 1963 when she decided to sell because neither one of her sons was interested in returning to Ontario to help her out.
My parents divorced and my father went on to a long career as a newspaper business manager, editor and writer. But he never again found work that was quite as satisfying. Late in life, he tried to develop a book out of his columns for the Ontario newspaper, but he couldn’t make it work. “All that old newspaper stuff and Ontario stuff as I wrote it in the rough draft would never be read today,” he concluded in a letter to me, written May 10, 1995 at the age of eighty. He then willed me his papers in the hope that I could re-direct the material “to the interests of today’s audiences.”
And in a draft introduction to the book he would have liked to write, he summed up his experience quite simply yet eloquently:
“A half century ago we had outlived our time mechanically. We were still using the same method of inking a raised impression and pressing paper against it that Gutenberg had worked out 500 years earlier. We were still printing with stinking-hot melted lead, clanking linotypes, and noisy presses. Even so we still had a sort of built-in community influence that is now as out of date as a horse and buggy. It was 45 years ago when I got in on the final years of that ancient world. I was one of the last of the old-fashioned country editors. What a privileged way to start a lifetime of journalism.”

Farm labor shortage predicted for summer of ‘53

2009-11-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

Prompt action must be taken by Malheur county farmers if they are to have an adequate labor supply for 1953, Roy Hirai, president of the county Labor Sponsors association said today.

Hirai reported the association drive for membership dues has made little progress, and that camp facilities cannot be operated without a minimum of 6,000 acres of row crop signed up and membership paid.

The sponsors association estimates 3,000 laborers will be needed in the area this season and that 350 of them must be housed and dispatched from the labor camps at Ontario, Adrian and Vale. Hirai pointed out that there is not adequate farm housing to maintain a labor force and that even operators with farm housing will suffer if the labor force is not large enough to stabilize wage rates and reduce competition among uses of labor.

Last year’s operations saw 245 workers during peak seasons living at the camps from April 20 to October. A large percentage of row crop operators used labor from the camp, and last year’s association membership totaled 139 operators and 6,950 aces of row crop. Labor supply and relationships with labor were the most favorable in many years in this area.

--- From a February 1953 issue of the Ontario Argus-Observer

God in Education Urged by Speaker

2009-11-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

The teaching of Christianity in the public schools as the most effective way to combat communism was urged by P. J. Gallagher in a talk to the Ontario Kiwanis club Wednesday.

The speaker paid tribute to the American tradition of freedom to worship as the individual chooses. He favored the teaching of the general tenets of Christianity which would be in keeping with the beliefs of all faiths.

“We are fundamentally a Christian nation. We believe in the principles of Christianity,” Gallagher said. “There is no reason why the teaching of fundamentals of religion should be barred from our schools, no reason why they should not be taught throughout the public schools and colleges.”

---From a November 1953 issue of The Ontario Argus-Observer

District Attorney Plans Abatement of Houses

2009-11-18T16:38:00.000-08:00

Abatement proceedings will be instituted against Farewell Bend’s houses of prostitution, District Attorney E. Otis Smith said this morning.

“I’m going to do all I can to abate these places,” he said. “I want to close them up. The girls may be out of town by now, and I don’t know what effect that will have on the evidence. But I think we’ve got good evidence.”

This official reaction followed raids early Friday evening on Farewell Bend’s historic bawdy house, the Farley hotel, and the Snake River Hotel on the East Side.

The raids were conducted by Sheriff John Elfering with the assistance of Farewell Bend city police who helped in booking the girls and the operators of the establishments.

Two special investigators from Portland were brought to Malheur County by Sheriff Elfering to obtain the actual evidence for the arrests. They were officers from the force of Terry Schrunk, sheriff of Multnomah County.

Posing as hunters, they entered the hotels and secured the evidence needed, then made the arrests for the Malheur sheriff’s office.

Helen Guyer, proprietor of the Farley hotel, was charged with “keeping a bawdy house,” as was Sue Morgan, operator of the East Side establishment.

The maid at the Farley was also arrested and charged with vagrancy. Five girls from the Snake River Hotel, allegedly prostitutes, were arrested on a charge of vagrancy. The girls were booked on “Jane Doe” warrants and did not themselves appear in court.

The two proprietors posted $150 bail each and the girls posted $100 bail each, for a total of $900 of bail money posted in the justice court of Judge Thos. Jones.

Mayor Frank Popper said this morning that he was “shocked” to learn that houses of prostitution have been operating in Farewell Bend. He went on to add that prostitution has been a recurrent problem.

His reaction sketched the nature of the task that faces District Attorney Smith. Farewell Bend was widely known as a center of prostitution before World War II. During the war the illicit industry was closed for a time. In the decade since the war, there has been intermittent operation except for one year when organized, commercial prostitution was stamped out by abatement proceedings.

Such proceedings are brought against the property instead of individuals, making it possible to padlock the property, taking it out of use for a year.

In former years, this has been the only effective method of restricting prostitution here.

---Excerpted from Farewell Bend the novel and based on an actual story from the Ontario Argus-Observer published during an early 1950s hunting season. Most names have been changed.

Planting catfish and pike in local streams proposed

2009-11-13T10:40:00.000-08:00

Local sportsmen have induced a top official in the game commission to come to Ontario to discuss the possibility of developing warm water species of fish in the area, Don Moore said today.

More said there would be a public meeting with John Rayner , chief of operations, division of fisheries, Oregon state game commission.

On species that is under consideration is the catfish like those found in North and South Dakota, Moore said. These fish sometimes grow to weight one hundred pounds and are a good food fish.

Another species under consideration is the wall-eyed pike which is a native of Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Moore said the group was not trying to tell the game commission what to do but simply wanted to find out what could be done.

--- From the Ontario Argus-Observer of Feb. 9, 1953

How dumb could a teenager be?

2009-11-08T06:25:00.000-08:00

PAYETTE – Two teenage boys stealing gasoline set a fire which destroyed a four-car garage, two automobiles and other contents to bring an estimated loss of some $15,000 to the Fred Robertson residence on Central Avenue Friday night, according to Chief of Police Cecil Fetter.

The boys both in junior high school admitted the offense and gave details of how it happened when they were arrested at their homes later in the evening, Fetter reported.

The cars were owned by Ike Whitely and Earle Sample, both of Payette. Other contents of the garage included factory machinery which was owned by Robertson valued at $10,000.

According to the boys’ story, the chief said, they had driven to the garage in their Model A hot rod and were stealing gasoline from the Whitely car. One of the boys had opened a cap at the bottom of the tank with a special wrench they had for the purpose. He was using a Purex bottle to catch the gasoline. When the bottle was nearly full the boy under the car dropped the cap and lit his cigarette lighter to look for it. The flame ignited gasoline spilled on the ground and the whole area immediately burst into flames. The boys then tried to start their hot rod for a getaway but when it wouldn’t start ran away from the scene.

The boy who had been stealing the gasoline received a badly burned forearm, the chief said.

Both were in bed at their homes when the when the officers called. They admitted the offense after only a few questions and told the details.

Both are being held for action by the Probate Court, which handles juvenile offenses in Idaho, Fetter said.
…… From the January 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer

The way first graders learned in 1953

2009-11-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

(Editor’s note: My father, author of the following newspaper column from 1953, was the son of a school teacher who Dad late in life described as an abusive father. Dad once wrote about how his dad who during the 1920s taught in a one-room country school near Mountain Home, Idaho, whipped Dad and two other junior high age students who he caught fighting with lilac bushes. And another time he took a belt to his ninth grade boys who failed to return to class from the basketball court. In 1953, Dad wrote that a certain amount of such corporal punishment might be necessary in schools. But he never described exactly how much. I know he whipped me for fighting with my younger brother when I was nine or ten. But I’m not sure he’d have been happy if a teacher had taken his belt to me – which I never saw happen to any of my classmates. Anyway, it’s clear in this column that he liked the way this first grade teacher in our small town approached her job. Standardized tests were apparently the last thing on her mind.)

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch
From the Nov. 5, 1953 issue of the Ontario Argus-Observer

The capable Ontario teacher Mrs. Sylvia Osborn brought her charts and illustrative material and various teaching helps to the weekly Kiwanis luncheon and presented the program to the club men for their annual observance of American Education Week.

There is no rigid schedule to first grade work, she said. Instead the information taught is worked into the child’s everyday living.

Each morning Mrs. Osborn’s class starts with the day’s news. At this time each day, the learning of reading is related to the habit of reading about the news.

First graders, she says, are very observant about the weather. So they keep a record every day and at the end of the year they know how many sunny days, rainy days, windy days, etc. there have been during the school term.

A major reaching effort is directed at making the first graders number conscious. Over and over again they are taught that the same combinations will produce the same results whether they are dealing with blocks, or apples, or people or animals or any other units. The little ones have a hard time making the transfer of mathematical reasoning from one subject to another and this is a slow learning process.

Six year olds have a different adjustment problem in getting used to the closeness of school work. The rate that reading is learned is much affected by the youngster’s natural ability to focus his eyes.

The children make up the first stories they read, writing them in simple terms to learn simple words, and then re-reading what they have written. They also illustrate their stories, drawing the characters and situations in a group effort.

One evidence of the relation of education to everyday living is that children in this year’s first grade classes insist on equipping their houses with TV antennas.

(Editor’s note: In the fall of 1953, TV had just come to Eastern Oregon. Good antennas in Ontario were picking up the signal from a Boise, Idaho station, the first to begin broadcasting in the area.)

Rubbing shoulders with Charles Dana and W. R. Hearst’s crew

2009-10-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: My father Don Lynch, author of these postings from The Argus Observes, died at age 84 early in January 2000. Though he was observant and analytical almost to the end and knew that the computer age was changing journalism, he couldn’t foresee what has happened to its practitioners since then. By that year, newspaper websites were beginning to make deep inroads into news distribution. Someday someone will write the history of the development of powerful blogs, but I didn’t understand where the Drudge Report could lead us and I don’t think many others did. My father was no exception. But for much of his mature life he saw himself as a bridge between the titans of newspapering, the William Allen Whites and William Randolph Hearsts and the powerful voices of newspaper editors, columnists and writers in the late 20th Century. In this column from October of 1953 he honors another journalist who shared some of his memories of the last half of the 19th Century and first half of the 20th.

The Argus Observes

By Don Lynch
From the Oct. 8, 1953 issues of The Ontario Argus-Observer

Shades of Wild Bill Hickcock and Calamity Jane.

Who’d ever expect to run into a newsman who had rubbed shoulders, at least figuratively, with them and with William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, the great Charles Dana and many other notables of an early day that are legendary movie-type characters to us today.

Well, we have such a newsman right here in Ontario. He is 91-year-old M. E. Bain, tramp printer, editor and publisher for 35 years before he came here in 1909 … and who has been a favorite elder citizen in Ontario for almost a generation since his retirement 37 years ago.

He told of his experiences in a talk to the Kiwanis club Wednesday. It was an enchanting talk, at least to me, for I can well imagine what a lot of his experiences must have been like. . . .

He was a great admirer of Charles Dana, whom he regards as the greatest editor of them all. When Bain worked for Dana’s New York Sun in the 1880’s, Dana published a four page paper on week days and an eight page issue on Sundays.

The great editor was so fussy that he always wrote special late leads on all stories were he could get late-breaking information. As a result, many times half of the material set was thrown away and would not be run at all.

Dana boasted a circulation of a “million a week,” and had it all right. He
had to throw out ads to keep his paper down to the size he wanted. And he boiled the news down tight and used little space for display of headlines.

But his product commanded great attention and he got a high rate for his ads to cover the high cost of his eccentric operation.

Dana was friendly with his crew and ate at the lunch counter with the printers who were devoted to him. Bain sometimes visited with Dana at lunch.

Joseph Pulitzer was regarded by Bain as the dynamo of his day in business management of a newspaper.

Later Bain worked for the Hearsts when William Randolph was just reorganizing his newly acquired San Francisco Examiner and getting set to build the biggest newspaper empire ever assembled.

Bain has told me how he and his fellow workers used to sit around and have a glass of beer and talk with some of the great writers of those early days.

“We had a wonderful time,” he recalls with the excitement of youth in his 91-year-old vocal chords. “We knew all about what was going on in the world and sat around and talked about it by the hour. It sure was fun.”

As William Allen White used to say, “There were giants in those days,” at least they are giants in retrospect.

That feeling of comradeship with writers and identification with the events of the day that Bain recalls so vividly is one of the things that puts ink in a man’s veins; and most of us who make our living knocking copy through a typewriter and watching it come out on the printed page, no matter how humble our situation, wouldn’t change jobs with a lot of more important people.

In the 50s: Trouble with that “Other Days” column

2009-10-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

Making the big trucks pay their fair share

2009-10-04T16:56:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: Debate over how much big trucks should pay for their heavy use of the highways has been going on for at least fifty years, as looking back to the 1952 Truck Tax initiative on the Oregon ballot reminds us. My father was a big proponent of increasing the tax on the long haul behemoths as the state Legislature had done, under the guidance of his friend State Sen. Elmo Smith, a Republican then from John Day, Oregon, and former mayor of Ontario. (Elmo was also the former publisher of the Eastern Oregon Observer, which was combined into the Argus five years earlier.) Anyway, here is the argument as Dad presented it in his front page column before the election. And this time I can tell you how it came out, because he wrote about it in a post-election column I happen to have at hand.

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch
From an October 1952 issue of the Ontario Argus-Observer

This (truck tax) initiative measure is most important in its effect on the economy and welfare of the state.

The 1951 Legislature believing that the trucks weren’t paying their full share of the cost of building and maintaining highways, boosted the weight-mile tax with the heaviest increase falling on long-haul truckers.

The Legislature and the State Highway Commission figured that trucks now pay about 29 percent of highway costs, but they should pay about 33 percent. This bill is intended to make trucks pay their fair share of road costs.

The long haul truckers, who claim they already pay more than their share of the road costs, got the bill referred to the people.

This bill is the product of a tremendous detailed study by the Legislature, and tremendously hard work in getting I passed over the opposition of the powerful truck lobby. It represents a great forward stride in Oregon highway financing, and to my mind it is perfectly fair and equitable.

It is the key bill in a whole system of highway taxation carefully designated by the state’s best experts.

This valuable work of the Legislature is supported by the Highway Commission, the state grange, all of the state’s newspapers, the Portland City club, and virtually all of the organizations qualified to judge its merits.

The big trucks simply are trying to dodge a tax that really nails them down to paying according to their heavy use of roads. Many smaller truckers such as Clarence Vogt in Ontario, favor the legislative program because under it they pay only according to their less extensive use of the roads. It is a fair tax.

It is most important that you support the Legislature by voting 318X Yes in favor of this measure.

(Editor’s note 2 – The truck tax measure passed, keeping the tax intact, and Dad wrote that it was an important victory justifying Smith’s tireless efforts on the Legislature as well as the newspaper support that the measure drew. Here is an excerpt from that November 1952 column, which talks about this pride in the efforts of the state’s nespapers.)

The result seem almost like a personal victory for many editors who sometimes wonder if their editorial voice is heard at all in the hubbub of movies, radio, comics and against all the competition of the livelier columns of general news in their own papers. This time editors could be certain much of what they said hit the target.

The Oregon State Motor Association believes that newspapers were instrumental in saving the state’s truck tax program and along with it the highway program.

I received a letter from Ray Conway, the association manager, thanking me for the state taken by the Argus-Observer and saying in part:

“…The discrimination (voters) showed at the polls is due to the n newspapers of the state who clarified the issue so well that the voters were able to understand our meager advertising and were not confused by the more elaborate arguments of the opposition.”

Perhaps Conway overestimated the effect of the newspaper’s work but this is one instance all right in which the newspapers certainly were influential in a genuine public service.

Trying to solve the time problem. What about liquor by the drink?

2009-09-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: Oregonians are known as bunch of independent sorts. Maybe that’s because a good number, at least in Eastern Oregon, hail from Missouri, though not as many as from Nebraska. But that’s another story. In 1952, they were suffering from a confusion about time and faced a November ballot measure designed set them straight. In an October column my father, editor and publisher of The Ontario Argus Observer, tried to give voters some advice about an effort to clear up the confusion. Maybe it was because of all the confusion that some in the state wanted legalize liquor by the drink. My old man, who was no teetotaler, had some ideas about that as well.)

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch
(From an October 1952 column)

One (initiative) sponsored by the Farmers’ Union, would make daylight time illegal.

It is designed to end the time confusion Regon has every summer. It is supposed to provide for uniform standard time.

Two years ago voters approved a measure which the majority thought would result in uniform standard time. It provided for standard time to prevail unless the governor decided it would be to Oregon’s special advantage to proclaim daylight time.

Under this law, Gov.McKay did proclaim daylight time in 1951 but the part of the state preferring standard time refused to make the change.

During the past summer he left the state on standard time and Portland and some coastal and Willamette Valley cities adopted daylight time. So that was confusing too.

The Argus-Observer opposed the time measure approved two years ago and I will vote agains this one. Admitting that Oregon does have a confusion of time in summer months now, I can’t see how a law would solve the problem.

To my mind, the state has little business legislating time. It should help if the present confusing time were removed from the books, but not by substituting another time law.

If we would quite trying to legislate time, perhaps the areas of the state would follow their natural preferences and work out some reasonable solution to the time mess.

My suggestion: vote 325X No.

AND AS FOR LIQUOR BY THE DRINK

This proposed constitutional amendment would make it legal to sell liquor by the drink in private clubs and in restaurants, on trains, in private clubs and in fraternal and veterans organizations. It also provides local option for communities that don’t want this alaw to apply.

Its proponents argue that I would promote the tourist trade and, they say, promote temperance by enabling people to drink without having to buy a whole bottle ofliquore. They call themselves the”Buy Less Than A Bottle Committee.”

These are thin arguments to me. I just can’t believe that having liquor readily available by the drink promotes temperance. Oregon’s Knox Law has provided excellent handling of liquor in neighboring states. I am opposed to prohibition at the other extreme. The moderate middle course we follow now seems to me the best way of handling one of society’s major problems.

One serious objection to this measure is that it is a constitutional amendment. It would make the liquor by the drink privilege a part of our state constitution. Even if it were to be authorized it should be as a law and not as a part of the constitution.

Another major objection is that it would probably dot the streets of Oregon with saloons under the modern guise of clubs.

I recommend you vote 329X No on this measure.

(Editor’s end note: The problem I have with all of this stems from the fact that history is disappearing from our grasp when questions predate the Internet. To tell you how the vote went on these two items with any certainty, I’d have to order up back copies of Oregon newspapers. That would take weeks if not months from my location in California. My memory tells me that daylight savings time soon came to prevail in all of Oregon, though Malheur County remained confused because it was on Mountain Standard Time while most of the rest of the state was on Pacific Standard Time. As for liquor by the drink, I’ve seen evidence that it won approval. There were already saloons on Oregon Street, Ontario’s main drag. They were called pool halls, and I suspect they served up plenty of beer. I don’t think the number increased with passage of this amendment though maybe a few private clubs began serving up more drinks than before. If people started crashing their cars and bashing their mates more often, I didn’t notice. I was just 14 at the time.)

Measure banning pari-mutual betting could be a gamble

2009-09-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: In 1952, Oregonians were as ballot measure happy as Californians are now. There were 18 measures put before voters that fall. Four tell us something about the temper of the times. One would permit liquor by the drink. In Oregon then you had to buy your hard liquor at a state store. As I recall, the pool halls sold beer but I guess no hard liquor before 1952. Two other measures involved truckers and daylight savings time. More on those three issues will be included in coming posts. A fourth ballot measure would have banned pari-mutual betting on horse races. As explained below, it was proof that California didn’t invest the practice of writing ballot measures in ways that no one could be sure what they were voting for. My father didn’t like gambling and, as explained below, planned to vote for the ban. I can find no evidence that it was imposed to overturn something that had been going on since 1933. But it may have been cancelled or changed by the state’s adoption of a State Lottery in 1984.)

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch
From the Ontario Argus-Observer for Oct. 20, 1952

The Oregon Council of Churches together with some Portland business men sponsored this initiative to make pari-mutual betting on the races illegal. The bill was sponsored on moral grounds.

Most of the tax income from the races has been allotted to the county fairs and various special fairs and shows such as the PI, the state fair and the Pendleton Round-Up. It supports these shows. Malheur County has been a major recipient receiving over $90,000 for the fair here through the years and over $12,000 in the past year.

Most of the critics of pari-mutual racing conceded that the races have been cleanly and fairly operated under state supervision in Oregon.

My personal objection to this bill is that it is confusing in its language. It would become a constitutional amendment if passed and, as I understand it, would replace the existing constitutional provision against gambling. Some authorities think it is so poorly worded that while it prohibits pari-mutual betting it might permit other types of gambling unless expressly forbidden by the legislature.

I shall vote in favor of this measure because of my personal antipathy toward legalized gambling and my dislike of using gambling as a source of tax income. I think the fairs could be financed from other sources of income.

But I have no recommendation to readers on this measure because of its doubtful wording and because you will all vote your personal convictions on a moral question of this sort.

As long as you know you are green, you continue to grow

2009-09-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: It was with this column that Don Lynch, editor and publisher of The Ontario Argus-Observer unveiled his personal front page column on Sept. 1, 1952. In it, over some five years, he frequently pulled back the covers on the town of Ontario, the spread-out farm and ranching communities of Eastern Oregon and Western Idaho as well as the newspaper he edited to serve the local residents.

The Argus Observes
By Don Lynch

This is the fifth anniversary of the consolidation of the Ontario Argus and the Eastern Oregon Observer into the Argus Observer. This consolidated newspaper has now served the Ontario area for five years as a semi-weekly. It has likely run more pages of newspaper per week, on the average, than any other one newspaper in a town the size of Ontario in the Pacific Northwest.

Some maturity must accrue to a newspaper on its fifth anniversary. Therefore this seems like a fitting occasion to begin a person column by the editor --- an idea we have been kicking around for a long time.

However, your editor doesn’t feel mature. Newsmen must guard against the feeling that they have arrived in professional competence.
The need for such humbleness on the part of working newsmen was well summarized by a sign that used hand above the sport desk in a Washington, D.C. newspaper. It read, “As long as you know you’re green you continue to grow, but when you’re ripe you start to get rotten.”

Columns like this one are standard features to be found in a great many newspapers these days. This trend stems in part from the tremendous readership acquired by syndicated news columns during the past generation. Success of the big columnist has caused editors to fee that a more personal touch would increase the readership of their own material.

For the past generation editors have bemoaned the fact that the readership of newspaper editorials has fallen off. In the days before movies, radio and television, frequently the best entertainment readily at hand was the writing of some old style fire-eating editor found on the editorial page of the local newspaper. Everyone read the editorials. Today editorials are read by a smaller percentage of newspaper subscribers --- sometimes referred to by editors as a “select” group.

The editor’s personal column represents an effort on the part of the editor to reach a larger general audience of readers. This was part of my reason for starting a column.

Another more important reason is the freedom and flexibility afforded by a column like this. Once can write easily in the first person about something he has read, a movie he has seen, an experience or idea he has had, all with an easy informality difficult to accomplish within the rather strict limitation of editorial style.

Selection of the name, “The Argus Observes,” is an obvious one taken from the name of the newspaper.

The name Argus comes from Greek mythology. Subsequent columns will deal with a variety of information and ideas. An early issue will tell the story of the Greek Argus.

Briefly the myth tells the story of a multi-eyed monster who was never supposed sleep so he was assigned important guard duty. But he was lulled into unconsciousness and failed at his job, much as some of today’s media.—The editor.)

Weekly updates to start by Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009

2009-09-02T22:45:00.000-07:00

Now that Oregon Quarterly has called attention to this blog, I expect to start new postings to judge continued interest. Beginning Sept. 6 I plan to post weekly one of my father's columns that focus on the character of Ontario and surroundings in the 1950s, and on the way the newspaper worked to report the news in a way that interested readers. Here and there I'll add editor's notes to include my own memories of the time, the place and the newspaper. As always, comments will be more than welcome.

Contemplating “The Next Million Years” by Charles Galton Darwin

2009-08-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: Picking up my scrapbook of Dad’s The Argus Observes columns, I quickly thumbed through for a mid-summer page in hopes of finding something current. This column, his localization of a futuristic book by the grandson of “the” Charles Darwin, struck me as something I’d never read. For the last few years, I’ve become obsessed with what could happen to the earth – and of course the quality of life – of my grandchildren over the next fifty years. And I had fooled myself into thinking the problems we face snuck up on us mostly unappreciated from a resource standpoint until the last 30 years. Not so. Here I re-present Dad’s column, written in 1953 about a book published the year before. And following that I’ll post two relevant quotations from the lone review now posted on Amazon of the book, which is now priced upwards of $200 secondhand. By coincidence, the review just was posted August 11, three days ago, by a prolific Amazon reviewer who has become fascinated with the subject you’ll find mentioned in the except. And he can point you to other books about the coming of a “ruling elite,” if you are interested.

The Argus Observes – June 29, 1953
From the Ontario Argus-Observer of that date

Are we living in the future population center of the United States?

We may be according to an idea advanced in a new book, “The Next Million Years” written by Charles Galton Darwin. The author is a grandson of Charles Darwin whose “origin of Species” published almost a century ago advanced the theory of evolution completely changing scientific concepts and disturbing the theology of our grandfathers.

Today’s Darwin thinks it will be difficult for man to survive during the next million years. Population may outrun food supplies. And man’s supply of fuel may soon become exhausted with tragic consequences because the earth’s fuel is necessary not only to cook our food and keep us warm but also to power the industry of civilization.

Darwin estimates that the world’s oil will be gone in about one hundred years and its coal in five hundred years. Even if his estimates are much too pessimistic we will eventually consume both fuels, perhaps within one thousand or two thousand years.

It is different with water power, the one fuel that abounds in this region. To quote Darwin:

“Waterpower is the only really big present source of energy that can be counted as income and not capital; it derives its energy from sunlight through the evaporation of water in the ocean and its precipitation as rain on the mountain tops.”

He writes further:

“The general picture of the economic condition of the world then is that the chief centre of power production and so of the most elaborate civilization, will be in the regions where there is water power, that is, speaking rather loosely, mountainous regions. It will be these that are the centres of manufacture, and they will exchange their manufactures for the surplus food produced in agricultural regions.”

Thus within the next few centuries this intermountain farming, ranching and forest region may become filled with “centres of manufacture” and so become the industrial heard of the United States with this nation’s “most elaborate civilization” on the western slope of the Rockies.

Don’t waste your time dreaming about an oil strike that will boom this country; rest assured a more permanent boom is coming only you won’t be here to enjoy it.

However, Darwin is pessimistic about the future of the world. He says:

“Now we are living in or perhaps at the end of the golden age, which may well prove to have been the greatest golden age of all time.”

So we should enjoy this wonderful country today. It may be richer but less pleasant for our descendents living here 500 years from now.
_____________________________________________

HERE IS A RECENT DESCRIPTION OF some of the content “The Next Million Years,” taken from the Amazon customer review authored by G. Charles Steiner of San Franciso.

(Darwin’s grandson suggests that) “because these wealthy families, generation after generation, have proven themselves "successful" because of their consistent "success" through time, they, therefore, must be of superior intelligence and ability over the rest of mankind, and, concomitantly, these families, and the individual members of these families, alone are fit to be the elite and to rule over and control the rest of the human race….

“The author concludes, presciently as well, that China will be the civilization emblematic of the future the elite are planning as it not only has endured for century after century, longer than the Roman Empire, but the very way of life in China, socially crowded and politically cowed, is a good paradigm for what the future of the entire world shall broadly look like in the 21st century with its provinces, dynasties, and collectivism spearheaded under one central head or world government owned and run by future descendants of the Darwin family and other ‘successful’ families in addition.”

(Readers can find the full review posted at the book’s page on Amazon so I won’t bother to include a link here, which would likely have to be pasted into you browser, a long process than an Amazon search.)

Boise Statesman reprises its 145 year history

2009-07-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Boise (Idaho) Statesman turned 145 on Sunday, July 26, 2009.

It's the daily newspaper I grew up reading in the late 1940s and early '50s. My father worked there as a classified ad manager after turning The Ontario Argus-Observer over to my mother in 1957.

Reporting the news in a growing Idaho city must have been a challenge many times over the years following 1864 when James Reynolds started printing the Tri-Weekly Statesman out of alog ccabin on Main Street, delivering news of the Civil War to the minors.

Long-time publisher Calvin Cobb bought the paper in 1988 and installed his son-in-law Joseph Perrault as editor.

The history published by the paper this Sunday in July notes that "Cobb brought the Idaho Statesman into the 20th century by advocating objective reporting. He signed the paper up with the Associated Press and became active in the organization nationally, eventually serving as president....

"After Cobb's death in 1928, his daughter Margaret Cobb Ailshie committed to follow his editorial policy. A socialite in Boise and Chicago, Ailshie loved the arts and advanced them in the Statesman by hiring her friend and confidant Betty Penson Ward as society editor....

"And the newspaper continued its efforts to support the growth of the community economically and intellectually. Ailshie through the newspaper advanced nearly all the money to build Bronco Stadium for then Boise Junior College. And the paper encouraged the businesses that were driving Boise's growth, including Boise-Cascade, Morrison-Knudsen, J.R. Simplot and Albertsons.

"But the 1950s also marked a troubling moment in the history of Boise and the Idaho Statesman. The newspaper's coverage of the so-called "Boys of Boise" scandal began with its Nov. 2, 1955, headline, "Three Boise Men Admit Sex Charges." Many prominent and powerful men in the community were prosecuted for homosexual activities and the Statesman's coverage was later criticized for contributing to the hysteria that ruined people's lives."

When Ailshie diedin 1959, the paper's general manager James L. Brown took over, then sold the newspaper to a Michigan-based chain, Federated Publications, in 1963.

That resulted in some changes in editorial philosophy, according to today's historical account:

" 'When we came in, the paper had become a very conservative organ in the community,' said Gene Dorsey, the first editor under Federated. 'I wanted the newspaper to not be as oriented toward conservative philosophy, to be more independent in supporting candidates for local, state and national office.'

"When the Statesman backed Frank Church for re-election, Democrats were shocked with the shift, Dorsey said.

"He also increased the size of the news staff and brought in new blood.

" 'It became a better paper under Gene,' said Ben Cross, then professor of journalism at the University of Idaho and now retired in Moscow."

For the full account of the newspaper's history carried in the July 16 issue of the Statesman, try pasting the following link into your browser:

http://www.idahostatesman.com/life/story/845515.html

Small New Hampshire chain closes – 120 fired

2009-07-12T17:10:00.000-07:00

When Harvey Hill shut down his community newspaper chain headquartered in Claremont, New Hampshire on Friday, July 10, the shock waves traveled at least 40 miles south where Howard Weiss-Tisman of the Brattleboro Reformer reported widespread concerns:

“The closing of the Eagle Times is affecting approximately 120 employees, the towns that did business with the paper and fans of journalism who are worried about the future of newspapers in America,” he said in leading his report.
The firings also set off alarms at the state Capital. Weiss-Tisman also reported that the state “sent a Department of Labor rapid response team to the Eagle Publications office in Claremont to help the workers there who lost their jobs when the company abruptly announced it would be closing Thursday.”

This chain was local and independent, thus may have been publishing the kinds of community connected newspapers that are supposed to survive in this Internet dominated environment. From a distance, this blogger can’t know what really happened.

But Weiss-Tisman and a writer for the Concord Monitor noted that the reporters who worked for the paper were devastated. And community minded residents were disappointed.

The Brattleboro report added:
“ ‘They were trying hard to make the change to have more news on the Internet, but I guess it was not enough to keep it from closing,’ said (Jim) Mullen, municipal manager for the town of Bellows Falls which was served by the chain. ‘People depend on their local newspaper to get information on town government and the question is, if newspapers go away, how will people find about their government.’

“ ‘It's always sad when a newspaper shuts down its presses,’ said Marianne Salcetti, a journalism professor at Keene State College. "The death of any newspaper leaves a gaping hole. Newspapers are the soul of any community.’

“Hill purchased the company in 1995 and the paper was one the few remaining independent newspapers in the region.”

The report quoted one employee of the papers who said Hill had been pumping his own money into the business and employees knew it was in trouble.

But they had not anticipated the news that arrived at their work stations by email on Friday, announcing their immediate termination.

More than 50 years ago this blogger’s father struggled to keep his newspaper relevant to the town of Ontario, Oregon, and for the near term he clearly succeeded. Every day he made a decision as to how much money to plow back into the effort and how much to spend on his family.

We never suffered when he decided for the paper, which according to the column, posted below and written in October 1953, was the way the decision often went.

For more, try pasting this link into your browser: http://www.reformer.com/localnews/ci_12816046

Spending ‘generously’ on pictures and staff

2009-07-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes

By Don Lynch

From The Ontario-Argus Observer issue of Oct. 5, 1953

This is one of the most overworked weeks in the year. In addition to being national pharmacy week and national fire prevention week it is national newspaper week.
This week is used each year to remind readers of the importance of public service performed by newspapers and also to remind newspapermen themselves of their responsibilities.

Here is part of a “Journalistic Creed,” voicing ideals that really are taken seriously by virtually all newspapermen (Ed.’s note, and newspaper women who reported for my father, often in key roles but obviously were unconsciously overlooked by him with some frequency):

“I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust.

“I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness, are fundamental to good journalism.

“I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true.

“I believe that suppression of news, for any consideration other than the welfare of society, is indefensible.

“I believe that no one should write as a journalist what he would not say as a gentleman, that bribery by one’s own pocketbooks is as much to be avoided as bribery the pocketbook of another; that individual responsibility may not be escaped by pleading another’s instructions or another’s dividends.

“I believe that advertising, news and editorial columns should alike serve the best interest of readers; that a single standard of helpful truth and cleanness should prevail for all; that the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service.”

The application of these ideals is more evident in the reporting of national and international news in the daily newspapers; but they do apply in much the same ways to the reporting of community news in a small town newspaper like the Argus-Observer.
I remember little violations of some of these principles that have been painfully embarrassing to me although they have probably gone unnoticed by mores readers. For instance:

Once when we had a new reporter writing the “In Other Days” column of notes from the files of former years, he picked up and retold some embarrassing crime stories long forgotten about local citizens who had since led exemplary lives.
On another occasion an eager reporter was publishing the lurid details of divorce complaints, which should be reported only in barest facts.

These were cruel, pointless stories. The person who had made a mistake and reformed should be granted the balm of public forgetfulness. Divorce items should only report the brief facts, so that the community knows the changing status of the individuals. No good is performed by broadcasting the miserable circumstances.

We spend far more time than readers might imagine just trying to handle the news with understanding and fairness for the individuals involved and at the same time with first consideration for the public interest.

Much of the responsibility of good country journalism likes in a willingness to spend generously of time and effort and money to give the public the best newspaper that can be had from the income available.

Perhaps the most difficult thing in newspaper management lies in establishing the balance tha provides the best paper possible and still retains a safe if modest margin of profit.

For instance, the Argus-Observer probably runs more pictures than any other non-daily newspaper in the Snake River Valley and more local pictures than many small dailies. This costs us the equivalent of half of one employees’ salary, quite a sizeable addition to profit if it were not spent.

But we spend generously for pictures in the belief that it makes a more interesting newspaper.

We get more than enough free handout material to fill the columns of the paper, stuff from government departments, various pressure groups and many manufacturers seeking free publicity.

Instead of using it we choose to use the community news from some 39 local reporters scattered throughout the county. They are modestly paid at best, but the total amount paid them in a year is a sizeable sum. However their report is the “meat” of the Argus-Observer which would be doing a miserable job if it ignored those communities.

We spend more than many papers for reporter time to cover the top government and public news, too, with the conviction that the product is worth the cost.
We spend freely for advertising helps (art) and services for the use of our advertisers and try to give as much attention as possible to the careful preparation of their copy.

Most important of all, everyone of the staff works hard and conscientiously.

I’m proud of our people, of their devotion to the newspaper and of the job they do.

Becoming The Ontario Argus-Observer

2009-06-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

By Larry L. Lynch
Posted at “rememberingtheargus.blogspot.com” on Father’s Day, June 21, 2009

(Reprint as you like as long as the author and the blog are both credited)

Don Lynch fidgeted in the straight-back chair facing his Royal upright and placed his wire rim glasses on a pile of copy paper to the typewriter’s right. He sat surrounded by stacks of notes, clippings and old newspapers --- saved for story ideas and background.

Lynch leaned forward, closed his eyes and used his long fingers to massage his temples. At thirty-seven, he looked almost handsome despite his slightly asymmetrical cheekbones, a carry-over from the polio he suffered as a youth. He had a full head of wavy hair, a twinkle in his eye and usually displayed a half smile that showed off his dimples.

The other desks crowded into the front office of his twice-weekly newspaper, The Ontario Argus-Observer, were vacant. Lynch had saved this quiet Saturday morning, August 30, 1952, to find the right words to explain to readers why he was starting a personal, front-page column. The simple truth was that he wanted to do it and his news editor, Hugh Gale, was still on best behavior. It would be months before Gale would begin putting the phone down on a particular country cousin correspondent and walking away while she droned on.

The name Lynch chose for the column, “The Argus Observes,” almost selected itself, given the name of his newspaper. The mythological Argus, Lynch would explain to readers, had one hundred eyes, thus its use for newspapers. What’s more, it slept with only two eyes closed. Still, the name had its shortcomings. The Greek Argus failed had failed as a bodyguard, the assignment that made it myth-worthy. Bored by a lengthy bedtime story, the monster fell totally asleep and was slain.

Lynch knew it would be a mistake to come off in his new column as overly impressed with himself, but after five years and nine months as editor and publisher, he’d grown sure of his place in town. He wanted to “write easily” about his experiences and ideas using the “informality of the first person.”

For more than five years, as I passed through high school and on to college, my father did just that, aptly commenting on life in a small western town in the 1950s.

For the previous five years, he had run his newspaper under the close guidance of a veteran partner, Bernard Mainwaring, whose large bald head and vigorous physical presence was matched by a dominating personality and equally impressive intellect. My father once observed that his older partner, who avoided alcohol, had “little understanding of the inclination of others to drink because he was two drinks ahead of the average guy all of the time.”

Mainwaring owned the daily Nampa, Idaho Free Press when my father went to work for him in 1944. The Nampa publisher found something special in the former meter-reader reborn as an ad salesman and sports writer. After two years, Mainwaring decided to stake his salesman to a half interest in a weekly newspaper, one of two then serving Ontario, Oregon, population about 4,200.

Before Mainwaring and my father purchased it, The Argus had settled into a deep slumber that hardly noted the changes going on in town. In one of his last columns, the former editor and publisher made fun of himself in print for driving through a newly installed stop light on which he’d reported the week before.

Another sign of the lack of activity occurred one weekday afternoon in the fall of 1946. While my father and Mainwaring sat for two hours in the weekly’s office haggling over the details of the purchase, the phone remained eerily silent. That silence drove Mainwaring to distraction, but it didn’t scare him off.
My mother, my brother Dennis, and I rarely saw my father during the first four months of the new operation. That was the time it took to locate and buy a small, white clapboard house on a tree-lined street of mixed homes with an ample scattering of vacant lots four blocks southwest of downtown Ontario. At first, the three of us were stuck without a car in a massively ugly and cold grey stone rental house in nearby Payette, Idaho. Our wait was only relieved on Thursday afternoon when my father drove us to Ontario to join the madhouse of publication night.

I liked the smell of the mix of old newspapers and ink that pervaded the tiny store-front newspaper plant, but I hated the racket the machinery produced late on the evening of publication day. A printer stood on a platform at the side of a huge roller atop a two-page press feeding sheets of paper into place. To produce a four-page section, the operator turned the paper over, exchanged the forms holding the pages of lead type, and sent the sheets through a second time. On each revolution the press roared as the roller spun on its axis, then groaned when it reversed directions, and roared again. When the press run was far enough along that my father fired up the folder, its sound added exponentially to the cacophony, clanging away, folding and stuffing the printed sheets into something that resembled a newspaper--- when it didn’t shred them.

This was our quality family time. Women enjoyed my father, and he returned the favor. His appeal rested mainly with his ability to flatter them by listening intently. On these evenings, however, he forgot that compulsive diversion of his. And my mother, a short, striking, dark-haired dervish put to good use the work ethic she absorbed growing up on a dairy farm near Caldwell, Idaho. On these nights our parents accomplished something together.

From the outset, The Argus’ new owners planned to convince the publisher of the town’s other weekly newspaper to sell out. Mainwaring provided the operating cash for my father to undercut ad sales for that paper, the Eastern Oregon Observer, by practically giving away ad space in The Argus. They also arranged for The Argus to be delivered to everyone in town, whether paid subscribers or not.
My father’s patience with this approach began to wear thin by spring, however. He’d learned that everyone in town seemed to read the paper even though almost no one would buy ads.

Then, as he tried to keep up the pressure on the Observer, a piece of luck presented itself in the form of an editorial mistake.

Harry Peterson, a town patriarch who ran a furniture store at the other end of Oregon Street from the old Argus plant and also operated a local funeral home. One morning as my father walked through town to make a call on Peterson, he mulled over a new problem. He’d heard that Peterson was steaming because The Argus printed the wrong time for a funeral, and people around town were calling to complain.

“Harry, I’m sorry, that was a mistake,” my father shouted as he entered the store and climbed to the top of the stairs leading to Peterson’s desk, where it overlooked the furniture displayed on the floor below. “But if this mistake is so important to our readers, how is it that we don’t have any value as an advertising medium?”

From that time on, Peterson’s furniture store advertised in The Argus. Other merchants followed his lead and began to buy paid space.

That summer, the competition with the Observer came to a head. Compared with The Argus, which traced its first publication to 1896, the Observer was an upstart. Elmo Smith, an acquaintance of my father’s from Smith’s college days in Caldwell, had started the paper late in 1936 and had made a success of it, becoming a power on the local scene. He served as Ontario’s mayor during part of World War II. But by 1946, he was ready to move on. He sold the Observer that December to Jessica Longston, who also owned the St. Helens (Oregon) Sentinel-Mist as well as a newspaper and radio station in Burley, Idaho. As part of his deal with Longston, Smith had agreed to run the Observer for a limited time. Eight months later, with the competition wearing on both papers, something had to give. Mainwaring offered Longston more money than she could make by continuing to operate The Observer, and she agreed to sell. The Ontario papers were combined into one beginning in September 1947. Elmo Smith soon bought another paper in John Day, Oregon and began a career in state politics.

Through the decade my father operated the Argus-Observer, his biggest business headaches involved how to keep a back shop purring with country printers and unreliable equipment. Press breakdowns were commonplace, even after a refurbished, high-speed eight-page press was installed in a new building. The turnover among printers was even more maddening. They’d walk in the door looking for work, be assigned a stone-slab work table for assembling type, turn out a few weeks of decent ads and printing jobs, then collect their checks and disappear.

And yet the worst problem my father ran into with a printer was quite the opposite.

Before the end of this printer’s first week, the back shop foreman discovered he had to position the new guy at a make-up bench far away from every other employee and especially far away from a particularly cranky linotype operator. The guy smelled so foully of drink and bodily filth that no one could stand to work close to him. This printer required cash for his work on a daily basis. If he was paid weekly, he’d be broke within a day or two. Even so, the foreman wanted to keep him on the job until someone who could replace him walked in the door.

It didn’t work out that way. My father’s patience ran out when the printer missed a day of work but didn’t realize that he hadn’t shown up. He disrupted the entire office with his insistence that he receive the money for two days when he had only worked one.

The odiferous printer came from Yakima, Washington, so my father bought him a ticket for home, packed him a lunch, took him to the bus station, handed the ticket to the driver, and watched the bus pull out with him aboard.
He then called the printer’s wife to tell her that her husband was on his way: “She wailed, ‘Why did you have to send him home?’ She thought she’d gotten rid of him for good.”

At the end of 1952, Mainwaring sold his interest in the Argus-Observer to my parents to help finance his purchase of the Salem, Oregon Capital Journal. My father used “The Argus Observes” column of February 5, 1953 to pay tribute to the man he described as “at least a near genius as a newspaper publisher (and) the nearest thing to a genius of any one I have ever known.”

He noted that Mainwaring impressed people by acquiring a depth of information along specific lines and using it freely in conversation. He never smoked, never drank, and during the war went “careening all over Nampa on a bike, pell mell like a 25-year-old kid....I have seen him take a highball to avoid awkward explanation and then pour it down a sink or set it aside at the first opportunity. However a stranger at a cocktail party might think him the life of the party because his animated voice can be heard above the hubbub of others.”

My father believed in the value of child labor. I began working at The Argus when I was eleven, hauling bundles of freshly inked newspapers to the bus depot, drug stores and coffee shops, and riding my bike to small neighborhood groceries. Downtown I usually covered on foot. I gathered up an order or two and headed out of the back door of the plant, past a one-room cement jail that sat behind city hall. Occasionally, I stopped to jaw with a drunk still stuck inside come late afternoon. By the time I was in junior high, I picked up an extra dollar now and then by making cigarette runs for the guys drying out in the old jail. One day a printer saw me making the exchange, and reported it to my father, who put a stop to the arrangement.

By 1952, my father had fallen in love with the news side and would have been overjoyed to devote himself to it full time. But he knew that the business depended on him to sell the ads that brought in the money that made the newspaper financially viable.

Meanwhile, self-proclaimed news editors frequently walked in the front door without notice to inquire about a job. If one didn’t drop in at the right time, they were easy to procure through a help wanted ad in the industry bible, Editor and Publisher.

The turnover at the editor’s desk came to an end for three years during the summer of 1952. My father hired Hugh Gale, a veteran reporter, as news editor. Gale provided the time my father needed to begin his front-page column. And Gale provided me, at an impressionable age, with an intriguing example of what a newspaperman could be like.

To function well as a country editor, my father reluctantly conceded, it was necessary to have not only a little flair but also to be self assured enough to go your own way, despite what some of the townsfolk might say or think of you. Hugh was maybe the most independent --- certainly the most addicted to hanging out in the local bars --- of those who came along. He also possessed the ability, perhaps too rarely used, to charm most anyone with a gruff compliment. He was a pudgy, gnome-like man with a bushy shock of light, grey-streaked hair hanging over a florid face.

When he was going good, he sat hunched over his typewriter at his desk facing a long window looking into the back shop, using the nicotine-stained middle and index fingers of both hands to pound out stories.

Hugh kept his distance from the society editor at one end of his row of desks and from the two women behind him, the bookkeeper and circulation manager who took care of the front counter. But that didn’t stop the women from taking an interest in him. They learned that he was married but had left his wife in Washington, and they began to ask him repeatedly when his wife would arrive.

“My wife is a very, very large woman,” he said. “I doubt that anyone here is going to welcome her.”

When his wife walked into the office for the first time some months later, she proved to be petite and beautiful. Or, as my father used to say, “I’m really not sure how a guy who looks like Hugh and drinks like a fish ever got such an attractive woman to live with him.”

At the time he was hired, Hugh was warned “that sometimes the news was sparse and it took hard digging to get out an interesting paper,” my father wrote in a January 5, 1953 column.

“After a few weeks, he asked what I meant by dullness… The news seemed plenty active enough for him. In his first month… a man burned to death in a trailer house fire, there was a Grade A public row over the failure of the school board to rehire two teachers, the Malheur River flooded and then the Owyhee really flooded --- all on top of an active situation in school district, city and county news and plus the regular flow of the news.

“But in the in the dog days between the Fourth of July and the county fair he found out what I had been talking about. He almost walked a hole in the tile on the office floor trying to dream up stories good enough for the top front page positions.”

As time wore on --- and this was obviously related to why his wife took some time to follow him --- Hugh’s lifestyle began to impinge on his productivity.

“He is always late,” my father complained as summer turned to fall in 1954. Years later, in one of a series of pieces he wrote as part of an effort to syndicate a column about being a country editor, my father recounted the workplace sins of an anonymous “reporter we had once’’ --- who might have been easily identified by readers in Ontario:

“The talented but unstrung reporter came to work so late so often that finally I had to tell him, if he was ever late again I’d expect him to just ask for his check without waiting to be fired.

“After that, when he was out very late at night, he’d park his car in front of the office before he went home. About 9:30 the next morning, he’d come running in the back door with his hands full of notes, as if he’d been on an early morning news assignment at the city hall. He’d rush up to his desk and begin typing furiously, never looking up.

“It was easy to tell that he hadn’t been awake 15 minutes. However, even though he was an hour late, it was earlier than he’d been coming to work. So I let him think he was fooling me.”

Earlier, my father had played a different tune on his typewriter keys when Hugh actually moved on July 21,1955 to run his own newspaper in Kirkland, Washington.

Opening his column with the admission that he hated to see his editor leave “more than I had thought I would,” my father noted that Gale had “worked at the news with the abandon of a volunteer fireman. He was forever getting up at daylight to photograph the blowing of a gas well strike, or flying off to Jordan Valley to a cattlemen’s convention, or taking a rangeland tour to study the problems of range management. He took jaunts of this kind almost every week, generally on his own time.

“And he got around. He lived with the men in the street and the farmers in the fields. He made it his business to know what was going on in the community, what the average citizen was thinking. There is no substitute for this intense interest in society and not many news men have the quality in the degree possessed by Hugh Gale.”

After Hugh’s departure, my father put his column on hold. But he revived it in early 1956, and the timing of its return was less than accidental. A subject presented itself that my father badly wanted to write about --- the rise of his old acquaintance Elmo Smith to the job of governor. On January 31, of that year Oregon Gov. Paul Patterson died of a heart attack. As president of the State Senate, Smith succeeded him.

Less than a month later, my parents visited Eugene for a social event with the Smiths. Returning home, my father published a column describing how “the governor took off his coat and shoes, loosened his tie, flopped on my hotel room bed in Eugene. He looked beat from his first 17 days as governor of Oregon.”

Some of Smith’s friends in the Ontario area were concerned that the man they knew as Elmo would change under the pressures of his new job.

My father suggested they “needn’t worry.” At an evening cocktail party with old friends, Smith had “trotted around the lobby with his hands jammed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward, his coattails flying, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and one hand periodically raising in that ‘hi’ salute, a mannerism that is uniquely his. He looked almost exactly like he did peddling ads on Oregon street ten years ago.”

During the following months, my father threw every ounce of editorial support he could justify, and some he couldn’t, into helping his friend win election to the governor’ post that November. But it wasn’t to be. Smith lost to the Democrat, Bob Holmes, a radio station manager from Astoria.

My father never admitted as much to me, but knowing the restlessness that was brewing in his soul, I’m almost certain he hoped that a Smith victory would mean a job for him in the new administration in Salem, a chance to get away from the newspaper --- and from family demands --- a least for a while.

The next May while I was off at college and my brother was in high school, he announced that he had turned the publisher’s job over to our mother so he could take a position helping to manage classified ad sales at The Statesman newspaper in Boise, Idaho, 65 miles to the east.

“This change was only possible,” he wrote in his May 23, 1957, column, “because Mrs. Lynch was willing to assume the rather demanding job of being editor and publisher of The Argus-Observer….

“In this particular case the wife is better qualified to manage the newspaper than she realizes. She has been closest to its problems for a long time, and has worked at all of the tasks required --- reporting, advertising and accounting. This is a broader background than my own because I couldn’t do the accounting.”

Time proved my father correct about my mother’s publishing skills. She whipped the staff into the kind of shape that increased profits year over year until 1963 when she decided to sell because neither one of her sons was interested in returning to Ontario to help her out.

My parents divorced and my father went on to a long career as a newspaper business manager, editor and writer. But he never again found work that was quite as satisfying. Late in life, he tried to develop a book out of his columns for the Ontario newspaper, but he couldn’t make it work. “All that old newspaper stuff and Ontario stuff as I wrote it in the rough draft would never be read today,” he concluded in a letter to me, written May 10, 1995 at the age of eighty. He then willed me his papers in the hope that I could re-direct the material “to the interests of today’s audiences.”

And in a draft introduction to the book he would have liked to write, he summed up his experience quite simply yet eloquently:

“A half century ago we had outlived our time mechanically. We were still using the same method of inking a raised impression and pressing paper against it that Gutenberg had worked out 500 years earlier. We were still printing with stinking-hot melted lead, clanking linotypes, and noisy presses. Even so we still had a sort of built-in community influence that is now as out of date as a horse and buggy. It was 45 years ago when I got in on the final years of that ancient world. I was one of the last of the old-fashioned country editors. What a privileged way to start a lifetime of journalism.”

Some changes are coming at Remembering the Argus

2009-06-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

The disappearance of newspapers is so thoroughly documented on a plethora of Web sites that I’m not going to be posting a lot here. In fact, what I have coming soon is a “factual” historical essay about my father’s tenure at The Ontario Argus Observer.
When that shows up I’ll be trimming the posts at this web site to columns written by my father with some editorial observations about that time, and now those columns figure in my book, “Farewell Bend.” Later on as time and my interests permit, I’ll be adding new columns – mostly from the months of the years that correspond to current time – but go back some 55 years.
If by chance you want to read the book and haven’t yet done so, some 98 percent of it is still posted at “FarewellBendtheNovel.” Follow the link on this page and scroll backwards through the months to the first post. After all you should have to do a little something to download the book for free. (Simply use the copy function in your browser. You shouldn’t have to go to too much trouble to clean them up. Maybe put in some paragraph breaks. And remember to number the chapters in the name of the files as you download them.)

The questions multiply as print newspapers struggle to survive

2009-05-23T18:07:00.001-07:00

This week reports from across the country gave us more reason to worry about community papers, and some reason to hope.

The worry comes from a Pew Research Center report that theorizes Craigslist is killing off newspaper classified sections. There’s no doubt that large papers are losing classified ads as the use of Craigslist grows and encourages local use. I recently considered selling and/or buying a bicycle in the San Luis Obispo area and where did I look first --- Craigslist. My assumption was that it would be a more complete listing of what’s out there and without checking against the local daily, I suspect I was correct.

If you want to look at the Pew study and follow the debate, which is quite heated with many Craigslist defenders, go to the Pew web site at:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10247668-93.html

But this discouraging news did not keep a small, local chain of newspapers from expanding in the Bremerton, WA area.Here’s what the paper had to say about its new venture, which involves both print --- distributed free – and a web site:

“Beginning Thursday, the Kitsap Sun is launching the newest member of its Life family of community newspapers. Bremerton Life will debut as a monthly community newspaper, and will be direct-mailed free to 18,000 single-family residences in Manette, East Bremerton and waterfront homes in the West Bremerton, Kitsap Lake and Chico Way areas. Select business locations in the downtown area also will serve as points of distribution.
“Kitsap Sun former features editor and marketing director Deb Smith has been named contributing editor of the new publication and will write stories and shoot photos for the paper and its companion Web site, www.bremerton-life.com”

But my favorite story of the week was one that confirms my bias against community newspapers that are part of large chains. I just assume these corporate efforts have lost touch with their communities and hired young reporters who have little experience and aren’t inclined to stay around. Maybe I’m wrong but here’s the full story of one death of some local papers in Minnesota.

I hope the Bob Shaw, the writer for the Pioneer Press which published this story, will consider the full publication of much of his story a compliment. You need it all to get the flavor.
The headline reads: “In the east metro, tough times threaten small newspapers”

He starts by noting that:

” Bankruptcy has been declared by the company that owns the four-day-a-week Stillwater Gazette and other metro newspapers, and the papers are up for sale. The company shut down a weekly newspaper in Inver Grove Heights in February.
“Early this month, weekly newspapers were axed in Stillwater and Lake Elmo.”
The Lake Elmo Mayor complained, according to Shaw’s report, that “Lake Elmo Mayor Dean Johnston. He said the town doesn't have a natural gathering place such as a high school or a business district, so the newspaper, the Lake Elmo Leader, helped define the city.”
And Yvonne Klinnert, who had been editor of the Leader, noted that closing the paper down was “the most difficult thing I have ever done in my career.”
One of the other reporters said the laid off employees, numbering seven, were mostly given no notice and three days severance.

Added Shaw: “The next day, Klinnert had to deliver the bundles of the final edition herself.
" ‘I am the only employee at this point," she said.”
I guess in her case I’d make an exception. She’s no doubt something more than a two-year wonder. But you have to worry about the small town newspaper chain owners that are making these decisions.
These were not the leading papers in their towns.
Shaw went on to explain:
“The papers were owned by RiverTown Newspapers, a division of Fargo, N.D.-based Forum Communications, which owns daily and weekly newspapers across the Upper Midwest.
“ 'It Takes Revenue' / RiverTown director Steve Messick said it was painful to close the Lake Elmo and Stillwater papers.
“ ‘It's a sign of the times," he said. “Stillwater did an excellent job. But it takes revenue.’
“The Leader was started six years ago. The Courier was founded in 1988, and RiverTown bought it in 2005.
“ Messick said the newspapers couldn't compete with longer-established newspapers — including the Stillwater Gazette and the Oakdale/Lake Elmo Review.”
Even the chains that own the long-established papers are having trouble, however.
Noted Shaw:
“The (Stillwater) Gazette is owned by American Community Newspapers, which declared bankruptcy in April. When asked about consequences of the bankruptcy, spokesman Joe LoBello said there will be "no impact on day-to-day operations." But LoBello said the newspapers will be auctioned off by the end of the month.”
For more of the story go soon to:
http://www.twincities.com/ci_12399128?nclick_check=1

The new and (maybe) prospering community newspapers

2009-05-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in this country almost every day a publisher, editor or writer for a community newspaper tells us they are doing well in the face of the meltdown of the big corporate dailies.

Tracking this for some months, I've concluded that may be true in small communities where the publisher and the editor and the writer are living in the town and invested there.

Corporate chains of weeklies and small dailies aren't having the same success, I sense, because they are too removed from the communities. Their local hires may stay around for a couple of years but aren't there to stay. It shows in the product and in the bottom line.

That's just a superficial judgment based on what I've seen at a glance. If there proves to be any reader interest, I'll take a harder look at this in coming weeks.

For now I would like to point you to a pair of columns in publications that call themselves local newspapers but have the appearance of on-line local papers. I can't be sure because I'm not there to check it out.

Here are the links to their websites and in each case a column about this issue. You may have to paste them into your browser to get there.

First from the publication serving Opelika and Auburn, Alabama:

http://www.oanow.com/oan/news/opinion/paul_davis/article/paul_davis_community_newspapers_still_doing_well/73040/

And second from a publication serving the reaches of agricultural land and communities along I-5 from Justine to Santa Nella in California:

http://www.westsideconnect.com/content/view/2358/112/

Finishing Farewell Bend -- then what?

2009-05-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

I'm planning now to post at least a chapter a week at my blog Farewell Bend the Novel until I run out of chapters. Which is not that many weeks away. Andd then what?

I'd like to find some useful and less than cliche way to write about what is happening to newspapers. And, as a result, to those of us still alive who love them. But I'm not sure right now how to approach the subject in a way that will contribute to the discussion. I've a few weeks to see what I can come up with.

Celebrating Larry Horyna’s life on April 25, 2009

2009-04-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Here’s his story as published in the Park Record, Park City Utah, on April 17, 2009:

Larry Leroy Horyna, longtime resident of Park City, passed away unexpectedly in Goodyear, Ariz., on April 7, 2009, due to heart failure. Larry was a wonderful father, husband and grandpa, and an outstanding professional, mentor and true friend to many people. If you knew Larry, you shared his wisdom, sense of humor and sensitivity toward others.

During the last three-and-a-half months of his life, Larry and his wife, Pat Brogan, were enjoying life to the fullest, living in Goodyear, Ariz., at Pebble Creek with his "tribe" of Oregon Duck friends. Larry was golfing, attending baseball games, swimming, entertaining many friends, taking road trips, cooking and having a glass or two of red wine at the end of each day.

Larry was born in Ontario, Ore., on January 28, 1938, to Stanley and Margaret Horyna, who preceded him in death, along with his younger brother, Richard. His sister, Joan Wright, resides in Ontario, Ore. Larry has two sons, Timothy David (Julie) of Salt Lake City, and Matthew James (Tiffany) of Park City. Larry's brightest stars were his two granddaughters, Arianna and Amaia.

Larry and Pat met in 1953 at a May Day Festival in Payette, Idaho. After graduating from Ontario High School in 1956, Larry joined the U.S. Air Force. He played football at the University of Oregon from 1960 to1964. Upon graduation, he married Pat on May 30, 1964, in Eugene, Ore. In 1968 Larry earned a MS degree from Central Michigan and in 1970 he returned to the University of Oregon as the Regional Center Director of Community Education. He and his family moved to Park City in 1985, and he worked as an administrator with the Utah State Office of Education until his retirement in 2000.

A celebration of Larry's life will be held at Park City's St. Mary's Catholic Church on Hwy 224 on Saturday, April 25, at 2 p.m., followed by a wake at the Elk's Club on Main Street from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Attendees are requested to wear a golf shirt and be prepared to shout, "Go Ducks!"
P.S. Our only regret is that it did not happen on the 18th hole looking at a birdie putt.

In lieu of flowers, please send a contribution in the name of Larry Horyna to the charity of your choice, or to the University of Oregon, Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, 2727 Leo Harris Parkway, Eugene, OR 97401

Editor’s note: There has been some suggestion by members of Larry’s class of 1956 at Ontario High School that we post stories of his life in new blog, probably titled “Tiger Tracks” after the newsletter he used to help us keep in touch. We could then use that blog as a way for the class to stay in touch, posting comments and pictures. If that is something readers and classmates would like to do, send your stories to the email address of this blog, t.c.lessons@gmail.com. I’ll set up the blog when I receive enough material and let classmates and contributors know when we get it going.

Horyna memorial service planned

2009-04-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

Verl Doman, a classmate in the Ontario High School class of 1956, on Thursday, April 9, provided this information about Horyna’s death and plans for a memorial celebration:

“I have just finished talking to Pat and she asked me to convey to all of you her great appreciation for all of your thoughts and prayers. She asked me to tell you that Larry was enjoying life to the fullest, having spent the last three months in Arizona, golfing, watching baseball, golfing, relaxing and golfing. He was taken by a sudden massive heart attack and though there were continuous efforts at resuscitation both by the paramedics and at the hospital, he never responded. She said that there could have been no better circumstance, except she would have preferred it much later, for him to go, as he was in the height of his glory these last few months. She said that she was grateful that his passing precluded any suffering or lingering illness, and as we all continue to age will all agree that is a great blessing.

“He wanted to donate his skin, which he has done, and thus will be cremated prior to being brought back to their Park City home. Pat expects that it will take some time to get him home and that a celebration of his marvelous life is tentatively planned for April 25th in the Park City Elks Lodge. More details will be made available leading up to that event. He will be interred at the VA Cemetery in Salt Lake City.”

Friends and former associates of Horyna who might stumble upon this page and want to reach his family can email us at t.c.lessons@gmail.com and we’ll try to put them in touch.

Tribute to Larry Horyna who died this fourth month of 2009

2009-04-09T17:58:00.000-07:00

The last time I talked to Larry Horyna he told me how proud he was of his football efforts on the University of Oregon team. I was surprised because I hadn’t followed his career then. When I ran into him in the library when we were both students there, he starting out on a football scholarship after the Army and I about to finish up my senior year, he said he was focusing on his school work. Football was just a way to a degree. He must have changed his view over the years while I was off trying to get started as a newspaper reporter.

Anyway, I do know that he carved out an exceptional career as an educator in Oregon, spending some of his huge energy on helping youngsters who were coming from tough backgrounds – maybe because he worked his way up in life the hard way though he never talked about that, at least to me.

My father in his later years, when we talked about the Ontario newspaper and my dad’s years there, frequently mentioned how much he was impressed by Horyna’s strength and leadership as a young man. (Frankly, playing across from him as a second string center, I was often impressed by his strength but I can’t say I liked it.)

Anyway, I sometimes go back to the following editorial my father crafted after our sad 9-8 loss to Vale in our senior football year in high school. Larry was a bulwark of that team and probably felt the loss as hard as anyone, though I know over his life he maintained friendships with many of the Vale players who whipped our team.

But enough of that: Here’s what my dad wrote after that Vale game:
His editorial, titled “These Were Our Boys,” included this passage with its tribute to Horyna’s appetite for watermelon:

“It was hard to hold back the tears driving home from Vale that night. That was partly because we knew from experience the nobility of these kids in defeat as well as their grandeur in victory.

“You see, they played knothole baseball for us five or six years ago. And they really learned how to take it. They were under-age, playing with a league of older kids in order to fill out the league schedules for summer play. If we ever won a game that summer, it has long since been forgotten.

“We couldn’t help but wonder if we hadn’t given some of these youngsters such adequate early training the philosophical acceptance of reverses on the playing field, if the result might not have been different at Vale on the critical evening this November. No bunch of kids ever wanted more to win a ball game. We know because we’ve listened to them work on it conversationally for the past nine years.

“For all that, we wouldn’t trade away that summer. What a sight it was to watch the Doman kids come in to town, covered with the dust of a day’s work in the field, and then take on an evening’s work on the playing field. And Larry Horyna, crouched behind the bat, whipped the gang in those days to higher performance, just as he has in recent years.

“Another sight we’ll never forget. Horyna eating watermelon --- seeds and all --- at the kids’ picnic in our backyard. That Larry could go through more watermelon in less time than any kid we’ve ever seen.”

Coming soon -- A trip to Baker City

2009-03-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

Jack takes a trip north to Baker City to visit his friend Pete, who is working hard selling ads and taking photos for the Baker City Herald. That's in Chapter 17 of Farewell Bend the novel, to be posted next at the blog.

Get the true story

2009-02-24T19:48:00.000-08:00

If you want to know the real life story behind Chapter 10, now posted at "FarewellBendtheNovel" go to my oldest blog, where you'll find it in detail. That's T.C.Lessons. You'll find the link alongside here at "RememberingTheArgus."

Sorry for the delay

2009-02-23T20:08:00.000-08:00

It's clear that my other activities are keeping me from posting chapters of Farewell Bend the novel as promised. I hope to soon begin to cath up --- Larry L. Lynch, 2-23-09.

What was Minidoka?

2009-02-14T12:22:00.000-08:00

Since I began preparing my “fictional memoir” for publication 18 months ago, the National Parks Service has significantly improved the information and photos about Minidoka Internment at the national monument’s website. Minidoka was the place many of my classmates in real life were taken after being scooped up from their homes in Western Oregon and Washington at the beginning of World War II. Some of their experiences coming from Minidoka to live in Ontario are dealt with at some length in the novel. But much more information about the entire experience they and their parents went through is available on the web. One place to start, if you are interested, as at the Minidoka National Monument website: http://www.nps.gov/archive/miin/home.htm

(Copy and paste the link into your browser to get there.)

To read about classmates from Minidoka follow the Farewell Bend the Novel link on this page. For this chapter, I’ve inserted line spaces between paragraphs because those are longer than elsewhere in the novel. – Larry L. Lynch

Readers will have to do a little work

2009-02-13T11:53:00.000-08:00

Making things easy for readers is the job of a good editor. But I want to get Farewell Bend the novel posted at the blog by that name without a lot of work. I should be able to keep up posting a new chapter each day until the end. To do so, I am dropping the job of inserting a line space between paragraphs. Short lines will be your guide. This should enable me to post a new chapter every day. -- Larry L. Lynch

All right, I've been among the missing

2009-02-10T15:16:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I posted any chapters of Farewell Bend the Novel at the blog by that name. Now I'm going to try to make up for the absence by posting a chapter a day. That should get us through to the end in short order.

-- Larry L. Lynch (Not to be mistaken for Jack Kavanagh, the fictional narrator of his fictional memoir.)

To read the first five chapters go to farewellbendthenovel.blogspot.com or simply click on the title to this post.

Imagining the town and the Argus as my father thought of them

2008-12-28T17:33:00.000-08:00

None of the new characters in Chapter 5 of Farewell Bend had real life counterparts. But my memories and others that my father shared with me when we talked about what happened in our small Western town inspired the action in this account.

To read the chapter at the blog, double click the title of this posting when looking at the actual RememberingtheArgus blog.

Only the weed patch is gone

2008-12-21T17:23:00.000-08:00

The setting for the duck hunting adventures in Chapter 4 remains much the same except for the undeveloped plot of land that’s described as the author’s hunting ground. The last time the author visited the site that area had been turned into row crop land. But the large pipe carrying irrigation water across the Malheur River at this spot remains in used. It’s up to the reader to decide how much of this day’s adventure actually happened. Much of it, as I recall. But then we’re dealing with an old man’s memories here.
--- To go to the chapter at Farewell Bend the Novel double click on the headline to this item.

At the time I thought it was blasphemy

2008-12-15T06:37:00.000-08:00

The words that open this chapter, which sounded so startling to the author when he was 17 and riding on the bus to what he viewed as the ultimate Ontario-Vale game, now seem a bit common. I’m more familiar what might come from the mouth of a teenager whose angry that he’s not getting any playing time in football, soccer, basketball or baseball --- the sport the grandkids play. I hear the gossip about their teams. I know the way kids think from the perspective of a lifetime of getting used to the human condition. But in the fall of 1955 when I heard them from another player, not especially a close friend, they shocked me enough that I have never forgotten them. From the time my classmates and I attended junior high in Ontario we planned and plotted how we were going to win our football games against Vale. This chapter does not exaggerate the significance of that game to the town folks. And those kinds of high school football rivalries continue to this day in many small towns. For Ontario kids, the town that goes by the fictional name of Farewell Bend in the novel, the Vale game now means less. It’s not even a conference game. Actually that was changed not long after my class graduated.

At a more personal level, this chapter begins to develop the relationship between the narrator and his best friend, who is based on number of good friends from that time. But the thing I always tell readers when they ask about Peter Sanger is that he is more another side of me than any one friend from those years. The events the two characters get involved with may or may not have happened in real life, but the dialogue between the two is mostly a meditation with myself.

To read Chapter 3 go to the blog Farewell Bend the Novel using the link at the right.

More truth than fiction in latest installment

2008-12-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

Chapter Two, which introduces both the family and the newspaper,contains a lot more truth than fiction. The dialogue and up front action is fictional, of course,but much of it is based on events I remember but couldn’t duplicate more than fifty years later. The Farley Hotel, as anyone who read the prologue knows, was a very real place. The story of the arrests there is based on a true account of such a raid, though it occurred in that early 50's time frame but a different year than the fall of 1954. The family relationships, as most readers would guess, are pretty close to those tensions in the family in which the author was raised.

To link to Chapter 2 click on the headline to this blog item or follow the link at the right to Farewell Bend the novel.

Chapter 1 is a look back based on three trips to Ontario

2008-11-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

This chapter is a fictionalization of three trips I made to Ontario, Oregon over the last decade or so. Two were for reunions of the Ontario High School Class of 1956, which is of course the model for many of the events and characters in the book. But as much fact as there is in the story, it is fiction. The characters are a blend of people as I remember some of them and thus become, in truth, figments of my imagination. Readers are supposed to realize that the narrator is looking back on life from advancing old age, putting his memories in place and trying to make peace with the present and the past --- which is what I would think we all do at high school reunions, as we wonder about who will be next to cross over.

To go to Chapter 1, click on the title of this entry in the actual “rememberingtheargus” blog. Or follow the link at the side to FarewellBendtheNovel.

Here's a chance to read the full book --- FREE

2008-11-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

Over the next four or five months, each of the chapters of Farewell Bend will be posted in sequence at "farewellbendthenovel" to expose the book to as many readers as possible. In the end, I may or may not put up a single post of the full book, or more likely, arrange individual chapters from front to back in separate posts. My hope of course is that those readers who follow the book on line will want a copy for their personal libraries.

As an added incentive to read each new chapter as it goes up weekly, I plan to post here at RememberingTheArgus some background to the story. I’ll talk about how and why I settled on that part of the novel. I’ll probably not identify very many of the real life models for the characters, but I will try to talk a bit about what I think is going on in the mind of the narrator as the story progresses. That could be a bit revealing. We’ll see.

To read the latest chapter, click on the headline at this blog.

Fund raising efforts were to begin for injured Nyssa football player Louie Vandrell Jr.

2008-10-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

Louis Vandrell Jr., a Nyssa freshman football player injured Oct. 5, 1953 in a football game with Vale was reported improving in a Boise hospital, where he was taken with a spinal injury.
The Oct. 15, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer quoted Nyssa schools Supt. Henry Hartley that the swelling had been reduced and “there was less paralysis.”

Meanwhile students and civic groups across the county began a fundraising effort to pay for Vandrell’s treatment. Wayne Chestnut of Nyssa, co-chairman of the fund-raising effort, said Vale students were particularly generous in their donations to the Vandrell fund, contributing $861.

The Argus Observes – Welcoming a fourth semi-weekly newspaper in the state. But it isn’t for the money

2008-10-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

From the Oct. 19, 1953 edition of the Ontario Argus-Observer

By Don Lynch

The Argus-Observer, along with Oregon’s two other semi-weeklies, is to have a distinguished companion.

The Hillsboro Argus has announced that it will publish semi-weekly beginning the first of November.

As Oregon’s most outstanding weekly newspaper, it will bring prestige to the semi-weekly field. Through the years, semi-weeklies have been considered a sort of hybrid operation, a cross between a weekly and a daily that many publishers have considered impractical. . . .

The Sentinel-Mist at St. Helens was the first of Oregon’s present twice-a-week newspapers. Jessica Longston and Robert Pollock who came to the Eastern Oregon Observer in Ontario from the Sentinel-Mist were apparently well sold on the semi-weekly operation. They soon converted the Observer to semi-weekly and the Argus converted some five months later in order to compete better with the Observer. Actually neither of the papers was large enough to support semi-weekly operation.

During the competing operation the Argus was losing several hundred dollars a month. I just naturally assumed from its larger volume of business that the Observer was making money, but discovered after they were consolidated that it too had been losing money. . . .

Two or three years later the Lebanon Express changed from weekly to semi-weekly publication . . . .

The Hillsboro Argus serves about twice as large a region as we have in Ontario. Although the town is only slightly larger, the rural area is densely populated and the Argus has nearly twice the circulation of the Argus-Observer. . . .

Semi-weekly publishers are almost uniform in their opinion that they make no more profit from two papers than they would from one. I feel sure this is true of Oregon’s semi-weeklies. . . .

It is in the news that the service really is improved. I think that a good semi-weekly often does a better news job and almost as timely as the smallest of the dailies. It is here that the semi-weekly really has its strength.

Ontario is a minimum town for semi-weekly publication. At times we have feared it would not sustain a high enough level of business to maintain the semi-weekly expense. Actually, it if could be weekly for the first three months of the year and semi-weekly for the balance of the year, it would fit the flow of business to support it.

(Editor’s Note: An Internet search suggests the Ontario Argus-Observer may be the only one of these newspapers that survived to become a small, six-day-a-week daily. The Hillsborough Argus web pages, which are combined at the OregonLive.com web site with the Portland Oregonian, suggest that newspaper may have survived as a strange semi-weekly. The Hillsborough paper’s news stories are posted at the Oregon Live site only on Thursday and Friday. As for the other 1950-era semi-weeklies in Oregon, the Lebanon Express has apparently reverted to weekly publication from the issue dates listed on its web site. And the St. Helens Sentinel Mist has no web site, though it is still listed on the web by its address. These outcomes fifty-five years later were no doubt influenced by urbanization patterns and competition from nearby dailies. They show that, in the community newspaper business, as in many other fields, what seems to be true one decade may not be true a decade or two later. – Larry Lynch)

Chapter 2 -- How Dad treated the Farley Hotel in his small town paper

2008-10-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

District Attorney Plans
Abatement of Houses
Abatement proceedings will be instituted against Farewell Bend’s houses of prostitution, District Attorney E. Otis Smith said this morning.
“I’m going to do all I can to abate these places,” he said. “I want to close them up. The girls may be out of town by now, and I don’t know what effect that will have on the evidence. But I think we’ve got good evidence.”
This official reaction followed raids early Friday evening on Farewell Bend’s historic bawdy house, the Farley hotel, and the Snake River Hotel on the East Side.
The raids were conducted by Sheriff John Elfering with the assistance of Farewell Bend city police who helped in booking the girls and the operators of the establishments.
Two special investigators from Portland were brought to Malheur County by Sheriff Elfering to obtain the actual evidence for the arrests. They were officers from the force of Terry Schrunk, sheriff of Multnomah County.
Posing as hunters, they entered the hotels and secured the evidence needed, then made the arrests for the Malheur sheriff’s office.
Helen Guyer, proprietor of the Farley hotel, was charged with “keeping a bawdy house,” as was Sue Morgan, operator of the East Side establishment.
The maid at the Farley was also arrested and charged with vagrancy. Five girls from the Snake River Hotel, allegedly prostitutes, were arrested on a charge of vagrancy. The girls were booked on “Jane Doe” warrants and did not themselves appear in court.
The two proprietors posted $150 bail each and the girls posted $100 bail each, for a total of $900 of bail money posted in the justice court of Judge Thos. Jones.
Mayor Frank Popper said this morning that he was “shocked” to learn that houses of prostitution have been operating in Farewell Bend. He went on to add that prostitution has been a recurrent problem.
His reaction sketched the nature of the task that faces District Attorney Smith. Farewell Bend was widely known as a center of prostitution before World War II. During the war the illicit industry was closed for a time. In the decade since the war, there has been intermittent operation except for one year when organized, commercial prostitution was stamped out by abatement proceedings.
Such proceedings are brought against the property instead of individuals, making it possible to padlock the property, taking it out of use for a year.
In former years, this has been the only effective method of restricting prostitution here.
–—From The Argus-Observer Oct. 17, 1954

“You didn’t tell me about closing down the Farley,” I yelled from the couch where I was reading that day’s issue of The Argus-Observer. I spoke as my father headed out the door for his usual Monday night turn at the office, preparing fresh layouts to take to the street on Tuesday to sell for Thursday’s publication.
Dad would not want to talk about the Farley Hotel with my mother listening, but I wanted to see how he would respond.
The bounce in his step slowed for a moment as he turned his rounded shoulders in my direction and made his dark brown eyes look vague behind rimless glasses.
I did not understand why women liked him as much as they did. He could be a great listener, but his looks were ordinary middle-aged except that his right cheek was slimmer than the left, from a bout of polio he had as a child. He’d been skinny as a young man and now carried what he called a “small tire” around his middle. His best feature was a full head of black wavy hair that, at forty, was lightly sprinkled with grey.
From a half-open front door, with the cold night air rushing in, he stared over my head.
“Not now, Jack,” he said. “Have you checked the stoker to be sure there’s enough coal? It’s getting real cold these nights.” He tried to smile, though it came out looking like a grimace.
“You really ought to be doing the dishes. You can read about the Farley later,” he said.
“How late are you going to be, James?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.
“The usual. Nine or nine-thirty.”
Dad quickly closed the door, slamming it to get on his way.
I rolled off the couch and groaned. My brother, Kevin, was in his room downstairs. He said he was studying. I was puzzled by how much time he spent studying. I couldn’t remember that I’d had much homework in seventh grade. I didn’t know then that Kevin was paying close attention to our parent’s debating my chances of getting into Stanford with my lackluster grades. He was making sure he avoided that problem, and from the vantage of fifty years later, it’s clear that he succeeded.
I wandered into the kitchen. My mother was still wearing a black skirt and ruffled white blouse from her Soroptimist meeting that afternoon, but she’d slipped a slightly spattered pink apron over the top and shed her hose. In flat slippers, her ankles always looked thick to me, but that evening she had not yet removed her makeup and her brown curls were neatly combed out. With her delicate jaw line and small nose, she looked like the “so pretty” mother my friends complimented me about.
“What do you think?” I asked. “About the Farley?”
“I don’t care what they do with the Farley. I’m worried about what your father does when he goes down to that office on Monday nights.”
“He’s working ads.”
She nodded at me like she wanted me to go check.
“You go,” I said.
“Call Pete and get him to go with you. Develop some of those photos you said he’s shooting to impress your dad,” she ordered.
That was not a bad idea. I would not report to her if my father wasn’t in the office, but she didn’t need to know that.
“And remember to tell Pete you’re going with us on Sunday. No going hunting,” she shouted after me as I headed to the phone.
I didn’t argue. That fall, I was sixteen and preferred to spend Sunday morning crashing through thickets behind The Butte with my friend Pete Sanger. Instead, I would ride along on the hour drive to Caldwell that next Sunday to make sure Mom and Dad did not have the final, big fight Kevin and I worried about. Mother had taken to staying away from home one or two nights every couple of months. She would never tell me or Kevin where she went. Each time, we worried she was not coming back.
Our parents were engaged in a running argument over whether Dad would bring her into the office to work as the bookkeeper, replacing the woman who was leaving. He resisted her effort to take over the job. The memory of her first attempt, two years earlier, was discouragingly fresh. For weeks at a stretch, she had failed to make the books balance at month’s end. Everyone around her, including the staff, suffered through her frustrated blow-ups. She also bossed the employees if she saw one do anything she didn’t like. It could be a task they had been doing their way for years. I saw their faces go tense, and they shook their heads when she turned her back.
My father knew better than to bring up any of that. Instead, he said he wanted to take one thing at a time. He was afraid he’d have to fire the news editor for drinking on the job and for being late all the time.
Dad had been running the Farewell Bend paper for eight years and similar arguments were becoming frequent. As Kevin grew older – he was twelve the summer I turned sixteen – my mother became more and more bored hanging out at home. She was angered at her failure to be elected president of the Soroptimists. After that, she decided that the action that interested her was downtown at our family’s newspaper.
And she had trouble conceding that was my father’s domain.
My parents had met at the College of Idaho in Caldwell and married in 1937 after my mother, Anna Larsen, graduated and taught school for a year. My father, James Kavanagh, started out the marriage recruiting for a Boise business school, got involved with the woman who owned it, and gave up the job. He tried moving our family to San Francisco, where he sold classified ads on commission for The Chronicle. That was too much of a struggle, and we returned to Idaho. Dad managed to stay out of uniform during the war because of two sons and bad eyesight while he tried meter reading and teaching school. None of it fit. Then in 1944, with the help of a friend who was leaving The Nampa Free Press for Field and Stream magazine in New York, he took over his friend’s job as a combination ad salesman and sports writer for the small Nampa, Idaho daily. He liked the work. He’d been a student politician in college and found that he’d learned some lessons which could be applied to small town ad sales. He and Mortimer Longshire, the Nampa publisher, got along well because Dad catered to Longshire’s superior intelligence. After two years in the Nampa job, Longshire staked him to part ownership of The Argus, one of two weeklies in Farewell Bend. The Nampa publisher was hoping to grow his business interests, betting that the southwestern Idaho and Eastern Oregon economies were starting to come back from the wartime doldrums.
When we moved to Farewell Bend, I paid little attention to the newspaper. I was trying to fit into a new school. But I couldn’t help but sense, even as young as eight, that those first months running The Argus were tough on my father.
I did not know why. I guessed later that it was partly because he had no role model for such an endeavor. His father was a musically inclined schoolmaster who came to Idaho from the Mississippi border country. Granddad Kavanagh lost a small investment in an ill-advised high desert development venture, then turned to teaching in a one room school house that my father attended. Granddad did not spare the rod, at school or at home. As a result, the two were never close. But my father blossomed under the tutelage of his mother, a striking, large-boned woman descended from Irish scholars and successful soldiers.
Mother’s parents were hard-scrabble farmers. Her father’s father came to America as a Norwegian cabin boy who jumped ship in Boston, married a girl he picked up there and headed cross country in a covered wagon in the 1870s. They could not afford train fare. One of their five sons, my mother’s father, O.J., became the man in my life I most admired. He bought a farm as a young man, lost it, tenant farmed for a while, then acquired his own dairy farm and found a way to raise a smart, strong daughter and send her to four years of college. Mom’s mom, Clara, was of French stock and as tough as O.J. She labored day in and day out over her small share of the farm devoted to her chickens. And the huge meals she put out for the neighbors on hay-stacking day were prepared with gusto despite a foot sore that would never heal. From her, I remember no complaints, ever, until O.J.’s funeral when the minister said, “No one who is with God ever dies alone.” At that my mother’s mother set up a wailing cry that still rings in my ears, for she and O.J. never went to church. I don’t think he was the kind to make an artificial peace with God.
Grandmother’s crying was so loud that I couldn’t ride to the cemetery alongside her in the hearse. I convinced my mother to let me ride with Uncle Jim. But Kevin, Mom, and Dad went with Grandmother Larsen. Kevin told me later he calmed her down by joking about how she used to scare him when she turned headless chickens loose to flop around on the back porch of her farmhouse. Kevin at twelve was developing some skills at handling family life, ignoring it or joking about it as long as the problems didn’t involve our mother. He never joked about her. He was definitely not the same kid at twelve as the one who threw a pocket knife at me at four. Nor the one whose neighborhood wrestling matches I managed when he was five and six, shortly after we moved to Farewell Bend. By age twelve he’d given up collecting a huge sack of all the marbles he won from his pals and had begun instead to relieve them of their spare change in poker games.
As the year 1946 came to a close, these changes were yet to evolve.
That December my father came to the purchase of the Farewell Bend Argus with a strong wife, a combination of sales expertise and some of the skills of a politician, and a determination to make his mark on the world. But he had limited business skills. Those he learned at the elbow of Longshire, who contributed deep pockets and a gambler’s leap of faith.
Years later, Dad would tell me that before he and Longshire took over, the flow of business at The Argus was so slow the phone never rang once as they sat in the weekly’s office haggling over the details of the purchase for two hours. That bothered Longshire, but it didn’t scare him off.
The day my father became publisher, he asked one of his three printers why the paper’s storefront entrance at the slow end of Oregon Street was not locked overnight.
“Why lock the door? There’s nothing here worth stealing,” the printer answered.
“And he was right,” Dad later recalled. “There it was. My world. A jerky little press that would only print two pages at a time, an old, old Model 5 Linotype used for setting news text and legal notices, a rickety folder, two California type-cases for hand setting headlines and the large type used in ads, a lead pot, a composition stone, a work bench, and a Wing mailer. It all had a wonderful, dirty smell of ink, hot lead, burnt paper, and grease.”
I liked the smell. But I hated the racket the machinery produced late on the evening of publication day, pounding my ears as I waited with my four-year-old brother while our parents struggled to get that day’s issue in the mail.
A decade after his purchase of The Argus, my father knew that the process of producing a newspaper would soon change dramatically. The photographic production of newspapers by the offset process was getting started in a few community newspaper operations. But during his years in Farewell Bend, he failed to foresee anything like the computer-based production of newspapers that requires minimal human intervention as stories move from reporter’s terminal through computer-operated editing and composition to the high speed presses of today.
In the crowded old Argus plant, a printer hand fed a small press with a huge roller. To get four pages the operator turned the sheets over and sent them through a second time. That old press roared as it spun on its axis, then groaned when it was stopped or restarted. When the folder was fired up, it added exponentially to the cacophony, clanging away, folding and stuffing the printed sheets into something that resembled a newspaper – when it didn’t shred them. A printer stood on a platform at the side of the press, feeding huge sheets of paper into place, and I can still see my father’s nervous gratitude when some copies actually emerged intact from the folder. In the front office, Kevin and I entertained ourselves running around the dirty counter facing the front door. Or we looked for whatever mysterious gadget we could dig out of the desk drawer inside Dad’s crowded publisher’s cubicle next to the stacks of back issues that lined a dirty green walkway heading into the back shop.
From the outset, the new partners planned to buy out the small town’s competing weekly, the Eastern Oregon Observer. Longshire put up money for my father to undercut the competition’s ad sales. The two of them practically gave away ad space in The Argus. They also arranged for their newspaper to be delivered to everyone in town, whether paid for or not. Their final commitment came in June of 1947, less than six months after they took over, when they followed the lead of The Observer by beginning to publish twice a week, a move that my father questioned later and sometimes regretted. But he never backed away from it.
Elmo Smith, who ran that competing weekly, was someone my father had known growing up in Caldwell. By the time Dad and Longshire took over The Argus, Smith was looking for a way out of town. He had started The Observer just before World War II, made a success of it, and then sold it in 1945 to a woman named Louisa Henderson who aimed to build up a chain of weekly papers across the West. Smith had agreed to stay on at The Observer for her for a time, but he was anxious to move on, and it turned out he would soon buy a community newspaper in the central part of the state.
For her part, Henderson decided the best way to compete with the new publishers of The Argus was to hire my dad away from Longshire. She sent Smith to make the pitch and offered my father whatever it would take to get him to quit Longshire.
Dad was proud of the answer he gave: “There isn’t enough money in the world to make me quit Longshire.”
As my father told the story, Smith smiled and said, “That’s exactly what I expected to hear.”
Shortly after that, Longshire offered Henderson more money than The Observer was worth. She agreed to sell.
Within a few months, our family’s day-to-day financial situation improved. Longshire arranged for a local businessman to put up a new building to house The Argus-Observer. Dad bought a better car, trading in our ’42 Ford on a nearly new Pontiac sedan. And fewer of my jeans had patches sewn on the knees.
My father could finally enjoy his ad calls up and down main street. He was the publisher of the only paper in town. He had the final say as to what was news. But his business headaches – mostly involving how to keep a back shop running with country printers and unreliable equipment – always were a nagging presence.
At least once a month, we would climb into the Pontiac and head to Nampa for Sunday dinner with the Longshires. He was a large man with a barrel chest and the biggest bald head I’d ever seen. His family lived in a well-crafted, aging Nampa home with a wide front porch and big rooms full of dark cabinets and over-stuffed chairs. At those dinners, Longshire dominated the conversation. He had no interest in a comment from anyone but my father. When my mother offered up a business suggestion, he always ignored her. She swallowed her anger and kept quiet, but on the drive home she’d chew on my father for ten minutes. “How can you let that man show no courtesy to me? I’m your wife, for God’s sake.”
During these front-seat fights, Kevin and I would stop punching each other and watch from behind as our father quietly fumed. We couldn’t relax and start pestering each other again until Mom fell silent and Dad managed to change the subject.
I began working at the paper when I was ten, hauling a few bundles of freshly inked newspapers to the bus depot and to neighborhood groceries, drug stores, and coffee shops. Downtown I covered on foot. I would gather up an order or two and head out of the back door of the plant past a one-room jail that sat behind city hall. Occasionally, I stopped to jaw with a drunk who was still stuck inside come late afternoon. By the time I was in junior high, I used to pick up an extra dollar now and then by making a cigarette run for the guys drying out in the old jail. One day a printer saw me making the exchange, and my father put a stop to the cigarette runs with a threat to bar me from playing on the junior high basketball team.
The next jobs my father assigned me proved harder: painting the back shop, pouring castings of hot lead in the stereotype room, stuffing papers.
In 1952, things changed at the newspaper. Longshire sold his interest in The Argus-Observer to my parents to help finance his purchase of an interest in a major Willamette Valley daily. And that was the year my father hired Hugh Storm as news editor. At the outset, Hugh’s work ethic was good enough that it gave my dad the freedom to do what he’d only dreamed of when Longshire was looking over his shoulder. He began writing a front-page column. It gave him a place to publish observations that ranged well beyond what he felt belonged in an editorial. That was his excuse, at least, for his column, which he called “The Argus Observes” and which he continued to produce off and on for five years.
By the time Hugh Storm had been news editor for more than a year, he was easily my favorite employee at the paper. To function well as a country editor, my dad liked to say, it was necessary to have not only a little flair but also to be a bit independent of what people thought of you. The most independent – certainly the most addicted to hanging out in the local bars – was Hugh, a short, beet-shaped man with nicotine stained fingers, a plump but beak-nosed face, and a rarely employed ability to charm most anyone with a gruff compliment.
When Hugh arrived, the women in the front office learned that he was married but had left his wife in Yakima, Washington, where he lived before he came to Farewell Bend. They soon began asking when she would arrive in town. Hugh’s response was that his wife was a “very, very large woman.” He said he doubted that people in Farewell Bend would accept her.
It turned out, as my father liked to tell the story, that was pure fantasy. When she finally came to town, she was petite and beautiful, my dad said, adding, “I’m really not sure how a guy who looks like Hugh and drinks like a fish ever got such an attractive woman to live with him.”

This was the place for hunters in the 1950s

2008-10-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Argus-Observer reported in early October of 1953 that the Vale Hotel, a favorite of out of town hunters, was sold by its Portland owner to a new Portland owner, Blanche Straight.

Ms. Straight didn’t need to worry about having a full house, at least the outset.

Charles Crittenden, the manager, said all rooms were full up for the hunting season and one hunter had even sent in a check to rent the storage room where he’d be provided a cot, probably along with some other hunters who would be seeking a place to park their shotguns and tired bodies.

The big draw, Crittenden told the Argus, was the hotel’s special accommodations for 15 to 18 hunting dogs.

The hotel was also remodeled by its previous owner, Dean Vincent, to provide visitors with steam heat or air conditioning, depending on the weather, of course.

As far as Vale goes, this was Ontario’s year

2008-09-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

Given what has been posted here about the prowess of Vale’s football team in years past, it must be noted that the Ontario High Tigers took the Vikings apart on Sept. 12, winning 20-0. Congratulations to new coach Trever Wilson. It looks like he’s got a team to go with for his first year at this head job. (For a link to the Argus game story, try double clicking on the headline above or go to the Argus-Observer site and search for Vale football.)

Nothing lasts forever

2008-09-23T09:56:00.001-07:00

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The row of buildings along the southern end of Oregon Street which used to and maybe still is Ontario's "main street," still stands in mute testimony to the idea that, for a time, little changes. That's where the Argus was composed and printed when my parents and Bernard Mainwaring bought it in January 1947. Later that year or early in 1948, they moved the combined into Argus-Observer into a new brick plant built especially for the paper on the site that is now a parking lot at the left of this photograph. The surviving six-day a week daily is now printed in a newist plant on the southeast edge of town across from the community college. (To be taken to a photo of the old 1947 plant that was in one of the building still standing, click on the headline of this posting from the main Internet site of this blog, "rememberingtheargus.blogspot.com)

The challenge of beating Vale, and other 50's sports stories

2008-09-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

Today Vale is a a small ranching town and still the unlikely Malheur County seat. It’s one of those scattered-seeming agricultural communities that cropped up across the West during the first half of the twentieth century. Some died. Vale has hung on. Situated on the edge of the Eastern Oregon desert, it’s not much changed from 1954 when my father penned this column about the able coaches of its dominating high school football team.

Malheur County’s old court house that was built of the same foot-square chunks of jutting grey-black sandstone as my family’s one-time and long-rued Payette home has been replaced by a plastic-paneled building that is equally characteristic of a certain age. The neon lights along A Street still welcome tired cowboys from out Juntura way for Saturday night action. Recent homage to the town’s heritage can be found in the form of a 1900 Sears Roebuck Bed and Breakfast at 484 North 10th Street and the Wilcox Horse & Buggy “Victorian catering service for your wedding transportation needs” at 4587 North Road East. The population, in the year 2000 census, remained stuck just under two thousand. 2,000. In 1954 it was about fifteen hundred.

The football dominance of Vale’s Vikings over Ontario, a town with population that has stayed five times Vale’s, seems to continue largely unchanged since my class at Ontario High graduated in 1956. We expected to break that hold, but failed. That’s a loss most of the class has never forgotten, even those of us who didn’t play in the game. In a way it was only fitting that in September of 2006, while our surviving classmates were in Ontario holding our fiftieth class reunion, the black-suited Vikings traveled to Ontario to power their way to another win.

To attribute Vale’s 2006 prowess to the lingering influence of the men who coached there in the 1950s would seem more than a slight exaggeration. And yet I think my dad’s November 1954 column fell short of aptly noting just how good Cammann was at coaching high school football players and at developing a program that lingered for years. The single tribute he paid Cammann was to note that “Vale has built football into a great tradition and no other person is as responsible as Cammann.”
There was no explanation of why he was so good. Maybe there was no acceptable way to say what he really thought when he had a son coming up through the Ontario football program with a class that everyone in our town expected to end Vale’s nine-year reign the very next year. By reputation, Cammann was a demanding, no nonsense coach who never let up on his kids and never, ever cracked a smile.

I think of myself in relationship to our Vale games as Ontario’s own Dick Nixon. I was fodder at the practices. But I got something beyond more somewhat more humility than Nixon took with him, which of course is not saying much. My humbling experiences as a want-to-be athlete striving alongside the talented kids in my class shaped attitudes I’ve carried through my life, just as their more accomplished victories and significant defeats must have shaped theirs. I learned early to accept that there were a lot of people better than me at baseball, basketball, football, tennis and track, just about any sport I’d decide to try out. And as good as they were, they must have learned that eventually someone would come along who was more adept. That didn’t necessarily mean accepting defeat --- and they didn’t. Not Larry Horyna who went on to play at University of Oregon and become a major force in Oregon’s vocational education programs. Not Jerry Doman who poured his heart onto the field at Oregon State, or Earl and Verl Doman who have nurtured many good players still working their way through the football program at Brigham Young. Not Stanley Olsen who made himself into a leading local architect. Not Junior Evans who became a military aide to the president of the United States, nor Kenneth Osborn who earned a degree in dentistry, came back to town to make his contribution and, the last I knew, was still running the first-down markers when the Ontario Tigers play their football games at home.

For me, failing on the playing field meant learning how to fill the void with other pursuits. That combined with growing up at The Argus-Observer likely dictated my lifelong tie to reporting and writing as a way to be important in the lives of others.

The true benefit of high school efforts is in the player and not in the game. And it can last a lifetime, of course.

My first meaningful sports lesson centered on a home run, or not a home run. The house where I lived in Ontario fronted on a broad, graveled street and was flanked on its south side by a narrow strip of grass. Beyond that strip of grass, a wider swath of open ground ran from the alley to the street. When I was ten, that weedy strip of land made for a passably large baseball diamond through the spring, at least until my parents planted it in summer vegetables.

Most of the pick-up softball games in the neighborhood occurred on that land, with the street serving as the outfield. A home run had to clear the street without getting caught. The foul lines were less distinct, usually running along an imaginary line from home plate to an Elm tree or a fence line across the street.

I almost never hit long balls, not at ten and not at thirty. That was well understood by my nemesis, a big, mean kid with a Huckleberry Finn shock of hair and all the muscles I imagine Huck must have had. He lived in the run-down brick house across the street just behind center field and was playing for the opposing pick-up team that day. When I hit that ball, he announced that it was foul, and I began to scream that it definitely landed fair, inside the tree line.

I would not back down and, since he’d been looking for a good reason to beat on me --- or anyone else younger and smaller --- Huck-personified had no need to give in. With half a dozen neighborhood kids looking on, I weighed in fists flying, struggling to trip him to the ground. Instead, I ended up on my back looking up at a canopy of leaves and the cooling evening sky just outside our kitchen window, unable to move and feeling like I was being choked to death. I looked over to see my mother watching out the window and grimaced hard, hoping to convince her to put a stop to the fight, stalling for as much time as I could. She never showed. I thought I might pass out before I could force got out the words “Uncle! I give up! Let me up!” And I before I was actually freed, I had to agree the ball was foul.

At dinner I asked my mother why she hadn’t helped me out.
“You need to learn to fend for yourself,” she said.

By my sophomore year in high school, I had developed an understanding of my place in the athletic hierarchy of the Ontario High Class of ’56. I thought of basketball as my best sport, but the farm boys that attended country schools came to town for high school, and 6’ 5” Julian Laca was among them. The class behind us had at least five kids who were as good as I was on the court, most of them better, and I knew they’d be the ones the coaches would want to give game experience. Still, when I was cut from the frosh-soph traveling squad as a sophomore, I mooned around the school hallways, hiding out at various unused entrances, all during the lunch hour that the list went up. Nothing much eased the pain: In Eastern Oregon at that time of year, the days were too cold and stormy to turn to tennis, even though I expected to make that spring season’s seven man team. (As it turned out for the next three years I played on the second doubles team, rarely climbing above number six or seven on the boy’s team even though most of the school’s athletes were busy that time of year with track and baseball.)

My most successful sport turned out to be football --- simply because it required 11 players on the field at once. As a freshman, I was assigned to play center behind Larry Horyna. Our sophomore year, he was promoted to the varsity early in the season. From then on, I was a starter for the JV team, and we ran over every team who’d play us but Vale.

Meanwhile, my high school years were premium ones for spectator sports in the Snake River Valley. Some of the athletes who entertained us would have been appreciated anywhere in the country.

In the beginning, the most exciting player in our area was R.C. Owens, who began to redefine the position we still simply called “end” in football. In 1952 Owens came to Caldwell, Idaho, from Santa Monica, California, to play for the College of Idaho football team --- becoming the first black to attend the school.

At the time, my father was beginning to take an interest in the college’s governance problems, and traveling with him to that small city 35 miles to watch Owens play became a special treat.

R.C. would line up well wide of the rest of the line on the right wing of the offensive line and rarely throw a block --- he apparently judged it sufficient that he took a defensive player out of the action just to cover him. By the time he reached his sophomore year, covering him proved extremely difficult at this level of college competition. He was taller and faster than the opposition players, although the College of Idaho’s quarterback sometimes struggled to get the ball to him. When Owens flew down the right sidelines, the pass had to be high and long enough to be catchable but short enough to be within his reach. If the throw was good, R.C. almost always caught it and often scored a touchdown.

Here’s how my father described Owens’ play in a November 12, 1953 column, written after the College of Idaho finished its season undefeated in league play.
“A year ago Owens was sort of a sensational joke. He was a talented pass receiver but he never played any football. He just stood at his end post except on a pass play and then, covered by good blocking, he ran out to make the catch. He never played any defense. He never even threw more than one or two blocks a game. Strictly a specialist.

“This year he has been taught to play football. Now he even pulls back to play linebacker on defense, makes bruising tackles, blocks most effectively, and has learned the ball carriers’ tricky shoulder block to bound off a tackler….

“On (one) play, two Whitman lads had Owens boxed downfield right after a pass reception. Then (he) did something probably never done before on a football field. He held out the pigskin like it was a basketball, teasing the Whitman men, faked once to the right, once to the left and then trotted right between the two for a touchdown.”

When I place a parenthesis around “he” in that last graph I was covering for a grim reality from those days. My father had actually described Owens as “the big colored boy.” Contrasted with the description of the “Whitman men,” it doesn’t sit well. It was not an example of conscious racism on his part, but it shows the way he, and almost everyone who was white, thought at the time.

Owens went on to play in the NFL from 1957 to 1964 and win two Super Bowl rings while with the San Francisco 49ers. Recently --- in the spring of 2007 --- he was still actively working with youth and raising money for charity while living in Manteca, California, just north of Modesto.

One of his major contributions to the College of Idaho was to help lure Elgin Baylor there from Washington D.C. for a single basketball season.

Baylor led the College of Idaho Coyotes basketball team to an undefeated season that school year, 1954-55, scoring a record 53 points in his last conference game of the season, played at Nyssa, just south of Ontario.

Owens played with Baylor on that team, and the two were a major force in a league that had seen nothing like the pair.

Baylor, for the season, was a man among boys. His favorite two plays indicate just how dominant he was. In his Argus Observes column published March 3, 1955, my father described how on a pair of free throws, Baylor’s teammates would try to aim their second shot so that it would bounce Baylor’s direction off the rim. If the bounce was right, he’d leap high to catch the ball and flick the ball through the net.

And when he had a chance to dunk, “he jumped high in the air, shot his wrists over the rim before reaching the peak of his jump and whipped the ball downward into the net with a sharp wrist snap. Then while he completed upward motion to the peak of his jump and appeared thus to hang suspended in air, he quickly brought his hands downward in a parenthetical arc to the bottom the net and caught the ball as it emerged from the net.

“He would return to the floor with the ball having been out of his hands for the barest perceptible instant of time and toss it gently to the referee.”
The next season he went to Seattle, sat out a year, then carried the Seattle University team to the NCAA championship game in 1958, where they lost to the Kentucky Wildcats. By the next year he was playing with the Minneapolis Lakers, and moved with them to Los Angeles in 1960.

It was during the early 1950s that our area produced its most famous locally grown athlete of recent years. That was Harmon Killebrew of home run hitting fame, who grew up in Payette.

My first memory of Harmon is the sight of his bulk carrying half our football team toward the goal line in the fall of 1953. He didn’t have much blocking and never made a touchdown in that game, which we won 40-0. But he went on to be named Idaho’s number one high school running back. A victory over Ontario was about all he was to be denied that year.

The summer of 1954 belonged to Killebrew even though the excitement only lasted about a month.

That June, Payette used a local semi-pro baseball team, the Border League Payette Packers, to show off Killebrew’s hitting talents. Teenagers and their parents from throughout the Valley found their way to the high school field in Payette for the Packers’ home games to marvel at his swing. During one stretch of three games, he batted twelve times and got twelve straight hits, four home runs, three triples and five singles. It quickly became clear he was going to be offered a professional baseball contract.

Before the end of June, Harmon signed to play for the Washington Senators, getting a $30,000 bonus up front and a salary of $10,000 year --- essentially guaranteeing him $50,000 over two years. It was a huge amount for a rookie at that time. He flew east to make his major league debut on June 29, 1954, under a new rule that required major league teams to keep their bonus babies on the major league roster for two seasons, even if they rarely got into a game.

On June 21, the Monday after the amazing youngster signed his contract and eight days before Harmon’s 18th birthday, my father’s column carried an account of the young man’s debt to his father --- stories passed along by Harmon’s brother Eugene Killebrew, editor of the Payette Valley Sentinel, which was published in nearby New Plymouth:

“Young Harmon had chores to do at home as a boy and sometimes when he was playing sandlot baseball his mother would send the father to fetch the son home for family duty. If Harmon was playing ball his father just couldn’t bear to interrupt. He would come home quietly and do the chores himself so his prospective ‘big leaguer’ could get in a few minutes more of precious practice.”

My father noted that his brother Eugene “has been Harman’s business manager during recent weeks when 12 of the nation’s 16 major league (teams) were trying to sign him….Harmon had about decided to go the University of Oregon, play football and then move into baseball. But when the bonus offer got so big, he couldn’t afford to turn it down. He will do his college work in off-season months until he does get his degree.”

My father later recalled talking with Eugene Killebrew during the contract negotiations they discussed whether signing before college was a good idea. One scout, apparently Oscar Bluege of the Senators, had said that the young man could be one of the great hitters in baseball. My father thought that “this is just a bunch of bullshit” and told Eugene “This guy is trying to lead you on.”

Even later, when Killebrew had proven his hitting prowess and won his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Dad maintained his signing so young had been a mistake.

But for all of the interest in Killebrew, no sports event raised the interest of folks around Ontario so much as the annual football game with Vale.

My class, Ontario High School’s Class of ’56, pursuit of a victory in that game came to an end on November 4, 1955. That year it was our turn to travel to Vale for the anticipated match-up. The evening was cold and we had no locker room --- just our school bus --- to use to get out of the weather. As I recall, we were at full strength with four strong running backs in the three Domans and Stan Olsen as well as a high-functioning quarterback in Reed Vestal. The critical center of the line was at full strength with Horyna snapping the ball and anchoring the defense and Evans and Osborn at guards.

We knew that Vale’s team included one of the strongest players in the state in Gene Bates, who worked well with his backfield partner Tater Smith. But we had a strong starting eleven with a half dozen solid back-up players. As my father would write in the aftermath, “before the game sports writers and opposing coaches generally considered Ontario the better of the two teams.”

The Argus-Observer’s story of the game does not, in my mind, quite do justice to the knock-down battle I watched that night from the bench. But most of the details are there in the Nov. 7 account. The game did not start well for us:

“The Vikings received the opening kickoff on the thirty-two and carried to the forty-six. There they failed to break through the Tiger defense and were forced to kick. On their first play the ball was fumbled by Ontario and Vale recovered on the Ontario thirty-seven. From here the Vikings started their drive goal ward. A twenty-two-yard pass from Bates to Derald Swift put the ball on the nineteen where Bates kicked for a field goal.”

Bates started the Vale drive that led to his teams second score by intercepting an Ontario pass at Vale’s at midfield early in the second quarter. Swift and Kay (Tater) Smith pounded out a series of short gainers to put the ball on our ten-yard line. Bates then powered it over the goal line but the play was called back on a penalty. It was a short reprieve. Smith punched in from the three a few plays later.

What followed was our most successful sequence. As the Argus-Observer story described it: “The Tigers put the ball into play on their own forty-nine. With a short pass from Reed Vestal to Norman Olson and a series of short runs by Stan Olson the ball was brought down the Vale 24 where Jerry Doman took a pitch out from Vestal and galloped around the left end to the one. From here J. Doman again took the ball and plunged through the line to pay dirt.”

But then our kick for the extra point failed, leaving the score 9-6 at half time.
For most of the third quarter the teams moved the ball up and down the field without getting close to a score. Then as the quarter drew to a close, Vestal connected on a long pass to Verl Doman who carried to the Viking 18 before he was brought down.

With that play as a jump start, our hopes to turn the game around rose to take the lead rose high in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter. On a series of short runs our backfield punched the ball to the two. There a big hole opened up in the Vale line, but the ball tumbled to the turf and although we recovered the fumble, we had stalled out. On Vale’s first play from scrimmage at the two yard line, he was caught for a touchback. The score stood 9-8 Vale’s favor and another Bates interception later in the quarter sealed the game for the Vikings.

My father felt the loss as keenly as we in the senior class.

He penned an editorial for the paper that aptly described how he felt about some of my classmates. Titled, “These Were Our Boys,” it concluded:

“It was hard to hold back the tears driving home from Vale that night. That was partly because we knew from experience the nobility of these kids in defeat as well as their grandeur in victory.

“You see, they played knothole baseball for us five or six years ago. And they really learned how to take it. They were under-age, playing with a league of older kids in order to fill out the league schedules for summer play. If we ever won a game that summer, it has long since been forgotten.

“We couldn’t help but wonder if we hadn’t given some of these youngsters such adequate early training the philosophical acceptance of reverses on the playing field, if the result might not have been different at Vale on the critical evening this November. No bunch of kids ever wanted more to win a ball game. We know because we’ve listened to them work on it conversationally for the past nine years.
“For all that, w wouldn’t trade away that summer. What a sight it was to watch the Doman kids come in to town, covered with the dust of a day’s work in the field, and then take on an evening’s work on the playing field. And Larry Horyna, crouched behind the bat, whipped the gang in those days to higher performance, just as he has in recent years.

“Another sight we’ll never forget. Horyna eating watermelon --- seeds and all --- at the kids’ picnic in our backyard. That Larry could go through more watermelon in less time than any kid we’ve ever seen.”

In basketball, most of the same athletes with some help from the towering Julian Laca earned some payback. We trounced Vale three times on the hard court that season and went on to take second place in the state A-2 tournament, with Earl Doman and Jerry Doman named to the All-State first and second all-tournament teams, respectively.

The Argus Observes: Jerry Camminn, a master at teaching high school football

2008-08-31T12:03:00.000-07:00

From The Ontario Argus-Observer of August 16, 1954

Jerry Camminn has done it again --- taken a lighter and probably a less talented group of football players and defeated an apparently stronger opponent.

The popular Vale coach was head mentor for the Snake River Valley all-stars who defeated the Boise Valley all-stars 13-7 in a pre-season benefit game under lights here Saturday night.

Praise for Cammann does not reduce the credit due to (the SRV’s assistant coaches) --- Ontario’s Ken Glore or Vale’s “Dutch” Kawasoe (former assistant and now head coach at Vale). They are both thoroughly competent.

The game was widely billed as the valedictory of Cammann’s unique coaching career. He resigned last spring as head coach at Vale after the most successful coaching record I have ever seen in a small high school. I do not know his win-loss record. He has just been the best football coach in this region in many years.

The Boise Valley youngsters who invaded Ontario Saturday night for the first SRV-BV contest were noticeably larger than the Snake River Valley players. And I feel sure that, man for man, they are superior athletes as individuals. But they didn’t measure up to the SRV men as a team.

Although the SRV gridmen won the game by only one touchdown, 13-7, they were relatively stronger than the score indicated. They outplayed the invaders 14 to 4 on first downs and nearly two to one --- 208 to 123 --- on yards gained from scrimmage.

The breaks of the game fell Boise Valley’s way. The visitors’ lone touchdown was set up by an SRV fumble on its own nine yard line. It is doubtful if the Boise Valley lads could have scored by straight play for they were never able to sustain a drive.

Other breaks of the game which are a real factor in football obviously favored Boise Valley; but the SRV eleven had enough strength to overcome the disadvantage.

The SRV team’s superior performance definitely reflected Cammann’s coaching ideas.

He deliberately worked his men in the heat of the day to toughen them up for the contest, trying to get them as hard as possible within the brief, two-week training period.

Boise Valley by contrast practiced in the evening when cooler temperatures made the workouts more pleasant. But it didn’t harden the players like the heat did to the smaller SRV men.

Another advantage for the SRV team lay in the use of the single wing formation behind an unbalanced line, a favorite strategy with the Vale coach through the years.

The advantage is not that the single wing is superior to the T. That’s questionable. It lies, instead, in the element of surprise. Most high school players have had little if any experience against the single wing. Even though they may have been taught the theory of defense against it, they are at a loss for a time, until they get the feel of the play. And by then the game may be lost.

The SRV men made quick gains in the opening minutes marching 65 yards in eight plays for their first touchdown. This same opening pattern of attack has been characteristic of Vale teams. Some of the tricks of catching an opponent off balance at the start of the contest must be credited to Cammann’s different style of attack.

Through the years I have sometimes heard Cammann criticized as being “hard boiled,” such criticism more often originating in Ontario than in Vale. I have heard it said that he was too rough spoken and too rough in manner.

There is a certain metal in Cammann’s manner, but it performs an essential function. High school athletes are not little boys. Many of them are men in physical and emotional development although still boys in knowledge and experience so that they live in a sort of in-between state between boyhood and manhood. They need firm treatment and they have an almost pathetic eagerness to follow strong, well-informed leadership that teaches them what they want to learn under the rigors of rigid discipline.

Underneath Cammann’s authoritative manner lies an understanding heart. If you would talk to him personally about his boys as I have, you would learn that his devotion to them is almost like that of a fond parent, and this affection is understood by the boys. They reciprocate with their own devotion that sees through his firm manner.

Once in a while a great teacher comes along. He seems to have an almost mystic understanding of what goes on in the mind of the student, and with it a super ability to direct the pupil’s learning process. Almost every person has had one such teacher at some time. I had one for a single year in math. She could teach geometry to the slowest student with a magic that amazed the learner, and the kids almost worshipped her.

Cammann is a great football teacher. If his health permitted, he could coach at any university in the Northwest and better than hold his own against most of his competition. For reasons of health he chose to stay in Vale.

Now, because of health handicaps, he has resigned as the coach at Vale, retiring from his chosen work while he is still in his mid-thirties.

He won’t soon be forgotten by his athletes, or his opponents either for that matter. My personal sentiments --- feeling it was a real privilege to watch his teams perform --- must be shared by thousands of football fans throughout the valley.

The 1953 County Fair features: National Guard night attack, bee handling, and the winning race horse Geebung

2008-08-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes: Why a mother-in-law grows uneasy

2008-08-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: This column starts off innocently enough about a trip our family took to Yellowstone National Park when I was 16. But it ends with a revealing story about the relationship of my parents, a relationship that I’ve fairly accurately represented in my novel Farewell Bend.

From the August 19, 1954 issue of The Argus-Observer

Bright and early tomorrow morning we’ll be off to bear country --- the civilized bear country of Old Faithful Canyon and Fishing Bridge.

It’s been 12 years since we have visited Yellowstone park. At that time, we had one boy, aged 3, and he is 16 and his younger brother nearly 12. These are good ages for visiting the park.

Someone told us that the park waters are now so well stocked and the fishing take so strictly controlled that you can always catch a few fish. Probably just a fish story but we’ll try our luck and hope it is better than it was 13 years ago.

On that occasion I fished in the Yellowstone lake with my father-in-law, who for a man descended from Norwegian sea-going ancestors is the most leery-of-water guy I ever knew. The guide who took us out on the lake told him it was a mile deep and that almost paralyzed him. He held onto the boat with both hands and could hardly let go long enough to handle his fishing pole. We didn’t have much luck fishing but we had a lot of fun.

I wish his health permitted him to make the trip again this year. We’d have some more fun.

At Yellowstone 13 years ago a bear taught me that I was deficient in the natural instinct an animal is supposed to have to for protection of its mate.

Agnes (Mrs. Lynch) and I were carrying the scraps from the evening meal to a large garbage can back of our tent house. It was an armload and she went along to hold a flashlight for me.

We approached the garbage can which was a large one held up in a rack at about table height above the ground.

Agnes asked, “What’s that noise?” It sounded like a hog.

About that time a bear, who had his feet on the rack and his head and shoulders in the garbage can, rose up on his haunches and growled. Standing on that rack he towered above us like King Kong at the movies.

My instincts worked just fine but on an overly practical basis. I dropped the garbage and took off like a rabbit. In nothing flat I popped into the tent house and slammed the door in the face of my dear wife who was about three jumps behind me.

“Where’s Agnes?” exclaimed my mother-in-law. Imagine my utter chagrin, for I had quite forgotten about her.

If I tried a simply honest explanation and told you my spouse is a thoroughly competent person at taking care of herself, you would think I was a poor excuse for a husband indeed.

Take care of old number one first --- that’s what I always say. But I’m afraid my mother-in-law has been a little uneasy about her daughter’s protection since that revealing experience at Yellowstone.

Well, we’ll see what the park holds for us this year.

Local soldier tells of his experience landing at Inchon, Korea in 1951

2008-08-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

The Argus-Observer issue of Aug. 17, 1953 carried a detailed account penned by Sgt. Jay R. Draper of his impressions upon landing at Inchon, Korea in the fall of 1951. Draper, who had attended Ontario High School, later served in Japan and studied journalism on the side. He wrote these impressions for one of those courses.

As soon as he arrived on shore, he noted, “a loud-voiced captain formed us into ranks and marched us single file to a waiting fleet of canvas-topped trucks, loading us twenty per truck while he counted heads or noses of bodies, whatever he used for a measure.”

Draper described the scene as the truck entered the city:

“Down muddy, rock-filled streets we went, passing box-like houses, surrounded by high board fences and poorly stocked stores displaying a few cans of dusty C-rations, a meager supply of dried fish and pitifully few fresh vegetables.

“Dirty, ragged people lined the road, stared at us in awe or hate or fear and begged for food in high-pitched, sing-song tones. Bombed buildings with gaping holes, armed guards with big guns, an armless beggar in the tattered remnants of a uniform --- all gave mute evidence of war and hunger and death.”

Draper marveled that only a few short months before he’d been walking down the streets of his home town whistling at the pretty girls while Korea was “only a name.”

Although he conceded his service in Korea“was necessary,” he wondered in print two years later, “what politicians had the God-given right to decide that we, out of the masses available, should come to this distant land and kill and bleed and die?”

Luckier that many of the Americans who served in Korea --- particularly National Guard troops -- Draper served 16 months in Korea before he became eligible to come home. He opted to be transferred to Japan and expected, in the fall of 1953, to be released from the service at the end of the calendar year.

Vale girl raising bobcat kittens

2008-08-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes --- August fishing with Zimm near New Meadows, Idaho

2008-08-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

From the August 20, 1953 issue of The Argus Observer

Zimm had told me where to fish. And it had worked out all right accorind to my standards, those of a dub who does not require many or very large fish to be happy.

“There’s some dandies right here in the meadow but you have to knowhow to catch them,” he said.

It was his busy season. For two months he had refused the temptation to fish with other summer guests. But he broke down one evening last August and took me fishing in the meadow.

First we worked the pools close to the cabins using a fly and caught half a dozen little squaw fish. They were to be our bait.

Then we drove a couple of miles down the meadow and walked in a little ways to a big deep pool where the water hardly moved.

We skinned the thick meat off the sides of the squaw fish and folded it over our hooks until they were concealed.

We wore tennis shoes instead of boots so we could wade waist deep. We worked opposite sides of the stream. Our lines were pretty well weighted and we threw them in above the deep water letting they work into the holes with the current.

The action started slow. I caught the first two --- nice ten-inch trout.

There was a point and a little brush in my way and the current was wrong. It kept me from getting into the deep hole.

Then after a half hour or so Zimm caught a better one. He motioned for me to come over to his side.

I waded across. My feet found a sand bar and I walked along it close the deep water.

The dusk settled in. I could just barely see my line against the dark water. I thought I had a bite and tried to set the hook. There wasn’t any jerk and I thought the weighted line had just hit a rock or log.

Then it started to move. Clear across the pool, deep. I set the hook a little harder and went to work.

It took all the skill I had. We battled for several minutes before I gained ground and reeled him a little closer slowly.

I didn’t have a landing net and knew I didn’t dare try to lift him. So I walked backward slowly along the bar, and then moved gently to the bank.

Well sir, sliding that boy out onto the grass was a real thrill. He measured just 15 inches but it was the biggest trout I had ever caught and an experience to remember for a long time.

If all goes well, as this is read we will be back in the same region trying to play a repeat performance of the same experience. This coming weekend has been set aside for our summer fishing trip. --- By Don Lynch

Broadhurst attorneys waive right to call witnesses

2008-08-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Sorry for the long post but it's time to get the rest of this story out there and move on to other things.

In a surprise move, the defense waived its own right to call witnesses, resting its case and starting arguments to the jury Wednesday afternoon, nearly a week sooner than some observers expected.Defense attorneys first waived further cross examination of Alvin Lee Williams. A few minutes later the state rested its case following a short redirect examination of Williams.

Defense attorneys went into a huddle then waived further examination of any other witnesses.

They then appealed to Judge M.A. Biggs for a directed verdict of acquittal on the ground that the state had failed to prove a murder was committed.

Defense Attorney P.J. Gallagher told the court that no evidence of conspiracy had been offered apart from Williams, own testimony which the defense contended showed him to be incompetent, and that Mrs. Broadhurst may have been an accessory after the fact but was not on trial for that offense.

Gallagher added: “It appears from state evidence that there was not a murder by Williams. The most that was shown was an assault by Williams on the doctor, which was terminated when he decided not to go through with the killing. The reason he later killed the doctor was self defense. He inflicted the fatal gunshot wound after he began to fear great bodily harm when the doctor charged him with a jackknife.”

he motion was denied by Judge Biggs and the defense then rested, leaving only the arguments of counsel and instructions by the court before the jury took the case.

DA says Mrs. Broadhurst’s complicity in murder proven “beyond a shadow of a doubt”

Beginning the closing argument for the state, Malheur County District Attorney Charles Swan declared the state had proved Mrs. Broadhurst’s complicity in the murder “beyond the shadow of a doubt” and he asked the jury to impose the death penalty.

Williams was virtually the defendant’s “slave,” Swan charged, adding that she planned, inspired and directed the killing of her wealthy husband. It was her injunction “do not fail me and if you do for God’s sake don’t come back” that kept Williams from losing his nerve and abandoning the ghastly project, the prosecutor declared.

William Langroise delivered the argument for the defense Wednesday afternoon, asserting that there was no direct or indirect evidence of Mrs. Broadhurst’s guilt except Williams’ own testimony. And that, he said, was given with “an axe hanging over his head.”

“What wouldn’t he testify to get what the state through the prosecutors must have promised him?” Langroise asked the jury, renewing the defense charge of a “deal” involving Williams’ testimony, which Williams had denied when asked about it on the stand.

The attorney asked why Williams’ trial was postponed until after Mrs. Broadhurst’s if it was not to force him to testify before his own fate was decided. He could have testified after his own trial and his testimony would have carried some weight, Langroise concluded.

One of four verdicts was possible

The 16-day-old Broadhurst murder case went to the circuit court jury sitting in Vale late in the this afternoon after arguments of state and defense counsel and instructions from Judge M.A. Biggs who presided over the hard fought legal battle.

The jury was instructed that it could return any of four verdicts: 1. Guilty of first degree murder without recommendation, which means death in the lethal gas chamber; 2. Guilty with a recommendation of leniency which means life imprisonment; 3. Guilty of second degree murder also carrying a life sentence and 4. Acquittal.

Special Prosecutor Blaine Halleck completed the state’s closing argument at 3:10 p.m. Thursday. He carefully reviewed the evidence which he said consistently showed a conspiracy between Mrs. Broadhurst and Williams. He answered defense attacks on circumstantial evidence by saying that when a mass of this has been assembled, all pointing in one direction, it is more to be relied upon that direct testimony, which can be false.

Halleck’s only reference to the death penalty that the state is asking for the attractive, several-times-wed defendant came in his closing paragraph in which he quoted the Biblical injunction “whosoever sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed.”

Gladys Broadhurst’s defense attorney argues Williams acted alone

P. J. Gallagher delivered the closing for the defense this forenoon, speaking for more than two hours. He attacked the conspiracy evidence as virtually worthless except for Williams’ testimony, which he charged resulted from a deal between the state’s key witness and the prosecutors who have it in their power to save or exact his life.

Gallagher assailed Williams as “hard, cynical and smart” on the stand, as a “sniveling drug store cowboy and a perjurer who sought to save his life by helping send the woman he married to the gas chamber.” Mrs. Broadhurst listened intently but never flinched at the frequent references to the grim death house at Salem. She was using her handkerchief when Gallagher concluded, however.

Gallagher said Williams committed the crime on his own account so he could acquire Mrs. Broadhurst, that his motives were jealousy, frustration and revenge and at the moment of firing the fatal shot, fear.

A crowded, tense court room heard the arguments but there were no crowds outside seeking admission.

Mrs. Broadhurst sentenced to life in prison

VALE – Mrs. Gladys Broadhurst was sentenced this afternoon to life imprisonment in the Oregon state penitentiary by circuit Judge M. A. Biggs.

“This not a pleasant duty for the court to perform,” Judge Biggs said. “I order that you be confined in the Oregon state penitentiary for your life.”

To an offer by the court to hear her statement, Mrs. Broadhurst replied, “I have no statement to make” in a firm voice. The widow’s eyes were swollen with tears but the managed to smile at a small cluster of spectators as she left the court chambers. The session was brief, consuming only about five minutes’ time.

Mrs. Broadhurst wore a black suit and black off-the-face hat as she heard the sentence imposed.

She will be taken to the state penitentiary at Salem as soon as it is convenient to move her, according to a decision made in a hasty conference after the court adjourned.

The life sentence was made mandatory when the jury found Mrs. Broadhurst guilty of first degree murder but recommended leniency, a verdict that in Oregon automatically forces the court to impose a life sentence.

Jurors were divided over Broadhurst’s punishment

In its story on the sentencing of Gladys Broadhurst, the Ontario Argus said it learned that while all jurors favored a verdict of first degree murder when they began deliberations, they were sharply divided over the punishment.

Five favored the death penalty on the first ballot and seven favored life imprisonment. After further discussion a second ballot showed 11 for life and only one for death. On the third ballot the 12 were unanimous,” the newspaper reported.

Broadhurst trial seen as complicated for its era

The recent murder trial of Mrs. Gladys Broadhurst may have been the most complicated criminal case in the history of the Pacific Northwest, an Argus analysis suggested.Circuit judge M.A. Biggs interpreted the law on scores of issues where his decision might be questioned.

The sixty-four dollar question concerned the defendant’s marital status. Was she actually Broadhurst’s widow or the wife of Lincoln (sic) to whom she was still married when she hitched the doctor but whom she had illegally married only two days after a previous divorce or was she the wife of her alleged hatchet-man, Alvin Lee Williams whom she married in Reno a month before the doctor’s untimely end?

Whose wife she was had a definite bearing on the admissibility of important evidence and while the judge may have figured out the answer, it is doubtful if many listeners did.Other questions involved whether to admit evidence taken without a search warrant; whether an Oregon officer remained an officer after crossing the state line; (and) what was the guilt of a conspirator if a planned crime failed to develop according to plan?

Williams also sentenced to a life term; both released before serving no more than ten years

Four days after the April 1947 sentencing of his accomplice, Alvin Lee Williams plead guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to serve a life term in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Malheur County District Attorney Charles Swan moved to have the court reduce the charge from first degree to second degree murder in exchange for Williams’ guilty plea.

Williams testified for the prosecution at the Vale trial of Gladys Broadhurst who was convicted of first degree murder in the death of her Willis D. Broadhurst, a retired Caldwell, Idaho, chiropractor killed in the Jordon Valley area of Malheur County Oregon. Williams said he bludgeoned and shot the victim because he was under the thrall of Mrs. Broadhurst, whom testimony indicated coveted her husband’s $200,000 estate.

Judge M. A. Biggs asked Williams if he had a statement to make before the sentencing and Williams responded “no sir.”

Oregon officials have reported subsequently that Mrs. Broadhurst served nine years of her life sentence. Private observers added, in an internet posting, that Williams was seen walking free even before Broadhurst's release although the date of his release was not specified.

Williams describes the killing of Broadhurst

2008-08-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

As Williams sat on the witness stand described the killing of Dr. Broadhurst, the widow of the slain rancher, remained outwardly calm.

Testifying in a low monotone and seldom lifting his eyes for a look at the packed and crowded courtroom, or at his alleged partner in lust and murder, the slightly built Parma cowpuncher told details of the scheming which culminated in his waylaying and killing the prominent Oregon rancher on a highway to Jordan Valley during the early hours of October 14.

Williams claimed that at the last minute he tried not to kill the doctor but that he heard the voice of Gladys Broadhurst saying “don’t fail me…don’t fail me” and was driven to the murder.

Even after he had struck Broadhurst a crushing blow on the head he said that he repented and gave the doctor a cloth to hold over the hole in his head.

He said he wanted to flee but that Broadhurst came at him with a pocket knife. Then Williams picked up a 12 gauge shotgun (that was lying at his feet in the courtroom as he gave testimony) and fired a load of buckshot into the Caldwell Chiropractor’s chest.

Williams insisted he was carrying out the instructions given him the night before by Gladys Broadhurst.

As Williams spent a solid day on the stand, his alleged partner in crime often stared fixedly at him, but he paid no attention to her. She gave a helpless gesture as he described the killing, and she sometimes talked in an animated fashion with her lawyers.

Williams also described the preparations for the crime. He told how he and his alleged cohort obtained the murder gun and a bedroll from the home of his parents in Parma. He said that he used the bedroll to cover the body as he moved it from the highway to a place of hiding.

Gladys Broadhurst's greeting: Come to bed but first destory the evidence

The witness told of reporting back to his confederate after hiding the body the night after the killing.

“When I first got back to the Caldwell ranch I knocked at Mrs. Broadhurst’s bedroom window. She unlocked the door. As soon as I got inside, I said, ‘Well, I done it.’ She said’ Good. Come to bed.’ ”

“I said, ‘I haven’t destroyed the evidence.’ ”

“She told me to go do it and come right back.”

Williams related that he threw Dr. Broadhurst’s knife down a hill where he later helped Oregon officers find it, that he tossed away a wrench that he’d used to bludgeon the doctor at a cross road west of Caldwell, and that he burned the bed roll in which he had wrapped the body. He then returned to Mrs. Broadhurst and went to bed.

Williams explains his confession

The young man from Parma said that he confessed in court to the killing of Dr. Broadhurst because his lawyers felt that it might be helpful to his own cause. He had been told he said, “It might help to get the facts out among the people.”

He denied that any deal had been made with the prosecution and said that the only suggestion of being helped that he heard came from his own attorneys.

He said he was surprised when Mrs. Broadhurst first mentioned a “disappearance” for the doctor. But after they talked about it all the time he got used to the idea, he said, although he had tried to get Mrs. Broadhurst to run away with him instead.

Broadhurst wrote the Sweet Pea alibi note

Saturday afternoon, Stanley McDonald, handwriting expert of the Portland police department, declared that Mrs. Broadhurst had written a “sweet pea” note authorities found in her handbag, a note that attempted to establish an alibi for her and for Williams.

The note said: “Your cowboy strong arm didn’t do it, but don’t start anything or I’ll get you the same as I did the doctor. I warned you I need some cash. Sweet Pea.”

Mrs. Broadhurst suggested the note was written by a vicious twin brother of her former husband, Leslie Merle Lincoln. The twin brother proved to be mythical.

MacDonald also testified that Mrs. Broadhurst signed the name “Elaine Hamilton” to a marriage certificate issued at Reno on Sept. 17 to a woman who give that name and to Alvin Lee Williams.

A signature “Mr. and Mrs. Al Williams” at a Sacramento hotel was identified as Williams’ writing.

They had already committed adultery so why not murder?

2008-08-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

The young cowboy from Parma took the stand for the prosecution and described how plotting the murder began after he and Mrs. Broadhurst began living together on a trip to California. The first night of the trip they spent in the car, he said, where she asked to kiss him on the cheek because he looked like a brother of hers. She kissed him again, the second time on the mouth, and they slept together in the car.

They went on to Truckee and Lake Tahoe and spent several nights in which he went from his cabin to her tent to sleep with her because she was “afraid to sleep alone.” They lived together as man and wife staying at hotels in Sacramento and Bakersfield.

During this time as they began conspiring to kill Doctor Broadhurst. Mrs. Broadhurst told him they had already committed adultery and that it would be no worse to murder.

She described Broadhurst as “more animal than man.”

Mrs. Broadhurst and Williams were married in Reno on September 28 on the same trip and he claims she assured him that after Broadhurst had disappeared and had been declared dead they would marry again.

After their return to Caldwell, Broadhurst went on a hunting trip and they discussed Williams going later to shoot him in an apparent hunting accident and decided against such a course in favor of the one later followed.

Cowboy lover adds to his version of the plot

The prosecution brought out some new facts on the case from Mrs. Broadhurst’s accomplice during his second day of testimony.

Williams said he took a letter off Dr. Broadhurst’s body from the Senator Hotel in Sacramento which said that a “Mr. and Mrs. Al Williams” had registered there.

Williams also said Mrs. Broadhurst had complained to him the doctor was unkind to her and had occasionally locked her in a room at the ranch for indefinite periods. She also told him the doctor “didn’t want her around if she had to take a sleeping pill all the time.”

Williams stuck to his story as he went through a day of grueling cross-examination. Defense counsel tried to make him admit that he had a grudge against Dr. Broadhurst, but he refused to do it.Closely questioned about his relations with Dr. Broadhurst, he said he had been well treated and had no ill feeling toward the man he had killed.

“Why did you kill him?” defense attorney Gallagher asked.“That I don’t know,” Williams answered, speaking more clearly than usual.

He went on, “I thought that eventually she would have her freedom. She said that would be the only way she could get her freedom from the doctor.”

“Do you know how many times she has been divorced,” Gallagher snorted.Williams admitted that he was in love with Mrs. Broadhurst.

“You’d do almost anything to get her, wouldn’t you?” asked Gallagher.“Yes,” murmured Williams.

Victim’s friend describes relationship between the accused and her cowboy companion

2008-08-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

(Taken from Ontario Argus stories from March 1947)

Relations between Mrs. Gladys Broadhurst – on trial here for the murder of her husband, Dr. Willis Broadhurst – and her alleged accomplice, Alvin Lee Williams, were described in detail by Mrs. Lola Adams of Caldwell, who lived at the Broadhurst ranch near Caldwell during the period.

Mrs. Adams said the two occupied the same bedroom, embraced affectionately and that on one occasion she found Mrs. Broadhurst seated on Williams’ lap. Asked on cross examination why she did not tell Dr. Broadhurst of these goings-on when he returned from (a hunting trip), she answered “because I didn’t want to destroy his happiness when he was trying so hard to make his marriage a success.”

Mrs. Adams said Williams was in the Broadhurst house the morning after the murder though both doors had been locked the night before and that he appeared pale, spilled his coffee at breakfast and couldn’t light a cigarette.

Mrs. Adams also told of finding, in a bureau drawer, a letter from Dr. Broadhurst to the defendant, written before their marriage sometime in the summer of 1945. The letter said in part, “In answer to your letter and your questions, I am not married and have no heirs and no descendants.”

Cowboy quoted as having a problem in bed

Mrs. Adams, who was living with the Broadhursts, testified that she complained one night in the presence of Williams and Mrs. Broadhurst about her feet getting cold during the night, at which statement Mrs. Broadhurst offered her an electric heating pad.Upon Mrs. Adams asking, “Are you sure you won’t need it?”

Williams replied, “No she won’t. She has so many covers on bed now that I can hardly turn over.”

The spectators in the courtroom shouted with laughter before order was restored by Judge Biggs.

Mrs. Adams added that the couple would leave the ranch each morning and stay away until dinner time each evening. She saw them upon several different occasions embracing one another, she said.

They told her that they had made two different trips to Jordan Valley and one day they went to Parma.

Returning home from a movie in Caldwell one night, Gladys asked me if I had seen the show ‘Leave her to Heaven,’ ” Mrs. Adams said. Upon her negative reply, Mrs. Broadhurst outlined the story briefly, and said, “Have you ever felt that for any reason you could take the life of another person?”

Prosecutor says Gladys Broadhurst planned the murder with her cowboy lover

2008-07-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

The State of Oregon, speaking through Blaine Halleck, special prosecutor, today told a Malheur County circuit court jury that it proposes to show step by step how Gladys Lincoln married Dr. Willis D. Broadhurst of Caldwell, Idaho, for his money and then conspired with young Alvin Lee Williams, an employee on Broadhurst’s ranch, to kill him both before and after she went through what the state claims was an illegal marriage ceremony with Williams at Reno, Nevada, Sept. 17, 1947.

The jury, along with two alternates, was completed at 11:05 today after Judge M.A. Biggs ruled in favor of the state on the defense’s attempt to secure possession of documents turned over to the state following Mrs. Broadhurst’s arrest and which the defense said contained evidence that could be used against the defendant. Judge Biggs also ruled that the state may introduce (the documents) as evidence during the trial.

Attorney Halleck, in his opening statement, charged that Mrs. Broadhurst renewed a 20-year-old acquaintance with the Caldwell chiropractor who had become worth an estimated $200,000 and got him to marry her several months before a divorce decree from (her husband) Merle Lincoln was to become final, May 20, 1946 in Reno, Nevada.

At the Broadhurst ranch in Caldwell, Idaho a few weeks later she met Williams and took up with him, suggesting to Dr. Broadhurst that (Williams) accompany her to California where (she claimed) she feared violence from her late husband’s brother. She told Broadhurst that Lincoln had been killed in the war. . . .

Halleck said the state will show that Mrs. Broadhurst paid $200 for the car Williams needed to carry out the crime, and the whiskey she knew he needed to steel him for it. Halleck also said the defendant went with Williams to Parma to get the gun he used.

“Dr. Broadhurst was beaten and shot to death by Alvin Lee Williams, but the murder was conceived, plotted, planned, directed, encouraged and assisted by the defendant whom the state contends is equally guilty,” Halleck told the jury.

According to the Argus story, the Jury --- as finally completed after two and a half days questioning --- included Ernest Adams, Van Maltsberger, Ed Oakes, Gertrude Blanton and Sam F. Taylor, all of Ontario; J.C. Olson, Torvald Olson, Ida Walters and Mona A. Davis of Nyssa, William Morrison of Vale, and Earl Flock of Fruitland (the newspaper listed only eleven). Alternates were Jonesie D. Scott of Vale and Carroll Loecy of Ironside.

Mrs. Broadhurst entered the courtroom (for the final day of jury selection and the opening of the trial) walking erectly looking composed, although showing great concern. She was dressed simply in a black tailored suit with a white blouse, a black hat with a touch of gold sequin trim, and a black veil worn off the face. She displayed keen interest over the questioning of the jurors, leaning forward frequently to catch each word of the panel members as they were questioned.

Defense Attorney P. J. Gallagher of Ontario questioned each prospective juror closely as the newspaper and magazine accounts he (or she) had read (as well as) whether it would prejudice the juror that Mrs. Broadhurst had been married several times and that her divorce might not have been final when she married Broadhurst. The defense attorney also attempted, unsuccessfully, to exclude from evidence letters and documents taken from Mrs. Broadhurst when she was arrested and later delivered to the prosecution by friends of Broadhurst.

Caldwell chiropractor’s widow and her cowboy boyfriend arrested for murder

2008-07-31T22:34:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: Beginning with this Dec. 19, 1946 story from the Ontario Argus, that newspaper (which was yet to be combined with the Observer) tracked the arrest and trial of suspects in the murder of W.D. Broadhurst, a Jordan Valley rancher and retired Caldwell, Idaho, chiropractor. The story would grow into one of the most spectacular accounts of passion and murder in the history of Eastern Oregon, drawing national attention to what in the 1950s retained some of the wide open character of the old West. An abbreviated version of the case --- placed in a different year and seen from the perspective of my father, the editor of the paper at the time --- appears in my novel Farewell Bend. The full story as it unwound in the pages of The Argus will soon be available here in several short bursts, or for readers who prefer a longer option, in a single long take.)

Mrs. Gladys Broadhurst, recently indicted on a charge of being an accessory in the slaying of her late husband, R. W.D. Broadhurst, Jordan Valley Rancher, was brought into Oregon to fact the charged Wednesday night after District Judge Thomas E. Buckner of Canyon County, Idaho, had denied a habeas corpus petition filed by her attorneys.

Previously Mrs. Broadhurst had been held in the county jail at Caldwell, since her arrest shortly following the finding of her husband’s body in mid-October and the alleged confession of Alvin Lee Williams, 32, a cowboy and Mrs. Broadhurst’s part-time chauffeur. Williams told police that he had slugged and shot the former chiropractor who had been on his way from Caldwell to his ranch near Jordan Valley.

Gov. Williams of Idaho last week honored the extradition request but had instructed the Canyon County sheriff not to turn Mrs. Broadhurst over to Oregon authorities until her attorneys --- P.J. Gallagher of Ontario and Cleve Groome of Caldwell --- had an opportunity to file the habeas corpus petition.

Williams, who was indicted on a first degree murder charge in connection with the death Oct. 14 of Dr. Broadhurst, pleaded not guilty in circuit court at Vale.

Broadhurst trial set to begin

The trial of Gladys Lincoln Broadhurst for first degree murder of her husband, R. W. D. Broadhurst, is set for Feb. 24, at the county courthouse in Vale, Oregon, The Argus-Observer reported on Jan. 9, 1947.

Dr. Broadhurst was beaten and shot to death on Oct. 14, 1946 while traveling from his home near Caldwell to his ranch in Jordan Valley.

Circuit Judge M. A. Biggs, who set the trial date for Mrs. Broadhurst postponed the trial of her alleged accomplice from Feb. 3 to March 10.

Deputy District Attorney Charles Swan, who was about to take office as county district attorney, asked for the Williams trial postponment, which suggests that prosecutors hope Williams might testify against Mrs. Broadhurst.

The Argus Observes: Thank you Mrs. Antrim for your criticism

2008-07-28T13:19:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: Here’s a short dissertation that, between the lines, suggests how much my father enjoyed being a country editor. In a month or so, I’ll expand on this theme with a series of blog posts I’m crafting describing my father’s tenure at The Argus-Observer in Ontario, Oregon.)

From the July 29, 1954 issue of The Argus-Observer

One or our readers gave me a real editorial lift this week.

In a letter to the editor published on the editorial page of this issue, she complains that we are too critical of the people’s elected representatives in Congress, that we are unfair to Senator McCarthy and continues:

“I am willing to let an editor spout off once in a while but when it becomes so frequent and so unfair as to indicate a policy that I consider very undesirable I deem it best to discontinue my subscription, so you can cancel my subscription as of now.”

This is the best compliment our editorial page has had in many months. Who would dream that way out here in Malheur County, far away from Washington’s halls of democracy, the expression of opinion on the editorial page of a country newspaper would arouse such definite reaction?

This proves a point. The extremely practical country newspapermen, the ones too busy to write editorials about anything as abstract as national affairs, are wrong. People do read the editorials and the letter we got this week proves it. Hooray for Mrs. Antrim! . . . .

We do get lots of criticism in the newspaper business because the chances for it run to several thousand for every issue and our work is in front of everybody, wide open for criticism. A person who is bothered by criticism has no business being a newspaperman.

Frequently --- more frequently than you would imagine --- criticism actually boosts the morale of the newspaper. We know from experience that people don’t stay mad. Some of my best friends are people who at one time or another have cancelled their subscriptions because of anger at the paper. They got over it.

What is just fatal for a newspaper is to be ignored, to not make much difference one way or another.

An editor never gets much personal reaction from people except little pleasantries. He often feels he is working in a vacuum because of lack of personal contact with his readers.

Although I don’t know Mrs. Antrim, she now ranks high on my list of favorite people. Even though we may disagree about Senator McCarthy and about congressional responsibility to the president, she has given my ego a boost.

Escaping driver dies in shootout over $2.48 worth of gas

2008-07-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

The Argus Observes: Suburbs on the rise can have their own provincialism

2008-07-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: In 1954 the rise of suburbs and the urbanization of America was already a phenomenon worth noting. Not everyone thought it a good thing. Nor would it, my father suggested, do away with the development of provincial attitudes. Come to think of it, provincialism is alive and well in 2008 America. It’s one way of thinking about the red state, blue state divide.)

From The Argus Observer for July 22, 1954

My brother-in-law, visiting here from Detroit, made the same observation about “suburbia” as that made by Frederick Lewis Allen in a series of two articles in the most recent issues of Harper’s Magazine.

He is Bruce McBane, an executive in charge of research in auto paints for Pittsburgh Paint in its Ditsler plant in Detroit. He and my sister live in a new post-war housing project for middle income families in Detroit.

It is the “for middle income families” that is the revealing factor.

Bruce said, “Our children don’t see enough of all kinds of people. For instance, they don’t get any contact with people of other aces or other income brackets or other economic interests.”…
It is so much a young family type of community that there are 74 children in their rather large residential block.

This is just one little phase of the change that has come about in living because of the great American movement to suburban living. Marriage prospects, social customs, hobbies and buying habits of this generation are being radically upset by America’s headlong rush into suburban living. In many areas the quiet rural neighborhood is vanishing, gobbled up by the fast spreading metropolis and the space-eating automobile.

Each one of these new communities develops its own provincial characteristics just like one of the country provinces from which the term provincial originate.

A peaceful, well settled family life results in certain provincial characteristics wherever it occurs.

As a boy raised in rural Idaho, I accepted the idea that we were provincial in the original sense because we had as Webster defines, “the ways or manners of a rural district.”

But there is a further definition of “provincial” in the dictionary, “confined to a definite locality . . . restricted . . . limited.”

As a young man selling advertising in the Mission district of San Francisco (during the late 1930s), I learned that some of the world’s most provincial people live in the cities.

The mission district had its own shopping area three miles from the city center. I met many people who hadn’t been downtown for two or three years and one prominent business man once told me in glowing terms of his trip east as a youth. He had been to Reno to see the famous Johnson and Willard prize fight in 1914.

Those people read less and knew less about what was going on in the world by a good deal than the farm people I had known in Idaho. So San Francisco’s working people looked shockingly provincial to me.

On the other hand I have noticed that we look provincial to people who move here from the cities. We have a different kind of community life, lacking many of the things the city dweller is used to, so we seem provincial.

I think that most families would find some restrictive tendencies in the educational training of their children no matter where they lived. No place is completely cosmopolitan and maybe it is just as good for us if we do have our roots in some definite community situation.

Almost everyone gets some emotional satisfaction out of his provincial roots.
O. Henry wrote a clever short story about the human trait of prejudice in behalf of one’s childhood surroundings.

Entitled “Cosmopolite in a Café,” it tells of a boisterous fellow who brags about being a citizen of the world and works up considerable enthusiasm among his associates until it reaches the point where someone makes a disparaging remark about “the bum sidewalks and the water supply” of Mattawankeg, Maine.

Thereupon the cosmopolite promptly punched the offender, “Originally from Mattawankeag,” the explanation goes, “he wouldn’t stand for no knockin’ the place.” – By Don Lynch

Television comes to Malheur County, Oregon: July 15, 1953

2008-07-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

Residents of Ontario and other Eastern Oregon and Southwestern Idaho communities gathered in front of the few new local television sets on Sunday, July 15, 1953 to watch the first signals arriving from the first station in the area. It was Boise’s KIDO TV, which went on the air at 2 p.m. that day. The first national show to come across the screen was the Dennis Day Show.

In Ontario, The Argus-Observer photographed the Hathaway family, including daughter Sue, 14, and son Chuck, 13, gathered around a set in their living room.

The newspaper’s photographer also found a large gathering in the Moore Hotel lounge where a set was displaying the black and white signal out of Boise.

Philo Farnsworth, who was credited with developing the basic idea for television broadcasts while a high school student in Rigby, Idaho, in 1921, appeared in Boise that July 1953 Sunday to commemorate TV coming to Idaho some years after it began appearing in homes in Los Angeles and NewYork.

The Argus Observes: Women of a certain age

2008-07-14T14:04:00.000-07:00

(Editor’s note: My father, who was 39 when he wrote this in 1954, always liked women who were his own age --- sometimes even older. Over time to I came to understand that he cared more for intellect and worldliness than looks. So this column represented his true feelings though if they had been otherwise I doubt he’d have written it for his own newspaper. He usually tried to avoid the wrath of my mother, for good reason, and I am not even sure this one slipped past that. For what it’s worth, that’s him, at about this age, on the cover of my novel, Farewell Bend, along with my mother and brother. For a picture of my dad when he matured some, you can go to my photo gallery at http://larryllynch.blogspot.com )

From The Argus-Observer of July 15, 1954

A recent experience may be a sign that middle age is here or not far away.

I noticed a nice looking woman on the street the other day, gal nearing 40 I’d say. She had a gracious, natural dignity, a lithe, easy movement as she walking and a charming manner --- real nice.

And I thought to myself “ … wonder why their younger sisters don’t have quite the quality possessed by the girls of my generation.”

Then it came to me that it was something about the way she was dressed. Somehow there was an expression of taste in her clothes a little different than would be selected by today’s girl of 20.

And whatever it was, it was all interconnected with a feeling of belonging with and preferring the contemporaries of my own age. Just a fleeting thought, and then it was forgotten.
Later in the day it was brought back to mind by a conversation with Joe Marquina, manager of Toggery Bill’s.

It’s hard to create much new business with the older men unless their young in spirit,” Joe said. “They don’t take very fast to new ideas in clothes.”

I recalled a distinguished and dressy old boy of my acquaintance who still wars shoes instead of oxfords. And while Joe and I talked a customer of the appropriate age came in and asked for a sailor straw.

We all tend to cling to things and the habits associated with our youth. Things that help us to capture an old feeling of well being, a feeling that must stem from some pleasant emotional origin.

Now believe it or not, I don’t know who the woman was who started this train of thought, can’t remember a thing about her, wouldn’t recognize her if I met her again.

All I remember is the impression. She might have been any one of dozens of women who have certain qualities that date them but qualities that are pleasing to me just the same.

But I can’t help wonder if these girls of my vintage will still be the best lookers among women in another 20 years.