The New Era was born on Sept. 27, 1929 with the publication of the first issue by Dr. Craig H. Crusen, who came from the Midwest in the mid-1920s to start a medical practice in Sweet Home.
According to an article in the Aug. 25, 1966 issue of The New Era, Crusen, who had come back to visit Sweet Home shortly before the article was written, said he had started his practice in “about 1927,” and “had a lot of time since my practice wasn’t too large.”
Sweet Home had actually had a newspaper previously, from 1912 to 1914, when Tom Duggar published the Intermountain Tribune before heading off to Scio to run another newspaper.
The Brownsville Times, which previously had been critical of the establishment of a saloon in Sweet Home, which the Times predicted would “be enough to make Sweet Home a mecca of the “wet horde” from all quarters – and probably something worse,” commented on the latest development: “The removal of the Tribune from Sweet Home demonstrates that the coming of the saloon to the town failed to build it up, as was anticipated. The Times is informed that Sweet Home has had enough of the saloon…”
Sitting on his porch one day, Dr. Crusen looked out across Sweet Home and “just sort of thought to myself that the town seemed large enough to have a newspaper. There were about 100 families living here then.”
He started collecting necessary equipment to produce the paper and made arrangements to have it printed in Lebanon. Later, it was printed in Brownsville and then, about a year after its founding, the printing operation was moved to Sweet Home.
Crusen initially had no subscribers, and simply mailed the paper to everyone in town.
“I said a lot of things back then that were quite controversial and the paper got a name for discussing controversial subjects,” he said. “Often, I’d take the unpopular side just to get people talking.”
A major thrust of the paper in those days was talk of a railroad coming to town. Crusen was an unabashed proponent of rail service.
“I was sure the railroad would do much to increase the potential of the valley, though at that time I thought the future would be more in the agricultural area of strawberries. No one seemed to think that timber would be such an important asset in the next 40 years.”
He was so confident, in fact, that in 1930 he published a two-color edition heralding the South Santiam valley and the strawberry industry. That was one of his sweetest memories of his days as a newspaper publisher.
The railroad talk became reality in 1931, followed by development of the highway, shortly before the doctor moved on.
“When I came here, it was difficult to get here,” he said. “Transportation such as the railroad and the highway have, no doubt, been the most significant factors in the growth of the area.”
Crusen had met a local resident, John Russell, who had once been a “newspaper man” and who often mentioned to the doctor that he wished he’d started a paper himself in Sweet Home. In 1931 Crusen was offered “a good position” in Eugene and decided to take it. Just before he left town, he spotted Russell walking down the street and called to him.
According to the 1966 account, “As John Russell entered the shop, Dr. Crusen said to him, ‘Well, here it is, John. It’s all yours.’”
Russell ran The New Era from 1931 to 1946, despite taking over “with many misgivings,” he wrote.
“Mrs. Russell and myself took over, rolled up our sleeves and started out to give Sweet Home a good newspaper. The success of our efforts is plainly mirrored in our enviable list of subscribers and in our advertising and job printing departments.
“The facts of the case are that Sweet Home and community folks have kept us very busy during the years since 1931.”
Russell was a colorful journalist who crusaded against a proposed dam that would have flooded Sweet Home and put a lot of effort into chronicling the town’s history. In 1936 he moved the newspaper plant from quarters behind Thompson’s Real Estate Office to a building located south and east of the intersection of 12th Avenue and Long Street.
Russell actually sold the paper briefly to Dave MacMillian in 1939, but it was returned to the Russells in 1940 and they resumed publishing it, continuing until the summer of 1946, when they sold The New Era to Bill Dudley and A.E. “Mac” Macoubrie, two young printers from Wyoming.
Macoubrie and Dudley had met and become close friends while working for the Casper, Wyo. Tribune. Their wives were actually sisters. They’d come to Oregon looking for a newspaper to buy.
“We came to Oregon in 1945 but worked in Eugene for a year before coming to Sweet Home,” Dudley told an interviewer. He worked for the University of
Oregon print shop and Macoubrie for the Eugene Register-Guard. Alton Baker, publisher of the Register-Guard, told Macoubrie he’d heard The New Era was for sale.
Things were a bit rough for the newcomers, initially.
Maxine Macoubrie recalled how, when her husband and brother-in-law were meeting with Russell in Sweet Home to discuss buying the paper, her sister, Russell’s wife, “had on high heels and a hat and the wind was blowing, and her heels kept falling down in the cracks (of the wood sidewalks).”
World War II had ended and peace talks were under way, but conflict was still a primary topic in the paper, which ran a headline warning that “Atomic War Could Force Return to Primitive Life.”
Russell stayed on for a year as editor and his son-in-law Ike Eisiminger was one of the print crew.
Dudley and Macoubrie were quite active in the community, among the charter members of both the Sweet Home Jaycees and the Toastmasters Club. Dudley was one of the city’s first planning commissioners.
“At the time, we were getting into problems with garbage dumps and subdivisions and there was no control,” he recalled. “If somebody wanted to sell a bunch of lots, they just went out with a tape measure and measured them off and sold them.”
His wife Lee, Maxine’s sister, served as Sweet Home’s first city councilwoman, from 1958 to 1962.
Dudley and Macoubrie saw the city growing and bought the lot behind the post office for a new building to house the newspaper, which was then located behind the Mid-City IGA storage building. However, Vivian Long offered to build them a building at the corner of 12th and Long, where the Friends of the Library Bookstore is now located, so they sold the land to the city for a new library.
In 1970 Macoubrie died, at age 54, and the paper was sold to three Springfield partners, already owners of the Springfield News, who owned it until 1972, while Dudley continued to serve as publisher. Printing took place at the Springfield News, which also printed the Lebanon Express, the Brownsville Times and several other local newspapers, including the Sweet Home High School Huskian.
After two years, the partners sold The New Era to Dave Cooper, who had worked for Macoubrie and Dudley as news editor from 1958 to 1961. His first editorial in that first stint at the paper had been “on the need for us all to work together for the improvement of Highway 20,” he said later. He’d applied for the job after briefly serving as an executive in the Boy Scouts, but realizing that “ink had already gotten into my blood.”
“Bill Dudley and the late A.E. “Mac” Macoubrie were impressed that anybody who had gotten out of the newspaper business and wanted back in must be dedicated (or stupid, I’m not sure which), so they gave me the job.”
Cooper and his then-wife Bridget had fond memories of Sweet Home, he said. He, like his former bosses, plunged into civic life, serving at one time or another as president of the Jaycees, Chamber of Commerce board member, as an organizer and delegate to the Linn County Chamber of Commerce, and as one of the founders of Sportsman’s Holiday.
Cooper said that he and Lebanon Express Editor Ken Bouton, a former employee at The New Era, “teamed for several editorial efforts for what we felt was the good of Linn County. We felt the need because the Albany Democrat-Herald was not much of an editorial leader.”
He said The New Era was instrumental in those days in the formation of the Linn County Chamber of Commerce, the formation of a county Parks Commission (under the leadership of then-President Ozzie Shaw), and pushing through a county work-welfare program that later went defunct, but not before it prompted threats on Cooper’s life. Cooper eventually became a county commissioner and, shortly after his four-year term was up, sold the paper to Alex and Debbie Paul in 1985.
The Pauls arrived in a Ryder truck from Iowa, via St. Joseph, Mo., with their three children, and began a 20-year stint as owners of The New Era.
Cooper said at the time that he sold the paper “after considerable discussion and lots of going back and forth” because of health problems his wife Sonia was experiencing and because “the Pauls are a young and energetic couple (Alex is 30 and Debbie is 26) and they are definitely dedicated to small-town journalism.
“I told them all the problems, including the timber economy, and they still wanted the newspaper, so I think they will serve Sweet Home well.”
Despite a nasty bout with illness on the first day of publication for Alex Paul, and too many all-nighters to get the paper out on time in an era of slimmed-down staffs and supposedly improved technology, the Pauls completed 20 years – on the nose – as co-publishers.
Along the way they won a Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association coveted Elmo Smith Award for General Excellence and dozens of other awards for writing and photography, maintaining The New Era’s reputation as one of the top small weeklies in the state.
The Pauls worked extensively alongside two longtime employees who have played an integral part of the newspaper’s history and development.
One, Pete Porter, they inherited from Cooper who had hired Porter as a sports and religion writer after Porter, a former logger, was injured while working in the woods. Porter wrote a weekly sports column called “Pete’s Potshots” and was generally a fixture in the community from when he was hired, about 1979, until he retired in 1994.
The Pauls then brought in Sean C. Morgan, a young graduate of the University of Oregon hired in December 1995, after Porter’s retirement, who like Porter will be remembered as a player in Sweet Home’s history.
Like their predecessors, the Pauls were heavily involved in community life – among other things, serving in the early years on the Sweet Home Economic Development Group Board of Directors, publishing programs for the Oregon Jamboree and the Linn County Parks Department, serving on the chamber Board of Directors, in the Elks and other organizations.
Under their guidance, The New Era provided in-depth coverage of the spotted owl controversy that shut down much of the local timber industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They took the newspaper through a series of changes technologically,
Their three children were educated in Sweet Home schools, participated heavily in local sports, and two served as valedictorians at the high school.
On April 1, 2005, 20 years to the day from when they took over The New Era, the Pauls turned it over to new owners Scott and Miriam Swanson. Like Cooper and Alex Paul, Swanson came to Sweet Home from other newsrooms, having gotten his start in journalism at the Grants Pass Courier in 1980.
With the Swansons at the helm, the newspaper negotiated its way through the tough recession of the late 2000s and, along the way, won more General Excellence awards.
“The New Era has been a critical player in Sweet Home’s community life and development,” Scott Swanson said. “Our primary goal has been to keep this newspaper not only alive, but thriving in an era when other journalism operations are cutting back on what people need and want – local news.
“It’s really important to us to make sure Sweet Home has a healthy local newspaper for, we hope, many decades to come.”