?I longed for the small-town life, where people still get worked up over a hard-fought football game on a crisp fall Friday night, or turn out for a high school stage production on Saturday evening and take the time for a cup of coffee and socializing with their neighbors after Sunday church services.
April 10, 1985 The New Era
Those words were included in my first column for The New Era, after Debbie and I had put down nearly every penny we had saved from several years hard work to buy this little hometown newspaper in the beautiful Willamette Valley.
We had planned to work hard for a few years, sell the paper and return back to Iowa to raise our family. We fell in love with Oregon and never made it back to Cyclone country.
That country lifestyle and three goals marked our eagerness to own a weekly newspaper:
1. I wanted to be with my wife and children every day, having grown up in a family where my dad had to work away from home for much of our life.
Until our three kids went off to college, we worked side by side, every day. We never had to miss a wrestling match, softball game or school play or ask permission to go. We might have to go back to work after the event or work over the weekend, but we were still there as a family.
2. We wanted to own a newspaper in which we and the community could take pride.
The New Era has twice been named among the state?s best weekly newspapers in terms of general excellence, we?ve won some five dozen news and photo awards including what we consider the key areas–spot news and editorials/editorial page, several times. We’ve also earned community service and President’s Awards from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association.
3. We wanted to be financially secure to the point that we never were late on a payment to Dave and Sonia Cooper and that we could provide a loving, secure life for our children, including college educations.
There are many families in Sweet Home with more money than us, but none who can say they have a tighter bond with their children or the community in which we chose to live, work, play and promote. Three kids, three college educations, with good jobs they love, who still enjoy spending time at home.
So, mission accomplished.
As we ponder the last 20 years that have flown by at a blurring pace, we feel satisfied that we are among the lucky few who can say they have lived their life exactly as they wanted.
A friend once asked why I stay in “this one horse town” and my reply was that I like one horse towns. I’ve lived and worked in big cities and they hold no appeal for us.
Sure, there have been times when we thought any other job had to be better than what we were doing…when machinery was broken, when a special section added even more hours to our long work week or when someone would buy an ad in another publication and ask us to run the same information as a ?press release.?
Perhaps it was seeing a drawing of a newspaper editor, complete with green eye shade, in my hometown newspaper when I was a child that put the wheels toward this vocation in motion. (I later worked with and admired that editor, a true old-time, hard-core newsman named Charlie DePuy.)
Perhaps it was writing high school sports for that same paper, or working for the epitome of ?Mom and Pop? newspaper publishers Hugh and Ronnie Doty in the little town of Corydon, Iowa for three years. Those early years were like earning a Masters Degree in community journalism from among the very best.
Or perhaps, it was the wise advice of my father, Frank, now passed away, who said a man should do what he does best and ?the money will follow.?
That adage seemed extremely difficult to understand when we had to work two and three jobs to stay afloat en route to owning The New Era.
As small towns continue to shrink, as industry finds it harder to locate away from main roadways, as businesses grow larger and larger with fewer ties to rural communities, weekly newspapers too have changed.
Gone are the full page grocery ads, the auto dealerships and the weekly quarter-page bank ads that were the staple for newspapers of the past. My old bosses would probably shake their head at the “new” newspaper world.
We live in a fast-paced, global economy. The income of many Sweet Home families isn?t generated locally. Watch the train of cars leaving our town each morning and returning each night and you?ll soon understand the dynamic demographic shift that has occurred not just here but nationwide in rural America, especially in the last 20 years.
It is a trend predicted by an Iowa State University extension service specialist as far back as 1978. We pooh-poohed his predictions then, but he was right on the money more than a quarter century later.
We thank God for allowing us to live, work and play in Sweet Home these last 20 years.
When we came to town, much like The New Era owners before us, we editorialized that Sweet Home has a certain dynamic energy and that it was, as then Mayor Ruth Ganta told us, ?A diamond in the rough.?
Although we?ve lived through a tremendous economic shift as the community has battled the decline of the timber industry, one thing has never wavered for us, and that is our belief that Sweet Home is indeed a ?diamond in the rough.?
Its development may not occur during our tenure here as guardians of the local newspaper, as we had hoped but it will surely occur.
The area?s natural beauty, the spirit of our townspeople and the sheer growth of Oregon in general, will mean that eventually Sweet Home will share in the riches other towns in the state already know.
We take comfort in our many great memories of our town and our lives within in.
As we ponder the impending half-century birthday mark that looms in December, we look back with very few regrets and bushel baskets filled with great memories.
Among them…
– I remember when we first met Senator Mae Yih. Debbie and I would spend most of the week getting the newspaper ready for print and spend the weekends working on inserts when we first came here. There we stood on a Saturday afternoon in April or May 1985. Dirty from handling the inserts, our three kids asleep at the office.
Up pulled a little Chinese lady in a Rolls Royce. In Sweet Home. She marched right into our office and introduced herself and a friendship was born.
It was, to say the least, an unusual sight.
– I remember when the Chamber of Commerce was located in Franny’s Furniture and was staffed by Julie Christianson. Verlene Carpenter adopted Deb and me in those early years and we had so much fun with Chamber events such as the year we dressed up as as Mafia families. There was also a St. Patrick’s Day event to which Deb and I wore potato sacks. Boy, did they itch. Jack Williamson of First Interstate Bank was also a key figure at the time.
– I remember industrial leaders of the community such as Ed Cutler and Wes Marchbanks from Willamette Industries, and Jack Barringer of Barringer Associates and Larry Blem of Cascade Timber Consulting and Mel and Stan Lester. Also, White’s Electronics, so quiet yet a worldwide leader in their field.
Deceased Jim Stock and Amos Horner. Civic leaders such as Jerry Wooley, Keith Gabriel and Jim Riggs. Gone but not forgotten.
Of course there’s Mona Waibel and Martha Steinbacher, who love Sweet Home and contribute so often to our pages.
Jerry Tack was a poster boy for a hard-working guy who would give anything he owned to Sweet Home.
Dave Holley and Sherman Weld devoted many years to the city council and to their town’s betterment in many ways. The list goes on.
– I remember the first meeting held at the Chamber to discuss how the town was going to deal with the Spotted Owl issue and the years of struggle that followed. Allowable timber harvest could be cut in half, we were told, only to learn that figure would really be more like 90 percent. I remember the food banks for local timber folks and the rallies in Salem and Portland.
– I remember the time the old addressograph machine broke down and after having the paper printed in Silverton, we loaded up the huge boxes of metal plates, reloaded the papers and headed back to Silverton to resurrect their old machine that hadn’t worked in years. It was an all-night event but we made it to the post office on time the next morning and the community never knew of our plight.
– I remember when Larry Chafin, John Rice, Scott Richards and I resurrected the Sweet Home Mat Club because our kids wanted to wrestle. Thus began a journey with Norm Davis and later Steve Thorpe that took us to dozens of gyms in Oregon and consumed every Saturday from November through March for many years. The result was back-to-back state championships in 1998 and 1999.
– I remember spending time listening to Marge Geil talk about developing a country music festival to be used as an economic development tool for the community. Everyone thought she was nuts but we believed it was worth a try. Today, the Oregon Jamboree in Sweet Home is hugely successful and brings much positive publicity to our community.
– I remember the terror associated with trying to keep the old Compugraphic equipment running in the early days of newspaper ownership. It cost $100 per hour to have a repairman come down from Portland and that was $100 we didn’t have. At one time, we had to set corrections in 14 point type on a machine known as the Headliner and reduce it to 10 point type (our regular body copy) on the copy machine. Not good.
– I remember buying our first MacIntosh computers and teaching ourselves how to operate them since we were the second or third weekly in the state to make the shift. Those early computers have now progressed through many generations to a state of the art system that allows us to print high-quality full color and to paginate our entire newspaper on the computer screen. With a keystroke, we can send pages to our printer in Albany or, for that matter, anywhere around the world.
– I have to thank Randy and Marty Leopard of Western Oregon Web Press for nearly 20 years of service to this newspaper. They first were at the Springfield News and then developed their own company with Hugh Crowe of Corvallis. They have done a great job printing this newspaper for 13 years. They are good friends who have helped us grow this paper technologically. We believe our color printing is as good as any weekly in the state and that’s due in large part to their devotion to the industry. Their staff, Bobbi, Mio, Vance, Caroline, Missy Robert, and the entire crew, deserve a tip of the hat from everyone at our office.
– I remember those early years when our family nearly lived at the paper. There was a year or two when I was in the office every single day of the year except Christmas. My dad came to visit for a couple weeks and stayed for nine months, without him here to help babysit, life would have been pretty rough.
During our years in Oregon, we’ve lost Debbie’s brother David, her three grandparents, my dad and my grandmother. We came to town with three young children and they are now grown, working adults.
Without the dedication of my wife Debbie and our kids, we could not have made it work. Debbie is respected statewide for her work in advertising and in the community. She was supposed to work only a few hours a week for the first year or so. She ended up working more than fulltime for 20 years.
Our kids were stuffing inserts, sweeping up and hauling trash while other kids were watching cartoons.
I thank all of them. There were many nights when we would put the kids to bed on a couch in the back room and the three of us, Deb, Pete Porter and myself would work around the clock except for a couple hours sleep on the concrete floor in the old office. Pete Porter, 10 years retired, was a big factor in our success as well, never complaining, always working long hours.
– I remember the great neighbors we had on Meridian Heights Loop. There’s no better place to raise kids. Barbecues and good times just chatting with others. There were many, many times Cliff Dewey and I would be mowing our yards, stop to chat and run out of daylight before we got back to the task at hand, put off for another day.
– I thank our loyal advertisers and subscribers, without whom there would not be a local newspaper in Sweet Home. Even though business has changed greatly in the last 20 years, we have many loyal advertisers who have been with us since the very beginning and several who have been with this newspaper long before we arrived on the scene. To all of you, we offer our deepest thanks and regards.
– I remember all of the kids, now grown, who have spent hour upon hour labeling newspapers in our backroom and getting lectured about studying, going to college, staying out of trouble. Our own kids. Vern Malone, Ron Brett, Floyd Neuschwander, Ian Copple, Justin Chafin, Kristin Philpott, the Moran girls (including Sara whose first question always was ‘Are we about done yet?”, Jordan Johnson, etc. There have been many. I hope their memories are fond ones as they are for me.
– I remember the honor of serving 10 years on the board of directors of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association and being elected president of that outstanding group. It marked a long journey from the small village in Italy from which my grandparents emigrated to America.
– I remember working on the Chamber of Commerce banquets for years, both setting up and tearing down with Greg Morse and many other volunteers. Of roofing the Chamber building with Jim Philpott and Arnie Anderson or helping the crew publicize the rebuilding of Weddle Covered Bridge and the work that went into garnering the community’s first Tree City USA designation.
– I remember Kiwanis Club meetings and work parties with folks like John Slauson, Dr. Robert Hyland, Lester Steckly, Lloyd White, Doctor Kyle, Ben Dahlenburg, Lloyd Sheldon and many others. Good times for good causes.
– I appreciate the outstanding working relationship we have with the City of Sweet Home, School District 55, Linn County Parks and others. We don’t shy away from hard news that might be unflattering to them at times, but the relationship overall remains positive and the lines of communication remain open. Bill Hampton, Bill Westphal, Larry Horton, Pat Stineff, Larry Johnson and office staff such as Caroline Wheeler, Barb Weld and Pat Haneberg, who have made our work so much easier over the years. We can’t forget the coaches who have been dedicated to providing us with information, even when we call on weekends or late at night and of course our local teachers, who call when there’s something special going in. We appreciate the heads up.
– I appreciated receiving the Alumnus of the Year award from Centerville (Iowa) High School two years ago, especially since my mentor, Robert K. Beck, made the presentation. I also remember the kind words of wisdom from my son, “Dad, that’s what happens when you get old” that quickly put me back into my place in the family pecking order.
– Our staff. The newspaper business, even at a weekly, is filled with deadline pressures. Add special sections, broken equipment or folks who bring items in after deadline and the stress level can get pretty high some days. We’ve been fortunate to have kept many of our employees for many years. Pete Porter, Sean C. Morgan, Dawnita Kurtz, Pam Mitchell, Vicki DeVines, Debbie Ashlock, Debbie Yeack and others spent five years or more with us. In fact, we’ve only had one or two folks who just didn’t work out in this game. So, we’ve been blessed with outstanding employees which makes a big difference when you have a small staff. Our current staff is outstanding. We laugh much but get the work done on time. Sean C. Morgan is the elder staff member at almost 10 years. Firiel Severns, ad sales, and Michelle Knight, composition, are both new within a year, but round out a great group. Our circulation kids are Cody Sanders and Marissa Lehman, who both do very good work.
– Our friends. We never planned to have many friends since we own the local newspaper, some folks have a hard time understanding what we do for a living. But, we have so many friends who have been with us through good times and bad.
We remember elk “camping” trips, fishing trips to the mountains with former Police Chief Gary David. One time we spent an entire morning on our hands and knees climbing up a snow-laden mountain to find a special lake only to realize it was the wrong mountain. We once fished for nine Sundays in a row until our wives put a stop to it.
There was the time at Suttle Lake when T.J. was very little that we fished with ice on our rod tips. We covered him with every piece of clothing available but it was still cold. “T.J., do you want us to go in?” I kept asking. “No, daddy, we’re catching fish,” he replied, his teeth chattering. He still loves to fish and hunt.
I remember Angela catching cutthroat trout in a high lake and giggling with laughter with each catch. I remember Amy enjoying crabbing at the Pacific Ocean.
Weekends at the coast, barbecues, graduation parties and many, many hours at the softball field or high school gym cheering on our kids or our friends’ kids or just the town’s kids. That’s where our lives have been spent.
I could not have written a better script for my life and I thank all who have played a role in it.