Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/572



Colonel Clark Wood was born in Iowa on June 7, 1869. His parents brought him across the plains by mule team in 1871. The following sketch of him is condensed from an article by Professor George S. Turnbull of the school of journalism of the University of Oregon:

""Clark Wood, editor and publisher of the Weston Leader, stands by common consent at the top in Oregon as a builder of those terse, snappy comments known as editorial 'shorts'. In the 20 years or so that he has been specializing in this type of writing he has been quoted in Literary Digest's 'Topics in Brief more than 500 times—a record probably equaled by few if any American editorial wisecrackers. Colonel Wood has been in journalism for 52 years, since as a grammar school graduate of 13, he got his first newspaper job as printer's devil on the Leader. He owns the paper now. It isn't a big paper, and his town is far from a metropolis; paper and town each count something like 400 noses; but the field is his and has been Colonel Wood's deliberate choice.

"After a year as devil, Clark Wood stepped out as a compositor, taking on the East Oregonian. In 1895–96 Mr. Wood spent several months as reporter on the La Grande Daily Chronicle. In 1896 he went back to the Weston Leader, where he had started, and with the exception of the year 1913, when he for once succumbed to the lure of the big city and did rewrite and editorial paragraphs on the Oregon Journal, he has remained there ever since.""

Several years ago Colonel Wood explained to a conference of Oregon newspaper men how these "shorts" are written:

""If you do paragraphs to the extent of giving them the attention they demand, you will lose your punch for long stuff. Gradually the damnably insidious things will come to absorb and possess your being, and you live, eat and sleep paragraphs. . . . They become a problem in mental arithmetic or as a move in chess or a cross-word puzzle. They beguile you and interest you—and please you, too, if you chance to yank a good one out of the void. But they are the devil's own instrument of mental torture, too, if you work for an hour on something that ought to inspire one, and find that it will not come, as I have done many a time.""

One doesn't turn off radio jazz or crooning without sound reason.