Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/204

Rh to rent a building at $25 a month. We were given $15,000 which I think was banked in Voorhees' name. The paper was to be 5 columns with a specified length and breadth of page. We were given minute details as to what should appear in the paper. Among the details I remember there was to be a complete fiction story in it every day. Our daily expenditure was set down to the last cent. Our mechanical equipment was to appear from some mysterious place.

We rented a tumble-down storeroom on East Clay street between an Italian grocery and a hay and feed store. As was the Scripps custom then, the editor was responsible for the news and the composing-room end, the business manager for the rest of the paper. I undertook to buy some type and was refused unless I disclosed to what purpose I intended to put it. I threatened to go to the prosecuting attorney and finally got a couple of cases of type and a very skimpy composing-room equipment for which I paid cash.

I hired a couple of printers named McArthur, brothers, from the Oregon Journal. They were fearful that I was going to print lottery tickets. During this time we were in constant receipt of letters from Seattle from Chase and Wells [manager and editor, respectively, of Scripps' Seattle Star,] all in very mysterious language. There was no mention of the paper except "the Columbian proposition." No signature to the letters and no indication where they came from. In the course of a few weeks we received notice that there was a carload of machinery at our disposal in Vancouver, Wash. This was part of the melodramatic secrecy.

The machinery turned out to be a battered old flat-bed press and one battered old linotype. We installed the press and linotype side by side in the storeroom and one day printed an East Side News. Now, the entire staff—business and editorial —consisted of Voorhees and Dillon. I had no reporters, no press service, no typewriter; just a lead pencil and some copy paper. I rewrote the Morning Oregonian, and Mrs. Dillon used to buy copies of the Telegram and Journal as soon as they came off the press and dash over to the East Side News office and I would hastily rewrite a few items and then we would go to press. In the meantime, Voorhees was out soliciting subscribers and he finally got enough before we started to justify a carrier force of exactly one carrier. By the end of the month we had a circulation of 700 and four carriers. But by the end of the second month everybody had quit and we were down to a circulation of about 50. Nonetheless, we carried on more with the idea of seeing what in blazes would come out of this than of achieving anything,