Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/291

282 Two years later Beebe combined the papers under the title Lane County News. The Lane County Publishing Association now took over the paper, and its editor was William A. Dill, graduate of the University of Oregon, and former member of Eugene newspaper staffs, who was later to go from the Oregonian to a journalism teaching position at the University of Kansas. He died at Lawrence in the spring of 1939. In place of two papers the town now had one issued twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, for which no more was charged than the weekly had sold for—$1.50.

In 1916 Walter R. Dimm, graduate with the first full four-year class of the University of Oregon School of Journalism, was associated with his father, J. C. Dimm, practical printer, in the publication of the paper. They got the circulation up to 968. From 1919 up to 1924 there were several changes. The paper was made a weekly, issued Fridays; and successive publishers were Lynn W. Miller, Tage & Cagley, Robert A. Brodie, Tyler (S. H.) & Freeland (S. M.). Freeland & Henderson (T. V.). In 1924 H. Elmer Maxey, who for several years had been a reporter on the Eugene Daily Guard, became the publisher and has continued to date. One of the first things he did was to raise the size of the paper from five to six columns and to cut the subscription price from $2 to $1.25.

The paper is now usually eight columns, the number of pages flexible according to the amount of advertising to be carried.

Under Mr. Maxey the paper has taken an active part in the promotion of the Willamette Valley navigation and irrigation project, the first stages of which have been approved by the federal government. He is the president of the organization actively promoting the project, which is expected to be the greatest single impetus given the development of the Willamette valley.

As this is written, Charles H. Dickson, artist-reporter-editor, formerly of Seattle and Baltimore, is organizing a new tabloid paper to be published in Springfield for the rural residents of the upper Willamette valley.

Florence.—Two names come at once to mind in Florence journalism—W. H. Weatherson and M. D. Morgan. Mr. Weatherson, who succeeded B. F. Alley, founder of the Florence West, in 1898, as publisher of the first newspaper in western Lane county, gave the paper a unique, homey flavor in the days when the trip from Florence to Eugene was a longer, more difficult journey than the run to San Francisco is today and when Florence, therefore, enjoyed fairly complete isolation. Mr. Weatherson conducted the West, with the help of Mrs. Weatherson for many years, giving up to become postmaster about 1920. The other man, M. D. Morgan, formerly of Harrisburg, is the editor today of the latest of the successors of the old West, the Siuslaw Oar, founded June 8, 1928. Mr. Morgan