Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/314

Rh experience in the Middle West before coming to the Pacific Coast in 1891. His first Oregon venture was the Bay City Tribune, a weekly paper, which he conducted for two years before moving to Astoria. For a time he published two newspapers from his printing shop—the Astoria Daily News and the Nehalem Herald. In 1897 he was associated with O. W. Dunbar, also of Astoria, in shipping a newspaper plant to Alaska, where Dunbar published Alaska's first daily newspaper, the Skagway Morning Alaskan. After publishing the Port Oregon Tribune at Warrenton for a time, he purchased the Morning Astorian from Lyle & Patterson.

The Astorian led the whole West in replacing hand composition with machines.

Of several versions, the Editor & Publisher account (78) of the coming of the linotype to Astoria and to Oregon checks best with the records of the Mergenthaler Linotype Co. The date was 1892; Ore gon led the Pacific Coast, for there was no linotype in California or Washington at that time; and Astoria led Oregon. A current story, based on fallible memory, that Samuel Elmore, fish-canner, then financial backer of the Astorian, saw the machine on exhibition at the Chicago world's fair and immediately ordered one for his paper, is discredited by two facts—the linotype was shipped from the factory at Brooklyn August 15, 1892 (79), and the world's fair, opened a year late, did not swing its gates to the public until the next year.

This machine, serial number 578, was lost in the Astoria fire of December 1922.

The facts as related in Editor & Publisher were, that P. W. Parker of Parker & Halloran, publishers of the paper, convinced from the performance of the machines in the New York Tribune office and at many other points in the East, that the new invention was practical and economical, made a trip to New York to get one. At that time the company was renting, rather than selling, the machines, then called by the operators Mergenthalers (generally "Mergs") from their inventor rather than Linotypes from their operation. Astoria, however, was so far away as to involve excessive shipping charges, and to get No. 578 Mr. Parker had to buy it.

Astoria now became a sort of holy city for the printers who wished to keep abreast of their vocation. There was a constant effort to get work there, and many an operator who has since put in a life time on the linotype learned its operation on the little paper at the mouth of the Columbia.

Seven months later the Oregon Statesman at Salem purchased two machines, followed the next year by the Oregonian, Portland, with eight.

John E. and William F. Gratke in 1919 sold the Budget, founded in 1892, to a group headed by E. B. Aldrich, editor of the East Oregonian; and Merle R. Chessman, Mr. Aldrich's news editor, was