Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/331

320 the understanding that he was to bid in the paper at the sale. This was carried out, and Kuck, dynamic, aggressive, a hard fighter, took hold as publisher. William E. Lowell, former publisher, remained for a time as city editor. The paper already, in March, had taken one step designed to prolong its life—it had moved out of the East Oregonian's evening field and become a morning paper, and such it remained to the end.

Publisher Kuck's aggressive policy led him into conflict with county and city administrations. Strong opposition was built up against him. In the meantime, with a young and clever staff, he was running an interesting paper even aside from its crusading. The question whether his crusades helped or hurt the paper financially will not be answered here. They did not seem to be dictated by any thing other than a desire to improve conditions. Kuck fought hard, but he lost. The paper was suspended in 1924.

Meanwhile the East Oregonian had gone ahead and prospered. C. S. Jackson had not burned his Pendleton bridges when he bought the Oregon Journal in 1902. Having moved to Portland, he employed Fred Lockley, who had been manager of the Pacific Monthly in Portland, to drive (horses, not a car) through eastern, central, and southern Oregon to enlist support for the Journal. Jackson, far from patting Fred on the back for lining up a lot of subscribers for the Journal in Pendleton, objected that he didn't want so many, since the Journal was not yet what he wanted to make it and it wasn't wise to antagonize so many potential readers. At that time Jackson was running the Northwest Livestock and WoolgrowersJournal as well as the East Oregonian, and he made Mr. Lockley manager. Then about 1904 he sold Lockley a quarter interest in the East Oregonian. Lockley at that time covered much of eastern Oregan for the East Oregonian, traveling by horseback or team. He has kept on traveling, much of the time, ever since, mostly working for the Oregon Journal, for which he produced a daily interview feature for the last 27 years. In that time he has interviewed more than 10,000 persons—"army officers, world travelers, explorers, government officials . . . Indian war veterans, mule-skinners, bull-whackers, scouts, pioneers, saints and sinners, heroes and hobos, and innumerable other human documents bound in broadcloth or buckskin." (92) In the spring of 1939 Fred started contributing only to the Sunday paper.

In 1904, about the same time that Lockley went to the East Oregonian, a young man named Edwin B. Aldrich (son of J. H. Aldrich of the Newport News, who was one of the founders of the Oregon State Press Association in 1887), four years out of the Oregon Agricultural College, came to the staff. In 1908 he became a stockholder, when he and Lee D. Drake, now business manager of the E. O., purchased Fred Lockley's stock; that year he became