Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/336

Rh the paper to a seven-column folio and printed it all at home. After a period of political "independence," they also made the paper Democratic. These two partners were physicians, classmates in medicine at the University of California, and they continued their practice in Weston while getting out the paper. McColl, a Scotchman, was also in the drug business. (95)

Publishers who followed were McColl, himself, in 1883; Felix R. Mitchell, 1886; Baker & Ridenour (Emsley), 1888; M. A. Baker, 1889; Foster & Boyd, 1890; H. L. Bowmer, editor, 1891. The paper appears to have been called the Philistine for a short time following 1893, when M. J. Harvey was editor and publisher. The name Leader was resumed, and Clark Wood came into the picture again in 1896, this time as editor and publisher.

He was tempted away from Weston once to the big show—in 1913, when C. S. Jackson enticed him over to Portland, to write editorial paragraphs and do rewrite on the Oregon Journal. After a year, he returned to the small field and has since remained in Weston. "In the city," Mr. Wood once said in a paragraph, "the average man is a unit, in the country an individual." This he later cited as his reason for going back to the country. (96)

While in Pendleton he served three years as city treasurer (1891–94). He has done about everything one can do in connection with a newspaper. As he once expressed it, (97) he was "a linotype operator, a unitype operator, a hand compositor, ad man, job man, pressman, news writer, editorial writer, and to some extent paragrapher." The paragraphing end (editorial-short writing) of his paper has become his main interest. In twenty years or so of paragraphing, the Wood quips were quoted in Literary Digest's "Topics in Brief" nearly thousand times—a record equalled by few American editorial wisecrackers though coveted by all of them.

The Leader plant was twice destroyed by fire—and the second fire, in 1895, all files prior to that date were destroyed. The newspaper had a good deal to do with the founding of the old Weston state normal school, which Clark Wood, himself, was student, and for the start of the Weston–Elgin highway.

Yes, here's what those shorts that Colonel Wood grinds out are like: