Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/367

358 Board members in addition to these were Messrs. Kramer, Doll, and Blake (121).

Kramer, probably the most picturesque member of the group, had been editor of the Advertiser, and his brother Ernest, its owner. The Kramers received $2500 for their newspaper and plant, and a like sum was paid to P. C. Levar for the Mail. The salary paid Kramer as editor and manager was $100 a month, and it was, he recalled recently, a night-and-day job. Revenues were limited in the small and in those days isolated community of about 700 population, far from railroad transportation and with nothing that would now be classed as a real highway. In less than a year Kramer gave up the struggle and left the paper to other hands.

This early editor, a native of Hanover, Germany (1876), had come to this country as a boy of 5, worked his way through high school and the National law school at Washington, D. C. Before his law school days he had been a southern cotton mill worker at 50 cents a week, cub printer, tramp journeyman typo, publisher of several papers in Arkansas and Utah. After his law graduation, he practiced for several years before getting into Oregon journalism. At various times in his life he has been professional cornetist, ham actor, minstrel in blackface, railroad builder, Linotype operator, and commercial printer. He is now (1936) and has been for 15 years a member of the Walter T. Lyon Printing Company at San Francisco.

Like a good many other Oregon dailies, the daily Times started small—a four-column folio, confined to local events.

After the Kramer regime, the Times was purchased by Michael C. Maloney and his brother, Dan E. Maloney, who conducted the paper, the former as active editor-publisher, Dan as manager, for a full twenty years. M. C. Maloney, who had been an editorial writer on the New York World and the Chicago Tribune, took hold as publisher in December, 1907, and at once changed it over to the evening side. It has continued ever since as an evening paper. In his valedictory, issued Saturday, December 31, 1927, Mr. Maloney briefly reviewed the progress of the paper.

Mr. Maloney recalled that the daily started under the Kramer regime was not the first daily paper on Coos bay. The Spanish-American war, great stimulant to journalistic enterprise, prodded the Times editor, T. H. Barry, to get out a daily paper. Telegraphic dispatches were arranged for, to meet the demand of avid readers of war news in those early-summer days of 1898, and a one-page daily paper was issued. For this paper, printed on only one side, the publisher was able to get $1 a month from enough subscribers to keep the paper going until the end of the war. The Maloney regime was one of keen journalistic battle, and it was the desperately competitive situation between the Times and the competing Southwestern Oregon Daily News that resulted in the Maloneys' selling out. They moved