Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/402

Rh Alva Patterson were the owners of the Gazette. The Record was taken over by the Pattersons December 1895 and the subscriptions filled out by them. I had a darned hard time living. It was during the Cleveland panic when wheat was 20 cents a bushel and wool 4 cents a pound. The only event of importance that I recall is that during this year I finished my career as a Democrat and have been a Republican ever since." This was written in 1925. Mr. Nelson is well known as the editor of the Junction City Times. He moved the plant away to a better-looking field at Pilot Rock.

Later owners of the Gazette, following Redington, were Rev. Henry Rasmus, then pastor of the Heppner Methodist Episcopal church, and Otis Patterson, a teacher from Waitsburg, Wash. With his brother Alva, he organized the Patterson Publishing Co., which conducted the business until 1898. The Patterson brothers brought to Heppner the first power printing press, a Country Campbell. The Pattersons were ambitious, and in a town then having fewer than a thousand population they published a semi-weekly, Tuesdays and Fridays, for five years, from March 1, 1892, to the fall of 1897. For several months in 1898, during the Spanish-Amerian war, they even issued a five-column, four-page daily.

Otis Patterson was something of a humorist, with a quaint journalistic style. One of his little jokes was to get out a "daily" for one day. This he did, June 5, 1891, saying to his readers: "It might be right to say that this is neither a salutatory nor a valedictory but rather a combination of both, for this day our little daily comes forth and tomorrow, with the setting sun, it dies."

When Otis Patterson moved away to The Dalles as receiver of the United States land office, in 1898, Corliss Merritt became publisher of the Gazette. J. W. Redington was back in 1900 running a Republican paper, which he soon after sold to Fred Warnock and Ed Michell. After two years Warnock purchased Michell's interest and conducted the paper until 1910.

Meanwhile the second Heppner Times was in the field, having been established November 18, 1897, by E. M. Shutt, with a plant very similar to that of the Gazette. Elected sheriff of the county in 1902, Mr. Shutt sold the Times to A. J. Hicks, who continued the Shutt policy of keen competition with the Gazette all along the line and installed a Simplex typesetting machine, the first mechanical composing apparatus put in use in the county. He ran the paper for ten years, when Shutt resumed control.

Vawter Crawford, formerly of the Record, took charge of the Gazette in December 1910, purchasing the paper from Fred Warnock. February 16, 19 12, he eliminated the competition by purchasing the Times from E. M. Shutt and consolidating the papers as the Gazette-Times. The paper has come down to the present (1939) under the same name and with the ownership in the Crawford