Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/426

Rh formerly foreman of the composing room on the Coos Bay Times at Marshfield and later publisher of the Arlington Bulletin. The next July 21 Mr. Reeves sold to Dean D. Sellers, formerly of Forest Grove, Honolulu, and Bend. Publisher Sellers later made Willard D. Arant, a 1933 graduate of the University of Oregon School of Journalism, his editor.

Mr. Sellers sold the paper to R. E. Blankenburg in 1936. Mr. Arant continued as editor, leaving after a year to do graduate work at Harvard. Editors and publishers (1939) are R. E. and Lois Blankenburg.

Burns and Harney.—The Burns Times-Herald, through its various consolidations, has come down as a direct descendant of the Harney Valley Items, established more than half a century ago (in September, 1885). The Harney Valley Items, circulation about 200, though the first paper in what is now Harney county, was not established in that county but in Grant, from which the new county was taken in 1889.

Charles A. Byrd, of the Times-Herald staff, remembers the start. As a boy he was engaged in hauling wood for the winter, and one day in the late fall he looked through the window and saw Horace A. Dillard and his helpers printing the first issue.

Mr. Dillard had come from Prineville, attracted by final proof notices. Six years after he had looked in through the window, C. A. Byrd bought the paper. This was in 1891.

Meanwhile the new Harney country was sprouting other ambitious publications. Mr. and Mrs. D. L. Grace launched the East Oregon Herald in 1887. The Harney Times, an independent Saturday weekly, later absorbed by the Herald, was started by Ben Brown in November, 1889, with M. Fitzgerald as editor. Later Mrs. (Nellie R.) Grace started the News for an interesting reason later to be related. This completes the early set-ups from which the consolidations were effected which resulted in the present Times-Herald.

Getting back to the Items: It was sold subsequently (161) to a stock company headed by Hank Levens, later Harney county judge. The paper was consolidated later with the News, established by Mrs. Grace in 1894.

As indicated, Mr. and Mrs. Grace had launched the Herald. C. A. Byrd, his father W. C. Byrd, and his brother Julian, now co-publisher of the Times-Herald with Douglas Mullarky, bought the Herald in 1891 with the understanding that they were to run a