Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/427

418 newspaper. Mrs. Grace set up an office with part of her formeir equipment to do commercial job printing. Later, when the Byrds had a job-press freighted in to supplant the old Washington handpress in printing the paper, Mrs. Grace interpreted the move as a plan to establish a job department of their own. She therefore went back into the newspaper business with her own new paper, the News, in 1894. The Herald and the Times, started in 1887 and 1889 respectively, remained.

Now for a bit of description of the papers:

The Items, vol. 2, No. 30 (February 16, 1887): A six-column folio. No ads on the first page, four columns on the second, four and a half on the third, and three and a half on the fourth, or a total of 12 columns of advertising out of 24, or 50 per cent. The paper contained 16 notices of final proof on land. Advertising was carried by hotels, stage lines, blacksmithing, drug stores, general merchandise, Prineville Boot and Shoe Co. ("send your orders by stage, Marlin rifle, two livery stables, grocery store, saloon, meat market, two barbers (one, Lee Caldwell, a "practical" barber; the other, C. Sampson, practical and mechanical barber), baths Saturdays and Sundays; St. Jacob's Oil, Cuticura, Hall's Sarsaparilla, Piso's Cure for Consumption, D. M. Ferry's Seeds, Royal Baking Powder Dr. Pierce's Pleasant Pellets and Favorite Prescription, Electric Belts, etc. Recall when this sort of thing was fairly standard for all the papers and you're an old-timer.

Not much local news.

A lot of miscellaneous matter clipped from eastern exchanges, including the 1887 brand of jokes and wisecracks: "My mamma gives me a penny every day," said a little girl to her companion, "for taking a dose of castor oil." "What do you buy with so much money?" "Oh, mamma saves it up to buy castor oil with."

The Items, apparently, was full of the spirit and flavor of its day. Perhaps this was illustrated even in its quarters. Before the advent of the Items the building it occupied had been used as the cow-town's "social center." After the altogether informal young women had moved to better quarters behind a saloon across the street, the newspaper plant moved in. The girls' abandoned house made a good newspaper office because the inmats' numerous individual windows gave the place plenty of light for typesetting when the partitions were removed.

When John E. Roberts, later of Ontario, was editor and publisher of the Harney Times, and justice of the peace at Harney, Oregon, in 1893, the paper was a five-column quarto, 12×18. It started off, as many other newspapers of those days, with an official directory, headed by "President, Grover Cleveland; Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson." Cards for lawyers, doctors, tonsorial artists, and the hotels Tremont at Harney and Hess at Vale. Two little