Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/492

Rh of Oregon. The Sunday Welcome was not the only Sunday newspaper started by Atkinson, who, February 13, 1890, launched the Sunday Chronicle, publishing it for some time, only to sell it out and enter another business.

Down from The Dalles came Thomas B. Merry, editor, canoeist, and all-around sportsman, to be Sunday editor of the Oregonian—the first in Oregon. Much of the sparkling column stuff in the Sunday Oregonian was his.

A contemporary, Allan B. Slauson, recalls Merry as a very entertaining and prolific writer, one of the best Slauson ever knew. He spent his whole week preparing copy for his Sunday features, the "Grizzly" column and others.

Another who stands out was Col. William Lightfoot Visscher, who, after a short stay in 1888 went to C. X. Larrabee's boom town of Fairhaven, Wash., to edit the Herald, soon moving east to build up a national reputation in Chicago as poet and columnist of the Eugene Field type. Slauson succeeded him in 1889. Then came Henry E. Reed, followed by A. L. Parker, Joe Levinson, and George A. White, now major general in charge of the Oregon National Guard. The Sunday magazine section, which, as newspaper men know, is the only part of the paper for which the "Sunday editor" was responsible, was necessarily small in those days before the development of heavy advertising and pulp paper. It is no disrespect to the memory of any of the very able men who handled the Sunday features of those early days to say that the development of the real Sunday paper, with home-produced rather than syndicated features, is a matter al most of the last decade or so, and that the later Sunday editors—Clark Williams, Philip H. Parrish, W. H. Warren, and Edward M. Miller on the Oregonian, and Donald Sterling, O. C. Merrick, and Sam Raddon Jr. on the Journal have done more than a full share in this development.