Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/521

512 "Mr. Jerome Porter, of Forest Grove, came in yesterday and was at the Perkins. He has quite a number of promising young trotters, but is troubled with failing eyesight."

Several other short paragraphs follow, and there was nearly half a column on "Mr. Quimby's New Colt," including also a description and general writeup of L. P. W. Quimby's racehorses. The reporter was beginning to go out after sports news. We note, Jan. 31, 1891, a local writeup, more than a column in length, describing "Witch Hazel Farm," where fast horses were in training. In the same issue, under a four-deck head keylined "Horses and Horsemen," appeared two-thirds of a column of local racing news and gossip. The detail is full and the form excellent except for the dull heads of the "label," non-action type. Here is one of the items:

"Mr. W. H. Babb, the famous thoroughbred owner, came in from his ranch at Echo yesterday and went to the Perkins, where he was seen by a reporter. He brings the news of several important sales he has just made to Mr. M. J. Sullivan, of Great Falls, Mont. The transfer includes the grand race horse Sir Henry, who was the sensation of City View track last fall."

The sports reporter was coming along all right, but the sports writer had not yet arrived.

Oregon papers were still giving sports rather scant coverage at the turn of the century. In the issue of the Oregonian for April 5, 1905, for example, out of 48 columns of news space, sports received only one column, or slightly more than 2 per cent. All the sports news was telegraph, covering boxing (an advance story on the Jeffries-Ruhlin fight), trapshooting, and horse-racing. The next day's paper carried absolutely no news of amateur sports.

Increased attention to sport news, however, was "just around the corner." It had, in fact, arrived in the East, and the next few years were to see all the Portland papers heavily increase their sport cover age. Three factors cooperated for this result—increasing organization and interest in sports, especially amateur athletics; increased space for this phase of the news, since the papers had heavily increased in size, owing to the linotype's cheapening of type composition costs and to the recent development of cheap pulp paper and the almost simultaneous development of the department store, with its heavy newspaper advertising; the rise of the exclusive "sporting editor," as he was then known (4).

Really, all these factors were closely related. It can well be argued that the heavy increase in sports interest, particularly in the amateur field, came from the increased attention given by the papers in their heavily enlarged papers; likewise, the increased attention given amateur and professional sports tended to demand space recog-