Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/524

515 Wiggs and Partridge were easy for the Portland players, who batted them all over the field, piling up eight runs to the visitors' two. ..

During August and September the Journal averaged less than 3 columns of sports a day, the percentage of total news space devoted to sports running less than 5 per cent. Sports carried, more or less seasonally, through the year, were baseball, basketball, boxing, chess, horse-racing, billiards, football, with apparently no golf and no wrestling.

The by-line of John A. Horan appeared as sports editor in the of March 16, 1903, and remained until May 5, 1907, when notice of his resignation was carried, with the following complimentary send-off:

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"John A. Horan, who has been sporting editor of the Journal for more than four years past, has resigned the position in order to become business manager of the Portland Spectator.

The Journal was the first paper in Oregon to devote a special department to sports, and Mr. Horan was its first editor. He therefore enjoys the distinction of being the pioneer sporting editor of Oregon. The Journal's sporting page has always had a large number of readers."

The page for that day carried no by-line, and there was no announcement of a successor to Mr. Horan. The paper that day contained 54 seven-column pages. Sports occupied 10 columns, or close to 3 per cent of the whole and 6 per cent of the non-advertising space.

By the end of its fifth year the Journal was running a full page of advertising and general reading matter dealing with automobiles — more than all sports had been receiving a few short years before.

Mr. Horan, first Journal sports editor, as a former football player, emphasized football rather heavily in his columns. Sunday, November 18, 1906, as a part of two full pages of sport news, he had a big story on the Willamette-Multnomah football game played on the club's field in Portland. Some of the names he mentions are those of athletes still well remembered, including Frank J. Lonergan, now a Portland lawyer and state legislator. Horan's lead was decidedly unconventional, of a freak type considerably used at that time. Representing a sharp break away from the old stilted type of writing, it read:

On Multnomah field, yesterday, a small, wiry young man named Hockenberry made a noise like an automobile; a great crowd of football enthusiasts roared as does the "mob out side" when it is in ferocious mood; a smaller body of grid iron partisans assured the aforesaid Hockenberry that he was "all right," a "good boy," the real thing in umpires, and