Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/528

519 in the general scheme of things on the gridiron as they later came to be. Five football stories in this issue of November 17, 1906, made only two bare mentions of football coaches, and the mentors broke into the headlines in only one spot, where "Coach Henderson Will Not Resign" gets one little black-line head.

Sport cartoons of those days on the Oregonian were signed H. M. for Harry Murphy, one of the first men to draw cartoons for the paper.

While Will G. MacRae was sporting editor of the Oregonian and John A. Horan of the newly-started Oregon Journal in 1903 and Harry B. Smith on the Telegram, an item (Jan. 24 of that year) in the Evening Telegram under Harry Smith brings in the name of another sports editor, Robert W. Boyce of the Seattle Times, who developed an ultra-lively style that did much to revolutionize sports writing in the Northwest. While Portus Baxter of the Post-Intelligencer, a very careful New Englander, was still writing conservatively, getting his effects from purely factual writing, Boyce was dolling up his stuff with a lot of imagination and an ornamental, even hilarious, vocabulary. None of the others followed him the full length, but he did have the effect of stirring them up a bit.

As an example of how the Oregon papers were beginning to enliven their sports pages early in the century, the Portland Evening Telegram of Saturday, February 7, 1903, carried a strip cartoon clear across the top of its seven-column page devoted to sports. Murray Wade, later publisher of the Oregon Magazine at Salem, was cartoonist, and the art layouts were by Werschkul.

Professional wrestling was having another flurry, and the Telegram carried, January 10, 1903, the first bit of wrestling news this writer had noticed in an Oregon paper. This was in the days when the massive Tom Jenkins of Cleveland was champion, Martin Burns was of the clean and clever exponent leading (Farmer) "rasslin'," as he called and the great Frank Gotch, soon to be champion, was learning his stuff from that old master. (6).

So the Telegram carried a column on this sport, offsetting what was regarded as "rough stuff" in those days by devoting also some space to chess. The general style of writing had become chatty and informal under young Harry B. Smith, who was soon to move on to San Francisco, where he has been heading the Chronicle's sport page for more than 30 years.

The Oregon Journal sport page, directed by Horan, was giving plenty of space to that sort of thing, with a preponderance of boxing and baseball news and comment. In the issue of March 21, 1903, Horan had 9½ columns of sports matter. The page carried his by-line; he was one of the first sports editors to sign his stuff.

A youngster who filled in as sporting editor in 1906 while Will MacRae was ill was Claude McColloch, now a Klamath Falls