Page:Oregon Exchanges volume 5.pdf/212

OREGON EXCHANGES OREGON PRESS IN LEAD, SAYS BEDE AFTER TRIP TO MINNESOTA

[Elbert Bede, editor of the Cottage Grove Sentinel and president of the Oregon State Editorial Association, contributes an article on his summer and fall vacation trips to Minnesota. Written in his well-known light vein, the article contains also some heavier stuff of value to Oregon newspapermen.]

I HAVE been asked to write a few

per had progressed

some

in

younger

I words about my recent extended mo

hands, but it was not yet above cutting

tor trip be confined It occurs never made

off at the waist-line a picture which

years ago.

to to to of

the east and I’m not to strictly newspaper stuff. me that this is a request a country editor 10 or 15

Country editors didn’t

at

that time take extended motor trips about which to write. Gas conldn’t be bought with vegetables taken in on subscription, and motor cars couldn’t be secured by the

simple method of trading in a little ad vertising space. Neither can they now, which indicates to me the wonderful pro gress in the newspaper business in Ore gon during the brief space of years I have been a resident here, for many of

the boys ride around in their high powered benzine buggies and few there are who haven’t at least a lizzie on the pay roll.

Where'er I go I endeavor to use my eyes—a habit cultivated years before the short-skirted flapper came into being— and the result of my observations in the east—quite aside from mental notations

as to the stockier build of the Oregon flappers—was to the effect that middle western papers do not come up to Ore gon papers, either typographically or editorially.

came in the boiler plate and did not fit the column, running the head, shoulders and waist at the bottom of one column and the remainder of the picture at the

top of the next column. In other of fices where I had served time I found the same type that I had handled as a tyro, and tailor-made editorials on one of these papers were coming from a source that was willing to take advertis

ing space for its services.

The same ad

that paid for this service now was doing

duty at the same stand two decades ago. ORsoon Eorroas Lnan There are, of course, many splendid country newspapers in these states, but

I returned to Oregon convinced that the Oregon newspaper boys are the livest, the most progressive and the best off finan cially of any in the world. I found no dailies in any of the states I visited which

compare with the metropolitan papers of Oregon. There must be an explanation for this condition, and mine is that the livest and the most energetic from the eastern states

have come to Oregon, while those who weren’t alive couldn’t come and thus we

STILL IN SAME Rm In the Minnesota town where for a number of years I made my home while

have the cream of the earth. I greatly enjoyed digging up the files in the shops where I once had done some

incubating ideas as to how I would set

of the editorial work.

the world afire when I got to swinging an editorial pen of my own, I found at least

nized some of the stuff I once wrote. I

one of the papers setting their ads just

as they were set 20 years ago and ap parently with the same type that had done yeoman service even before I decided that

there were greener fields.

The other pa

I hardly recog

don’t wish to do any bragging, but I feel that I have progressed some myself since those days that are but a memory. Pos sibly it was the pull that my editorials cast upon the communities where I once operated which explains why some of the

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