tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29403301912596930222024-03-12T21:57:59.835-07:00RememberingTheArgusStories of a 1950s Western town, its people and its newspaperLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.comBlogger214125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-7991689882617959482015-01-05T07:24:00.001-08:002015-01-05T07:24:09.838-08:00Our time at the Ontario Argus ObserverBy Larry L. Lynch<br />
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Don Lynch fidgeted in the straight-back chair facing his Royal upright and placed his wire rim glasses on a pile of copy paper to the typewriter’s right. He sat surrounded by stacks of notes, clippings and old newspapers --- saved for story ideas and background.<br />
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Lynch leaned forward, closed his eyes and used his long fingers to massage his temples. At thirty-seven, he looked almost handsome despite his slightly asymmetrical cheekbones, a carry-over from the polio he suffered as a youth. He had a full head of wavy hair, a twinkle in his eye and usually displayed a half smile that showed off his dimples.<br />
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The other desks crowded into the front office of his twice-weekly newspaper, The Ontario Argus-Observer, were vacant. Lynch had saved this quiet Saturday morning, August 30, 1952, to find the right words to explain to readers why he was starting a personal, front-page column. The simple truth was that he wanted to do it and his news editor, Hugh Gale, was still on best behavior. It would be months before Gale would begin putting the phone down on a particular country cousin correspondent and walking away while she droned on.<br />
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The name Lynch chose for the column, “The Argus Observes,” almost selected itself, given the name of his newspaper. The mythological Argus, Lynch would explain to readers, had one hundred eyes, thus its use for newspapers. What’s more, it slept with only two eyes closed. Still, the name had its shortcomings. The Greek Argus failed had failed as a bodyguard, the assignment that made it myth-worthy. Bored by a lengthy bedtime story, the monster fell totally asleep and was slain.<br />
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Lynch knew it would be a mistake to come off in his new column as overly impressed with himself, but after five years and nine months as editor and publisher, he’d grown sure of his place in town. He wanted to “write easily” about his experiences and ideas using the “informality of the first person.”<br />
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For more than five years, as I passed through high school and on to college, my father did just that, aptly commenting on life in a small western town in the 1950s.<br />
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For the previous five years, he had run his newspaper under the close guidance of a veteran partner, Bernard Mainwaring, whose large bald head and vigorous physical presence was matched by a dominating personality and equally impressive intellect. My father once observed that his older partner, who avoided alcohol, had “little understanding of the inclination of others to drink because he was two drinks ahead of the average guy all of the time.”<br />
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Mainwaring owned the daily Nampa, Idaho Free Press when my father went to work for him in 1944. The Nampa publisher found something special in the former meter-reader reborn as an ad salesman and sports writer. After two years, Mainwaring decided to stake his salesman to a half interest in a weekly newspaper, one of two then serving Ontario, Oregon, population about 4,200.<br />
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Before Mainwaring and my father purchased it, The Argus had settled into a deep slumber that hardly noted the changes going on in town. In one of his last columns, the former editor and publisher made fun of himself in print for driving through a newly installed stop light on which he’d reported the week before.<br />
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Another sign of the lack of activity occurred one weekday afternoon in the fall of 1946. While my father and Mainwaring sat for two hours in the weekly’s office haggling over the details of the purchase, the phone remained eerily silent. That silence drove Mainwaring to distraction, but it didn’t scare him off.<br />
My mother, my brother Dennis, and I rarely saw my father during the first four months of the new operation. That was the time it took to locate and buy a small, white clapboard house on a tree-lined street of mixed homes with an ample scattering of vacant lots four blocks southwest of downtown Ontario. At first, the three of us were stuck without a car in a massively ugly and cold grey stone rental house in nearby Payette, Idaho. Our wait was only relieved on Thursday afternoon when my father drove us to Ontario to join the madhouse of publication night.<br />
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I liked the smell of the mix of old newspapers and ink that pervaded the tiny store-front newspaper plant, but I hated the racket the machinery produced late on the evening of publication day. A printer stood on a platform at the side of a huge roller atop a two-page press feeding sheets of paper into place. To produce a four-page section, the operator turned the paper over, exchanged the forms holding the pages of lead type, and sent the sheets through a second time. On each revolution the press roared as the roller spun on its axis, then groaned when it reversed directions, and roared again. When the press run was far enough along that my father fired up the folder, its sound added exponentially to the cacophony, clanging away, folding and stuffing the printed sheets into something that resembled a newspaper--- when it didn’t shred them.<br />
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This was our quality family time. Women enjoyed my father, and he returned the favor. His appeal rested mainly with his ability to flatter them by listening intently. On these evenings, however, he forgot that compulsive diversion of his. And my mother, a short, striking, dark-haired dervish put to good use the work ethic she absorbed growing up on a dairy farm near Caldwell, Idaho. On these nights our parents accomplished something together.<br />
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From the outset, The Argus’ new owners planned to convince the publisher of the town’s other weekly newspaper to sell out. Mainwaring provided the operating cash for my father to undercut ad sales for that paper, the Eastern Oregon Observer, by practically giving away ad space in The Argus. They also arranged for The Argus to be delivered to everyone in town, whether paid subscribers or not.<br />
My father’s patience with this approach began to wear thin by spring, however. He’d learned that everyone in town seemed to read the paper even though almost no one would buy ads.<br />
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Then, as he tried to keep up the pressure on the Observer, a piece of luck presented itself in the form of an editorial mistake.<br />
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Harry Peterson, a town patriarch who ran a furniture store at the other end of Oregon Street from the old Argus plant and also operated a local funeral home. One morning as my father walked through town to make a call on Peterson, he mulled over a new problem. He’d heard that Peterson was steaming because The Argus printed the wrong time for a funeral, and people around town were calling to complain.<br />
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“Harry, I’m sorry, that was a mistake,” my father shouted as he entered the store and climbed to the top of the stairs leading to Peterson’s desk, where it overlooked the furniture displayed on the floor below. “But if this mistake is so important to our readers, how is it that we don’t have any value as an advertising medium?”<br />
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From that time on, Peterson’s furniture store advertised in The Argus. Other merchants followed his lead and began to buy paid space.<br />
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That summer, the competition with the Observer came to a head. Compared with The Argus, which traced its first publication to 1896, the Observer was an upstart. Elmo Smith, an acquaintance of my father’s from Smith’s college days in Caldwell, had started the paper late in 1936 and had made a success of it, becoming a power on the local scene. He served as Ontario’s mayor during part of World War II. But by 1946, he was ready to move on. He sold the Observer that December to Jessica Longston, who also owned the St. Helens (Oregon) Sentinel-Mist as well as a newspaper and radio station in Burley, Idaho. As part of his deal with Longston, Smith had agreed to run the Observer for a limited time. Eight months later, with the competition wearing on both papers, something had to give. Mainwaring offered Longston more money than she could make by continuing to operate The Observer, and she agreed to sell. The Ontario papers were combined into one beginning in September 1947. Elmo Smith soon bought another paper in John Day, Oregon and began a career in state politics.<br />
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Through the decade my father operated the Argus-Observer, his biggest business headaches involved how to keep a back shop purring with country printers and unreliable equipment. Press breakdowns were commonplace, even after a refurbished, high-speed eight-page press was installed in a new building. The turnover among printers was even more maddening. They’d walk in the door looking for work, be assigned a stone-slab work table for assembling type, turn out a few weeks of decent ads and printing jobs, then collect their checks and disappear.<br />
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And yet the worst problem my father ran into with a printer was quite the opposite.<br />
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Before the end of this printer’s first week, the back shop foreman discovered he had to position the new guy at a make-up bench far away from every other employee and especially far away from a particularly cranky linotype operator. The guy smelled so foully of drink and bodily filth that no one could stand to work close to him. This printer required cash for his work on a daily basis. If he was paid weekly, he’d be broke within a day or two. Even so, the foreman wanted to keep him on the job until someone who could replace him walked in the door.<br />
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It didn’t work out that way. My father’s patience ran out when the printer missed a day of work but didn’t realize that he hadn’t shown up. He disrupted the entire office with his insistence that he receive the money for two days when he had only worked one.<br />
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The odiferous printer came from Yakima, Washington, so my father bought him a ticket for home, packed him a lunch, took him to the bus station, handed the ticket to the driver, and watched the bus pull out with him aboard.<br />
He then called the printer’s wife to tell her that her husband was on his way: “She wailed, ‘Why did you have to send him home?’ She thought she’d gotten rid of him for good.”<br />
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At the end of 1952, Mainwaring sold his interest in the Argus-Observer to my parents to help finance his purchase of the Salem, Oregon Capital Journal. My father used “The Argus Observes” column of February 5, 1953 to pay tribute to the man he described as “at least a near genius as a newspaper publisher (and) the nearest thing to a genius of any one I have ever known.”<br />
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He noted that Mainwaring impressed people by acquiring a depth of information along specific lines and using it freely in conversation. He never smoked, never drank, and during the war went “careening all over Nampa on a bike, pell mell like a 25-year-old kid....I have seen him take a highball to avoid awkward explanation and then pour it down a sink or set it aside at the first opportunity. However a stranger at a cocktail party might think him the life of the party because his animated voice can be heard above the hubbub of others.”<br />
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My father believed in the value of child labor. I began working at The Argus when I was eleven, hauling bundles of freshly inked newspapers to the bus depot, drug stores and coffee shops, and riding my bike to small neighborhood groceries. Downtown I usually covered on foot. I gathered up an order or two and headed out of the back door of the plant, past a one-room cement jail that sat behind city hall. Occasionally, I stopped to jaw with a drunk still stuck inside come late afternoon. By the time I was in junior high, I picked up an extra dollar now and then by making cigarette runs for the guys drying out in the old jail. One day a printer saw me making the exchange, and reported it to my father, who put a stop to the arrangement.<br />
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By 1952, my father had fallen in love with the news side and would have been overjoyed to devote himself to it full time. But he knew that the business depended on him to sell the ads that brought in the money that made the newspaper financially viable.<br />
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Meanwhile, self-proclaimed news editors frequently walked in the front door without notice to inquire about a job. If one didn’t drop in at the right time, they were easy to procure through a help wanted ad in the industry bible, Editor and Publisher.<br />
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The turnover at the editor’s desk came to an end for three years during the summer of 1952. My father hired Hugh Gale, a veteran reporter, as news editor. Gale provided the time my father needed to begin his front-page column. And Gale provided me, at an impressionable age, with an intriguing example of what a newspaperman could be like.<br />
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To function well as a country editor, my father reluctantly conceded, it was necessary to have not only a little flair but also to be self assured enough to go your own way, despite what some of the townsfolk might say or think of you. Hugh was maybe the most independent --- certainly the most addicted to hanging out in the local bars --- of those who came along. He also possessed the ability, perhaps too rarely used, to charm most anyone with a gruff compliment. He was a pudgy, gnome-like man with a bushy shock of light, grey-streaked hair hanging over a florid face.<br />
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When he was going good, he sat hunched over his typewriter at his desk facing a long window looking into the back shop, using the nicotine-stained middle and index fingers of both hands to pound out stories.<br />
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Hugh kept his distance from the society editor at one end of his row of desks and from the two women behind him, the bookkeeper and circulation manager who took care of the front counter. But that didn’t stop the women from taking an interest in him. They learned that he was married but had left his wife in Washington, and they began to ask him repeatedly when his wife would arrive.<br />
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“My wife is a very, very large woman,” he said. “I doubt that anyone here is going to welcome her.”<br />
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When his wife walked into the office for the first time some months later, she proved to be petite and beautiful. Or, as my father used to say, “I’m really not sure how a guy who looks like Hugh and drinks like a fish ever got such an attractive woman to live with him.”<br />
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At the time he was hired, Hugh was warned “that sometimes the news was sparse and it took hard digging to get out an interesting paper,” my father wrote in a January 5, 1953 column.<br />
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“After a few weeks, he asked what I meant by dullness… The news seemed plenty active enough for him. In his first month… a man burned to death in a trailer house fire, there was a Grade A public row over the failure of the school board to rehire two teachers, the Malheur River flooded and then the Owyhee really flooded --- all on top of an active situation in school district, city and county news and plus the regular flow of the news.<br />
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“But in the in the dog days between the Fourth of July and the county fair he found out what I had been talking about. He almost walked a hole in the tile on the office floor trying to dream up stories good enough for the top front page positions.”<br />
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As time wore on --- and this was obviously related to why his wife took some time to follow him --- Hugh’s lifestyle began to impinge on his productivity.<br />
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“He is always late,” my father complained as summer turned to fall in 1954. Years later, in one of a series of pieces he wrote as part of an effort to syndicate a column about being a country editor, my father recounted the workplace sins of an anonymous “reporter we had once’’ --- who might have been easily identified by readers in Ontario:<br />
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“The talented but unstrung reporter came to work so late so often that finally I had to tell him, if he was ever late again I’d expect him to just ask for his check without waiting to be fired.<br />
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“After that, when he was out very late at night, he’d park his car in front of the office before he went home. About 9:30 the next morning, he’d come running in the back door with his hands full of notes, as if he’d been on an early morning news assignment at the city hall. He’d rush up to his desk and begin typing furiously, never looking up.<br />
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“It was easy to tell that he hadn’t been awake 15 minutes. However, even though he was an hour late, it was earlier than he’d been coming to work. So I let him think he was fooling me.”<br />
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Earlier, my father had played a different tune on his typewriter keys when Hugh actually moved on July 21,1955 to run his own newspaper in Kirkland, Washington.<br />
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Opening his column with the admission that he hated to see his editor leave “more than I had thought I would,” my father noted that Gale had “worked at the news with the abandon of a volunteer fireman. He was forever getting up at daylight to photograph the blowing of a gas well strike, or flying off to Jordan Valley to a cattlemen’s convention, or taking a rangeland tour to study the problems of range management. He took jaunts of this kind almost every week, generally on his own time.<br />
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“And he got around. He lived with the men in the street and the farmers in the fields. He made it his business to know what was going on in the community, what the average citizen was thinking. There is no substitute for this intense interest in society and not many news men have the quality in the degree possessed by Hugh Gale.”<br />
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After Hugh’s departure, my father put his column on hold. But he revived it in early 1956, and the timing of its return was less than accidental. A subject presented itself that my father badly wanted to write about --- the rise of his old acquaintance Elmo Smith to the job of governor. On January 31, of that year Oregon Gov. Paul Patterson died of a heart attack. As president of the State Senate, Smith succeeded him.<br />
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Less than a month later, my parents visited Eugene for a social event with the Smiths. Returning home, my father published a column describing how “the governor took off his coat and shoes, loosened his tie, flopped on my hotel room bed in Eugene. He looked beat from his first 17 days as governor of Oregon.”<br />
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Some of Smith’s friends in the Ontario area were concerned that the man they knew as Elmo would change under the pressures of his new job.<br />
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My father suggested they “needn’t worry.” At an evening cocktail party with old friends, Smith had “trotted around the lobby with his hands jammed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward, his coattails flying, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and one hand periodically raising in that ‘hi’ salute, a mannerism that is uniquely his. He looked almost exactly like he did peddling ads on Oregon street ten years ago.”<br />
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During the following months, my father threw every ounce of editorial support he could justify, and some he couldn’t, into helping his friend win election to the governor’ post that November. But it wasn’t to be. Smith lost to the Democrat, Bob Holmes, a radio station manager from Astoria.<br />
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My father never admitted as much to me, but knowing the restlessness that was brewing in his soul, I’m almost certain he hoped that a Smith victory would mean a job for him in the new administration in Salem, a chance to get away from the newspaper --- and from family demands --- a least for a while.<br />
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The next May while I was off at college and my brother was in high school, he announced that he had turned the publisher’s job over to our mother so he could take a position helping to manage classified ad sales at The Statesman newspaper in Boise, Idaho, 65 miles to the east.<br />
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“This change was only possible,” he wrote in his May 23, 1957, column, “because Mrs. Lynch was willing to assume the rather demanding job of being editor and publisher of The Argus-Observer….<br />
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“In this particular case the wife is better qualified to manage the newspaper than she realizes. She has been closest to its problems for a long time, and has worked at all of the tasks required --- reporting, advertising and accounting. This is a broader background than my own because I couldn’t do the accounting.”<br />
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Time proved my father correct about my mother’s publishing skills. She whipped the staff into the kind of shape that increased profits year over year until 1963 when she decided to sell because neither one of her sons was interested in returning to Ontario to help her out.<br />
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My parents divorced and my father went on to a long career as a newspaper business manager, editor and writer. But he never again found work that was quite as satisfying. Late in life, he tried to develop a book out of his columns for the Ontario newspaper, but he couldn’t make it work. “All that old newspaper stuff and Ontario stuff as I wrote it in the rough draft would never be read today,” he concluded in a letter to me, written May 10, 1995 at the age of eighty. He then willed me his papers in the hope that I could re-direct the material “to the interests of today’s audiences.”<br />
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And in a draft introduction to the book he would have liked to write, he summed up his experience quite simply yet eloquently:<br />
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“A half century ago we had outlived our time mechanically. We were still using the same method of inking a raised impression and pressing paper against it that Gutenberg had worked out 500 years earlier. We were still printing with stinking-hot melted lead, clanking linotypes, and noisy presses. Even so we still had a sort of built-in community influence that is now as out of date as a horse and buggy. It was 45 years ago when I got in on the final years of that ancient world. I was one of the last of the old-fashioned country editors. What a privileged way to start a lifetime of journalism.”<br />
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(Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-13581522798111842014-11-12T13:45:00.000-08:002014-11-12T13:45:46.892-08:00Friday Night Lights -- Eastern Oregon style<em>Jovial, chunky Dutch Kawasoe takes little credit for the remarkable showing that his state champion (Vale) Vikings have made on the gridiron this year. … After Vale won the (state) title Saturday, Dutch told the excited crowd of fans, “I wish Jerry Cammann was up here instead of me and that he had coached these kids with my help as it was in former years….Jerry knew this would be a great team, and that’s why he was willing to resign and let me to take over this particular bunch of boys. He wanted to leave me in safe hands.”… From The Argus Observes by Don Lynch, November 29, 1954</em><br />
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Today Vale is a still a small ranching town and still the unlikely Malheur County seat. It’s one of those scattered-seeming agricultural communities that cropped up across the West during the first half of the twentieth century. Some died. Vale has hung on. Situated on the edge of the Eastern Oregon desert, it’s not much changed from 1954 when my father penned this column about the able coaches of its dominating high school football team.<br />
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Malheur County’s old court house that was built of the same foot-square chunks of jutting grey-black sandstone as my family’s one-time and long-rued Payette home has been replaced by a plastic-paneled building that is equally characteristic of a certain age. The neon lights along A Street still welcome tired cowboys from out Juntura way for Saturday night action. Recent homage to the town’s heritage can be found in the form of a 1900 Sears Roebuck Bed and Breakfast, The Oregon Trail Inn. More typical of the Old West character that still rules in Vale, however, are the Sagebrush Saloon and BBQ and 197 A. St. E and the 7U Hunting Ranch and Sports Clays not far outside the city limits. The population, in the year 2000 census, remained stuck just under two thousand. 2,000. In 1954 it was about fifteen hundred.<br />
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The football dominance of Vale’s Vikings over nearby Ontario, Oregon, a town with population that has stayed five times Vale’s, seems to continue largely unchanged since my class at Ontario High graduated in 1956. We expected to break that hold, but failed. That’s a loss most of the class has never forgotten, even those of us who didn’t play in the game. In a way it was only fitting that in September of 2006, while our surviving classmates were in Ontario holding our fiftieth class reunion, the black-suited Vikings traveled to Ontario to power their way to another win.<br />
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To attribute Vale’s 2006 prowess to the lingering influence of the men who coached there in the 1950s would seem more than a slight exaggeration. And yet I think my dad’s November 1954 column fell short of aptly noting just how good Cammann was at coaching high school football players and at developing a program that lingered for years. The single tribute he paid Cammann was to note that “Vale has built football into a great tradition and no other person is as responsible as Cammann.”<br />
There was no explanation of why he was so good. Maybe there was no acceptable way to say what he really thought when he had a son coming up through the Ontario football program with a class that everyone in our town expected to end Vale’s nine-year reign the very next year. By reputation, Cammann was a demanding, no nonsense coach who never let up on his kids and never, ever cracked a smile.<br />
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I think of myself in relationship to our Vale games as Ontario’s own Dick Nixon. I was fodder at the practices. But I got something beyond more somewhat more humility than Nixon took with him, which of course is not saying much. My humbling experiences as a want-to-be athlete striving alongside the talented kids in my class shaped attitudes I’ve carried through my life, just as their more accomplished victories and significant defeats must have shaped theirs. I learned early to accept that there were a lot of people better than me at baseball, basketball, football, tennis and track, just about any sport I’d decide to try out. And as good as they were, they must have learned that eventually someone would come along who was more adept. That didn’t necessarily mean accepting defeat --- and they didn’t. Not Larry Horyna who went on to play at University of Oregon and become a major force in Oregon’s vocational education programs. Not Jerry Doman who poured his heart onto the field at Oregon State, or Earl and Verl Doman who have nurtured many good players still working their way through the football program at Brigham Young. Not Stanley Olsen who made himself into a leading local architect. Not Junior Evans who became a military aide to the president of the United States, nor Kenneth Osborn who earned a degree in dentistry, came back to town to make his contribution and, the last I knew, was still running the first-down markers when the Ontario Tigers play their football games at home.<br />
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For me, failing on the playing field meant learning how to fill the void with other pursuits. That combined with growing up at The Argus-Observer likely dictated my lifelong tie to reporting and writing as a way to be important in the lives of others.<br />
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The true benefit of high school efforts is in the player and not in the game. And it can last a lifetime, of course.<br />
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My first meaningful sports lesson centered on a home run, or not a home run. The house where I lived in Ontario fronted on a broad, graveled street and was flanked on its south side by a narrow strip of grass. Beyond that strip of grass, a wider swath of open ground ran from the alley to the street. When I was ten, that weedy strip of land made for a passably large baseball diamond through the spring, at least until my parents planted it in summer vegetables.<br />
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Most of the pick-up softball games in the neighborhood occurred on that land, with the street serving as the outfield. A home run had to clear the street without getting caught. The foul lines were less distinct, usually running along an imaginary line from home plate to an Elm tree or a fence line across the street.<br />
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I almost never hit long balls, not at ten and not at thirty. That was well understood by my nemesis, a big, mean kid with a Huckleberry Finn shock of hair and all the muscles I imagine Huck must have had. He lived in the run-down brick house across the street just behind center field and was playing for the opposing pick-up team that day. When I hit that ball, he announced that it was foul, and I began to scream that it definitely landed fair, inside the tree line.<br />
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I would not back down and, since he’d been looking for a good reason to beat on me --- or anyone else younger and smaller --- Huck-personified had no need to give in. With half a dozen neighborhood kids looking on, I weighed in fists flying, struggling to trip him to the ground. Instead, I ended up on my back looking up at a canopy of leaves and the cooling evening sky just outside our kitchen window, unable to move and feeling like I was being choked to death. I looked over to see my mother watching out the window and grimaced hard, hoping to convince her to put a stop to the fight, stalling for as much time as I could. She never showed. I thought I might pass out before I could force got out the words “Uncle! I give up! Let me up!” And I before I was actually freed, I had to agree the ball was foul.<br />
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At dinner I asked my mother why she hadn’t helped me out.<br />
“You need to learn to fend for yourself,” she said.<br />
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By my sophomore year in high school, I had developed an understanding of my place in the athletic hierarchy of the Ontario High Class of ’56. I thought of basketball as my best sport, but the farm boys that attended country schools came to town for high school, and 6’ 5” Julian Laca was among them. The class behind us had at least five kids who were as good as I was on the court, most of them better, and I knew they’d be the ones the coaches would want to give game experience. Still, when I was cut from the frosh-soph traveling squad as a sophomore, I mooned around the school hallways, hiding out at various unused entrances, all during the lunch hour that the list went up. Nothing much eased the pain: In Eastern Oregon at that time of year, the days were too cold and stormy to turn to tennis, even though I expected to make that spring season’s seven man team. (As it turned out for the next three years I played on the second doubles team, rarely climbing above number six or seven on the boy’s team even though most of the school’s athletes were busy that time of year with track and baseball.)<br />
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My most successful sport turned out to be football --- simply because it required 11 players on the field at once. As a freshman, I was assigned to play center behind Larry Horyna. Our sophomore year, he was promoted to the varsity early in the season. From then on, I was a starter for the JV team, and we ran over every team who’d play us but Vale.<br />
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Meanwhile, my high school years were premium ones for spectator sports in the Snake River Valley. Some of the athletes who entertained us would have been appreciated anywhere in the country.<br />
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In the beginning, the most exciting player in our area was R.C. Owens, who began to redefine the position we still simply called “end” in football. In 1952 Owens came to Caldwell, Idaho, from Santa Monica, California, to play for the College of Idaho football team --- becoming the first black to attend the school.<br />
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At the time, my father was beginning to take an interest in the college’s governance problems, and traveling with him to that small city 35 miles to watch Owens play became a special treat.<br />
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R.C. would line up well wide of the rest of the line on the right wing of the offensive line and rarely throw a block --- he apparently judged it sufficient that he took a defensive player out of the action just to cover him. By the time he reached his sophomore year, covering him proved extremely difficult at this level of college competition. He was taller and faster than the opposition players, although the College of Idaho’s quarterback sometimes struggled to get the ball to him. When Owens flew down the right sidelines, the pass had to be high and long enough to be catchable but short enough to be within his reach. If the throw was good, R.C. almost always caught it and often scored a touchdown.<br />
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Here’s how my father described Owens’ play in a November 12, 1953 column, written after the College of Idaho finished its season undefeated in league play.<br />
“A year ago Owens was sort of a sensational joke. He was a talented pass receiver but he never played any football. He just stood at his end post except on a pass play and then, covered by good blocking, he ran out to make the catch. He never played any defense. He never even threw more than one or two blocks a game. Strictly a specialist.<br />
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“This year he has been taught to play football. Now he even pulls back to play linebacker on defense, makes bruising tackles, blocks most effectively, and has learned the ball carriers’ tricky shoulder block to bound off a tackler….<br />
<br />
“On (one) play, two Whitman lads had Owens boxed downfield right after a pass reception. Then (he) did something probably never done before on a football field. He held out the pigskin like it was a basketball, teasing the Whitman men, faked once to the right, once to the left and then trotted right between the two for a touchdown.”<br />
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When I place a parenthesis around “he” in that last graph I was covering for a grim reality from those days. My father had actually described Owens as “the big colored boy.” Contrasted with the description of the “Whitman men,” it doesn’t sit well. It was not an example of conscious racism on his part, but it shows the way he, and almost everyone who was white, thought at the time.<br />
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Owens went on to play in the NFL from 1957 to 1964 and win two Super Bowl rings while with the San Francisco 49ers. Recently --- in the spring of 2007 --- he was still actively working with youth and raising money for charity while living in Manteca, California, just north of Modesto.<br />
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One of his major contributions to the College of Idaho was to help lure Elgin Baylor there from Washington D.C. for a single basketball season.<br />
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Baylor led the College of Idaho Coyotes basketball team to an undefeated season that school year, 1954-55, scoring a record 53 points in his last conference game of the season, played at Nyssa, just south of Ontario.<br />
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Owens played with Baylor on that team, and the two were a major force in a league that had seen nothing like the pair.<br />
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Baylor, for the season, was a man among boys. His favorite two plays indicate just how dominant he was. In his Argus Observes column published March 3, 1955, my father described how on a pair of free throws, Baylor’s teammates would try to aim their second shot so that it would bounce Baylor’s direction off the rim. If the bounce was right, he’d leap high to catch the ball and flick the ball through the net.<br />
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And when he had a chance to dunk, “he jumped high in the air, shot his wrists over the rim before reaching the peak of his jump and whipped the ball downward into the net with a sharp wrist snap. Then while he completed upward motion to the peak of his jump and appeared thus to hang suspended in air, he quickly brought his hands downward in a parenthetical arc to the bottom the net and caught the ball as it emerged from the net.<br />
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“He would return to the floor with the ball having been out of his hands for the barest perceptible instant of time and toss it gently to the referee.”<br />
The next season he went to Seattle, sat out a year, then carried the Seattle University team to the NCAA championship game in 1958, where they lost to the Kentucky Wildcats. By the next year he was playing with the Minneapolis Lakers, and moved with them to Los Angeles in 1960.<br />
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It was during the early 1950s that our area produced its most famous locally grown athlete of recent years. That was Harmon Killebrew of home run hitting fame, who grew up in Payette.<br />
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My first memory of Harmon is the sight of his bulk carrying half our football team toward the goal line in the fall of 1953. He didn’t have much blocking and never made a touchdown in that game, which we won 40-0. But he went on to be named Idaho’s number one high school running back. A victory over Ontario was about all he was to be denied that year.<br />
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The summer of 1954 belonged to Killebrew even though the excitement only lasted about a month.<br />
<br />
That June, Payette used a local semi-pro baseball team, the Border League Payette Packers, to show off Killebrew’s hitting talents. Teenagers and their parents from throughout the Valley found their way to the high school field in Payette for the Packers’ home games to marvel at his swing. During one stretch of three games, he batted twelve times and got twelve straight hits, four home runs, three triples and five singles. It quickly became clear he was going to be offered a professional baseball contract.<br />
<br />
Before the end of June, Harmon signed to play for the Washington Senators, getting a $30,000 bonus up front and a salary of $10,000 year --- essentially guaranteeing him $50,000 over two years. It was a huge amount for a rookie at that time. He flew east to make his major league debut on June 29, 1954, under a new rule that required major league teams to keep their bonus babies on the major league roster for two seasons, even if they rarely got into a game.<br />
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On June 21, the Monday after the amazing youngster signed his contract and eight days before Harmon’s 18th birthday, my father’s column carried an account of the young man’s debt to his father --- stories passed along by Harmon’s brother Eugene Killebrew, editor of the Payette Valley Sentinel, which was published in nearby New Plymouth:<br />
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“Young Harmon had chores to do at home as a boy and sometimes when he was playing sandlot baseball his mother would send the father to fetch the son home for family duty. If Harmon was playing ball his father just couldn’t bear to interrupt. He would come home quietly and do the chores himself so his prospective ‘big leaguer’ could get in a few minutes more of precious practice.”<br />
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My father noted that his brother Eugene “has been Harman’s business manager during recent weeks when 12 of the nation’s 16 major league (teams) were trying to sign him….Harmon had about decided to go the University of Oregon, play football and then move into baseball. But when the bonus offer got so big, he couldn’t afford to turn it down. He will do his college work in off-season months until he does get his degree.”<br />
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My father later recalled talking with Eugene Killebrew during the contract negotiations they discussed whether signing before college was a good idea. One scout, apparently Oscar Bluege of the Senators, had said that the young man could be one of the great hitters in baseball. My father thought that “this is just a bunch of bullshit” and told Eugene “This guy is trying to lead you on.”<br />
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Even later, when Killebrew had proven his hitting prowess and won his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Dad maintained his signing so young had been a mistake.<br />
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But for all of the interest in Killebrew, no sports event raised the interest of folks around Ontario so much as the annual football game with Vale.<br />
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My high school class' pursuit of a victory in that game came to an end on mid-fifties November night. That year it was our turn to travel to Vale for the anticipated match-up. The evening was cold and we had no locker room --- just our school bus --- to use to get out of the weather. As I recall, we were at full strength with four strong running backs in the three Domans and Stan Olsen as well as a high-functioning quarterback in Reed Vestal. The critical center of the line was at full strength with Horyna snapping the ball and anchoring the defense and Evans and Osborn at guards.<br />
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We knew that Vale’s team included one of the strongest players in the state in Gene Bates, who worked well with his backfield partner Tater Smith. But we had a strong starting eleven with a half dozen solid back-up players. As my father would write in the aftermath, “before the game sports writers and opposing coaches generally considered Ontario the better of the two teams.”<br />
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The Argus-Observer’s story of the game does not, in my mind, quite do justice to the knock-down battle I watched that night from the bench. But most of the details are there in the Nov. 7 account. The game did not start well for us:<br />
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“The Vikings received the opening kickoff on the thirty-two and carried to the forty-six. There they failed to break through the Tiger defense and were forced to kick. On their first play the ball was fumbled by Ontario and Vale recovered on the Ontario thirty-seven. From here the Vikings started their drive goal ward. A twenty-two-yard pass from Bates to Derald Swift put the ball on the nineteen where Bates kicked for a field goal.”<br />
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Bates started the Vale drive that led to his teams second score by intercepting an Ontario pass at Vale’s at midfield early in the second quarter. Swift and Kay (Tater) Smith pounded out a series of short gainers to put the ball on our ten-yard line. Bates then powered it over the goal line but the play was called back on a penalty. It was a short reprieve. Smith punched in from the three a few plays later.<br />
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What followed was our most successful sequence. As the Argus-Observer story described it: “The Tigers put the ball into play on their own forty-nine. With a short pass from Reed Vestal to Norman Olson and a series of short runs by Stan Olson the ball was brought down the Vale 24 where Jerry Doman took a pitch out from Vestal and galloped around the left end to the one. From here J. Doman again took the ball and plunged through the line to pay dirt.”<br />
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But then our kick for the extra point failed, leaving the score 9-6 at half time.<br />
For most of the third quarter the teams moved the ball up and down the field without getting close to a score. Then as the quarter drew to a close, Vestal connected on a long pass to Verl Doman who carried to the Viking 18 before he was brought down.<br />
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With that play as a jump start, our hopes to turn the game around rose to take the lead rose high in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter. On a series of short runs our backfield punched the ball to the two. There a big hole opened up in the Vale line, but the ball tumbled to the turf and although we recovered the fumble, we had stalled out. On Vale’s first play from scrimmage at the two yard line, he was caught for a touchback. The score stood 9-8 Vale’s favor and another Bates interception later in the quarter sealed the game for the Vikings.<br />
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My father felt the loss as keenly as we in the senior class.<br />
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He penned an editorial for the paper that aptly described how he felt about some of my classmates. Titled, “These Were Our Boys,” it concluded:<br />
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“It was hard to hold back the tears driving home from Vale that night. That was partly because we knew from experience the nobility of these kids in defeat as well as their grandeur in victory.<br />
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“You see, they played knothole baseball for us five or six years ago. And they really learned how to take it. They were under-age, playing with a league of older kids in order to fill out the league schedules for summer play. If we ever won a game that summer, it has long since been forgotten.<br />
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“We couldn’t help but wonder if we hadn’t given some of these youngsters such adequate early training the philosophical acceptance of reverses on the playing field, if the result might not have been different at Vale on the critical evening this November. No bunch of kids ever wanted more to win a ball game. We know because we’ve listened to them work on it conversationally for the past nine years.<br />
“For all that, we wouldn’t trade away that summer. What a sight it was to watch the Doman kids come in to town, covered with the dust of a day’s work in the field, and then take on an evening’s work on the playing field. And Larry Horyna, crouched behind the bat, whipped the gang in those days to higher performance, just as he has in recent years.<br />
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“Another sight we’ll never forget. Horyna eating watermelon --- seeds and all --- at the kids’ picnic in our backyard. That Larry could go through more watermelon in less time than any kid we’ve ever seen.”<br />
<br />
In basketball, most of the same athletes with some help from the towering Julian Laca earned some payback. We trounced Vale three times on the hard court that season and went on to take second place in the state A-2 tournament, with Earl Doman and Jerry Doman named to the All-State first and second all-tournament teams.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-23517871277303384392011-07-02T08:27:00.000-07:002011-07-05T13:51:05.074-07:00Trout fishing near New Meadows, Idaho<em>From the then editor Don Lynch's "The Argus Observes" column<br />in the August 20, 1953 issue of The (Ontario, Oregon) Argus Observer</em><br /><br />Zimm had told me where to fish. And it had worked out all right accorind to my standards, those of a dub who does not require many or very large fish to be happy.<br /><br />“There’s some dandies right here in the meadow but you have to knowhow to catch them,” he said.<br /><br />It was his busy season. For two months he had refused the temptation to fish with other summer guests. But he broke down one evening last August and took me fishing in the meadow.<br /><br />First we worked the pools close to the cabins using a fly and caught half a dozen little squaw fish. They were to be our bait.<br /><br />Then we drove a couple of miles down the meadow and walked in a little ways to a big deep pool where the water hardly moved.<br /><br />We skinned the thick meat off the sides of the squaw fish and folded it over our hooks until they were concealed.<br /><br />We wore tennis shoes instead of boots so we could wade waist deep. We worked opposite sides of the stream. Our lines were pretty well weighted and we threw them in above the deep water letting they work into the holes with the current.<br /><br />The action started slow. I caught the first two --- nice ten-inch trout.<br /><br />There was a point and a little brush in my way and the current was wrong. It kept me from getting into the deep hole.<br /><br />Then after a half hour or so Zimm caught a better one. He motioned for me to come over to his side.<br /><br />I waded across. My feet found a sand bar and I walked along it close the deep water.<br /><br />The dusk settled in. I could just barely see my line against the dark water. I thought I had a bite and tried to set the hook. There wasn’t any jerk and I thought the weighted line had just hit a rock or log.<br /><br />Then it started to move. Clear across the pool, deep. I set the hook a little harder and went to work.<br /><br />It took all the skill I had. We battled for several minutes before I gained ground and reeled him a little closer slowly.<br /><br />I didn’t have a landing net and knew I didn’t dare try to lift him. So I walked backward slowly along the bar, and then moved gently to the bank.<br /><br />Well sir, sliding that boy out onto the grass was a real thrill. He measured just 15 inches but it was the biggest trout I had ever caught and an experience to remember for a long time.<br /><br />If all goes well, as this is read we will be back in the same region trying to play a repeat performance of the same experience. This coming weekend has been set aside for our summer fishing trip. --- By Don LynchLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-71164622043287503442011-06-13T17:23:00.000-07:002011-06-13T17:26:06.423-07:00The Argus Observes -- Blaming the rain on the atomic bomb explosions in Nevada<strong>The Argus Observes column from the June 4, 1953 edition of The Argus-Observer:</strong><br /><br />Man is full of curiosity with a penchant for the mysterious and unusual.<br /><br />I suppose that’s why people like sensational explanations for unusual phenomena.<br /><br />For instance, at every turn these days you hear people say, “Haven’t you heard, it’s the atom bomb explosions in Nevada that caused all this rain.”<br /><br />I thought maybe this explanation was one that occurred just in Malheur County, but it must be a fairly general idea, because the (Portland) Oregonian ran a feature story Sunday explaining that there is just no basis for blaming wet weather on the atom explosions.<br /><br />The weather has been just as unusually wet in Portland as in Malheur County and in Portland that is a lot of rain. The rose city had 28 inches of rain in the first five months of 1953 compared to 8 inches in Ontario.<br /><br />Is this really unusual? Not at all says the weather man in Portland. Although it is the wettest first five months for any year since 1916, there have been seven wetter springs in the history of recording weather in Portland, and 1879 was much wetter with 39 inches of rainfall in the first six months.<br /><br />So there you have the official weather viewpoint: “Nothing very unusual about this rainfall. Why it happened just like this only 37 years ago.”<br /><br />But here in Malheur County where we have been keeping weather records for only ten years, it looks like a wet spring.<br /><br />Is this blaming of the weather on atom bombs the first time that people have sought to explain away the weather by something new in the atmosphere?<br /><br />Not at all, according to Col. Eckley S. Ellison, head of the Portland weather bureau office.<br /><br />He says the ruckus over the atom bombs spoiling the weather is nothing compared to the storms of protest that swept the county when radio stations first began broadcasting. The radio waves were blamed for drought, flood, hail, lightening and rings around the moon. – By Don LynchLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-64972377801209198672011-06-04T14:05:00.000-07:002011-06-04T14:07:30.132-07:00The Argus Observes -- Perils of spring for high school seniorsThe Argus Observes By Don Lynch<br />From the May 13, 1954 issue of The Ontario Argus-Observer<br /><br />News stories this week have made me glad to be a country editor rather than a high school principal.<br /><br />A fatal accident on the Nampa senior sneak day and subsequent action of the school board there to abolish the annual senior outing brought back to me painful memories of an accident on a student outing ten years ago when I was principal at Roswell high school in Idaho.<br /><br />With a student body of fifty we lacked athletic resources and so we’d had a terrible year in school sports. Lost all of our football games, most of basketball; but we had won about half of our baseball games and the kids were proud of finally doing something in sports.<br /><br />We had a wet spring in 1944 and we had a lot of cancelled baseball games but they were finally all made up except for one game with Marsing.<br /><br />The game day game, a beautiful May day like we’ve been having this week, and we excused all of the students who wanted to go to the game.<br /><br />Most of the players and many of the students including a number of girls piled into the back of a farm truck early in the afternoon and left for Marsing.<br /><br />Agnes (this columnist’s wife who taught at Roswell high) and I stayed with the pupils who remained in classes. It was a warm, drowsy afternoon. We settled down to just marking time until the end of the day.<br /><br />The team had only been gone a few minutes when the first dazed victims began to stumble in. Agnes met the first of them in the hall<br /><br />She came running. “Don, the kids have had a wreck.”<br /><br />I refused to believe it. But when I saw them I realized with considerable shock that it was true.<br /><br />The effervescent load of youngsters had shifted the truck off balance on a curve a mile from the schoolhouse. It had flipped off the road, smashed through a fence and turned over in a field.<br /><br />Our wartime Red Cross first aid training paid off that day. We filled our beds and davenport with youngsters suffering from shock and minor injuries. We improvised a stretcher for a boy who apparently had a serious back injury. We carefully transported the injured to a doctor’s office.<br /><br />I’d have treated myself for shock if we’d had the time. That was about the most unnerving day I ever put in.<br /><br />However we were lucky. The youngsters all recovered fine except for one girl who had trouble with a leg injury for a considerable time after the accident.<br /><br />We forfeited the ball game. It was too late and we were too hurt to play it….<br /><br />In addition to this year’s fatal accident, Nampa’s problem was further complicated by a student beer drinking riot that wrecked some private party at McCall on the senior sneak a year ago. Although it involved a relatively few people it embarrassed and humiliated the entire class, the school and the community.<br /><br />The Nampa school board has my sympathy. I hope abolishing the senior sneak day solves their problem. But it won’t be easy. Seniors are capable of being pretty headstrong and defiant, especially if they think that they are being treated as youngstersLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-49537362927128821522011-05-23T09:32:00.000-07:002011-05-23T09:34:32.163-07:00Argus reports on shootout at WeiserOne man was killed, another wounded when a service station operator at Weiser Station north of Ontario turned his gun on three armed men who tried to drive off without paying for $2.48 worth of gas, the Argus-Observer reported on July 20, 1953.<br /> <br />Doyle C. Fulton, 23, was fatally wounded the previous Friday evening when he was struck in the back of the head by one of three shots that service station operator Frank Rembert fired into the rear of the escaping car.<br /><br />Rembert told police that the front seat passenger in the car, John M. Kimball, pulled a gun from his shirt and used it to order Rembert into the service station building after he pumped gas into the car.<br /><br />Rembert then retrieved a .38 revolver from his office.<br /><br />According to the newspaper account, Rembert said he’d planned to shoot at the car’s tires but realized he was being fired on and aimed into the car.<br /><br />Kimball, 27, was wounded by one of Rembert’s shots and the escaping car stalled a few miles down the road. From there, the would-be bandits pressed a passing motorist, C.W. Davis of Ontario, into their service to take Fulton to a hospital in Ontario, where Fulton died.<br /><br />State police, alerted by Rembert and called to the hospital by hospital authorities, soon arrived to place Kimball under arrest.<br /><br />Four men total were in the escaping car during shoot-out. Oregon authorities said they were from Los Angeles and that one of the men in the car was AWOL from the Army and another had served time for car theft. But neither the dead man nor the gunman had any kind of police record, according to testimony at a quickly convened coroner’s inquest.<br /><br />The inquest resulted in Rembert being exonerated of any criminal responsibility in the shootingsLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-82010750393099669492011-05-01T16:49:00.000-07:002011-05-01T16:55:17.671-07:00The Argus Observes: High school basketball, beer and what to do?By Don Lynch<br />From The Argus Observes,<br />in the Argus-Observer for Dec. 18, 1952<br /><br />“There was no evidence that the athletes in question actually drank any beer,” high school principal Robert McConnaha told me Tuesday.<br /><br />He was explaining last week’s incident in which several basketball players were temporarily suspended from the team because of their association with an alleged student beer-drinking episode. I had told him that on the basis of the information we had gained in reporting the news, it appeared the affair had been mishandled by school authorities.<br /><br />Here briefly is what we knew of what had happened:<br /><br />School officials permitted police to use an office at the high school to question students in connection with the sale of beer to juveniles. Thus the school became by association entangled in a problem that was not a school responsibility except in so far as the violation of athletic training rules might have been involved.<br /><br />A few athletes were in the party which was said to have had beer in possession. Members of the team were consulted on their opinion and they voted unanimously, according to report, to drop the players, three of whom were first team basketball men.<br /><br />Two days later the school officials announced that the players had been returned to the squad and said the incident was “closed.”<br /><br />Many basketball fans and school patrons were concerned with the appearance of the whole affair. Dropping of the players certainly made it appear that they were guilty of some infraction. Their quick return to the team indicated they had received little discipline.<br /><br />I was concerned along with other people. Tuesday I told the school principal so and sought a further explanation.<br /><br />It was then that McConnaha explained to me that there was actually no evidence the athletes had participated in any drinking. They were caught in the familiar and often disastrous situation of “guilt by association.”<br /><br />He further revealed that the school authorities did not overrule the vote of the team to suspend the players. The team members reconsidered their decision and came to the principal asking that the suspended players be returned to the squad, he said.<br /><br />It developed, McConnaha reported, that the original decision of the team to suspend the players was based not on the incident in question but on a succession of grievances accumulated over a period of a year or so. On reflection, the voting team members concluded many of them had themselves been guilty of shortcomings similar to those used as a basis for suspending the players. They reconsidered and decided the players should be returned to the team.<br /><br />This is all a somewhat involved situation and it apparently never occurred to the school officials that any further public explanation was needed. They felt the situation had been satisfactorily solved and the matter settled so no further comment was needed.<br /><br />Normally they might have been right. They are used to handling similar disciplinary problems that occur frequently and never come to the light of public attention.<br /><br />The difference this time lay in the fact that this incident had come to public attention by a mere coincidence. There was a story of police investigation of the alleged sale of beer to miners. At the same time a sports story noted that some basketball players had been suspended or alleged infraction of training rules. The two stories automatically fitted together and revealed an incident of apparent involvement of athletes in a beer drinking party.<br /><br />I hope that this further explanation which completes the information will help to answer doubts as to how the matter was handled.<br /><br />During our discussion “Mac” and I disagreed on one point. I thought it a mistake to permit police to use a school office for investigating an incident that itself had no relation to the schools.<br /><br />The principal said he would rather have such an investigation run where he would watch it than under police questioning elsewhere. He thought that within the school the matter could thus be better handled for the youngsters involved. He also thought it might be good for the other youngsters to see how easily an apparently trivial escapade could come to police attention.<br /><br />I doubt it. An unnecessary police investigation in the school --- upsetting the atmosphere within the school and coluding the reputation of the school through needless “guilt by association” --- seems to me to be more damaging than helpful.<br /><br />But that is simply a matter of opinion. The important thing is that the public had only half truths for its judgment of the basketball player discipline, and then the incident was considered “closed” by the school men.<br /><br />The public is entitled to know what goes on it its schools. When chance reveals half of the information in an awkward situation, the full information should be provided in order to clarify public understanding.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-967199347562313642011-04-08T09:16:00.001-07:002011-04-08T09:16:23.350-07:00In the 50s: Trouble with that “Other Days” column<em>Editor’s Note: In October of 1953 my father wrote a column commemorating that year’s newspaper week by enunciating some of the ideals of a Journalistic Creed he’d come across. One stated ideal was that “no one should write as a journalist what he would not say as a gentleman.” What with blogs and the Internet we’re way beyond honoring that principle today. But it was that basic idea that triggered his recounting of a pair of violations in which his reporters had indulged. The stories that slipped by on his watch in the 1950s might get killed today by the editors or publishers of the better community weeklies, if there are any of those left. Today, one hopes that respect means something in “small town” America,though the rancor in the letters column of today's Argus can raise questions whether that is true now in Ontario.</em><br /><br />The Argus Observes<br /><br />By Don Lynch<br /><br />An excerpt from the October 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer<br /><br /> I remember little violations of these (Journalistic Creed) principles that have been painfully embarrassing to me, although they have probably gone unnoticed by most readers. For instance:<br /><br /> Once when we had a new reporter writing the “In Other Days” column of notes from the files of former years, he picked up and retold some embarrassing crime stories long forgotten about local citizens who had since led exemplary lives.<br /><br /> On another occasion an eager reporter was publishing the lurid details of divorce complaints, which should be reported only in barest facts.<br /><br /> These were cruel, pointless stories. The person who has made a mistake and reformed should be granted the balm of public forgetfulness. Divorce items should only report the brief facts, so that the community knows the changing status of the individuals. No good is performed by broadcasting the miserable circumstances.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-90495645299458455862011-04-02T09:23:00.000-07:002011-04-02T09:25:07.074-07:00The gremlins that haunted newspapersThe Argus Observes<br />By Don Lynch<br />From the Feb. 26, 1953 Argus-Observer<br /><br />The Oregonian does it too. And so does the Idaho Statesman.<br /><br />The Oregonian had a classic bobble in Monday’s late edition. Next day the Portland newspaper ran the following editorial explaining its error:<br /><br />“HATS OFF TO WARRENS<br /><br />“The gremlins that haunt newspaper plants, transposing lines and words sometimes in extremely embarrassing fashion, hit the jackpot when they slipped a cut of a Victorian architectural monstrosity into The Oregonian’s front page layout in Monday’s late editions.<br /><br />“The caption said the dwelling, in Salem, would be rented by Governor and Mrs. Paul Patterson after the legislative session ends. Actually the picture was that of the governor’s mansion at Sacramento, Cal.<br /><br />“We are not trying here to correct the confusion caused by the above mentioned gremlins. The news department is doing its best in that line.<br /><br />“We wish, however, to put in a word for Governor Earl Warren and his family of California. Many Oregonians were horrified to think that the Pattersons would have to live in such a house and we were inclined to agree with them. But the Warrens have resided in it, besides putting up with a lot of other irritations peculiar to California. The Warrens are even a finer family than we had thought. Imagine smiling so pleasantly , as they all do, while having to live like that!”<br /><br />This incident reminds us here at the Argus-Observer of the time we mixed up the cutlines between a state official and a visiting concert violinist. And since we didn’t know either guy it was weeks before we knew of the mistake.<br /><br />The lines most apt to become mixed between pictures here are the captions with wedding pictures. When we have two or three pictures of newly wedded couples, it requires constant watching to keep from mixing either the overlines for the lines under the pictures.<br /><br />The Boise Statesman has its troubles too. In an edition a week ago, the lead from one story carried this headline deck:<br /><br />Democrat Agriculture Record<br />Ohioan Sees Election Defeat<br />If Republicans Don’t Better<br /><br />Now the top line could be could be removed to the bottom or the bottom line could be moved to the top and the head would make sense. But as sit ran it was confusing.<br /><br />In an edition of the Evening Statesman last week, the editorial page cartoon ran upside down.<br /><br />We certainly have our troubles at the Argus-Observer as the readers much know but probably no more than most other newspapers our size. Just last week I was about to reprimand the news editor because the headline differed with the story in numbers of persons singing and attending at the Snake River Valley music clinic.<br /><br />Later I was glad I didn’t for the Freshmen won a regional basketball tournament in Boise and I wrote a headline calling them Sophmores.<br /><br />It’s never funny to the editor when these things happen to his own paper.<br /><br />But my it’s funny when they happen to the Oregonian or the Statesman.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-16226615808471479842011-03-25T08:28:00.000-07:002011-03-25T08:30:35.139-07:001953: From aerial photography to a bad news monthThe Argus Observes<br />By Don Lynch<br />From the Jan. 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer<br /><br />Last night Hugh Gale and I looked back over the picture news of 1952. There were some big stories. The Owyhee flood was colorful and we pictured it in considerable detail. We recalled how we rented a plane on an impulse late Wednesday afternoon. The light was just strong enough for us to take aerial photos.<br /><br />I ran the camera. Hugh handled the film holders and Joe Driscoll flew the plane. It was quite a thrill for me, the one and only time I have ever done any aerial photography, although Gales has been up with cameras twice since then.<br /><br />The picture of the washout at the railroad bridge at the mouth of the Owyhee River was the best picture of destruction that we got.<br /><br />The biggest thrill came when we shot the dam. I had no idea of the camera setting needed. It was getting late and I knew that the light in the canyon would be poor. So I opened the aperture on the Speed Graphic clear open to 4.5 and slowed the shutter speed as much as I thought it would stand. Joe flew the plan up along the right side of the canyon, cut back across the face of the dam and turned it up into a vertical position.<br /><br />We hung suspended there for just a split second with the camera aimed over the edge of the cockpit and pointed almost straight down at the dam. I tripped the shutter at that instant. The result was surprisingly good, an excellent picture when we had hardly hoped to get one at all.<br /><br />We rushed back to the shop, souped film and printed pictures until almost midnight. I got up early and rushed to the engravers at Nampa Thursday morning and returned before noon in time to get the engravings into the paper. We were proud of the results. The Idaho Statesman, situated just as well for taking pictures and with many times as much news covering strength, didn’t do nearly as well.<br /><br />We did an extensive job on the new high school which was a top story easily photographed. There were other important stories that produced good pictures: The Owyhee bridge cave-in that killed two workmen, the election, the polio epidemic, and the “Welcome to Oregon” centennial celebration. These events are all noted on today’s summary picture page along with some other human interest pictures.<br /><br />As we selected pictures last night we recalled Gale’s first month here. I had warned him as he started that sometimes the news was sparse and it took hard digging to get out an interesting paper.<br /><br />After a few weeks he asked what I meant by dullness in the news. The news seemed plenty active enough for him. In his first month we had the visit of the fabulous nut, Stanley Clement Green, a man burned to death in a trailer house fire, there was a Grad A public row over the failure of the school board to rehire two teachers, the Malheur River flooded and then the Owyhee really flooded all on top of an active situation in school district, city and county news --- plus the regular flow of news.<br /><br />But in the dog days between the Fourth of July and the county fair Hugh found out what I had been talking about. He almost walked a hole in the tile of the office floor trying to dream up stories good enough for the top front page positions.<br /><br />That’s the way it is in the news in a small town, in a big city or on an international wire service. It ebbs and flows. It is either feast or famine.<br /><br />So if we newsmen seem a little crotchety at times, please forgive us and charge our temperament off to the vagaries in the news. We’re either having a terrible time trying to keep abreast of events or we’re tearing our hair out trying to find enough good stories to keep you reading the paper.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-36668981365268052792011-03-20T09:33:00.000-07:002011-03-20T09:34:48.306-07:00Another era -- First graders taught using newspapersBy Don Lynch<br /><br />From the Nov. 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer<br /><br />Mrs. Sylvia Osborn, a capable Ontario teacher, brought her charts and illustrative material and various teaching helps to the weekly Kiwanis luncheon (to demonstrate how) information taught is worked into the child’s everyday living.<br /><br />Each morning Mrs. Osborn’s class starts with the day’s news. At this time each day, the learning of reading is related to the habit of reading about the news.<br /><br />First graders, she says, are very observant about the weather. So they keep a record every day and at the end of the year they know how many sunny days, rainy days, windy days, etc., there have been during the school term.<br /><br />A major teaching effort is directed at making the first graders number conscious. Over and over again they are taught that the same combinations will produce the same results whether they are dealing with blocks, or apples, or people, or animals, or any other units. The little ones have a hard time making the transfer of mathematical reasoning from one subject to another and this is a slow learning process.<br /><br />Six year olds have a different adjustment problem in getting used to the closeness of school work. The rate that reading is learned is much affected by the youngster’s natural ability to focus his eyes.<br /><br />Adults who in mid-years have to adjust to bifocal glasses get some idea of what a first grader goes through in learning to focus his eyes in order to read, the teacher said.<br /><br />The children make up the first stories they read, writing them in simple terms to learn simple words, and then re-reading what they have written. They also illustrate their stories, drawing the characters and situations in a group effort.<br /><br />One evidence of the relation of education to everyday living is that the children in this year’s first grade classes insist on equipping their houses with TV antennas (Editor’s note: TV broadcasts from Boise began to be viewable by homes equipped with antennas just the previous summer.)<br /><br />During Mrs. Osborn’s talk I was struck by the similarity of the learning process at all levels.<br /><br />People starting to do advertising layout work have some of the same problems a first grader has in starting to draw numbers and letters. They have difficulty making their letters uniform in size and shape and in gauging the working space so that they make a balanced use of it. Both first graders and advertising layout beginners are helped by lines that indicate where the top and bottom of the letter should go and where the top of the lower case letters should go.<br /><br />The whole learning process is one of simplification, like a blowup illustration of the parts of a machine to show how it works and where each part goes.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-87851338481994859902011-03-05T14:20:00.000-08:002011-03-05T14:25:30.406-08:00In 1950s -- Avoiding the "softness" of "New York -- California style of education"By Don Lynch<br /><br />From the Nov. 3, 1953 edition of The Argus-Observer<br /><br />Ernie Hill, Foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, has made an interesting report on the experiences of his son Jonathon in attending schools in New York, Tokyo and London.<br /><br />The boy had lacked interest in school in the United States and Japan and had repeatedly been tardy, but has taken a real interest in his work in London.<br /><br />Hill reports, “I once went this school in New York. When I put my head in the door, someone fired a book at me. All the kids were standing up and were screaming. The teacher was shouting and banging on the desk.<br /><br />“They’re so spirited this morning,” she told me outside. “Their little personalities are expressing themselves. We do nothing to curb their ego.’ When she went back into the classroom, she was beaned by an orange.<br /><br />“Then, at the American school in Tokyo six of them gave their egos a workout by pushing one boy through a window.”<br /><br />Hill says that British schools don’t operate that way. Jonathon was never late for school in London. He started doing his homework conscientiously and even studying ahead. When asked what would happen if he didn’t get his homework done, the boy said:<br /><br />“Well, the Head would send you down to his study. He wouldn’t talk or beg you to do your work. He would just give you six of the best . . . that’s wallops with his birch cane. And boy do they hurt.”<br /><br />Asked what would happen if a student threw a book, Jonathon said, “That would be a Monday night detention of three to five hours plus six of the best, plus no more swimming or football for the rest of the term.”<br /><br />Hill reported that under the British influence Jonathon said, “ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ and ‘No thank you,’ just like a civilized human being.”<br /><br />Hill said he wasn’t worrying about Jonathon’s personality or ego, but just “basking in the warm glow of an unbelievable transformation.”<br /><br />Thank goodness the Ontario schools and other schools in this region are not so progressively minded that the kids are permitted to run wild. We have a healthy compromise here between the severity of the English system and the softness of the New York-California style of education.<br /><br />My father, a lifelong school teacher now retired, made practical application of the birch-cane technique with good results. He didn’t abuse it, but he did require discipline and order in his school.<br /><br />I remember very well one occasion when he marched all of his ninth grade boys around the room whacking each one across the back with his belt when they came by his desk. They had refused to leave the outside basketball court to return to class after the noon hour. They never did it again.<br /><br />There was another time I remember better from personal experience. We kids were confined to a playroom in the schoolhouse basement because of severe weather. One boy used a wooden pointer teachers used for blackboard instruction, put it in the furnace until it was charred and then wiped it across the faces of some of the rest of us. I took it away from him and broke it over his head. About that time we got caught.<br /><br />The next morning I watched the old man cut three good strong lilac branches, and then walked to school through the deep snow of that year with him and the lilac branches.<br /><br />The three us of who were in that fight stood up before the room and one lilac branched was used on each of us. I was ashamed because I couldn’t keep from doing a little jig while the other boys were tough enough to stand and take it.<br /><br />However, the old man wasn’t always so stern. He yielded to the idea of progressive education to the extent of spending considerable effort on directing the learning process along lines that appealed to the interests of individual youngsters. Students got a chance to work on projects they liked and to acquire their learning in terms they would understand.<br /><br />With that background, it’s no wonder that discipline seem to me an essential prerequisite of education. Attention is essential to learning and discipline is necessary to get attention from most youngsters.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-65059250073672111042011-02-28T12:04:00.000-08:002011-02-28T12:06:31.736-08:00From that Era -- U.S. would have trouble ruling worldFrom the October 29, 1953 edition of The Argus-Observer<br /><br />By Don Lynch<br /><br />Major Malcolm Rosholt, former Air Force officer in the C-B-I theater in World War II and former Shanghi newspaper publisher, debunked the value of the United Nations in his talk to the Knife and Fork club here Tuesday evening.<br /><br />He told the crowd he had been re-reading Herodotus and was impressed by how little man’s heart had changed in 2400 years.<br /><br />“Unless man has a remarkably sudden change of heart we will never have peace of much duration during the next 2400 years,” he said.<br /><br />I asked him if he thought that with the scientific advancement in weapons, man could survive another 2400 years in a world of conflict.<br /><br />He expressed the opinion that even though millions of people would be killed quickly in an atomic war, the human race would probably survive.<br /><br />Then he added, “But it would become necessary for one country to rule the world.”<br />Sometimes that does appear to be the alternative if the United Nations or its equivalent eventually proves entirely futile.<br /><br />Who would that nation be?<br /><br />We know the world would be a tragic place if it were run by Russia. But what of the United States?<br /><br />Could we actually rule the world intelligently? I doubt it. We have trouble enough trying to harmonize the widely diversified interests of our own nation into enough of a common pattern to govern ourselves. We haven’t done that very well. How could we really rule the world except by brute force, even if it was moderated by some awareness of justice as a principle and the Golden Rule as a desirable ideal?<br /><br />The Romans were just, according to their own standards, and they were intelligent, but they flubbed the job of world rulership when it was much more simple that it would be now. And although they were rugged where we are soft, they couldn’t maintain enough character to handle their responsibilities.<br /><br />Things are far more complex, travel at a far faster pace in in our world today. If in the decades ahead, circumstances require us to assume the task of ruling the world, the speed of our physical and moral degeneration will probably make the Romans look slow indeed.<br /><br />Let’s not kid ourselves that we are qualified to rule the world. Far better to keep talking in the United Nations in the hope, however slim, that the world can find solutions and compromises that are at least temporarily acceptable to the diverse interests of its diverse people.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-8565962755686950042011-02-26T13:21:00.000-08:002011-02-26T13:42:26.751-08:00The Newspaper -- The first Argus Observes column from Sept 1, 1952By Don Lynch<br /><br />This is the fifth anniversary of the consolidation of the Ontario Argus and the Eastern Oregon Observer into the Argus-Observer. This consolidated newspaper has now served the Ontario area for five years as a semi-weekly. It has likely run more pages of newspaper per week, on the average, than any other one newspaper in a town the size of Ontario in the Pacific Northwest.<br /><br />Some maturity must accrue to a newspaper on its fifth anniversary. Therefore this seems like a fitting occasion to begin a personal column by the editor --- an idea we have been kicking around for a long time.<br /><br />However, your editor doesn’t feel mature. Newsmen must guard against the feeling that they have “arrived” in professional competence.<br /><br />The need for such humbleness on the part of working newsmen was well summarized by a sign that used to hang above the sports desk in a Washington D.C. newspaper. It read, “As long as you know you’re green you continue to grow, but when you think you’re ripe, you start to get rotten.”<br /><br />Columns like this one are standard features to be found in a great many newspapers these days. This trend stems in part from the tremendous readership acquired by syndicated news columns during the past generation. Success of the big columnist has caused editors to feel that a more personal touch would increase the readership of their own material.<br /><br />For the past generation editors have bemoaned the fact that the readership of newspaper editorials has fallen off. In the days before movies, radio and television, frequently the best entertainment readily at hand was the writing of some old-style fire-eating editor found on the editorial page of the local newspaper. Everyone read the editorials. Today editorials are read by a small percentage of newspaper subscribers --- sometimes referred to by editors as a “select” group.<br /><br />The editor’s personal column represents an effort on the part of the editor to reach a larger general audience of readers. This was part of my reason for starting a column.<br />Another more important reason is the freedom and flexibility afforded by a column like this. One can write easily in the first person abut something he had read, a movie he has seen, an experience or idea he has had, all with an easy informality difficult to accomplish within the rather strict limitation of editorial column style.<br /><br />Selection of the name, “The Argus Observes,” is an obvious one taken from the name of the newspaper.<br /><br />The name Argus comes from Greek mythology. Subsequent columns will deal with a variety of information and ideas. An early issue will tell the story of the Greek Argus. (Editor’s note: Read that column in a coming post.)Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-82259930859796846152011-02-23T09:38:00.000-08:002011-02-23T09:39:12.111-08:00Keeping it interesting in 1953By Don Lynch<br />From the April 9, 1953 issue of The Argus-Observer<br /><br />Few newspaper readers can possibly know how much of the newsman’s time and effort goes into trying to keep the news uncluttered and interesting….<br /><br />The stock in trade of a weekly newspaper is its names in the news. It is expected to carry the news about the everyday doings of the ordinary folk in its home town and region.<br /><br />This is sound in principle because it is the basis of reader interest in the paper.<br /><br />But pursued to extremes this philosophy would produce a sheet that was nothing but inconsequential clutter --- tripe that conceivably might hold the interest of a few avid gossips with a insatiable appetite for what their neighbors are doing but be dreadfully dull to large important groups of readers whose interest is needed if the newspaper is to be “everybodys” newspaper as we attempt to make this one.<br /><br />Therefore we steadfastly refuse to run meaningless lists of names. We frequently cuts lists of names of people who attended parties or who attended meeting. If they won prizes, were elected to offices or made committee reports, they may get mentioned. But lists that run a half a dozen or more names in a lump are taboo in the news unless they are in the news of crime and violence which really has public interest.<br /><br />One of the most frequent requests for dull treatment of the news comes from well-meaning sponsors of various worthwhile projects, who when the work is done, want to publicly thank the people who pushed the project….Readers just aren’t interested in all these gracious comments of thanks. So we try to avoid them unless they have some real news value.<br /><br />The good people who want this sort of news printed seem to feel that if a helper is publicly thanked in print it somehow means more to him than if he just receives a personal thank you.<br /><br />It is quite the other way with me.<br /><br />I quite agree with “Rainwater” Jones who once gave me the idea in conversation that it is both good religion and good business to keep quiet about the various things you do in public service.<br />The broad general statement of ethics, the Sermon on the Mount, says something about, “When thy doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”<br /><br />There is another quite practical reason why many people don’t want a fuss made over their public efforts. They don’t want to be “snowed” with further requests.<br /><br />There is a premium these days on persons willing to help on public projects and the willing horse is apt to get worked to death. I’d rather not be known as such a horse, and I’m sure many other people feel the same way.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-2924205934850583902011-02-07T11:52:00.000-08:002011-02-07T11:55:01.389-08:00Brevity in Feminine Attire(Editor's note: This is another favorite post from some year's back. It's a post taken from a front page column my father wrote for his newspaper.)<br /><br />From the Sept. 20, 1954 issue of The Ontario Argus-Observer<br /><br />The Argus Observes<br />By Don Lynch<br /><br />Brevity in feminine attire has become about as commonplace and unexciting as an old print dress.<br /><br />The utter indifference often accorded a scantily clad female was brought to my attention last summer by a chance observance.<br /><br />On one of the warmer days in late summer, I sat in a barber shop getting a shoe shine and watched a junior miss in high cuffed shorts and a scanty shirt wend her way through and past the groups of men that dotted the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.<br /><br />Her blouse may have been what the women call a halter scarf. At any rate, it wasn’t quite as diverting as the skin tight T shirts sometimes seen this past summer which, unfortunately, seem to appear most often on the fat girls.<br /><br />This girl was strictly a youngster who looked so young in fact that the average man would feel a little hesitant to note that she was a candidate to be quite a woman.<br /><br />At first I thought that she might be unaware of the rather obvious display of her charm. But not so. After she had walked the block one way she soon came back the other direction and it was plain that she was conscious of her feminine attractions. At least it was plain from where I sat.<br /><br />Yet not a single one of a couple dozen men standing on the street gave her a second glance. Most of them didn’t even give her a first glance.<br /><br />Perhaps if she had been dressed in snug fitting denim waist overalls, she might have rated more attention. She would have looked like a more approachable type to her audience.<br /><br />The contrast in today’s attitude toward women’s dress and that of a generation ago is well illustrated by an incident I remember from my childhood.<br /><br />My country-school teacher father sent two of his high school girl students home to get appropriately dressed when they rolled their stockings down below their knees and wore short knee-length skirts in the first of the flapper days.<br /><br />I don’t think he was shocked but he thought the community would be horrified. So he made the girls cover a little more before he would let them stay in school.<br /><br />Where will we be in another generation? Will it be bikini suits or less on the girls by then?<br />I hope not. There are still some things I’d prefer to leave to my imagination.<br />However, I shall try to ride with the times, adjusting to the trends whatever they may be to keep from being separated from the youthful part of society by the devastating attitude generally accorded to disapproving elders.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-30581870500424259252011-01-18T17:25:00.000-08:002011-01-18T17:31:59.089-08:00Was that a flying saucer or what?<em>Editor's note:<br /><br />While I work on another writing project, I'm going to recycle some of my favorite posts of old Argus-Observer stories for the enjoyment of anyone who stumbles on this blog, as folks do from time to time.<br /><br />Here's an early one:</em><br /><br />The Sept. 8, 1952 issue of The Argus-Observer reported the area’s “first close-up eye witness report of a ‘flying saucer’ incident" occurred the previous Saturday.<br /><br />Mr. and Mrs. Cliff Drinkwine said that about 9:50 a.m. they saw what could be a weather balloon but seemed to be under some kind of control when it moved away quickly.<br /><br />The flying object sat down on the Drinkwine property a half mile south of Payette and a quarter of a mile east of U.S. Highway 30.<br /><br />The Drinkwines said the object was about five feet in diameter and looked like it was made of rubber rather than metal. At first, they assumed it was a weather balloon but “decided it was something other than a weather balloon when it appeared to be controlled as it came to rest and especially as it moved rapidly away.”<br /><br />The Drinkwines decided the object was remote controlled. Cliff Drinkwine said he believes so-called “saucers” are a secret military device controlled by the United States.<br /><br />DRAT. Here's the answer published three days later.<br /><br />L. L. Sevlha, manager of what was identified as the CAA weather station, apparently the federal weather bureau, said he was certain the object seen by Cliff Drinkwine and his wife on the previous Friday was a weather balloon.<br /><br />Sevlha told The Argus-Observer for its Sept. 11 edition that his station released a weather balloon that was two feet by two and a half feet at about 8:50 a.m. on that Friday, and that it drifted in the direction of Payette, near where the Drinkwines spotted their flying object at about 9:30.<br /><br />Sevlha said the balloon responds to air currents in much the way the Drinkwines reported that the object had moved.<br /><br />Sevlha added that his organization is authorized to receive reports of flying saucer type objects and pass those reports along to the military.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-73284829699833005712010-11-20T12:58:00.000-08:002010-11-20T13:03:08.140-08:00It's hunting season(Editor's note: This is the hunting chapter from Farewell Bend the novel -- hunting and football filled the papers of The Argus Observer. Coming soon -- The Vale Game, 1954 and 1955.)<br /><br /> <br /> Pete’s model A plowed through a circle of light ending abruptly fifteen yards in front of the car. A soft blanket of new snow three inches deep lined the country road. A few flakes fell softly on the dark cold countryside, sticking briefly to the windshield and whirling through the cracks where the passenger door on my side bounced loosely against the frame. We had set out before daybreak for our favorite hunting ground where the Malheur River passes just south of Malheur Butte. Pete was silent as he nursed the aging car down the highway to Vale, watching for the gravel road that cut off to the butte. I wondered if he and Faye were having problems. I decided not to ask. Why spoil the hunting?<br /> As we passed the Doran ranch, I was reminded of the hunting outings my father took me on twice each fall. Kate Doran and her husband Keith owned the place, and Dad knew them well because Kate had worked as a reporter for The Argus-Observer before she was married. The Dorans were in their thirties with a young child who had named their hunting dog Jimmy Kavanagh in honor of my father.<br /> On our last outing that fall, as Dad and I walked down a set of pickup tracks to start working a cornfield, shotguns slung over our shoulders, my father actually strutted along, which he’d never do on Oregon Street. I strutted alongside. We talked about hunting, not work or school. And we bagged three roosters, a good result for us. My father was not a great shot, and if I scored a hit, it was mostly accidental. It was important to get five or six good chances during each outing. We usually could, working the cornfields and ditch banks on the Doran ranch. Dad had made it clear, however, that the Dorans’ was not a place I could take Pete. “Two teenagers could easily mess up a good thing,” he said. <br />Pete and I contented ourselves with a piece of vacant, unmarked land behind Malheur Butte and along the small, slow-moving river. We used it both for pheasant hunting and waiting for ducks to settle in one of the eddies.<br />As Pete urged his car through the fresh snow, I held out little hope for any success with ducks. The best we would get was a good shot or two. Even then, bringing a duck home was unlikely without a dog to fetch it out of the river.<br />We had planned to be waiting in a thicket before daylight, at a spot we knew the ducks liked to frequent. But it was later as we closed in on the butte. The sun was beginning to light a streak on the skyline in Pete’s rear view mirror.<br /> He pointed at the reflection and shook his head, smiling and curling his upper lip at the same time. <br /> “If you could get out of the house on time, Jack, we’d already be at the river,” he said. <br /> “Don’t worry. Those ducks aren’t going anywhere. It’s too cold,” I said.<br /> I wrapped my arms around my body. Even with a sweater and heavy coat, the wind blowing into the car worked its way down my neck and through the coat. Pete again drove in silence. <br />There was no excuse for being slow to get out of the house. It was a habit. I was always ten minutes late for an early morning hunting trip. Pete knew that. <br />“Is that the reason you’re in a foul mood?” I asked and laughed.<br />“What?”<br />“Foul mood. I made a joke.”<br />Pete looked at me and grinned. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “You are an odd ball. Somebody in FFA class said you’re an intellectual, whatever that is.”<br />Without warning, he hit the brakes so hard we went into a skid. I looked forward to see the headlights pick up a line of fence posts. We came up too fast on a T intersection that we both knew was there but was hidden by a sudden flurry of snow. Despite the rough surface of the gravel road, a line of fence posts was coming at us too fast. I reached for the dash to brace myself as Pete fought the steering wheel, still hoping to make the turn. <br /> “Ice,” Pete said.<br /> He’d hit a slick spot. A heavy, icy rain earlier that week had left a large puddle that froze over.<br />The car slid forward with no bite on the steering wheel and no catch in the tires. There was nothing for Pete to do but let it drift toward the near side of the fence. <br /> As the slow-motion action played out, the car ended up straddling the shallow ditch, with its left front fender leaning against a fence post.<br /> Pete hopped out.<br /> “Goddamn it, it’s dented,” he said, looking at the fender.<br /> “What about the post?” I asked. <br /> “It’s bent over, but the farmer will never know who ran into it.”<br /> “Not if we can back out of here. I don’t know, with the ditch and the snow.”<br /> “Get your ass out here and push. We’re going to need all the power we can get,” Pete said, leaning in through the window.<br /> “I don’t mind steering. You can push harder than I can,” I volunteered, keeping a straight face. <br /> Pete did not bother to stifle a laugh.<br /> “You push first,” he said and jumped back behind the wheel, waving his arm at me to hop on out.<br />The traction of the tires on the snow and dirt where we had come to a stop worked better than we expected. The car started moving backwards with just a little push, scraped its front bumper on the ditch bank but stayed in motion through the dip. The back tires found some solid road. Within minutes, we were once again headed toward the butte.<br /> “So did you hear the one about the ugly farmer’s daughter who was showing the traveling salesmen her dad’s prize bulls,” Pete asked, turning to me and laughing as if he’d just remembered the joke.<br />“I’m sure I have. Where do you get these things anyway, in FFA class?”<br /> “You got a better one?” <br />“Not this morning,” I said. I was too cold from pushing the car out of a snow pile to remember any jokes. <br />“You never know any jokes.”<br />“What about your foul mood?”<br />Pete sneered and was quiet for a moment.<br /> “So you going with Joyce to the Christmas dance?” he asked.<br />“Where did you hear that?”<br />“Word gets around,” he said, focusing his full attention on the road as he followed a turn to the right to head directly toward the outline of Malheur Butte beginning to take shape against the gradually lightening sky.<br />Despite going out with Faye Peterson, Pete still carried around a longing for Joyce Earns. It went back to the time, five years earlier, that they rode horses at the same stable. I also knew Pete wouldn’t do anything about his crush. Joyce was the prettiest girl in my class, really kind of Hollywood pretty, a perfect complexion, flawless features, no strand of her out of place. She struck most boys as unapproachable. But we were getting to be friends, beginning to joke around about our lousy history teacher whose idea of instruction was reading out of the text. And with Joyce’s boyfriend out of town, she had talked to me about looking for a friend to take her to the Christmas dance. I didn’t have much luck with the girls I liked, but I was beginning to think I could make something happen with Joyce. <br /> “I doubt it, but it’s up to her,” I said.<br /> “So you were just bullshitting me about having trouble finding dates?”<br />“With her boyfriend living in Portland, we’re getting to be friends. At least we talk. She might need somebody to take her to the dance, but she isn’t interested in a real date.”<br /> I watched Pete’s jaw muscles work a bit and then relax. He knew she could go out with any of the top jocks, even the Mormons who usually didn’t date anyone but the girls who went to their church. As pretty as she was, and smart, she did not need a guy to help her get out of town.<br /> Pete said nothing more as he guided the Model A across a bridge over the Malheur River. He turned right onto a narrow dirt road that circled away from the river, behind the northern side of the butte, into our usual parking spot. The road’s end there defined the northern border of a pocket of wild land leading to the river. <br /> We pulled our shotguns out of the back, loaded them, and walked in silence, wandering through sagebrush and weed thickets toward a backwater pond. The field was fertile bottomland that had not been claimed for alfalfa. It wasn’t exactly level ground, and it could be difficult to get equipment into.<br /> With pheasant season over, we were stuck scouting the area for ducks. Those sleek birds were difficult to get close to and hard to knock down, at least for me. Pete always insisted it was not that difficult a shot for him. I never saw much evidence of that. We often went home skunked from one of these duck outings. If he hit a duck, it was usually because the bird’s wings were set gliding into a landing. I could knock one down under those circumstances. And I often did.<br /> Pete’s advantage came in the form of a three-shot semi- automatic twelve gauge, and he was sometimes lucky with his third shot. With my double-barreled twelve gauge, I got off just one effective shot. By the time I got my finger on the back trigger, my second shot was slow, an afterthought.<br />. This morning as the light began to glint off the red thistles peeking out of the snow, we had to search to find our usual path to the river. Tall clumps of slender willows, blanketed in white, were everywhere and almost indistinguishable. <br /> Without warning, Pete’s shotgun went off immediately behind me. Hot air from the barrel blasted my left ear and neck before I could duck.<br /> “What the hell?”<br /> Pete sidled past me through the weeds, grinning slightly.<br /> “Goddamn it, Pete, don’t pull that kind of shit.”<br /> “Scared you, did I?”<br /> “Not funny. What if I moved sideways? Or turned around?”<br /> “It wasn’t even close. The barrel was over your head.”<br /> “It didn’t sound like it. Didn’t feel like it.”<br /> I watched Pete move on ahead, his gun dangling at his side, chuckling to himself, and I thought about bringing up his dad’s death. It felt strange that he could mess around with guns. Could he be taking out his father’s bad luck on me? I didn’t think he would do that. I decided the thing with Joyce pissed him off.<br />Now I was the one who was seriously pissed. It was stupid to be best friends with a guy who could pull a stunt like that. I liked hunting, but I didn’t like messing with guns. Pete was too sure of his ability to back off at the right time, too willing to take big risks. I made a promise to myself then and there that I’d get away from him if he ever again even looked like he was going to mess with a loaded gun. I’d watch him. The next time anything like that happened, I’d call it the end of our friendship. <br />He must have been reading my mind.<br /> “Don’t worry. I won’t do it again. You might shit your pants,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear over the sound of our feet crunching on the snow.<br /> “You bet you won’t. I won’t give you a chance to get behind me where I can’t see you.”<br /> “Shhhh. We’re almost at the pool.”<br /> We cut to the left, down river toward where it backed up behind a bend in the bank and a small island. During pheasant season, we had seen ducks land and take off at this spot. We approached through trees at the water’s edge, moving quietly, picking out the trail that led us most directly to a place to peer over the edge of the bank at the target section of slow water. Even with snow on the trees, we knew this place. Its taller willows were more distinctive than the clumps of brush we had just walked through.<br /> I hung back, and Pete took the lead moving to the riverbank, the sound of the flowing water becoming audible above the crunch of our boots on the frozen ground.<br /> “Look!” Pete mouthed the warning hoarsely. “To your right.” <br /> I heard the birds swoosh as he spoke. They coasted in with their wings set, coming over the river in a flying V from the west, fifty feet above the water. Pete pulled up to take a bead on one as I slid to his left and down the bank a yard to get room for a shot. Pete got his off first. The nearest duck flipped over and fell into the river. I pulled the trigger as the ducks began to beat their wings to pull up, veering away to the south. Pete took a second shot. Nothing. We both let go with another round, hoping our shot patterns could still reach the fleeing tail of the last duck. No luck. Four birds still in the sky, returning to formation, darted behind the tree line on the other side of the river.<br /> “Follow me down river. I may need some help getting that duck out,” Pete said, beginning to run along the bank, his feet slipping a bit in the snow and ice.<br />“You’ve got the good wading boots,” he shouted. <br /> “I’ll get a long branch,” I said as I leaned my spent double barrel against one of the sturdier willows, making sure the shotgun wouldn’t slip into the snow. I searched for a dead branch long enough to help snake the duck out of the current, sturdy enough not to break, and slim enough I could get a good hold on it. The best stick was only about five feet long. And the search took a couple of minutes.<br /> “Over here,” Pete yelled from twenty-five yards downstream.<br /> I struggled through the underbrush to where he stood at the water’s edge and laughed out loud at what I saw. <br /> Pete was ejecting an unspent shell from his automatic while the duck, which had waddled up onto a bit of mud bank, staggered around in front of him. <br /> “I don’t want to shoot it again at this range. It’ll ruin the meat,” Pete shouted, breathing loudly as he worked the action on his automatic.<br /> “Hit him with this before he gets back in the water and swims away,” I said, getting ready to toss my stick down the embankment to where the wounded, staggering bird was about to stumble back into the river.<br /> “I’m gonna use the shotgun,” Pete said and swung it like a bat so it clipped the duck in the head. It toppled over. He then picked up the bird and swung it around, as my grandmother would do with a chicken to break its neck before she chopped its head off.<br /> “One of us needs to get a retriever if we’re going to keep doing this,” I offered as he stuffed the duck into his hunting vest.<br /> We returned to a spot near the backwater pool and found a place to sit on a log behind some willows, so that we were situated in a natural blind.<br /> “You think they’ll come back after we shot at one group of them,” I asked after we had waited quietly for ten or twelve minutes.<br /> “Who knows? You want to walk upriver?” <br /> “Let’s wait a bit longer. But I’m getting cold. I can’t sit here forever,” I said.<br /> After another five minutes of quiet, Pete shifted his feet and, without looking at me, asked: “So when you take Joyce home after school, do you go park someplace?”<br /> “I’ve only taken her home once. Hey, we talk about you, how you had horses in the same stable and used to go riding every weekend,” I lied.<br /> “What does she say about me?”<br /> “You used to have a lot of fun,” I lied some more. We had never talked about Pete. “I don’t think she knows you have a crush on her.”<br /> “Well, I never said anything. Now I can’t. It would screw things up with Faye.”<br /> “Are things getting serious with Faye?”<br /> He nodded. <br /> “So you doing it?”<br /> “No,” he said, looking away so it was clear he was lying. “Just heavy petting.”<br />“I don’t believe that. You’ve been heavy petting for a long time.”<br />“She’d kill me if she knew I told you.”<br /> “You using rubbers?”<br /> “Most of the time.”<br /> “When you don’t, do you worry?”<br />“Yeah. So does she. Mostly we say we’re not going to do it. Then we just get carried away.”<br />“Be careful Pete, unless you want to be stuck in Farewell Bend the rest of your life.”<br /> “You don’t think I know that.” <br /> He looked at me and smiled as if he was about ready to tell a joke. This time he stopped himself.<br /> We sat quietly another twenty minutes. Sitting still was getting easier because the sun had finally climbed high enough to be slightly warming.<br /> “Let’s walk upriver some. Maybe cross over. See if we can find a few birds,” Pete suggested.<br /> “What about the no-hunting signs over there?”<br /> The farmers with land along the south bank posted their fences right across the trail along the river’s edge. During pheasant season, we had honored those for the most part — making just one or two treks along that side of the river, hoping to scare any pheasants we encountered across onto our favored triangle of land. Late in the season, one of the farmers caught us on his posted land and chewed us out, shouting from atop his tractor, which we hadn’t noticed as it headed our direction. <br /> “Ah, ain’t none of these farmers will be out on a cold Sunday morning,” Pete said.<br /> “Yeah. What the hell.”<br /> Driving in, we had crossed the river on a bridge a half mile upstream. On foot, there was another alternative. An elevated silver irrigation pipe, six feet in diameter, spanned the water with the help of suspension wires that gave us something to hold onto as we worked our way along.<br /> During pheasant season, it usually stayed dry and the crossing proved easy, even carrying our shotguns. This morning, with four inches of snow beginning to melt off the top of the tube, the footing looked treacherous.<br /> “I don’t know about that thing,” I said as we reached the point where we had to climb the chain link fence that protected the irrigation pipe’s mounts at both ends. Climbing was made easier because of wood posts close to the chain link. The posts formed part of a barbed wire fence stretching off to the west, keeping a dozen cows contained in a pasture.<br /> “You going to let a little snow stop us? Just hold on tight,” Pete said.<br /> “It’s my shotgun I’m worried about. I’m going to need both hands to hold onto the cable,” I said. “Same for you.”<br /> “Just move slow. Carry the shotgun in your left hand and lean against the cable if you have to. I’ll go first.”<br /> Pete heaved himself up and started across, keeping one boot well planted against the tube at all times while pushing the snow aside with the other.<br /> “The water’s only four or five feet deep here. Just be a little cold to fall into,” he shouted back as he started across. <br /> “I think I’ll let you have that side, and I’ll walk the road down to the bridge. Meet up with you there,” I said.<br /> Pete proceeded to cross and clamber over the chain link fence at the other end, making it look easy despite his weight. I reconsidered and pulled myself to the top of the fence post, where I could step onto the end supports for the tube and slide easily onto the top of the tube itself. <br /> “Come on. Don’t be a pussy,” Pete shouted.<br /> As I stepped onto the huge pipe with both feet, I let go of my shotgun, catching it as it bounced back at me. Fortunately, I had unloaded it. I stood for a minute thinking how lucky that had been. I did not want to have to climb down after the gun and then back up again.<br /> Once I got my balance atop the tube, sliding across proved fairly easy. Pete had the right idea.<br /> That was until a flight of ducks came in low overhead, gliding into the backwater pool we had abandoned earlier. <br /> Pete swung his gun across an arc that included where I stood exposed atop the tube. <br /> “No,” I shouted.<br /> He held his fire until the ducks were well down river before he let go with a round.<br /> But the sound startled me. My feet started slipping inexorably down the side of the tube. I dropped my shotgun and tried to grab the cable with both hands, reaching across my body with my left arm. I acted too late. I dangled above the water holding onto the cable with one hand.<br /> I couldn’t pull myself back up. My fingers were too cold. They just wouldn’t grip with any strength. I let go, trying to lurch atop of the tube to balance myself there.<br /> That didn’t work either. Over a few seconds, I slowly slid down the shining silver side of the water conveyor, finally dropping in a rush, splashing into the murky, cold water. <br /> The fall didn’t hurt. I covered the distance of ten feet from the top of the tube to the surface still upright, making only a small splash as I went in. The river proved to be only four feet deep as my boots touched bottom, but the mud gave way for another six inches. The bitter cold shocked me as the water penetrated my clothes. That wasn’t the worst part. The mud sucked at my wadding boots. The current pulled at me with more strength than I expected <br /> I leaned into the water, holding my breath, feeling around in the mud at the bottom. On a second try, I located the gun before I came up for air.<br /> “I can’t wade out,” I shouted to Pete. “The mud is too deep.”<br /> “Hold on. I’ll get a branch to reach you. Try to work your way to this side.”<br /> “God it’s cold!”<br /> “I know,” Pete said.<br /> He disappeared and took forever to find a branch to reach me with. It flashed through my mind that he really was pissed about Joyce. Or he thought I wasn’t working hard enough to get him a job as a photog at the paper.<br /> “C’mon Pete, where the hell are you?” I shouted.<br /> Silence.<br /> “I’m going to try to swim,” I yelled and flung my shotgun to the shore, falling on my back under the surface a third time.<br /> When I came back up, I still didn’t see Pete.<br /> “I got to get out of here,” I told myself.<br /> Standing again, I bent forward to work my legs out of the boots that had me anchored. After a frighteningly long struggle, I freed myself. Then I lunged toward the shoreline, ineffectively beating my arms and legs inside my waterlogged wool coat and pants. It took another five minutes while I was pushed by the current fifteen yards downstream to finally make it close to shore.<br /> Suddenly, I saw Pete alongside me. He’d waded in to help the last ten feet.<br /> “Where you been, man?” I sputtered, shaking from the cold and exertion.<br /> “Couldn’t find a branch,” he said.<br /> After I climbed dripping over the side of the bank, he stripped off my wet coat and wrapped me in his dry one, which he had thought to shed before wading in. But there was nothing to do for my bootless feet.<br /> We were in trouble. We were both soaked, and I was so tired and cold I felt unable to move. Without his coat, and with his pants wet now, Pete was freezing as well. <br /> “It will take me an hour to walk around by the bridge. I got to try to cross the tube again, then drive around,” Pete said. “That’s quickest.”<br /> I doubted I could hold out that long.<br /> “We’ve got to find a farm house close by,” I said.<br /> Pete agreed and started up the trail along the riverside, toward the road and some houses we remembered there. <br /> I followed but very soon he was out of sight in the riverside thicket.<br /> My feet were numb. They quit aching, but I could not feel them and I wanted to sit down, though I knew I had to keep moving. I could only feel my hands by rubbing them together. They ached. I trudged slowly up the trail.<br /> I was beginning to get confused and stumble when I heard a shout.<br /> “What the hell do you kids think you are doing?”<br /> It was the farmer we’d seen weeks before on his tractor.<br /> “You are both stupid, stupid assholes,” he said and scooped me up. Pete carried my legs and the farmer held me by my armpits as they staggered a hundred yards across a snow-covered pasture to his pickup, left where he’d been throwing hay bales to his heifers. He raced to his house where he called an ambulance and, I was told later, stripped me and wrapped me in a blanket. <br /> Pete went home, crawled into bed for the rest of the day, and returned to school on Monday.<br />I spent Sunday night being monitored for hypothermia at St. Mary’s Hospital. I thought the aching in my feet would never go away.<br />Monday was better. Two duty nuns stopped by my bed with soup and woke me for lunch. They clucked away and tried to sympathize. I tried to imagine what they wore underneath those black and white robes. My mother brought in the latest issues of Time and Life and a radio, and I forgot where I was for a few hours, listening to “One Life to Live” and “Queen for a Day.” I was eight again, staying home from school with the flu. I thought for a while I would be happy to be kept there another night, until I asked the nurse what was for dinner.<br />“Boiled fish,” she answered.<br />Late that afternoon, my doctor took my pulse, leaned over the bed, listened to my heart, and said he was happy to let me go home. <br />“Get some exercise. Play some basketball. But keep those feet out of the cold for awhile,” he warned as he hustled from the hospital room. <br />That settled, I tried to think what to do about Pete. I wasn’t sure he’d been intentionally slow pulling me from the water. But I was going to make him explain.<br />That lasted a week. He called to offer me a ride to school. I accepted and neither one of us talked about duck hunting. Pete had a few jokes ready, and it was easy to put the whole thing behind us.<br /> After all, I decided, he had waded in. He could have been in trouble himself from the cold water if that farmer hadn’t come along.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-31947001592486627112010-10-28T11:05:00.001-07:002010-10-28T11:05:57.454-07:00Take a virtual trip around town but you won’t find the old one-room jailTake a virtual trip around town but you won’t find the old one-room jail<br /> Google Maps now makes it easy to tour Ontario by computer, and when you want to write about what’s stood up over 55 years and what has not, this comes in handy.<br /> I realize that over 55 years things change. But it was a little disconcerting on my more recent visits to find that the folks who remade downtown Ontario have paved over much of the block that was most important to me as a youth. Last week I wrote at Farewell Bend the Novel about how they made the old Argus-Observer building into a parking lot. I also knew they’d made a parking lot of the old one-room city jail behind the former city hall, just across the alley from the old Argus also into a parking lot.<br /> Now, given Google’s new “street views” for some cities, including Ontario, I enjoy letting readers actually see the sites they are told about from the files of 1950s issues of the Argus-Observer.<br /> So if you want to see the parking lot that’s gone up in the place of the city jail that county Grand Jurors said was “filthy” in 1953, just go to Google maps and plug in the address 248 S.W.1st Street in Ontario, Zip 97914. <br /> Sorry I don’t have any pictures of the old jail, where I passed inmates a pack of cigarettes on occasion after making a run to the Moore Bus Depot a block south. What I could see of the inside through the bars didn’t exactly look comfortable or appealing, as I remember. <br /> (For some of this blog’s readers, I expect what will be even more exciting is the ability to use the street view option to move around town on many streets and look at a lot of the city. Fiddle with it a bit and you’ll figure out how that works. I don’t know whether and where Google has done or is still offering this option, but I’ll find out and soon put up a note about this.)<br /> For now, here’s what the Ontario City Council had to say about the county Grand Jury’s report that the city jail was filthy. The headline in the Argus-Observer pretty much summed it up:<br /> “City Council visits jail and calls it good enough for its purpose.”<br /> The July 2, 1953 issue reported that the Ontario City Council adjourned a council meeting to make a quick visit to the jail.<br /> Denying that it ever received the report from the county Grand Jury – carried in the Argus-Observer on May 28, 1953 -- the Ontario City Council visited the city jail and pronounced it fit enough.<br /> “This jail looks perfectly satisfactory to me,” Councilman Horace Beal said. “Any man in jail should feel damn fortunate to have a jail this good to be in.”<br /> The council members did note that that walls had been recently white washed.<br /> The Grand Jury had called the jail “filthy and unsanitary” because it had no shower or bathing facilities and no mattresses on the beds.<br /> In recounting the council’s response, the reporter for the Argus that year took it on himself to repeat a suggestion that “wet backs” --- the term of the day for illegal immigrants from Mexico who came to the area to work on the farms --- had been incarcerated there just before the Grand Jury visit.Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-49368578976619081892010-10-28T10:56:00.000-07:002010-10-28T10:58:03.809-07:00Becoming The Ontario Argus-Observer<em>Writer’s note: Here is the non-fiction account of my father’s time as publisher of the The Ontario Argus-Observer. A version of this story appears as background in my fictional memoir, Farewell Bend the Novel.</em><br /><br />By Larry L. Lynch<br /> Don Lynch fidgeted in the straight-back chair facing his Royal upright and placed his wire rim glasses on a pile of copy paper to the typewriter’s right. He sat surrounded by stacks of notes, clippings and old newspapers --- saved for story ideas and background. <br /> Lynch leaned forward, closed his eyes and used his long fingers to massage his temples. At thirty-seven, he looked almost handsome despite his slightly asymmetrical cheekbones, a carry-over from the polio he suffered as a youth. He had a full head of wavy hair, a twinkle in his eye and usually displayed a half smile that showed off his dimples. <br /> The other desks crowded into the front office of his twice-weekly newspaper, The Ontario Argus-Observer, were vacant. Lynch had saved this quiet Saturday morning, August 30, 1952, to find the right words to explain to readers why he was starting a personal, front-page column. The simple truth was that he wanted to do it and his news editor, Hugh Gale, was still on best behavior. It would be months before Gale would begin putting the phone down on a particular country cousin correspondent and walking away while she droned on. <br /> The name Lynch chose for the column, “The Argus Observes,” almost selected itself, given the name of his newspaper. The mythological Argus, Lynch would explain to readers, had one hundred eyes, thus its use for newspapers. What’s more, it slept with only two eyes closed. Still, the name had its shortcomings. The Greek Argus failed had failed as a bodyguard, the assignment that made it myth-worthy. Bored by a lengthy bedtime story, the monster fell totally asleep and was slain. <br /> Lynch knew it would be a mistake to come off in his new column as overly impressed with himself, but after five years and nine months as editor and publisher, he’d grown sure of his place in town. He wanted to “write easily” about his experiences and ideas using the “informality of the first person.” <br /> For more than five years, as I passed through high school and on to college, my father did just that, aptly commenting on life in a small western town in the 1950s.<br /> For the previous five years, he had run his newspaper under the close guidance of a veteran partner, Bernard Mainwaring, whose large bald head and vigorous physical presence was matched by a dominating personality and equally impressive intellect. My father once observed that his older partner, who avoided alcohol, had “little understanding of the inclination of others to drink because he was two drinks ahead of the average guy all of the time.” <br /> Mainwaring owned the daily Nampa, Idaho Free Press when my father went to work for him in 1944. The Nampa publisher found something special in the former meter-reader reborn as an ad salesman and sports writer. After two years, Mainwaring decided to stake his salesman to a half interest in a weekly newspaper, one of two then serving Ontario, Oregon, population about 4,200.<br /> Before Mainwaring and my father purchased it, The Argus had settled into a deep slumber that hardly noted the changes going on in town. In one of his last columns, the former editor and publisher made fun of himself in print for driving through a newly installed stop light on which he’d reported the week before. Another sign of the lack of activity occurred one weekday afternoon in the fall of 1946. While my father and Mainwaring sat for two hours in the weekly’s office haggling over the details of the purchase, the phone remained eerily silent. That silence drove Mainwaring to distraction, but it didn’t scare him off.<br />My mother, my brother Dennis, and I rarely saw my father during the first four months of the new operation. That was the time it took to locate and buy a small, white clapboard house on a tree-lined street of mixed homes with an ample scattering of vacant lots four blocks southwest of downtown Ontario. At first, the three of us were stuck without a car in a massively ugly and cold grey stone rental house in nearby Payette, Idaho. Our wait was only relieved on Thursday afternoon when my father drove us to Ontario to join the madhouse of publication night.<br />I liked the smell of the mix of old newspapers and ink that pervaded the tiny store-front newspaper plant, but I hated the racket the machinery produced late on the evening of publication day. A printer stood on a platform at the side of a huge roller atop a two-page press feeding sheets of paper into place. To produce a four-page section, the operator turned the paper over, exchanged the forms holding the pages of lead type, and sent the sheets through a second time. On each revolution the press roared as the roller spun on its axis, then groaned when it reversed directions, and roared again. When the press run was far enough along that my father fired up the folder, its sound added exponentially to the cacophony, clanging away, folding and stuffing the printed sheets into something that resembled a newspaper--- when it didn’t shred them. <br />This was our quality family time. Women enjoyed my father, and he returned the favor. His appeal rested mainly with his ability to flatter them by listening intently. On these evenings, however, he forgot that compulsive diversion of his. And my mother, a short, striking, dark-haired dervish put to good use the work ethic she absorbed growing up on a dairy farm near Caldwell, Idaho. On these nights our parents accomplished something together.<br /> From the outset, The Argus’ new owners planned to convince the publisher of the town’s other weekly newspaper to sell out. Mainwaring provided the operating cash for my father to undercut ad sales for that paper, the Eastern Oregon Observer, by practically giving away ad space in The Argus. They also arranged for The Argus to be delivered to everyone in town, whether paid subscribers or not. <br />My father’s patience with this approach began to wear thin by spring, however. He’d learned that everyone in town seemed to read the paper even though almost no one would buy ads. <br />Then, as he tried to keep up the pressure on the Observer, a piece of luck presented itself in the form of an editorial mistake.<br />Harry Peterson, a town patriarch who ran a furniture store at the other end of Oregon Street from the old Argus plant and also operated a local funeral home. One morning as my father walked through town to make a call on Peterson, he mulled over a new problem. He’d heard that Peterson was steaming because The Argus printed the wrong time for a funeral, and people around town were calling to complain.<br />“Harry, I’m sorry, that was a mistake,” my father shouted as he entered the store and climbed to the top of the stairs leading to Peterson’s desk, where it overlooked the furniture displayed on the floor below. “But if this mistake is so important to our readers, how is it that we don’t have any value as an advertising medium?”<br />From that time on, Peterson’s furniture store advertised in The Argus. Other merchants followed his lead and began to buy paid space. <br />That summer, the competition with the Observer came to a head. Compared with The Argus, which traced its first publication to 1896, the Observer was an upstart. Elmo Smith, an acquaintance of my father’s from Smith’s college days in Caldwell, had started the paper late in 1936 and had made a success of it, becoming a power on the local scene. He served as Ontario’s mayor during part of World War II. But by 1946, he was ready to move on. He sold the Observer that December to Jessica Longston, who also owned the St. Helens (Oregon) Sentinel-Mist as well as a newspaper and radio station in Burley, Idaho. As part of his deal with Longston, Smith had agreed to run the Observer for a limited time. Eight months later, with the competition wearing on both papers, something had to give. Mainwaring offered Longston more money than she could make by continuing to operate The Observer, and she agreed to sell. The Ontario papers were combined into one beginning in September 1947. Elmo Smith soon bought another paper in John Day, Oregon and began a career in state politics.<br />Through the decade my father operated the Argus-Observer, his biggest business headaches involved how to keep a back shop purring with country printers and unreliable equipment. Press breakdowns were commonplace, even after a refurbished, high-speed eight-page press was installed in a new building. The turnover among printers was even more maddening. They’d walk in the door looking for work, be assigned a stone-slab work table for assembling type, turn out a few weeks of decent ads and printing jobs, then collect their checks and disappear. <br />And yet the worst problem my father ran into with a printer was quite the opposite.<br />Before the end of this printer’s first week, the back shop foreman discovered he had to position the new guy at a make-up bench far away from every other employee and especially far away from a particularly cranky linotype operator. The guy smelled so foully of drink and bodily filth that no one could stand to work close to him. This printer required cash for his work on a daily basis. If he was paid weekly, he’d be broke within a day or two. Even so, the foreman wanted to keep him on the job until someone who could replace him walked in the door.<br />It didn’t work out that way. My father’s patience ran out when the printer missed a day of work but didn’t realize that he hadn’t shown up. He disrupted the entire office with his insistence that he receive the money for two days when he had only worked one.<br />The odiferous printer came from Yakima, Washington, so my father bought him a ticket for home, packed him a lunch, took him to the bus station, handed the ticket to the driver, and watched the bus pull out with him aboard. <br />He then called the printer’s wife to tell her that her husband was on his way: “She wailed, ‘Why did you have to send him home?’ She thought she’d gotten rid of him for good.”<br />At the end of 1952, Mainwaring sold his interest in the Argus-Observer to my parents to help finance his purchase of the Salem, Oregon Capital Journal. My father used “The Argus Observes” column of February 5, 1953 to pay tribute to the man he described as “at least a near genius as a newspaper publisher (and) the nearest thing to a genius of any one I have ever known.”<br />He noted that Mainwaring impressed people by acquiring a depth of information along specific lines and using it freely in conversation. He never smoked, never drank, and during the war went “careening all over Nampa on a bike, pell mell like a 25-year-old kid....I have seen him take a highball to avoid awkward explanation and then pour it down a sink or set it aside at the first opportunity. However a stranger at a cocktail party might think him the life of the party because his animated voice can be heard above the hubbub of others.”<br /> My father believed in the value of child labor. I began working at The Argus when I was eleven, hauling bundles of freshly inked newspapers to the bus depot, drug stores and coffee shops, and riding my bike to small neighborhood groceries. Downtown I usually covered on foot. I gathered up an order or two and headed out of the back door of the plant, past a one-room cement jail that sat behind city hall. Occasionally, I stopped to jaw with a drunk still stuck inside come late afternoon. By the time I was in junior high, I picked up an extra dollar now and then by making cigarette runs for the guys drying out in the old jail. One day a printer saw me making the exchange, and reported it to my father, who put a stop to the arrangement.<br />By 1952, my father had fallen in love with the news side and would have been overjoyed to devote himself to it full time. But he knew that the business depended on him to sell the ads that brought in the money that made the newspaper financially viable.<br />Meanwhile, self-proclaimed news editors frequently walked in the front door without notice to inquire about a job. If one didn’t drop in at the right time, they were easy to procure through a help wanted ad in the industry bible, Editor and Publisher. <br /> The turnover at the editor’s desk came to an end for three years during the summer of 1952. My father hired Hugh Gale, a veteran reporter, as news editor. Gale provided the time my father needed to begin his front-page column. And Gale provided me, at an impressionable age, with an intriguing example of what a newspaperman could be like. <br /> To function well as a country editor, my father reluctantly conceded, it was necessary to have not only a little flair but also to be self assured enough to go your own way, despite what some of the townsfolk might say or think of you. Hugh was maybe the most independent --- certainly the most addicted to hanging out in the local bars --- of those who came along. He also possessed the ability, perhaps too rarely used, to charm most anyone with a gruff compliment. He was a pudgy, gnome-like man with a bushy shock of light, grey-streaked hair hanging over a florid face. When he was going good, he sat hunched over his typewriter at his desk facing a long window looking into the back shop, using the nicotine-stained middle and index fingers of both hands to pound out stories.<br />Hugh kept his distance from the society editor at one end of his row of desks and from the two women behind him, the bookkeeper and circulation manager who took care of the front counter. But that didn’t stop the women from taking an interest in him. They learned that he was married but had left his wife in Washington, and they began to ask him repeatedly when his wife would arrive.<br />“My wife is a very, very large woman,” he said. “I doubt that anyone here is going to welcome her.”<br /> When his wife walked into the office for the first time some months later, she proved to be petite and beautiful. Or, as my father used to say, “I’m really not sure how a guy who looks like Hugh and drinks like a fish ever got such an attractive woman to live with him.”<br /> At the time he was hired, Hugh was warned “that sometimes the news was sparse and it took hard digging to get out an interesting paper,” my father wrote in a January 5, 1953 column. <br /> “After a few weeks, he asked what I meant by dullness… The news seemed plenty active enough for him. In his first month… a man burned to death in a trailer house fire, there was a Grade A public row over the failure of the school board to rehire two teachers, the Malheur River flooded and then the Owyhee really flooded --- all on top of an active situation in school district, city and county news and plus the regular flow of the news.<br /> “But in the in the dog days between the Fourth of July and the county fair he found out what I had been talking about. He almost walked a hole in the tile on the office floor trying to dream up stories good enough for the top front page positions.”<br /> As time wore on --- and this was obviously related to why his wife took some time to follow him --- Hugh’s lifestyle began to impinge on his productivity.<br /> “He is always late,” my father complained as summer turned to fall in 1954. Years later, in one of a series of pieces he wrote as part of an effort to syndicate a column about being a country editor, my father recounted the workplace sins of an anonymous “reporter we had once’’ --- who might have been easily identified by readers in Ontario:<br /> “The talented but unstrung reporter came to work so late so often that finally I had to tell him, if he was ever late again I’d expect him to just ask for his check without waiting to be fired.<br /> “After that, when he was out very late at night, he’d park his car in front of the office before he went home. About 9:30 the next morning, he’d come running in the back door with his hands full of notes, as if he’d been on an early morning news assignment at the city hall. He’d rush up to his desk and begin typing furiously, never looking up.<br /> “It was easy to tell that he hadn’t been awake 15 minutes. However, even though he was an hour late, it was earlier than he’d been coming to work. So I let him think he was fooling me.”<br /> Earlier, my father had played a different tune on his typewriter keys when Hugh actually moved on July 21,1955 to run his own newspaper in Kirkland, Washington. <br /> Opening his column with the admission that he hated to see his editor leave “more than I had thought I would,” my father noted that Gale had “worked at the news with the abandon of a volunteer fireman. He was forever getting up at daylight to photograph the blowing of a gas well strike, or flying off to Jordan Valley to a cattlemen’s convention, or taking a rangeland tour to study the problems of range management. He took jaunts of this kind almost every week, generally on his own time.<br /> “And he got around. He lived with the men in the street and the farmers in the fields. He made it his business to know what was going on in the community, what the average citizen was thinking. There is no substitute for this intense interest in society and not many news men have the quality in the degree possessed by Hugh Gale.”<br /> After Hugh’s departure, my father put his column on hold. But he revived it in early 1956, and the timing of its return was less than accidental. A subject presented itself that my father badly wanted to write about --- the rise of his old acquaintance Elmo Smith to the job of governor. On January 31, of that year Oregon Gov. Paul Patterson died of a heart attack. As president of the State Senate, Smith succeeded him.<br /> Less than a month later, my parents visited Eugene for a social event with the Smiths. Returning home, my father published a column describing how “the governor took off his coat and shoes, loosened his tie, flopped on my hotel room bed in Eugene. He looked beat from his first 17 days as governor of Oregon.”<br /> Some of Smith’s friends in the Ontario area were concerned that the man they knew as Elmo would change under the pressures of his new job. <br /> My father suggested they “needn’t worry.” At an evening cocktail party with old friends, Smith had “trotted around the lobby with his hands jammed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward, his coattails flying, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and one hand periodically raising in that ‘hi’ salute, a mannerism that is uniquely his. He looked almost exactly like he did peddling ads on Oregon street ten years ago.” <br /> During the following months, my father threw every ounce of editorial support he could justify, and some he couldn’t, into helping his friend win election to the governor’ post that November. But it wasn’t to be. Smith lost to the Democrat, Bob Holmes, a radio station manager from Astoria. <br /> My father never admitted as much to me, but knowing the restlessness that was brewing in his soul, I’m almost certain he hoped that a Smith victory would mean a job for him in the new administration in Salem, a chance to get away from the newspaper --- and from family demands --- a least for a while.<br /> The next May while I was off at college and my brother was in high school, he announced that he had turned the publisher’s job over to our mother so he could take a position helping to manage classified ad sales at The Statesman newspaper in Boise, Idaho, 65 miles to the east.<br /> “This change was only possible,” he wrote in his May 23, 1957, column, “because Mrs. Lynch was willing to assume the rather demanding job of being editor and publisher of The Argus-Observer…. <br /> “In this particular case the wife is better qualified to manage the newspaper than she realizes. She has been closest to its problems for a long time, and has worked at all of the tasks required --- reporting, advertising and accounting. This is a broader background than my own because I couldn’t do the accounting.”<br /> Time proved my father correct about my mother’s publishing skills. She whipped the staff into the kind of shape that increased profits year over year until 1963 when she decided to sell because neither one of her sons was interested in returning to Ontario to help her out.<br /> My parents divorced and my father went on to a long career as a newspaper business manager, editor and writer. But he never again found work that was quite as satisfying. Late in life, he tried to develop a book out of his columns for the Ontario newspaper, but he couldn’t make it work. “All that old newspaper stuff and Ontario stuff as I wrote it in the rough draft would never be read today,” he concluded in a letter to me, written May 10, 1995 at the age of eighty. He then willed me his papers in the hope that I could re-direct the material “to the interests of today’s audiences.” <br /> And in a draft introduction to the book he would have liked to write, he summed up his experience quite simply yet eloquently: <br /> “A half century ago we had outlived our time mechanically. We were still using the same method of inking a raised impression and pressing paper against it that Gutenberg had worked out 500 years earlier. We were still printing with stinking-hot melted lead, clanking linotypes, and noisy presses. Even so we still had a sort of built-in community influence that is now as out of date as a horse and buggy. It was 45 years ago when I got in on the final years of that ancient world. I was one of the last of the old-fashioned country editors. What a privileged way to start a lifetime of journalism.”Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-39318226143572979102009-11-29T21:59:00.000-08:002009-11-29T22:00:03.823-08:00Farm labor shortage predicted for summer of ‘53Prompt action must be taken by Malheur county farmers if they are to have an adequate labor supply for 1953, Roy Hirai, president of the county Labor Sponsors association said today.<br /><br /> Hirai reported the association drive for membership dues has made little progress, and that camp facilities cannot be operated without a minimum of 6,000 acres of row crop signed up and membership paid.<br /><br /> The sponsors association estimates 3,000 laborers will be needed in the area this season and that 350 of them must be housed and dispatched from the labor camps at Ontario, Adrian and Vale. Hirai pointed out that there is not adequate farm housing to maintain a labor force and that even operators with farm housing will suffer if the labor force is not large enough to stabilize wage rates and reduce competition among uses of labor.<br /><br /> Last year’s operations saw 245 workers during peak seasons living at the camps from April 20 to October. A large percentage of row crop operators used labor from the camp, and last year’s association membership totaled 139 operators and 6,950 aces of row crop. Labor supply and relationships with labor were the most favorable in many years in this area.<br /><br />--- From a February 1953 issue of the Ontario Argus-ObserverLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-64254463468822868472009-11-22T10:12:00.000-08:002009-11-22T10:13:12.232-08:00God in Education Urged by SpeakerThe teaching of Christianity in the public schools as the most effective way to combat communism was urged by P. J. Gallagher in a talk to the Ontario Kiwanis club Wednesday.<br /><br />The speaker paid tribute to the American tradition of freedom to worship as the individual chooses. He favored the teaching of the general tenets of Christianity which would be in keeping with the beliefs of all faiths.<br /><br />“We are fundamentally a Christian nation. We believe in the principles of Christianity,” Gallagher said. “There is no reason why the teaching of fundamentals of religion should be barred from our schools, no reason why they should not be taught throughout the public schools and colleges.” <br /><br />---From a November 1953 issue of The Ontario Argus-ObserverLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-41511697961352129732009-11-18T16:38:00.000-08:002009-11-18T16:45:19.056-08:00District Attorney Plans Abatement of HousesAbatement proceedings will be instituted against Farewell Bend’s houses of prostitution, District Attorney E. Otis Smith said this morning.<br /><br /> “I’m going to do all I can to abate these places,” he said. “I want to close them up. The girls may be out of town by now, and I don’t know what effect that will have on the evidence. But I think we’ve got good evidence.”<br /><br /> This official reaction followed raids early Friday evening on Farewell Bend’s historic bawdy house, the Farley hotel, and the Snake River Hotel on the East Side.<br /><br /> The raids were conducted by Sheriff John Elfering with the assistance of Farewell Bend city police who helped in booking the girls and the operators of the establishments.<br /><br /> Two special investigators from Portland were brought to Malheur County by Sheriff Elfering to obtain the actual evidence for the arrests. They were officers from the force of Terry Schrunk, sheriff of Multnomah County.<br /><br /> Posing as hunters, they entered the hotels and secured the evidence needed, then made the arrests for the Malheur sheriff’s office.<br /><br /> Helen Guyer, proprietor of the Farley hotel, was charged with “keeping a bawdy house,” as was Sue Morgan, operator of the East Side establishment.<br /><br /> The maid at the Farley was also arrested and charged with vagrancy. Five girls from the Snake River Hotel, allegedly prostitutes, were arrested on a charge of vagrancy. The girls were booked on “Jane Doe” warrants and did not themselves appear in court. <br /><br /> The two proprietors posted $150 bail each and the girls posted $100 bail each, for a total of $900 of bail money posted in the justice court of Judge Thos. Jones.<br /><br /> Mayor Frank Popper said this morning that he was “shocked” to learn that houses of prostitution have been operating in Farewell Bend. He went on to add that prostitution has been a recurrent problem.<br /><br /> His reaction sketched the nature of the task that faces District Attorney Smith. Farewell Bend was widely known as a center of prostitution before World War II. During the war the illicit industry was closed for a time. In the decade since the war, there has been intermittent operation except for one year when organized, commercial prostitution was stamped out by abatement proceedings.<br /><br /> Such proceedings are brought against the property instead of individuals, making it possible to padlock the property, taking it out of use for a year.<br /><br /> In former years, this has been the only effective method of restricting prostitution here.<br /><br /><em>---Excerpted from Farewell Bend the novel and based on an actual story from the Ontario Argus-Observer published during an early 1950s hunting season. Most names have been changed.</em>Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-71820308000218078412009-11-13T10:40:00.000-08:002009-11-13T10:41:29.632-08:00Planting catfish and pike in local streams proposedLocal sportsmen have induced a top official in the game commission to come to Ontario to discuss the possibility of developing warm water species of fish in the area, Don Moore said today.<br /><br />More said there would be a public meeting with John Rayner , chief of operations, division of fisheries, Oregon state game commission.<br /><br />On species that is under consideration is the catfish like those found in North and South Dakota, Moore said. These fish sometimes grow to weight one hundred pounds and are a good food fish.<br /><br />Another species under consideration is the wall-eyed pike which is a native of Wisconsin and Minnesota.<br /><br />Moore said the group was not trying to tell the game commission what to do but simply wanted to find out what could be done.<br /><br />--- From the Ontario Argus-Observer of Feb. 9, 1953Larry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2940330191259693022.post-89882189470985441202009-11-08T06:25:00.000-08:002009-11-08T06:27:50.253-08:00How dumb could a teenager be?PAYETTE – Two teenage boys stealing gasoline set a fire which destroyed a four-car garage, two automobiles and other contents to bring an estimated loss of some $15,000 to the Fred Robertson residence on Central Avenue Friday night, according to Chief of Police Cecil Fetter. <br /><br /> The boys both in junior high school admitted the offense and gave details of how it happened when they were arrested at their homes later in the evening, Fetter reported.<br /><br /> The cars were owned by Ike Whitely and Earle Sample, both of Payette. Other contents of the garage included factory machinery which was owned by Robertson valued at $10,000.<br /><br /> According to the boys’ story, the chief said, they had driven to the garage in their Model A hot rod and were stealing gasoline from the Whitely car. One of the boys had opened a cap at the bottom of the tank with a special wrench they had for the purpose. He was using a Purex bottle to catch the gasoline. When the bottle was nearly full the boy under the car dropped the cap and lit his cigarette lighter to look for it. The flame ignited gasoline spilled on the ground and the whole area immediately burst into flames. The boys then tried to start their hot rod for a getaway but when it wouldn’t start ran away from the scene.<br /><br /> The boy who had been stealing the gasoline received a badly burned forearm, the chief said.<br /><br /> Both were in bed at their homes when the when the officers called. They admitted the offense after only a few questions and told the details. <br /><br /> Both are being held for action by the Probate Court, which handles juvenile offenses in Idaho, Fetter said.<br />…… From the January 5, 1953 issue of The Argus-ObserverLarry L. Lynchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15145899436646174638noreply@blogger.com0