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HISTORY OF OREGON NEWSPAPERS
183

Frank Morrison. The paper, like all of Noltner's, was Democratic. They suspended the daily and ran the weekly with indifferent success for several years, finally selling it back to Noltner. He continued the paper as a Thursday weekly, claiming, in 1900, a circulation of 1900. The old warrior was getting near the end of the journalistic trail. He died in Portland in 1907.



THE LINOTYPE, HARD TIMES, AND THE SUN


Portland union printers, forced out of jobs by the hard times and the substitution of machine work for hand composition on the Oregonian, launched the Sun, a morning daily, in the fall of 1894 to help take care of the idle men. The Sun was an interesting paper—eight pages of six 13-em columns, with the service of the Eastern Associated Press, as one of the first-page ears announced while the other was proclaiming that the Sun's circulation books were open and that the paper already had 3,000 local subscribers.

The Oregonian was gracious in its welcome to the newcomer, saying of its first issue:

The Daily Sun came out yesterday with a bright appearance and a good deal of news. Its promoters are a body of printers working on the cooperative plan. The Oregonian notes its advent as a commendable enterprise and hopes it will do well. There is ample room in Oregon for new undertakings, in almost any line of effort. The future is always in the hands of those who work for it.

Capt. John A. O'Brien, officer of the typographical union, was one of the leaders in the Sun enterprise, which was semi-officially a union project. No names appeared at the masthead, and it was the aim and policy to emphasize the equality of all the workers rather than the leadership. In the September 2 meeting of Multnomah union No. 58, Captain O'Brien managed to get through the union an appropriation of $100 for stock in the Sun Publishing Co.

The salutatory editorial emphasized the cooperative character of the paper but gave no names of officers or staff and said nothing about its relation to the typographical union. It was a neat and rather well-edited paper, with a capable, even clever, staff. The type, of course was all hand-set.

The whole first page was occupied with telegraph news, in cluding one 80-word dispatch from New London, Conn., on the test of the new battleship Maine, to be held the next day. This was the vessel that within four years was to be "remembered" as a cause of