St. Paul, Oregon, Hodges moved to California, where he died in 1932.
The Appeal has had intermittent competition in its fine field. First there was the old Tribune, a Republican weekly started in 1889 by Davis & Wiles while Fred Warnock was getting out the Appeal. It ran for four years.
Then Churchill & Cook got into the arena with their Marion County Record (1894-1897).
Wiles & Hodges launched the Silvertonian, a Friday weekly, in 1902, and kept it going for four years.
Another Tribune was back in the field in 1915. Founded in Mount Angel in 1913, it was moved to Silverton by H. E. Browne, who sold it in 1920 to Edward B. Kottek, a former Minnesota printer and publisher. Kottek carried on the paper, with particular emphasis on the commercial printing, until August, 1931, when he sold it to John T. Hoblitt. Mr. Hoblitt consolidated the Tribune with his paper under the title Appeal-Tribune, and Mr. Kottek gave the job printing business his exclusive attention until his retirement five years later.
Stayton.—The Stayton Times, established in 1890, was the first newspaper in the town. It was started by Walter Lyon, who at one time was secretary to Governor Geer. Lyon sold the paper to Horace Mann, after three years. Mann ran the paper, a five-column, four-page Friday weekly, for three more years. Then E. F. Bennett, now of the Auterson-Bennett Printing Co., Portland, came into the field with an offer to buy the Times. The deal seemed sure to go through but finally Mann refused to sell. It was then (February, 1896) that the Mail, which has come down to the present, was started by Bennett. Mann then moved the Times plant out of town.
The Mail's first editor-publisher was assisted in the publication of the four-page five-column paper by his son, H. E. Bennett. Soon he increased the size to six columns, eight pages, half of it ready-print. He sold to H. E. Browne, later founder of the Silverton Tribune, in 1900, who sold the paper to E. D. Alexander in 1901. Alexander later started a new paper, the Standard (in 1914) and consolidated it with the Mail in 1915. He leased the paper to A. F. Fletcher in 1930, took it over again a year later. He is now (1937) retired, and the paper is being published by Lawrence E. Spraker, formerly of Arlington and Condon, succeeding Ralph C. Curtis, formerly city editor of the Statesman at Salem, who recently returned to the Statesman as news editor. Other editors of the paper have been E. M. Olmsted, later with the Grangeville (Idaho) Free Press, and Charles S. Clark, later of the Turner Tribune.
Woodburn.—L. H. McMahan, now and for many years circuit judge in Marion county, was the founder of the Woodburn Independent, the first newspaper published in the town.
