The Polk County Observer was started in Monmouth in 1888 by Charles C. Doughty and George Snyder and was moved to Dallas. A few months later (January 29 of the next year) Snyder withdrew as a partner, and in 1892 Carey Hayter purchased an interest. In 1899 Mr. Hayter bought Mr. Doughty's interest and continued as publisher until 1910, when he leased the paper to Jack Allgood and Dean Collins. Collins was a young graduate of Dallas Academy and the University of Oregon who later was to advance into the front rank in Portland journalism.
In 1911 the Observer was sold to Eugene Foster and William Totten. After Foster's death Totten sold to Volk and Parsell in 1914. Parsell sold to Volk, and Volk to Lew Cates in 1914. H. W. Brune bought the paper in 1916 and turned it back to Cates the next year to enlist in the army. E. E. Southard then purchased the paper, and in a few months Cates had it back again. The last owner prior to Earle Richardson was E. A. Koen, later of Oregon City, who conducted the Observer from 1919 until March 1, 1924. The Observer plant was destroyed by fire in April 1921, but Koen did not miss an issue and soon had an enlarged plant. Richardson came to Dallas from Elgin, where he had conducted the Elgin Recorder, his first independent publishing venture, for a short time. He had previously been associated with W. Arthur Steele in the publication of the Clatskanie Chief. To the Chief he had gone after two years of work as an employee, part of it on the Cottage Grove Sentinel under Elbert Bede and the rest on the Oregonian as a reporter under City Editor Horace E. Thomas. He had been graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1920.
The Itemizer-Observer, notwithstanding a general policy of sparing use of editorial, is not backward when anything really needs to be said. What Mr. Richardson can do on occasion was demonstrated in his two-year fight against a dishonest public official, conducted in the face of what the Oregonian in an editorial of appreciation published December 12, 1933, called "severe and threatening" disapproval. Reviewing the case, the Itemizer-Observer expressed the editor's attitude as follows:
We decided that if necessary we would walk out of Dallas still able to look our fellowmen in the eye, and hold our own head high, even though it cost us everything we had in the world.
Threats of retaliation should the editor dare to discuss in print "the repeated neglect of the court to pass sentence" were published in the paper and ignored. The outcome was victory for the paper and the public interest; but the issue was long doubtful. "The people of Polk county and of Dallas," the Oregonian concluded, "should be proud of the Itemizer-Observer and its editor."
