paper, then running an evening edition only, was merged with the Evening Guard. Edwards' partner in the firm that started the daily was a well-known 1882 graduate of the University of Oregon, who later went to California and became an editorial writer on Los Angeles papers.
In July, 1899, Will G. and W. Frank Gilstrap, who had given Springfield its first newspaper, the Messenger, a few years before, purchased the Register. The Gilstraps built up the mechanical equipment, put in a Cottrell press immediately on taking charge, installed a linotype in 1903, and a Cox Duplex press in 1908, the first press in Eugene to print paper from a roll. In 1905 the Register installed the Associated Press service, and the paper became the largest in Oregon outside of Portland.
In 1918, W. G. Gilstrap having retired several years before, W. F. Gilstrap sold his stock and retired as president and manager of the company. The paper was now directed by Frank Jenkins, editor, and Ernest Gilstrap, manager, who together had purchased the greater part of the stock in the paper. For many years Otto Gilstrap was telegraph editor and Horace Burnett city editor of the paper.
The Morning Register format was very conservative, resembling the Oregonian of those days in general makeup. It was never necessary for the news editor to "dummy" the front page, for the makeup scheme was always the same—alternating large and small single-column heads while the paper was printed on a seven-column page, and the same except for two small heads side by side in the fourth and fifth columns after the eight-column 12-em form was adopted. The paper featured its telegraph service, and a local news story had to be "tops" to fight its way on the front page. Register readers had been brought up on that sort of thing, and apparently they liked it. In the last few years the page was brightened up with Frank Jenkins' editorial comment column played under a box head and a by line in the first column of the page.
In 1930 Richard C. (Dick) Horn, who had been vice-president of the University of Oregon student body and a student of advertising in the School of Journalism, worked up a shopping news in Eugene. This and a weekly paper, the Record, edited by Fred Guyon and published by Elmer Maxey's Willamette Press at Springfield, combined to form the Morning News, a daily paper started to fit into the morning field abandoned by the Register, which had been consolidated with the Evening Guard late in 1930. In November, 1931, the paper was started with Joseph Koke, a leading Eugene commercial printer, as financial backer, John W. Anderson managing editor, Richard C. Horn manager. Fred Guyon was city editor, Harry Dutton sports editor, Helen Reynolds Wadleigh society and local.
