ter member of the typographical union in Portland, worked for a time as a printer in Seattle, had been a reporter on the Call and the Chronicle in San Francisco, and already had started three newspapers — the Star of Victoria, B. C., the East Portland Star, and the Astoria Town Talk.
Illness of his little daughter, Claire Agnes (now Mrs. Claire Dunbar Roberts, dramatic reader, of Spokane) had caused Dunbar to leave Portland for the coast, and he took a position on the Astoria Pioneer, edited by D. C. Ireland.
Difference of opinion with the editor caused two of the Pioneer's printers to quit—Dunbar and C. J. Curtis. The result was two more weekly papers for Astoria, the Herald, with Curtis as editor, and the Town Talk, with Dunbar editor—in 1890.
After two years as editor of the Town Talk, Mr. Dunbar started the Budget, evening except Sunday, and weekly, taking in with him as partner a young man who eight years before had begun a career of nearly forty successful years in Astoria journalism —John E. Gratke, who was editor of the Budget from 1897 to 1920.
The "Oregon style" of personal journalism, lively with invective, prevailed in Astoria; but did not affect the editor's personal relations. The editors, as Mr. Dunbar's daughter expressed it later, "were very friendly enemies, ripping and roaring at each other through the papers, but understanding friends on the outside."
When Dunbar started Town Talk, he lost no time in getting the community to buzzing. A leading citizen was "Slippery Slim" in the columns of the paper, and, as Mrs. Roberts recalls, the newsboys on the street used to call "Town Talk! All about Slippery Sam!" and even the parrot out in front of Jeffries' saloon joined in the chorus. Then one fatal day the paper went a step too far and slipped "Slippery Sam" in with his surname. The startling allegations made brought on a criminal libel case, and the editor was sentenced by Judge Frank Taylor to a year in the county jail. Indignation in Astoria was widespread, for Dunbar's friends were many. "The deputy sheriff," Mrs. Roberts recalls, "gave up his room to my father. Citizens declared they would furnish the deputy's room with the finest furniture that could be had if my father were not pardoned within the month. Thirty-five citizens went to the jail during visiting hours the first Sunday and asked admittance. They perched every where.
"A petition was gotten up and signed by hundreds of citizens. My mother and I took it to Governor Pennoyer in Portland. [The governor issued the pardon.]
"While in jail my father continued to write his scathing stories. He had so many enemies who were willing to do anything that my mother tied the petition to my body and never let me out of her sight as we went on the old steamer Telephone, and even as we went to
