of county government—added interest and excitement to Klamath Falls journalism during Smith's direction of the Herald.
Meanwhile, Smith continued the Republican for a time as a weekly, for the benefit of his rural readers. They found the service too slow, and for a time the Republican was run as a semi-weekly. Finally, the name of the semi-weekly Republican was changed to the semi-weekly Herald.
The fight with the Northwestern has been noted. With this competition out of the way the Herald had the field to itself until the Klamath News was started in 1923. Mr. Smith had an outstandingly capable staff on the Herald. Prominent among its members were Phil Sinnott, Fred Fleet, both of whom have been mentioned in connection with the Northwestern, and Fred Dunbar, who years afterward was murdered on Klamath Lake while on a vacation trip. Edison Marshall, before he got going as a fictionist, was a reporter on the Herald—"rotten," said Mr. Smith; "too much imagination." During the courthouse fight Mr. Smith brought in a chalk-plate cartoonist from Denver and had him drawing daily cartoons of the candidates "with courthouses on their backs and the like." This was something new, journalistically, and it was warmly received.
The Herald, under Mr. Murray, had two high points, its battle with Don Belding and the Record and the solution of a murder mystery by two smart staff men, William H. (Bill) Perkins, news editor, formerly police reporter on the Oregonian, and Tom Malarkey, in January, 1925. Let's tell the murder story first.
Klamath Falls was suffering something like a "crime wave" at the time of the murder mystery. Oscar Erickson, 35, was shot down in a hold-up of a card game by several masked men in the basement of the Scandinavian h. After a week, when the officials' clues had run cold, Perkins and Malarkey took a hand, and, aided by a former constable familiar with the Klamath underworld, they ran down a suspect in a lonely farmhouse west of Jacksonville, arriving there in the middle of the night, after a wild drive across the mountains through a rainstorm. Governor Walter M. Pierce had given the men authority to press their search outside of Klamath county. It took nerve to go in and get that man. They did it, and, to make a long story short, he confessed a part in the crime. He and three others whom he implicated, were arrested. One of these was acquitted the other two received life sentences, and the informant, taken by Perkins and Malarkey, 15 years.
While the war between the Herald and the Northwestern was the biggest and most interesting of Klamath's newspaper struggles, the bitterest was the strife between E. J. Murray of the Herald and Don Belding of the Record for possession of the newspaper field beginning in 1921 and lasting for several years—a struggle involving personal conflict and gunplay. Here's the story:
