Democrat from Mr. Gregg, taking the editorial chair while Mr Dodge acted as manager. Mr. Dodge married Miss Riddle, they changed the name to the Optimist and together ran the paper until 1912, when J. E. Roberts organized a stock company and purchased it.
Mr. Roberts changed the name back to the Democrat and put it back in the Democratic ranks. About a year later, after some financial trouble, the Democrat went into the hands of a receiver, J. R. Gregg being appointed by the court. He repurchased the plant at sheriff's sale, cleared the indebtedness, and sold it again to C. C. Dodge and A. F. Riddle, who conducted the paper with Mr. Riddle, a former Kansas newspaper man, as editor. Mr. Riddle later went to the staff of the Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise. Mr. Dodge, still in Ontario, has retired from newspaper work.
Dodge & Riddle sold the Democrat to George K. Aiken in 1918. Mr. Aiken, then owning the Argus, discontinued the Democrat.
William Plughoff entered the picture again when he purchased the Ontario Argus from Don Carlos Boyd in 1908. He sold in 1910 to M. E. Bain, who after selling to W. C. Marsh in 1915 and repurchasing, sold the paper in 1916 to George K. Aiken, who proceeded to control the field by the purchase of the Democrat.
A graduate of Macalester College, in St. Paul, in 1908, Mr. Aiken had his early newspaper experience in St. Paul before coming west to Puget Sound. He did railroads and other beats on the Tacoma Ledger, and from there, after his marriage to Miss Lulu Piper, a Macalester college-mate, he first became a publisher at Roslyn, Wash., moving from there to Ontario. Mr. Aiken has been drafted for an exceptional amount of public service by the people of his community. As this is written he is both mayor of Ontario and member of the state game commission.
In the summer of 1937 Editor Aiken was cited for contempt after criticising the conduct of the circuit judge in his county in paroling a convicted thief, citing a parallel case in Idaho in which the accused had received a sentence of 25 years and contending that such differences represent neither justice to the criminal nor protection to society. The Argus editorial questioning the justice of the judge's action appeared while the court was awaiting a complete report from Washington, D. C., on the prisoner's criminal record. On this showing the judge sentenced the prisoner to two years in the penitentiary and withdrew his own charges against the editor. Here was another Oregon example of an editor's risking personal safety for the benefit of society. The Oregonian, commenting on the case a few days late attacked the assumed right of judges to try their own contempt cases. "A contempt case as much as any other," said the editorial, "should be tried before a disinterested tribunal."
A second paper, the Eastern Oregon Observer, was started in
