Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/522

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
HISTORY OF OREGON NEWSPAPERS
513

nition in the newspapers. The rise of the separate sports editor (his torically in Oregon this species had started in the 80's with Henry E. Reed giving it part of his attention on the News and the Oregonian, but actually the big advance did not come until the enlarged papers which followed the machine and paper inventions) is in part due to the increased size and greater prosperity of the newspapers, which were permitting extensive departmentalizing—a development not outside the ambition of the older reporters and editors but beyond the newspapers' physical and financial possibilities. Men like Harry B. Smith of the Portland Telegram, now of the San Francisco Chronicle; Will G. MacRae of the Oregonian, and John A. Horan of the new Journal were given a fairly free hand and highly in creased space to devote to all the developing sport activities. Use of the halftone, too, invented by Frederic Ives of Philadelphia in the late 70's, and by now so far developed and cheapened as to begin displacing the less exact and more cumbersome and expensive illustrations by staff artists, was soon to simplify the picture problem and give the sport page added life and attractiveness.

The Sunday paper, also developed largely after the larger news paper became economically possible, began giving a full page to sports in the late 90's; and after the turn of the century this single page expanded to two, three, four, and on up, frequently to a full section of eight or more pages in the larger papers, while even the small-town dailies began to have their full page of sports once a week.

On the very day (September 12, 1902) that C. S. Jackson's name appeared for the first time at the head of the Oregon Journal's editorial page, the paper contained the following reference to the beginning of an abuse which later was to inflict more death and injury on the American people than they suffered in the World war:

Those good people who object so strongly against prize fighting might turn a little of their attention to the automobile speeder. He is a much more dangerous personage.

The Sunday Oregonian was giving a page of sports (page 26 in section three, in the issue of April 7, 1901 ) under the stock heading "In the Sporting World." Two single-column line cuts depicted, respectively, a sweet-faced girl in baggy bloomers poised to shoot a basketball at the hoop, and a conventional male athlete swinging upward from a trapeze. A total of 24 inches was given to telegraphed sport news, in the news section, covering fencing, yachting, horseracing, trapshooting, and pool. A seven-inch local story told of an accident at a Portland paper chase.

Sports covered on the special page were the Portland bench show for Oregon dogs; track; bowling; baseball, amateur and professional; fishing; and handball. The bench show received a column of space, and the story was told in straight-news style—not a sprightly