The Press: Oregonian Forges Ahead

An A.B.C. (Audit Bureau of Circulations) report made news last fortnight in the Pacific Northwest. The 91-year-old Portland Oregonian (a.m.) passed in daily circulation its rival the Journal (p.m.)—151,591 to 147,159.

During the early ’30s the hard-fighting Journal held a nip-&-tuck lead over the Oregonian. In 1937, when chunky, agile-minded Edwin Palmer (“Ep”) Hoyt took over, the Oregonian began a circulation march that in two years carried it to an 18,000 lead over the Journal. Then in 1939 the Journal bought the money-making News-Telegram for $525,000 and apparently clinched its lead with a solid 16,000 advantage.

How 41-year-old Publisher Hoyt managed in the last two years to overcome this lead is a story of smart publishing. He boosted his out-of-town circulation by bettering the Oregonian’s coverage in small

Northwest communities, putting out an early night edition to compete with the Journal’s afternoon final, etc.

But the Oregonian also gets circulation by a means rarely effective for other newspapers: its editorial page. Surveys by the Continuing Study of Newspaper Reading rank the Oregonian’s lead editorial with its best-read features. Its editorial page was the only section of the Oregonian to escape the streamlining applied by Paper Doctor Guy T. Viskniskki in 1934.

One of the best written editorial pages on the Pacific Coast, it is authored by three closely geared individualists, with a neat division of talents. They write in a tradition founded by such rugged journalists as the Oregonian’s famed Harvey W. Scott, an erudite, walrus-faced editor who prowled the office in stocking feet for 40 years, and by Albert Hawkins, ex-cabin boy and coal-heaver, who liked best to write about education, science and Pacific Northwest history.

Publisher Hoyt entirely separated the news departments and editorial page, setting the Oregonian’s editorialists entirely apart. The Oregonian now has no editor-in-chief, and Managing Editor Robert Not-son never crosses the editorialists’ path. Its three editorialists are:

Philip Hammon Parrish, “editor of the editorial page,” who is the youngest of the three (45). Sawed-off, gaunt-faced, paunchy, bushy-haired Editor Parrish writes about international and U.S. politics, relaxes at home by talking the same subjects with his shoes off. Author of two books on Northwest history, he is the only one of the three who went to college (but he has no diploma of any sort; he never graduated from a high school). As editor of a page printed in small type, he believes “the editors of the country have been driven into big type and innocuous opinion through offering their readers domineering opinion and insult rather than close reasoning and comradely respect.”

Ronald Glenn Callvert, 68, oldest of the three, has been on the Oregonian since 1909, was assistant and managing editor until he became editorial writer in 1931. Bushy-browed, kindly, he hunts & pecks his tax and fiscal editorials at furious speed on a portable typewriter while chewing an unlit cigar. (All editorialists, like Oregonian reporters, buy their own typewriters.) The story is that Editor Callvert in 1938 was about to be fired because he was too expensive. The idea was dropped when he won the Pulitzer Prize for best editorial of the year.

Ben Hur Lampman, 55, is the Oregonian’s beer-barrel poet and “genius,” whom Editor Parrish calls “the country’s greatest editorial writer on nature and whimsey.” His editorials are much reprinted, from coast to coast. He wears flowing black ties (one made from one of his wife’s old black silk stockings) and is a tireless fisherman. A favorite fishing companion is his Japanese dentist, brother of a Tokyo mayor, a jujitsu artist and fabulous drinker, who while fishing with Ben Hur emptied a pint of whiskey at one gulp, tossed the bottle into the air and shattered it with his target pistol. Readers quickly recognize Editor Lampman’s nature whimseys, but they are sometimes fooled by his serious pieces. Book Critic Harry Hansen called a Lampman editorial on the war the best short story of the year. He handled the Oregonian’s whole campaign against the Roosevelt court-packing plan. Herbert Hoover tried to hire him to write speeches in the 1932 campaign, but Magnificent Sentimentalist Lampman preferred to work at a job where he could write about bees, apples, trees, dogs, an average fellow called “Joe Pungle.”

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