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Fighting for the Forty-Ninth Star
C. W. Snedden and the Crusade for Alaska Statehood
By Terrence Cole
University of Alaska Foundation
Copyright © 2010 University of Alaska Foundation
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-883309-06-0
Chapter One
Ain't God Good to Fairbanks
In 1949 Austin E. "Cap" Lathrop was the richest resident in all of Alaska, but the eighty-three-year-old self-made tycoon was not a happy man. Among the many enterprises that Lathrop controlled the least profitable was probably the small daily newspaper in Alaska's second largest city, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. At a recent board meeting Lathrop had exploded when he looked at the News-Miner's balance sheet, filling the air with expletives that could not appear in his family newspaper. Lathrop made it profanely clear to his attorney, "Judge" Ed Medley, that he wanted to know why the News-Miner was losing so much money and to rectify the situation as soon as possible. The man Medley hired for the job was a "newspaper doctor" from Washington State, thirty-six-year-old Charles Willis "Bill" Snedden.
Bill Snedden was born in Spokane in 1913 but raised by his grandparents in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. He found his true calling while he was still a schoolboy, working part-time as a janitor in the print shop of the Vancouver Columbian. As he watched a typesetter working the Linotype machine, one of the most complicated contraptions ever invented, he had a realization that would set the course of his life.
"I saw a guy setting type," he said, "making more money than I was." Snedden learned that a position on the Linotype was coming open because one of the typesetters was going to quit. Besides mechanical aptitude and skilled hands, another essential requirement for a Linotype man was knowing how to spell, and particularly knowing how to spell like a printer: upside down and backward. At thirteen he hired on as an apprentice printer at the Portland Telegram. To master the trade he lived with a small dictionary in his pocket. "Morning, noon, and night, every time I had a spare minute, I went through that darn dictionary. You know that's one way to learn English, and it stuck with me." He had some college, at Washington State in Pullman and Oregon State in Corvallis, but his stubborn independence meant that formal education would never be his strong suit. "I think the teachers couldn't stand me," he once joked in an interview, "so they shipped me out."
Part of the problem was that he had to work his way through college in the depths of the Depression, and another was that he couldn't make up his mind about what he wanted to study. "I thought I was going to be an electrical engineer to start with," he said, "then I discovered what that was all about and didn't like it, so I switched to mechanical [engineering]. And I never got a degree in anything."
Snedden had a gift for tinkering with machines. By the time he was eighteen he was a journeyman Linotype operator, machinist, and electrician. He worked for some time selling, installing, and servicing Linotype machines for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, and earned money on the side as a musician playing trumpet, trombone, and French horn in silent movie houses and dance halls. While playing at a Vancouver dance hall in 1933 he met his future wife, Helen; they were married the next year. While building their house he developed another profession: putting up spec houses as a contractor, eventually constructing and selling more than a dozen until Pearl Harbor.
The day after the Japanese attack Snedden tried to enlist in the navy, but since he had been born with a 50 percent hearing deficiency he was rejected out of hand. As Snedden put it, "I wanted to join the navy and those meatheads discovered I couldn't hear very well. So I got smarter and went down and joined the army and I bluffed my way through the first days." His military career did not last long. When he was sent to officer training in Fort Benning, Georgia, "the first guy I meet as I step off the train" was an old, previously retired soldier, "Major Painter." Snedden had sold him a house in Vancouver.
"He wondered what the hell I was doing there. I told him I'd come to win the war. 'Well,' he says 'yeah, but you can't hear.' And that was the end of that."
On his way home Snedden sat next to a man on the train who would become a superintendent at the Henry Kaiser Shipyard, then under construction in Vancouver, and found his war service. Snedden went to work at the Kaiser yard, rising to be an assistant superintendent responsible for about eight thousand machinists. The yard worked around the clock turning out ships during the war, including LSTs, Liberty ships, and pocket carriers almost six hundred feet long. "We shot one down the river every Tuesday morning for fifty-seven-some consecutive weeks."
The job was dangerous and stressful. Snedden and the other men slept on cots at the office and often did not go home for weeks at a time. "Three of us in the shipyard had about the same job and the other two guys dropped dead on the job-both of them," he later recalled. Snedden had his own health problems. As he would say, "My pump had gone bad. I was having heart trouble." It started one day when his crew discovered that a ship near completion had a "rough bearing" in a main turbo generator. "I crawled inside the casing and asked the crew to slowly turn the armature by hand while I felt the bearing journal for rough spots. Then someone by mistake closed the main switch." He was jolted by a charge of thousands of volts that melted all but the brim of his hard hat, and woke up later in a hospital. The shock had ruptured a valve in his heart, requiring open-heart surgery and almost a year of convalescence.
Following the war he branched out into other enterprises. He briefly ran a hardware stove in Vancouver before hitting on the idea of consulting for ailing newspapers. He knew the ins and outs of the Linotype business and he'd been a careful student of what would and would not work in pressrooms. Selling a paper the right Linotype machine meant he'd had to fully understand the operation. "I was exposed to the operating methods, operating problems, and problem-cures of many newspaper plants," he said. Thus he became a self-accredited "newspaper doctor."
"Anyone who was doing what I was in the Linotype field would have had to be a sleepwalker not to notice the efficiency differences among the various newspapers. So to become a 'newspaper doctor' was really very simple: merely remember the equipment, methods, personnel policies, etc. of the efficient operations you were exposed to, steal the good ideas, and use them on the sloppy operations."
He was never paid a fixed salary. Instead, he negotiated a percentage of the increase in profits over the previous three-year average. "The big wonder to me about this modus operandi," he said, "was that I never encountered-or even heard of-anyone else doing the same thing-or reasonably close to the same thing."
Snedden came to Medley's attention as the possible answer to the News-Miner's problems due to his work with William H. Cowles Jr., the publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Medley called Snedden to set up a meeting in Seattle, but at first Snedden declined Medley's offer, because at the time the News-Miner had a circulation of only about three thousand. "I wasn't interested because it was too small. Even if you got an increase in all of the profits of an operation that size you wouldn't have much." In the end, however, there was one factor that outweighed all the others and convinced him to take the job, a reason that has brought many men to the Last Frontier: going to Fairbanks would be the perfect excuse to take the fishing trip of a lifetime.
The Lathrop Company agreed to pay his expenses, and Snedden flew Pan American to Fairbanks in December 1949 to make a preliminary investigation. After a short visit he agreed to return in the spring of 1950. He drove up the Alaska Highway in a panel truck rigged up as a traveling machine shop, equipped with a lathe, drill, welding tools, spare parts, and all the machinery needed for a newspaper repair man, as well as all his fishing gear. His eye was on the calendar, particularly the start of the fishing season. "I wanted to get the job done at the paper by the time the weather broke," he said, so he could spend several months relaxing with his son, Duane "Skip" Snedden, going after grayling and sheefish on the rivers of Interior Alaska, before driving back to Vancouver in the fall. It didn't work out that way. The three-month job he didn't want to take and the summerlong Alaska fishing trip that was his true motivation would turn out to be the start of a forty-year commitment to the farthest north daily newspaper in the United States.
Snedden's first impression of Fairbanks in the spring of 1950, however, was hardly enthusiastic. He got a room at the Nordale Hotel on Second Avenue, directly across the street from the offices of the News-Miner. A snap spring blizzard blanketed the city and at first he couldn't remember where he had parked his panel truck, now buried in the snow. It was a harbinger of the hard work to come. Fixing what was wrong at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner was going to be a challenge. Its problems were deeply rooted in the management of the paper and the community it served.
* * *
In 1950 the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner was the oldest operating business in Fairbanks and the oldest daily newspaper in Alaska. Founded in 1903, it boasted the second-longest streak of continuous publication in the territory and was one of only three gold rush newspapers that still survived, along with the triweekly Nome Nugget and the weekly Wrangell Sentinel. Given the uncertain history of a typical gold rush town, and the even less likely chances of survival for a gold rush newspaper, the sheer endurance of the News-Miner was remarkable, particularly because the operation had nearly always been a money-losing proposition. The News-Miner owed its existence in no small part to the determination of two characters who dominated the history of the newspaper's first half-century: W. F. Thompson and "Cap" Lathrop. Two more dissimilar personalities could hardly be imagined, but as publishers they were both passionate boosters of anything that had to do with Fairbanks, even if neither ever succeeded in making the News-Miner turn a profit.
With his wicked pen, peculiar sense of humor, outrageous opinions, and unquenchable thirst for gambling, alcohol, and adventure, William Fentress "W. F." Thompson could have been created by Mark Twain. Thompson was never shy about expressing his editorial opinions in language that many of his critics-the crowd of "long-haired men and shorthaired women"-thought unduly intemperate. In person he was usually quiet and soft-spoken, unless, it was said, he had been too much in the company of "the great god Bacchus." After the onset of prohibition he once ran a banner headline across the entire front page of the News-Miner that read "Whiskey Is a Sure Preventative of the Influenza." A headline that he used repeatedly during those years was "The Evils of Prohibition." He claimed he owed his longevity to the fact that he "drank, smoke and chewed to excess" all his life.
Even when sober, Thompson limped along the streets, as he had been crippled in a train accident as a young man. The tapping of his cane on the wooden sidewalk announced his arrival. Impeccably dressed and distinguished-looking, especially when his thick head of hair and neatly trimmed beard turned gray, he favored pinstriped shirts, high stiff collars, and a gray herringbone vest and suit coat; at work he doffed the coat and wore long black sleeve protectors to keep ink off his shirt. "He was slightly deaf," a coworker said, "and used this to ignore that which he considered not worth listening to."
Popularly known behind his back as "Wrong Font" Thompson-"wf " was the common proofreaders' shorthand to indicate a mistaken typeface-W. F. usually called himself "The Old Man" or "Wandering Foot" for his proclivity to roam. Born in Michigan in 1863-the same year as Henry Ford-he joined the legion of western printers and newspapermen who traveled from camp to camp with portable presses and trays of type to spread the latest news, rumor, slander, or gossip. Not a great deal is known about Thompson's early life or education, but the discipline of school was not his style. He once claimed that as a young man he had been forcibly divorced from the Michigan Military Academy "for throwing a bottle at the Commandant's head (it was an empty bottle, and he had caught us taking the last drink from it)." Despite his lack of formal education, Thompson picked up a sizable vocabulary and a propensity to use it. "Writing with him was spontaneous," a friend said, "and coupled with a wanderlust, carried him through years of reckless adventure." "The only game we really know anything about," Thompson wrote of himself, "is the newspaper game, which consists in keeping the nearby public informed of that which they may be interested in (or pretend that they are), and if you are sincere in your work it is SOME job." He said in 1920 that he had been printing and publishing for forty years in, among other places, Michigan, California, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and, finally, Alaska. In Washington alone he worked on papers in Davenport, Spokane, Tacoma, Des Moines, Steilacoom, Roslyn, Westport, and Sprague, sometimes running papers in two places at once. It was only when he came to Fairbanks in 1906 that he found his true home. The boldface motto he adopted for the News-Miner may not have been grammatical, but whether he posed it as a question or an exclamation, it captured his feeling for the community: "Ain't God Good to Fairbanks!"
* * *
The origins of the News-Miner actually go back three years before Thompson arrived in Fairbanks. Another itinerant printer, George Hill, published the first issue of the Fairbanks News on September 19, 1903. Veteran Fairbanks printer Paul Solka Jr., who researched a detailed history of the News-Miner, thought that vol. 1, no. 1, was printed on a hand-powered, portable printing press. Solka believed it was probably printed on either a Washington Hand Press, a relatively compact press, as light as seven hundred pounds, invented in 1827 and a symbol of "country journalism" on which many small papers, including Vancouver's Columbian, first appeared, or an even lighter and more portable Army Press, so called because it "was designed in size and weight for transportation on a pack horse, and so constructed that it would be ready to print a few minutes after it was taken off the horse." By 1904 the News had the distinction of being set on the first Linotype machine brought to Alaska, Mergenthaler Linotype No. 5801. (Like locomotive engines, all Linotypes were individually numbered, and they were often named by printers who became attached to them.) The following year Alaska's second Linotype was installed in the offices of the Nome Gold Digger.
When No. 5801 debuted in Fairbanks in 1904-the same year that the U.S. government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., first adopted a typesetting machine-the Linotype was a remarkably modern piece of machinery for such an isolated mining camp. Alaska was the last of the current fifty states to get a Linotype machine, but the timing was still astonishing considering the remoteness of Fairbanks; the first Linotype in Washington State had appeared in Seattle just eleven years earlier, in 1893, and Fairbanks' Linotype was set up a mere six years after the first in Idaho (the Idaho Statesman in Boise, 1898), four years after the first in South Dakota (the Deadwood Pioneer Times, 1900), and three years after the first in Nevada (the Reno Gazette, 1901).
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Excerpted from Fighting for the Forty-Ninth Star by Terrence Cole Copyright © 2010 by University of Alaska Foundation. Excerpted by permission.
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