Remember When?

80 YEARS AGO • MAY 24, 1944

HIT OR MISS

Running a newspaper is getting to be a tougher job every year. Part of the reason is bookkeeping. Years ago when we first started in we didn’t have to keep books. Whatever we took in we threw in the jack-pot, and then kept drawing out of the pot until it was empty. Of course most of the time the pot was empty, but we didn’t have to make any accounting. Now it is different - every dime you take in you have to keep a record of for income tax deduction purposes. No ifs, ands or buts! At that our records are so balled up that any time they want to send us to Alcatraz they can. Oh how we hate bookkeeping. All our advertising accounts have to be billed, tear sheets, duplicates, affidavits, etc. We got to prove it. They won’t take our word for it

Got an inquiry from a burglary alarm company this week on our advertising rates. We wrote back something like this - “Save your money, since it is doubtful if such a type of advertisement in our paper would produce results, because this section thru here has little or no crime. Months at a time will go by without any boarders in the county jail and the town ‘hoosegows’ only once in a dogs-age are any culprits detained.” Crime is prevalent in poverty stricken areas, where there are large classes of ignorant, dispossessed, and inferior types of people, smarting under lack of opportunity and a deep sense of insecurity and resentment toward more privileged elements of society.

Where there is great poverty is generally great wealth. Out here in the west there is very little of the two extremes.

But we are far from saints out here at that. The boys try to get the jump on the game warden right along. Most of our J.P. fines are game violations. Then we do have some crimes of violence but they are very few and far between. Up in this cold country people aren’t as hot blooded, and so a shooting over a woman may not happen only once in 10 years. If she wants to run off let ‘er go. A common law, murder doesn’t happen here once in decades. We do occasionally have Indian shootings or stabbings from the reservation country, or an Indian breaking in to steal some liquor, but the Judge usually lets them off easy because he knows their weakness. But if once every five years we do have some high crime it is usually thugs passing through who take us for easy marks, but generally get left.

One thing though out here that we really excel in is divorces. There are more divorces, and less church attendance in these western states than in any part of the U.S., but less crime of all other natures. On the divorce score the only thing we can figure is that our western women are so damned independent that they won’t put up and suffer with a man if he won’t trim his toenails, shave Saturday nights, and bring home a box of candy now and then. Divorces are easy to get too out here. You don’t have to prove he’s a brute, just call him that and the judge will give the lady a divorce, all in line with our western theory of personal preference and freedom morally and socially.

Willis Dunlap, Publisher of the Sanders County Ledger 1932 - 1947

In all my years of researching my column, “Remember When,” Willis Dunlap and Doc Eggensperger rank as my two favorite editors. They were outspoken and left no one guessing as to their leanings.

The following was written after Willis Dunlap died: “Anyone who was a consistent reader of the Sanders County Independent Ledger during recent years, was well acquainted with its editor, whether or not he was personally known to them. For his personality was reflected in the Ledger’s pages in a remarkably effective manner; his uninhibited thinking found expression in his week to week editorial and reportorial writings. Often he by-passed the typewriter and tapped out on the linotype, without preliminary copy preparation, the comments he wished addressed to his readers - a feat which only a small-town newspaper editor can manage but one which is conducive to extemporaneous speech-making.

Those who knew Willis Dunlap personally inevitably grew to admire his individualistic approach to business, civic and political subjects. Because he wasn’t of a conventional mold he frequently encountered hurdles that escape lesser men but which in his effort to overcome them, further increased his stature and maturity. When he died in mid-life, he was a man with many friends of high and low degree throughout his community and his state.