Moving Time in Portland

Like a good housekeeper, the rich and respected Portland Oregonian went over its yellowed files with a vacuum cleaner. Then, last week, the "Old Lady of Alder Street" moved lock, stock & files into a fancy new $4 million plant, neither missing an edition nor spilling a case of type. It wanted no dust in its new air-conditioned house, which is faced with an acre of sea-green glass and equipped to turn out big-scale newspapers, radio and television shows all at once.

Before they left the old building, sentimental staffers unscrewed its monogrammed brass doorknobs, to take home as paperweights. The management didn't mind; it had cannily sold the place for nearly $200,000 more than it cost in 1892.

The morning Oregonian, which has stepped out well ahead of its only rival, the afternoon Oregon Journal, also beat it by three weeks in getting into a new home. Furthermore, the Oregon floods had taken some of the joy out of moving for Philip Ludwell Jackson, the Journal's 54-year-old editor & publisher. The three-block-long waterfront building, built as a public market, was ringed with sandbags to bar the flooded Willamette River from the door. A battery of pumps sucked away to keep the basements dry in this other $4 million plant.

The Journal's new decor crackles with color: the presses, painted royal blue, are set among salmon-pink pillars, and the dining room is done in an appetizing peach. The roof will be a landing field for the newsroom's new helicopter. The twin towers, laced with 30,000 feet of neon tubing, will house a clock and the four big Journal bells that have ding-donged every quarter-hour since 1913.

Look-Alikes. The timing of the moves was symbolic of the kind of business-office journalism that has come to Portland.

Though the Oregonian is Republican and the Journal Democratic, the difference is one of label rather than nature. Except for other superficial differences between its competent but unexciting dailies, the city might as well be a one-newspaper town.

In the old days of personal western journalism, Portland's papers entertained the customers by bullying each other in print. Now they find it good business to live in peace. In news and picture coverage, in columns and comics, they are closely matched; they regard crusading as unrefined. But they do a good job of printing plenty of straight, uncolored news. To staffers, the similarity between the papers is sometimes discouraging. Typical of their latter-day chumminess was the Journal's recent decision to change its page size to conform to the Oregonian's; in case of disaster (or a strike) one can now print on the other's presses.

Since Editor Palmer ("Ep") Hoyt left for the Denver Post (TIME, Feb. 18, 1946), the Oregonian has had no oldfashioned, hard-hitting chief. It is run by Michael Frey, who is up from the business office. Editorially it emits only peevish echoes of its oldtime thunder. Last week, when the President came to town, flowing-tied Ben Hur Lampman, a fixture on the Oregonian's GOPartial editorial page for 29 years, greeted him: "We trust Harry Truman will understand why Missourians are in good standing with us--as Missourians. And the same goes for mules . .."

Street Fighters. Both papers have doubled their circulation since war workers began pouring into town in 1940. But on the country roadsides, the yellow & green mailboxes of the Oregonian (circ. 280,036 Sunday, 223,655 daily) still outnumber the blue & orange boxes of the Journal (217,808 Sunday, 201,421 daily). By straining to beat each other to the street, they have spaced their editions so that each is, in effect, a 24-hour paper.

For years, the Journal was a matriarchy run by wise and wiry Mrs. Maria Jackson, 84, the founder's widow, and son Phil. Lately Mrs. Jackson has spent most of her time helping run a veterans' club. Since her gay and handsome grandson, Sam II, died in a Journal helicopter crash last winter, Oregonians have wondered who might move up when Phil steps down. Last week Publisher Phil Jackson answered: nobody. Sam's death, he said, "was the end of the dynasty, if you want to call it that. When I'm through, the paper would go to a trust, and, I imagine, be sold to the employees."

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