Another exciting season of college football is set to kick off this weekend, so it’s an ideal time to revisit the sports pages of yesteryear on Chronicling America.

With the University of Oregon Ducks preparing to defend their Pac-10 Conference title–and the Beavers of Oregon State once again looking like a formidable challenger for the Roses–we turn all the way back to the year 1917. This was the year that an Oregon team made its first January trip to Pasadena for the postseason game that would later come to be branded as the “Rose Bowl.” In those days, the team from the East was always regarded as a prohibitive favorite. Such was the case when UO faced off against the University of Pennsylvania.

It is an interesting exercise to compare coverage of the game from journals on the opposite coasts. In its January 2nd recap, the Klamath Falls Evening Herald sticks mostly to a blow-by-blow account of the action on the field. The post-game article in the Evening Public Ledger of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania focuses rather more on analysis and excuses for the game’s unexpected outcome. Published a week later, Penn team captain Neil Mathews’ reflection demonstrates good sportsmanship as the author attempts to balance the two perspectives on the big game.

Interesting trivia to note from these articles:

• Circa 1917, Oregon’s uniform colors were “blue and lemon yellow.” Green came later, apparently.
• The 25,000-30,000 in attendance were, at this time, the largest audience ever for a game on the West Coast.
• This contest, along with Cal’s defeat of Brown University in the previous year’s game, was instrumental in earning respect for college athletics in the West. The assumption had been that Eastern and Midwestern teams were inherently superior in both talent and tactics.
• Even at this early date, we hear of the controversial relationship between college sports and money. “The primary object of the game,” writes the reporter from Evening Public Ledger, “was to swell the receipts of the football season, and in this respect it was a success.”

Enjoy the season!

ODNP was recently the subject of a feature story in the Klamath Falls Herald and News. Published in the Sunday, August 1st ‘Living Well’ section of the paper, Ryan Pfeil’s article includes lots of information on our projects, some amusing anecdotes from the digitized issues, and a timeline of journalism in Klamath Falls. Publication of this piece coincides with the ‘go live’ on Chronicling America of approximately 11,ooo pages of historic content from the Klamath Falls Evening Herald; an important predecessor of the current Klamath Falls newspaper.

Thanks to Ryan for taking the time to speak with us, and for producing a fine article on our project.

We have recently announced that we will be digitizing select dates of the Portland Oregonian as part of the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project. These issues, mostly from 1900 and 1901, should be available online at some point later this year.

For those who are interested in accessing a more complete archive of past Oregonian issues, we are happy to note that there is now another resource available. The Multnomah County Library has recently announced that the paper will be available as a free, digital resource for library patrons:

“Multnomah County Library now features the only publicly available, complete full-text digitized archive of The Oregonian newspaper. Multnomah County Library cardholders can now access every article, editorial, illustration, photograph and advertisement published in The Oregonian between 1861 and 1972. By the end of this year, the archive will include all editions up to 1987.”

This is great news, as digitized content from The Oregonian had previously been accessible only on a for-pay basis. For more information, you can read the full article on the Multnomah County Library website.

This week I am choosing to highlight and article by Brian Veseling originally published on the IFRA website.

“Learning from old media” explores news website design strategies that have been drawn from the page layout techniques of newspapers of yesteryear. The author discusses creating dramatic headlines, highlighting the best elements of each article, organizing information around hierarchies of value, and bundling ‘packages’ of related content. There are many scans and screen shots illustrating both the contempoarary and historic application of these techniques.

This is interesting stuff for those of us who are frequent users of online news sources. It also offers something of a “mirror image” on our project to convert historic papers to new media digital formats. I was fascinated to learn how old tricks of the typesetters’ trade continue to have relevance in how news gets disseminated via cutting-edge technology, as well as an ongoing impact upon our perceptions of the information that is presented to us.

The votes from our Advisory Board are in, and new titles have been prioritized for Phase 2 of our project. We may be rolling out several of these in the months ahead, as space and funding allows… but, for the time being, we are happy to announce two new titles:

The Medford Mail-Tribune has been selected for inclusion in NDNP/Chronicling America. This will increase the project’s coverage of southern Oregon and the Rogue Valley area. The Mail-Tribune is a major regional paper that has come down to the present day, and is a rare example of a 19^th Century paper that was unaffiliated with any political party. From 1907-1919 the paper was owned/edited by George Putnam, a colorful and controversial legend in Oregon journalism, later publisher of the Salem Capital Journal.

The additional title selected at this time for inclusion on the Oregon-only website is a small subset of the well-known Portland Oregonian, encompassing a smattering of issues from 1878, 1885 and 1895, as well as a fairly complete run from 1900-1901. These were the earliest issues microfilmed by UO for the U.S. Newspaper Project: Oregon.  Since the inception of our project, we have frequently been asked about including some Oregonians, and this is intended to address those requests.

I am also happy to announce that it is now easier than ever to make small donations (or large ones!) to the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program. The UO Foundation has recently updated its website with an online form to make a charitable gift to ODNP.

Hope everyone had a fun and festive July Fourth.

Oregonians have long been accustomed to celebrating the holiday with fireworks… as the front page of the July 4, 1912 Klamath Falls Evening Herald will attest. Note the article occupying the three center columns in the lower half of the page: ‘Magnificent Display Fire-works On Lake To-night.’

The paper records a full itinerary of the pyrotechnic novelties to be shot off that evening. Apparently, 1912 citizens and guests of Klamath Falls enjoyed a show of ‘Aerial Wrigglers,’ ‘Fire Swans’, ‘Meteorites,’ ‘Monster Glow Worms,’ ‘Floating Gyroscopes’ and even a battery of  ‘President Taft Inauguration Bombs.’ How did your local fireworks show compare in 2010?

Just a timely little reminder to explore the Oregon newspaper content that’s recently been made available on Chronicling America!

Just wanted to use this week’s post to offer an official and well-deserved “Thank You” to some people who’ve made valuable contributions to our project over the past several weeks:

Thanks to Lisa Berenschot and Sommer Fain, our student assistants who performed much of the page collation work during the academic year that was just completed. Now that summer is here, Lisa and Sommer have both accepted out-of-state internships in their fields of study. Congratulations and good luck!

Thanks to Isolde Raftery, our historic newspaper essayist. Isolde has recently completed researching and writing the essays for all NDNP titles included phase one of our project. A graduate student of Journalism, Isolde is spending the summer living and working in New York City.

Thanks to Karen Nitz, librarian in the Western History Room in the Public Library in Burns, Oregon. Karen provided invaluable assistance to Isolde when she was researching the history of the Burns Times-Herald — in particular, she helped us find the public records that cleared up the mystery of C.A. Byrd’s first name (see earlier blog post dated April 16th for more details.)

Finally, thanks to Gary Dielman, President of the Baker County Library Board and member of our ODNP Advisory Board. Gary helped us by researching Baker County records for information on J.W. Connella, another nineteenth-century Oregon newspaperman we knew only by his initials. Gary’s work provided the vital clues that helped us solve this one.

(The subject’s full name turned out to be James Wright Connella. Here’s a link to Connella’s genealogy page at RootsWeb. Key for our purposes was the following passage: “1900 Federal Census in North Sumpter Precinct, Baker County, Oregon, lists James W Connella, age 40, born January 1860 in Alabama, father born Virginia, mother born Alabama, occupation Editorial [illegible word] Paper, residing as a lodger in the home of Charles Marsh and his wife Eva — Marsh’s occupation is Editor [illegible word] Paper”)

We got some great news earlier this week from Deborah Thomas, National Digital Newspaper Program Coordinator with the Library of Congress:

“Today, we added 275,824 newspaper pages to Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ ) received since our last site update in April. We now have more than 2.3 million pages of newspapers from 295 titles published in 19 states and the District of Columbia available.”

Included among those 275,824 new pages is our very first Oregon content. You can now search and view issues of the Klamath Falls Evening Herald published between 1908 and 1922. Our essay detailing the history of the Evening Herald is also included for those who would like to learn more about this interesting paper.

The next site update at Chronicling America is scheduled for September. At that time, even more Oregon newspapers should be made available. In the meantime, we’re thrilled to have the Evening Herald online. It really feels like our project is coming together now!

We hosted an important visitor today! Mary Solari and her late husband, Richard, are major benefactors of our Library and the University of Oregon as a whole. They have lent financial support to no less than five library endowments, including the Corrigan-Solari Endowment for Collections, which supports our efforts to build the Digital Collections. Knight Library’s beautiful spiral staircase is also named in honor of the Solaris.

Mary and her daughter, Ann Ferrante, are currently spending a few days touring the campus here in Eugene. Given all the stops they will be making, we at the Digital Newspaper Program were pleased to get a few minutes with them! We explained the overall goals and processes of our project, displayed a few finished page scans,  and demonstrated the keyword-searching feature on the Chronicling America Website. Mary informed us of their family’s connection to James Piratsky, a newspaper publisher in turn-of-the-(20th) Century California. Searching for ‘Piratsky’ on Chronicling America brought up no less than 17 hits, all published in the San Fransisco Call between 1892 and 1907. Here is the reference from June 24, 1895:

Looks like we found our man! This was an excellent demonstration of the speed, convenience and utility offered by this digital resource.

While collating a microfilm reel of the Coos Bay Times from 1912, our student assistant, Sommer, came across a mysterious item billed as The Big Noise. It looked a lot like an issue of the Times, but the title was different, and there was no date or issue number. A glance at the paper’s masthead quickly revealed its humorous intent.

A little more digging through this issue’s contents told more of the story. Billed as “A Foolishhouse Paper Printed Once in a Lifetime–That’s Enuf,” the Big Noise is in fact a satire of the Coos Bay Times that seems to have been produced as a unique promotional handbill/program for the “Vaudeville and Minstrels” variety show staged for charity by the local chapter of the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks. The paper makes it clear that this event was to be held on the evenings of December 5th and 6th, 1912, at the Masonic Opera House in Marshfield.

The Big Noise was printed on the presses of the Coos Bay Times, and was evidently designed to parody that respectable local journal. Scattered among the “joke” ads printed in the Noise are many for actual, local businesses that regularly advertised in the Times — Ekbald & Son Hardware, Hub Clothing and Shoe Company, Owl Prescription Pharmacy, the S.S. Breakwater, etc. — but with the standard marketing copy altered to gently tease the proprietors. It can be assumed that many of these local businessmen were members of the Elks Lodge. Other prominent local figures are parodied in the ‘news’ articles and humorous cartoons that fill the paper, such as the two reproduced below.

On page 4, the ‘Editor’ of The Big Noise explains: “This paper was published to inform, instruct and amuse, make glad and mad the various members mentioned herein… The paper contains some information, bits of wisdom, and numerous scandalous lies and misrepresentations of our friends, who will have to stand for it… There will be no mud slinging in this paper. Only the very best quality of Coos River bottom soil will be used.”

We were surprised and excited to find this early predecessor of satirical papers like The Onion or National Lampoon produced in small-city Oregon just after the turn of the last century. What a unique document… and what irreplaceable insight into the “lighter side” of life in 1912 Marshfield!  —Jason A. Stone