In 1881 the New York Evening Post, already 80 years old, was merged with Editor Edwin Lawrence Godkin's Nation. The small New York Times (published by Raymond & Jones) was 30, and Adolph Ochs was editing his Chattanooga Times. James Gordon Bennett the Elder was dead, succeeded by his son as publisher of the Herald. Joseph Pulitzer was about to leave St. Louis (after one of his editors shot a prominent citizen) to go to Manhattan and, as things turned out, to buy the World. Frank Munsey was a telegraph operator in Augusta, Me. Edward Wyllis Scripps had started his Penny Press in Cleveland three years earlier; young "Bob" Scripps and Roy Wilson Howard were not born. In Chicago the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (Tribune) astounded its readers by printing in a single issue the entire New Testament, just revised; and the Herald (now Hearst's Herald Examiner) was established. Also in 1881, in the overgrown pueblo village of Los Angeles, was born the Los Angeles Times, which shortly was acquired by General Harrison Gray ("Old Walrus") Otis, a goateed, long-mustached turkey-cock who loved a fight and was sometimes compared to Editors Jones of the New York Times and Greeley of the Tribune. With true Southern Californian fervor the Los Angeles Times this week was celebrating the soth anniversary of that birth.
Although a half century is a much longer measuring stick in the West than in the East, about a dozen metropolitan dailies on the Pacific Coast are that old, or older. The Express was alive in Los Angeles for ten years before the Times came along. In San Francisco, in 1880, Senator George Hearst accepted the nearly worthless Examiner in lieu of payment of an old debt, negligently kept it for seven years until his son William, home from Harvard by expulsion, astounded him by asking to have the paper for his own. The Chronicle's stormy career under the brothers Charles and Michael De Young was already in its second decade, and the brothers had engaged in individual pistol duels with a traitorous, roustabout reporter, a Communist candidate for Mayor, and the latter's son, who killed Charles.
The San Francisco Call and the Bulletin, which survived a strange variety of in carnations before being merged by Hearst two years ago (TIME, Sept. 9, 1929) had been going since the swashbuckling, law less 1850's. James King of William, editor of the Bulletin and the West's first crusader, had been assassinated by James Casey, leader of the corrupt politicians.
The vigilantes were formed to avenge King of William; and "when Casey's body swung from a rope, law was born." In the next few years the Call and Bulletin together fought many a sensational campaign, notably that of 1875 against financier William C. Ralston, pride of San Francisco, builder of the famed old Palace Hotel. The papers accused him of dishonesty, ruined him, supposedly drove him to suicide, were nearly mobbed by the inflamed populace.
In the San Joaquin Valley the long-powerful Fresno Republican was five years old. And in Sacramento the Union was 30, the Bee 24. Portland's respected Oregonian was older than any of the others; and the Telegram was in existence, too. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had been there since 1863 and Hearst was not to get it until 1921.