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Centennial World Introduction and interview by Andy Dappen On July 3, 2005, The Wenatchee World, the daily newspaper servicing the Vermont-sized territory of North Central Washington, will celebrate its 100th birthday. Producing this paper each day has been a task for three generations of the Woods family. Interestingly, two of the three publishers who have piloted the paper all these years are UPS graduates. Wilfred Woods ’42 inherited the paper in May of 1950 upon the death of his father, Rufus Woods. Wilfred published the paper for 46 years, before stepping aside for his son, Rufus G. Woods ’80. Throughout this long tenure, the Woods family has become known for a legacy of community service. The original Rufus Woods was a tireless booster of the region, and without his influence it’s entirely possible that the Grand Coulee Dam, a ferro-silicone plant in Wenatchee, and the Public Utility Districts (PUDs) in Chelan and Douglas counties would never have existed. Wilfred’s contributions were smaller in scale but numerous. He modernized the paper’s technologies. He ironed out personnel issues his father had created with the installation of a profit-sharing program—one of several actions that earned him the loyalty of his staff and prevented unions from taking hold at his paper. Wilfred has also been an unwavering patron of the arts, and many regional facilities and programs benefit from his philanthropy. Since 1996 Rufus G. Woods has carried the mantle of the family trade. In an age when the owners of chain newspapers have gutted the newsrooms and staffs of their papers so that stockholders can enjoy the highest possible returns, Rufus G still hires an inordinately high number of local reporters and contributes generously to local nonprofits. Despite receiving a master’s degree in business administration from the Tucks School of Business at Dartmouth, he rejects the notion that the ultimate goal of business is to maximize profits. “Newspapers and other enterprises operating this way have lost their souls. They aren’t fun places to work, and they no longer make it a priority to improve their communities.” In the following excerpt taken from the new book The Buckle of the Power Belt: A Personal History of The Wenatchee World’s First 100 Years, which was written to commemorate the centennial, Wilfred Woods discusses the news cycles that produced the biggest headlines during the paper’s first century of existence. Even in this factual accounting, Wilfred inserts the occasional editorial comment—like the comparison of Kennedy’s achievements (uniting and elevating the country in a seemingly impossible dream) to Nixon’s (debasing the country in the Watergate scandal). These comments give the measure of the Woods family and their multi-generational belief that serving the community pulls everyone up—yourself included. Certainly not all of the big stories we covered locally, nationally, or internationally came with the bold headlines accompanying a major catastrophe, the declaration of war, armistice, the assassination of a president, or men walking on the moon. The importance of many stories that dramatically changed the fabric of the country—like the invention of the automobile—weren’t immediately understood and weren’t announced like the outbreak of war. People tend to remember better those incidences they can attach to a specific date—that have definite starting or ending points. Papers like those incidences, too. Stories that evolve slowly with many little developments don’t grab attention—or headlines—like a startling change. So be aware that my listing of the “biggest” stories covered by The World over its 100-year history, is biased toward those events with bold headlines. One big story for us that was not accompanied by a big headline was the introductory issue of the paper on July 3, 1905. A small headline on page two announced this was “Wenatchee’s First Daily.” The bigger headlines on page one that day announced “Cherry Crop Better Than Expected” and “Is Norway on the Verge of War With Sweden?” The demise of the Titanic, on the other hand, was one story the paper played big on April 16, 1912. The headline read “Titanic Sinks—1,234 Lives Lost.” The headline that day was only about an inch tall, but that was playing it big in that era when the paper used smaller headlines, bigger pages of paper, and fewer ads. Despite the magnitude of that disaster, the loss of about 100 people in the Wellington avalanche near Stevens Pass on March 1, 1910, may have had more impact on the people of the region. In that slide, two passenger trains standing on the tracks below Wellington, in the Cascades west of Stevens Pass, were crushed. More people were killed in our backyard than in any other avalanche in U.S. history. World War 1 broke out in July 1914, as Britain, France, Serbia, and Russia united to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary. We announced the outbreak of the war with what may have been our boldest headline to date [about 2 inches high] on July 28, 1914: “Austria Begins War.” During the 1920s we ran many articles that were not huge headliners but proved to be important stories of regional development. These focused on the building of Grand Coulee Dam and the affiliated Columbia Basin project, which would bring water to dry lands. The first mention of damming the Columbia near Grand Coulee and diverting water into the river’s old channel in order to irrigate millions of acres of desert was a page-seven story my father wrote on July 18, 1918. By contrast, the Appleyard Flood of 1925 was a very important local story. On Saturday, September 5, hard afternoon rains created a 15-foot wall of water that raged down Squilchuck Creek; washed over the Great Northern terminus; carried away the Springwater Hotel; ruined sheds, barns, houses, and cars; moved huge boulders; and killed 14 people. On Monday, September 7, a headline larger than the start of World War I read “12 Bodies Recovered; Four Known Missing.” The Great Depression provided the social background for a good portion of the paper’s third decade of operation. I don’t recall the stock market crash of Wall Street [October 28, 1929] being a big story when it happened—the significance of the event became apparent later. In the context of hard times, however, the jobs provided by dams and irrigation projects, and the cheap land these projects might open up, became big news. Building of the Rock Island Dam in the early 1930s, which was the first dam to span the Columbia, provided 2,400 jobs. This was important local news, and when the dam was completed my father wrote the mighty Columbia had been tamed to provide power and light for Seattle. On July 28, 1933, FDR provided the initial funding of $60 million to begin work on the Grand Coulee Dam as a public works project—that was big news. So was the initial excavation of the dam site in December 1933. In 1935, more big news followed when authorization came to build the high dam at Grand Coulee and make the effort both a hydro and a reclamation project. One big event that The World did not play big, because my father opposed the sale of alcohol, was the repeal of Prohibition on December 5, 1933. Prohibition’s end did make front-page news, but the prominent story that day was “Dirt Flies at Coulee Dam.” Dam stories continued making big headlines in the 1940s. On June 1, 1942, water from the 150-mile long reservoir backed up behind the Grand Coulee Dam and poured over the top spillway for the first time, symbolizing that 24 years of work and advocacy had been fulfilled. The bold headline that day read “Colossal Waterfall Started Today,” and the subhead stated “Another Milestone in History of Great Granite Slab.” In truth, the dream was not completely fulfilled because World War II interrupted the irrigation/reclamation portion of the project. The first irrigation waters would not be delivered to the thirsty lands of the Columbia Basin until 1951. World War II was, of course, the biggest story during our fourth decade of existence. Many major headlines leading up to the Allies’ involvement in the war ran with one of the largest being: “Warsaw Attacked ‘Help!’ Cries Poland,” on September 1, 1939. The Allies declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. December 1941 was, of course, a momentous month for the country. Most of us living at that time remember what we were doing when we heard the news about Pearl Harbor. It happened on a Sunday—the day we did not publish a paper, so we had time to make Monday a blockbuster issue with the bold headline “3,000 Casualties, U.S. Declares War on Japan.” Many big battle stories followed over the coming years, but 1945 was a blockbuster news year. On April 12, 1945, a headline using one third of a page read “ Roosevelt is Dead.” The huge headline declared “Truman Takes Reins.” Roosevelt’s death had a profound effect on the mood of the country, but equally momentous events kept coming that year. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, and we ran a very big headline on May 1 stating “Hitler Dead.” V-E [Victory in Europe] Day came a week later on May 8, on August 6 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, the Japanese agreed to an unconditional surrender, and on August 15 our bold headline announced “World Rejoices.” The subhead stated “Fighting Stops, Japs Face Hard Future.” Sunday, September 2, was V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, and our September 1 paper ran the big headline “Formal Surrender Tonight.” Not many years match the hopes and the horrors of 1945. Following the international theater of World War II, local stories grabbed more attention again. On a snowy November 26, 1945, the tight-knit community of Chelan shuddered when a school bus slid into Lake Chelan and 15 children and one adult drowned. It was a terrible blow to a small community, and it was an important local story. The 1948 Columbia River flood in late May was another terrible but memorable event. The flood tore up the Methow Valley and, with bridges washed out, left that region cut off from the rest of the state for a period of time. Downriver, the city of Vanport, which was one of Oregon’s largest cities, floated away when a dike restraining the Columbia broke. The residences of nearly 20,000 people were destroyed, and what was once a city is now Delta Park on the outskirts of Portland. A major headline on May 29, 1950, announced the death of my father, Rufus Woods. True to my father’s approach to news—“play it big, play it like a circus”—the staff ran the big headline “Publisher Rufus Woods Dies.” Rufus devoted himself to the development of North Central Washington and it wasn’t just his family who felt his loss. On April 26, 1951, a headline taking up nearly one third of the front page read “P.U.D. Lands Alcoa Plant.” Subheading stated: “Construction of $50,000,000 Plant to Start Immediately.” Our wording irritated those who had fought against the establishment of the PUD in favor of private power interests. But without the PUD, Alcoa would have never established a plant here and provided 900 good-paying jobs in our valley, nor would they have diversified our agriculture-based economy. In 1952 the plant opened and started providing aluminum for the country’s swelling consumerism and the Korean War effort. The Korean War, meanwhile, did not command the country’s attention like World War II, but President Truman’s sacking of MacArthur and the installation of General Matthew Ridgway on April 11, 1951, was a big story. So was the signing of the cease-fire ending the Korean War on July 27, 1953. The biggest stories of the early 1960s were national in scope—the space race, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis taking place over a two-week period in October 1962. Then on November 22, 1963, came one of those stories, like Pearl Harbor, where you remember what you were doing. This was, of course, the assassination of JFK. The shooting happened in the morning [12:30 p.m. CST] shortly before the paper would be closed and sent to the printer. This was an unusual occasion when we reworked the front page and held the paper open until the afternoon, waiting to learn the details of the story and of the president’s condition. From the mid-’60s to mid-’70s, we covered such memorable stories as Apollo 11 landing on the moon on July 20, 1969, and the break-in at the Watergate Hotel [June 1972], which ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 8, 1974. What two different stories those were: One demonstrated the near-miraculous accomplishments of administrations that united the country behind a dream, the other illustrated the squandered potential of leaders who placed private gain above public good. One story that among longtime residents of Wenatchee produced the “where-were-you-when” litmus test accompanying really big stories, was the Appleyard blast of the chemical tank car in Wenatchee’s railyard. On August 6, 1974, we may have been the only paper in the country that pushed the story about Nixon telling his Cabinet that he would not resign to the bottom half of the page. A huge headline declared: “DISASTER Tank Car Blast Rips Railyard.” The explosion injured 113 people, destroyed many buildings within a one-mile radius of the blast, shattered windows as far as three miles away, hurled mangled chunks of train cars across the Columbia River, left a 100-foot-wide by 35-foot-deep crater in the railyard, and created about $7.5 million in damage. Given the power of that blast, the fact that only two people died may be the most remarkable statistic. From the mid-1970s until my retirement in 1997, I remember the really big stories being such incidences as the fall of Saigon in April 1975, the assassination attempt on President Reagan in March 1980, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May 1980, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986, the threat of local wildfires in late summer of 1994, the death of 168 people during the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995… What’s curious is that for a paper headquartered in the “Apple Capital of the World,” we haven’t had truly momentous apple stories. There’s a steady stream of smaller stories about this industry that has directed the local economy and history, but the biggest apple story since I became publisher was, arguably, the Alar scare (1988-89). However, if you ask locals when that occurred, most will think a while and guess, “Mid-’80s…early ’90s?” Alar was an important story that impacted our readers and our economy, but it wasn’t a huge headliner we remember so well. It was one of those gradually developing stories with no dramatic starting or ending point. What is also curious is that the events of the last 30 years run together much more than older news events. Maybe with age it becomes harder to be shocked. Perhaps to young people, the news and images of the Oklahoma City bombing or the Twin Towers falling were just as shocking, just as memorable, as Pearl Harbor was to me. But maybe we receive so much information today that it’s harder not just to be shocked but to keep all the news straight. |
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