Portland Saga

One January day in 1919, the 83-year-old publisher of the Portland Oregonian, ten days ill with grippe, had himself carried to the east bay of his grey stone mansion on Portland's Imperial Heights, to look once more across the city where he had made his fortune. As the late winter sunshine streamed through the window, Henry Lewis Pittock knew that his time was short, knew that his keenest regret was to leave to other hands the great daily he had founded 58 years before. Next night he died, and Portlanders learned that his $7,894,778.33 estate was the largest ever probated in Oregon.

But not even in death could wily Founder Pittock wholly loose his loving hold on the Oregonian. His will left his 470 (out of 700) shares of Oregonian stock to two trustees, with "full and complete authority" to run the paper for 20 years. That trust ends next January 28. Last week the surviving trustee, Ore Lee Price, (age 61), Henry Pittock's longtime private secretary, made a long anticipated move. Pending expiration of the trust, when Mr. Price plans to retire for good, he will hold the title of president & publisher. Succeeding him last week in the key executive job as manager was Edwin Palmer ("Ep") Hoyt, 41, onetime logger who has been the Oregonian's managing editor since 1933. Editor Paul Roelofson Kelty, "Ep" Hoyt's boss until four years ago, stayed at his post. Youthful Lester Arden ("Pang") Pangborn was upped from executive news editor to managing editor. Retained as nonresident consultant was Newspaper Doctor Guy T. Viskniskki, who was summoned in 1934 to modernize the ailing Oregonian (TIME, Jan. 7, 1935), did such a good job it is once more Portland's largest paper (108,350 daily, 145,130 Sunday), is once more making money.

But oldtime Portlanders were not convinced this was the final word on the future of their most famous newspaper. When Henry Pittock's 470 shares of stock are distributed among five heirs next year, almost anything can happen. And back of this uncertain prospect loomed the tenacious shadow of the other giant who built the Oregonian--its famed, longtime (1865-1910) editor, Harvey Whitefield Scott, who died convinced that Henry Pittock had double-crossed him.

The partnership of these two strong men is a big story of U. S. journalism. Scott was a big, brusque, walrus-faced fighter, who read Horace for diversion and stepped up to bars in a long frock coat and high silk hat to call for a shot of straight whiskey. Pittock was barely five feet tall, with a goat-beard, cool, abstemious and calculating. In his later years he loved to ride a horse at the head of parades because it flattered his disproportionately large head and shoulders. Brought from England by his printer father when he was four, he went West in a wagon train at 18, traded shots with Indians, turned down a bartender's job in Portland to set type for a weekly paper also called the Oregonian. His liquor-loving boss, Thomas J. Dryer, finally gave him the paper for back wages in 1860 and went off to the Sandwich Islands as a U. S. Commissioner. On Feb. 4, 1861, before he was 26, Pittock founded the daily Oregonian.

Harvey Scott came across the plains in his father's covered wagon from Illinois when he was 14, saw his mother die of plains cholera on the way, helped to bury her beside the trail. He carried a musket in the local Indian "war" in 1855, attended Pacific University and became Portland's first librarian. A short article he wrote about Lincoln's assassination interested Pittock, who hired him in 1865. But five years later they disagreed over politics, and Scott went to the rival Bulletin, later serving as Collector of Customs. In 1877, he returned to the Oregonian to stay. Combining immense physical vigor with wide knowledge and a penetrating intellect, Scott was the Oregonian to thousands who never heard of Pittock. In 1933 his statue in bronze was set up in Portland's Mount Tabor Park, with one arm stretched toward the city centre.

Many old Portland families believe that Harvey Scott was promised a half interest in the Oregonian in 1877, learned later he could never have it because of a deal Pittock had made with rich U. S. Senator Henry Winslow Corbett. One story goes that Editor Scott was in the East when he first learned of the "betrayal," dashed across the continent, and wiped up the office floor with his partner's pint-sized frame. Present day Scotts and Pittocks are noticeably cool toward each other. Most embittered has been big, bald, son Leslie M. Scott, President of Portland's chamber of commerce who took part in conferences leading up to last week's changes as representative of the 230 Oregonian shares that Harvey Scott left to his four children. Leslie Scott has an ambition to fill his father's shoes. And with the time fast approaching when the Pittock interest will be divided, it may be possible again for a Scott to rule the Oregonian.

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