April 2021

Since we've been in charge of publishing news in this area since 1952 (this week is our last in print) we have long memories of many promotional efforts all designed with two goals. First and foremost, promote local business and the community. Without them, there wouldn't be any news (and that's still true.. and worth remembering) and second, because gathering news and presenting it, especially in print  is not free, our goal (not always successful) was to make a profit.

We introduced ideas like Secret Shopper, and Get to Know Us, and a magazine section we did called the Gateway. We did tons of ads with photos of the merchants and cartoon  bodies, There were many holiday sections, cookbooks, Summer fun sections, Home improvement sections and more clip out coupons over 70 years than you've likely ever seen. We can't share them all of course so here are few we did we look back on fondly.

Our mother Lee Robinson (speaking now as the Robinson Family) was an excellent writer.  She was wise, witty, and without her efforts the paper, especially in the early days would not have survived. Before she began what would be a series of her own columns for the paper she would take over our Dad's "colllum" as they called it as a guest writer. Here's one of her early entries from the first year the family owned the White Center News.

By Tim Robinson

Co-Publisher, Robinson Newspapers

In those early days, when our dad acquired the White Center News, we often accompanied him to the office, usually on weekday mornings in the summer. An immediate side-trip took us to the post office on the main street in town where he collected a twine-wrapped bundle of letters the size of a loaf of bread. 

At his office he would separate the mail, often discarding pieces of mail unopened. I noticed this and questioned the action. Dad said "junk mail" to me. I had no idea what that meant as receiving mail was as foreign to me as visiting relatives in Portland, OR. In other words, not often.

By Ken Robinson

Managing Editor

As this is my last column for print, it seems fitting to append the FIRST column I wrote for this paper, age 9.

By the way, the family tradition was to spell column as "collum" in the event you thought we habitually made typos, which we did of course, but we usually caught them before putting them in print.

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