Highline’s first newspaperman has died.

Vance Orchard passed away March 7 in Walla Walla from cancer diagnosed just a week earlier. He was 88.

Mr. Orchard first started writing news stories for the Highline High School newspaper.

In 1936, he graduated from Highline and was hired three years later by 92-year-old printer Alfred C. DeNisson to start a weekly newspaper for Highline.

As related in The Many Roads to Highline, “Vance, full of vigor and enthusiasm, plunged into the assignment of getting out the weekly Burien City Press.

In December 1940, the first issue was printed.

Mr. Orchard's combination newspaper office, print shop and sign shop was located next to the Burien Fire Station on Southwest 151st Street near 10th Avenue Southwest. As a volunteer firefighter, Mr. Orchard was provided a rent-free apartment over the station in exchange for being on fire call 24 hours a day.

In 1941, Mr. Orchard left the paper for a job in Seattle and then worked for weekly newspapers in Auburn and Sumner.

Times/News publisher Jerry Robinson recalls first meeting Mr. Orchard in 1948.

“We both worked selling ads for John Fournier, he in Auburn and I in Kent,' Robinson related. “He was a very creative writer, cartoonist and advertising illustrator.'

Mr. Orchard moved to Eastern Washington in 1951 to work at the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, where he stayed 32 years before retiring.

Mr. Orchard did retain a connection to the Highline area, despite being gone for a half-century. In 2002, he married his Highline High sweetheart, Janette Armstrong.

Wives Pearl Orchard, Marguerite McAllister Orchard and Mary Mayberry Orchard had preceded him in death.

In his long career at the Walla Walla paper, Mr. Orchard’s beats included the outdoors, agriculture, religion, county courthouse and food.

He also wrote columns including “Blue Mountain Ramblings' and “Outdoors in the Blues,' for the Union-Bulletin and “Touchet Valley Ramblings' for the Waitsburg Times.

Some of Mr. Orchard’s favorite columns were compiled into two books. He also wrote two books on a favorite subject, Bigfoot, a hairy humanlike creature that some say lives in the Pacific Northwest mountains.

In a Union-Bulletin obituary, editor Rick Doyle remembered, “Vance had a great ability to connect with people, the real people, as opposed to celebrities and such.'

His wife, Janette; sons Willis and Paul Orchard; and three daughters, Dollyjean Pettyjohn, Marian Hamilton and Charlene Slater; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, survive Mr. Orchard.