By Ken Robinson

Managing Editor

April 6 is a special day for us. It is Dad’s birthday. The date symbolizes both his life and the legacy that brings you this newspaper.

Gerald S. (Jerry) Robinson came to Seattle in 1942 to work at Boeing after his flat feet kept him out of the military. He worked as a functional test electrician on the big bombers. He and wife Lee started their family in the shadow of SeaTa Airport. Dad worked at Boeing until laid off in 1949 like thousands of others. He had three kids by then.

He found work digging ditches, cleaning oil stoves of soot and the occasional light construction job. Mom clerked at a local grocery store. And they got by.

A neighbor who worked at the Union Pacific Railroad asked Dad one day if he was interested in visiting the Kent newspaper office where he’d learned there was a job opening for a printing salesman. Dad got the job and soon was selling cards, letterheads and printed envelopes. And writing local sports. In his first year, he won a statewide award for his writing in spite of knowing little about sports and being thin as a beanpole himself.

He took to his work like a fish to water. He made cold calls on local businesses for advertising and learned about rejection. But he also learned about hard work.

In 1951, the owner of the White Center News, a building contractor in his late 60s, came to the Kent News-Journal office to have some work done for the paper. The work involved an overnight process and Dad volunteered to deliver the finished work to Burien and the Highline Times office also owned by the builder. This impressed the man and he offered to sell the White Center paper to Dad. Dad had no money. But he said he would buy the paper if the builder gave him 10 years to pay back the $29,000 cost.

A great adventure in newspapering began by a man who grew up in a poor family of 10 kids in Portland, Oregon.

It was a small operation at the White Center News. There was a editor, office manager, two printers in the Composing Room and a few hangers-on. 

Dad realized he would need more manpower if his enterprise was going to grow. He pressed his three sons, nine, eight and seven, (and eventually five boys) into service as Printer’s Devils. We worked as helpers after school in the back shop, in the darkroom, in the printing department.

We worked in the circulation department and swept and cleaned the office. We had paper routes. We earned our own money and we learned how to work.

In the next few years, the company morphed into Robinson Newspapers—adding Des Moines News, Federal Way News, Highline Times, West Seattle Herald and Ballard News-Tribune. Dad also grew a printing and mailing division—Rotary Offset Press and Northwest Mailing—into a company that by 1980 employed about 400 people.

Dad had an immaculate sense of timing . He knew the world was changing and in 1989, sold the company to an east coast conglomerate. In two years, they went bankrupt. The Seattle Times bought the press, the Highline and Federal Way papers and began operating. By 1997, the Times also folded the tent. A week later, Jerry Robinson ordered the startup of the papers again. 

His words were simple: “The community needs a local paper.” 

The Ballard paper began in 1891. We have the old copies in book form. West Seattle and White Center are from the early 1920s. Federal Way is from the early 1950s. Those records of history are still around. 

The ethic that drove Dad to persevere, to succeed, is the same one that guides us, his family, to go to work every day to notice the lives of the people in the community; to celebrate their wins and mourn their losses, to praise and congratulate those who strive to achieve excellence, to mention those who choose an anti-social path, to partner with the business community in spreading a message about local goods and services and to serve as a record of contemporary history and to preserve that history for those who follow.

That is why we still need a community paper.