In 1952 I accepted an offer to manage this newspaper if I could also buy it someday. I had no money. I was a trained electrician at Boeing before a neighbor mentioned that there was a job opportunity in advertising and writing for the old Kent News Journal. 

In high school a friend had told me he'd like to own and operate a small community newspaper. It was not on my bucket list. I wanted to become the best ballplayer or the snazziest dresser so the girls would admire and hopefully love me.

A funny things happens to a man when he discovers his passion. Not passion itself. I mean the passion for loving what you do.

With no particular training beyond holding a job at Meier & Frank, a Portland, Oregon department store, I worked as a copy boy in the ad dept. I did take a mail order advertising course; but I had no qualifications to own a newspaper. I had to learn as I went. 

Everyone needs a break at some point. My break was a benevolent newspaper owner named John Muller. He was an Alaskan banker who moved to Burien in the early 40's. He had some cash. He purchased the Highline Times and later he acquired the White Center News but he needed somebody to manage the papers.
My good friend Al Sneed got the job in Burien. I was tapped to take over at White Center. Some years later I bought out Al and assumed control of the Federal Way News, too. Not long after that I purchased the West Seattle Herald. The Ballard News-Tribune was added to the group in the early 90's.

Mistakes?...I've made plenty. You do that when you try things. One of my inspirations was Thomas Edison. My mom worked for him at his light bulb factory in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison never thought of his experiments as failures. He only thought they were attempts that did not work.

When I took over in 1952 the previous owner had a Georgetown funeral home ad running on the front page.  I kept it there to honor the contract that had been signed. Dick Yarington owned a funeral home right in White Center but was never an advertiser. I had no idea that I would become a villain in his eyes during my first year in town. Dick thought a new owner would simply cancel that competitor's ad and favor a hometown business like his on the front page.

I was so new it never occurred to me to ask him to advertise since I already had a funeral home ad in the paper. Dick never said a word to me at community functions but I learned soon enough he was unhappy with his Georgetown competitor buying space in my paper. He also tried to hire my ad manager to start his own newspaper in town. 

I guess he was pretty angry at me.

When the contract expired for the funeral home ad, I did go to see Dick. With his taciturn nature he declined to advertise but was happy to see his competitor had stopped advertising. Dick did finally run some ads. I think he had to get over his anxiety about running ads at all

I was in the office shortly after I took over when I got a call. “this is Dick Scrawge and I want to buy an ad.”
I got his address and told Mr. Scrawge I would be right over to help. Once on site I learned my second lesson of the business. Listen, listen, listen.

The business was Dick's Garage. I quietly took the order from Dick.

Last week I wrote about the Epicure Restaurant being my second office. My first office was actually on Roxbury St. where Dr's Mike and Jerry Vellling practice dentistry today. We were there for six months when a fire broke out at the Luck Toy Chinese restaurant on 16th near the roller rink. The place was gutted but the frame was intact. I bought the building and moved it to a vacant lot on 17th and 98th next to a feed store. Within months we were operating at our new digs. It was very small but it fit our needs at the time. We did have a number of folks come in looking for chicken feed and oats. We sent them next door

My third lesson came few years later. The local Volkswagen dealer was incensed that we'd run an article about a "lemon" he sold to a citizen a few weeks before. The citizen got about two hundred yards from the dealer and the car quit running.  He had tried to take it back but the dealer refused. He came over to the news office to complain to my editor.

We thought it was news so we ran a photo and small story. The next day, I was in my office when I noticed the dealer heading to our door. He had a gun on his hip and angry look on his face. I had enough sense to let him meet our editor while I hid in the backshop. He ranted about the article and questioned my whereabouts. My editor, Jim Lang, said “Mr. Robinson is out. Can you shoot him later?”

By 1956 things were going okay. Al and I had most of the newspaper group put together. We had purchased a large press as our business expanded. We knew we could not afford to "feed" it with just our publications. We sold commercial printing. Our plant was operating 24/7.

Fast forward. In 1975 with business in full throttle we accepted an offer from some investors back east to form a separate company.  It was necessary to throw in some collateral of our own. We needed a million bucks to stay in the game. We sold off vacation properties, we counted pencil sharpeners and eked out enough to participate.

Sadly, within months, one of our major partners was killed in an auto accident. The lesson learned? Bad things happen to good people. We could not have seen that coming.
Here it is 2012. We are in our 60th year. I think back on those early
years and attribute our success to three things. We tried, we accepted
our mistakes and we learned. We had some bad luck on the way but luck
sometimes makes opportunity. We were lucky.

Jerry Robinson is the publisher of the West Seattle Herald/White Center News. He can be reached care of Ken Robinson at kenr@robinsonnews.com.