Sydney and Nyel, 1986 — a Stan Thompson photo for the Observer

Yesterday, Matt Winters was the speaker at the Oysterville Schoolhouse. He talked about his twenty-five years as editor/publisher of our local weekly newspaper, the Chinook Observer. I don’t know if the talk, itself, was newsworthy but it certainly got the undivided attention of a record crowd.

As Matt pointed out, small community papers such as ours are alive and well even as the metropolitan dailies struggle to stay in business. Besides being the best option for local news, weeklies such as the Observer are often the only option. And, as those of us who live here know all too well, our local communities are but an up-close-and-personal microcosm of the Greater Outside World.

Certainly for those of us who are interested in local or regional history, small-town newspapers are the very best source of what happened to who and when. In that regard, the Observer is a treasure trove. It has been in business since 1900 and most of the back-issues are in bound volumes available for research.

1985 Invitation — illustrations by Gordon Schoewe

Along those lines, Matt told about a man who came into the office some years back – before the Observer had moved to its present building – looking for the back-issues of a certain year. He found what he was looking for – an article about a bank robbery that had taken place on the Peninsula a number of years previously. It turned out that he was the perpetrator, identifying himself as a “retired bank robber!”

It seems that after a series of robberies in small towns off the I-5 corridor, he had been caught. He served his prison time during which he took advantage of the vocational training program then offered and became a barber. That had been some years back and he was now trying to find out “the rest of the story” – specifically, how the local paper(s) reported his crimes and, in this case, if the teller (who he had badly frightened) was all right.

Croquet Gala 1987 by Norma Walker

As always, Matt was interesting, personable, and forthcoming. He gave us his take on various politicians, answered questions about the paper’s “policies” and talked about the people of the community he had known and admired. He talked about the toughest stories to do (yearly drownings at the beach, especially involving children) and the reasons for devoting eight pages each year to “Letters to Santa.” He even talked about some of the Oysterville events and people near and dear to his heart – (he and his wife Donna were married in the Oysterville Church, had their reception at the schoolhouse…)

One thing though, Matt – we need to talk about those old Oysterville Croquet Galas. Contrary to popular and editorial opinion, they were not put on by Willard or even by my mom and dad. Nyel and I dreamed up the idea as a way to keep him (then a graduate student at the U dub) on the Peninsula and, subsequently put them on for nineteen years… but that’s a story for another time.