70 years of history: Herald, Tri-Cities have grown up together

Monday is the Tri-City Herald’s 70th birthday.

The fledgling Herald was only 13 years old when I walked through the front door one December Saturday in 1960.

Since its first edition in 1947, it had already been scarred by a union strike, community strife, the establishment of a competing daily newspaper, lawsuits and money problems.

And that was just the start of its woes.

I was just 18 months off the boat (literally) from England and was moving from newspapering in the Boise Valley because the Herald had offered me a 30 percent raise from my Idaho weekly pay of $99 a week.

In 1960, the Tri-Cities was still somewhat of a stark place to work and live. My intention was to learn all I could — and flee.

The Herald building was a converted pea cannery. The retail center of the Tri-Cities was downtown Pasco. Columbia Center was an isolated, empty stretch of sagebrush between Kennewick and Richland. There were no interstate highways. The road to Umatilla was christened the Goat Path because it twisted and turned to the Columbia River near Umatilla where it ended in a ferry, not a bridge.

Two of the few decent places to eat were the Desert Inn (now the Red Lion) in Richland and the Friday night fish fry at the Pasco Elks.

You couldn’t cross the old green Pasco-Kennewick bridge without getting a wheel alignment. The trip to Seattle took six hours. The road to Boise passed through a one-lane railroad underpass outside of Baker.

When there was an air inversion, the sickly smell from the Wallula pulp plant contrasted with the brown plume of poisonous air from the Finley fertilizer plant.

But the Tri-City Herald was a vibrant, active newspaper with a publisher by the name of Glenn Lee who had sold stock on the streets when it looked like the paper was going bankrupt.

It was a feisty paper with its daily red-ink Page 1 headline — printed, according to the paper’s detractors, with the blood of its victims.

Imagine the times when the Herald was “birthed.” The Tri-Cities (a name coined by the Herald for its masthead and a geographical location no one recognized) was going through one of its first Cold War booms.

People were living in their cars, tents or rented garages. Kennewick and Pasco each had one hotel — until Kennewick’s burned in 1948. All water and sewer plants were overtaxed. Housing and sanitary conditions were described as the worst in the nation.

A man at the Richland Y area was renting out tents for multiple occupancy and had the legs of each bed in a can of water to stop rats getting at the sleepers.

Richland was strictly a government town and a better place to live. However, all support services were inadequate. In just seven years Richland had gone from a town of 327 to 25,000; Kennewick from 1,918 to 15,000 and Pasco from 3,913 to 16,000.

Lee came from Seattle with his partner, Bob Philip, to buy a flour mill.

Instead, he saw a different opportunity. But he was operating on a shoestring. He was paying his editor, Don Pugnetti, $90 a week. The government kept a stranglehold on news and would not let the Herald have an office in Richland.

It allowed only one of everything — a supermarket, one drug store. And it had a so-called newspaper called the Richland Villager, totally government controlled, and it reckoned it did not need another newspaper. Eventually it lifted the ban. But the office allowed was a shack.

Six months after the Herald’s first edition, its first major problem occurred when the Columbia River flooded the Tri-Cities, isolating the towns from each other and bringing business — and advertising revenue — to a standstill.

As the Herald struggled back to its feet, in 1950 its printers went on strike. Lee made national news when he donned a sandwich board and picketed the pickets.

Worse was to come. The printers union, the then-powerful International Typographical Union — opened a competing daily newspaper in Pasco named the Columbia Basin News.

That was much the situation when I joined the 13-year-old Herald in 1960, as the youngest reporter in the newsroom.

We didn’t use the names of attorneys in news stories — because some of the more prominent were associated with the unions, and Lee didn’t want them to get free advertising in his paper.

Money was tight. My first Christmas present from the Tri-City Herald was a $16 gift certificate to a store that hadn’t paid its advertising bill.

The Columbia Basin News folded in 1963 — after losing $3 million of the union’s funds when $3 million was real money.

However, that good news was offset by news from Hanford that the sole contractor, General Electric, was to phase out. With the U.S. awash in plutonium, Lee feared a shutdown of Hanford’s production reactors and formed the Tri-City Nuclear Industrial Council.

That was when the Herald headed into its most productive years as a community supporter.

Lee had a sense of the jugular and a rifle-like aim at issues that were important to the economic health of his community. He used the Herald and the Tri-City Nuclear Council, which later became today’s Tri-City Development Council (TRIDEC), to fight battles on the local, state and national scenes through the Herald for what he regarded as the economic betterment of the Tri-Cities.

With his right-hand man, Sam Volpentest, and a group of individuals and organizations, Lee used the Herald in a way that now we would regard as bordering on the unethical.

But he made things happen.

Without such vision, there would be no federal building in Richland; the interstate highway would have run south from Yakima, totally bypassing the Tri-Cities; the Columbia Basin irrigation project would have stalled long before it did.

Gov. Dan Evans would have stopped much of the corporate farming that now covers the south Horse Heavens; and the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) project would never have been built at Hanford for us to argue about 30 years later.

The Herald also played a pivotal role in Washington State University’s decision to locate a branch campus here.

A major event occurred in the late 1970s. Lee was in his 70s and was concerned about death taxes. So he put the Herald on the market and sold it to McClatchy Newspaper for a reported $40 million — $1 million of which he shared with employees.

He had higher offers, but Lee was convinced McClatchy would continue the aggressive, community-oriented journalism for which the Herald was noted.

Over the years the Herald has won a multitude of top national, regional and state journalism prizes with a talented team of reporters and editors. It has survived flood, financial woes. lawsuits, and government intimidation. But of late it has had a tough time with social media as advertisers have a multitude of options for getting their message out — whether it be Facebook, Craigslist or Google.

When I started work at the Herald in 1960 it had five reporters and a circulation of about 16,000. When I retired as publisher in 1997 reporters numbered 18, circulation was about 43,000 and the future looked bright enough to build a new office building in downtown Kennewick.

Today the Herald is back with a smaller news staff, a wider readership reach through adopting the modern communication of the electronic media — but with a smaller printed edition.

Yet the objectives of the Herald remain the same as when I walked though that door 57 years ago: Cover news of the community as completely and fairly as possible.

And, editorially, advocate for what is best for the Tri-Cities economically, socially and recreationally.

This story was originally published November 11, 2017 at 4:40 PM with the headline "70 years of history: Herald, Tri-Cities have grown up together."