A month later Frank DeVos arrived by canoe from
Oroville to manage The Chronicle for the Omak Publishing Co. DeVos ran a social item
inviting people to come in and get acquainted.
“Never too busy for a pleasant howdy,” he breezed.
His 1965 article in the “Heritage” reports he went
to work for $100 a month and that his wife found a steady teaching job at $65 a month.
Scates was a serious challenger of issues. DeVos was a
wildly enthusiastic booster of Omak and Okanogan County.
He also got into verbal squabbles with neighboring editors,
took on James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railroad on everything from tardy
construction to late trains, and ran The Chronicle’s first color - an off-orange jack
o’lantern for the 1913 Halloween edition.
DeVos announced Sept. 8, 1915, that he was buying out the
Omak Publishing Co.
“The Chronicle is now five and a half years old and has
spent all of this time boosting for Omak and the adjacent (irrigation) Project and to date
has never produced any dividends for the men who originally put up the cash to install
this business in Omak,” he wrote.
Dave Johnson, then editor and publisher of the Grant County
Journal in Ephrata, reported after a visit with DeVos in 1967 that the bank had foreclosed
on the Omak Publishing Co. and sold the paper to DeVos for nothing down. |
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Chronicle file photo |
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Chronicle reporter Dee Camp peers out of the darkness of the basement during 1979 remodel |
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