Ephrata Alumni Association

My Days as a Newscast Carrier

(and a little bit about Joe Brennan and the Newscast)

by John Morris

I started working for Joe Brennan carrying the Newscast in the summer of 1956, when I was nine years old. We lived on F Street N.E., and I had 18 customers on D and E streets N.E. The paper was published six days a week, sold for a penny, and the monthly subscription rate was 35 cents; 20 cents to Joe and 15 cents to the carrier. It was my first job, and I enjoyed it very much. I had been involved in Cub Scouts for about a year when I got the job as a carrier, and moved on to Boy Scouts in 5th grade as a member of the Beaver Patrol in Troop 64, headquartered in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church. Joe was always very supportive of scouting, and I remember receiving camping gear as Christmas presents from Joe. I liked the responsibility of the job, and the camaraderie of the carriers while waiting for our papers to come off the press. It was always a challenge at month-end when collecting the subscription amount due when two quarters were offered for the 35 cents due. How much hemming and hawing while slowly searching pockets for the 15 cents change could one manage before the customer would relent and say "keep the change".

In the spring of 1960 I passed my Newscast route on to my brother Paul, and moved on to a different job - shoeshine boy at Bilbro's Barber Shop, which was just west of the post office, and across the street from the Hobby Shop. I bought the existing supplies from the prior shoeshine boy (Rich Nessen), and when I moved on to my next job as office boy at Haley's Office Equipment, Charlie Freestone took over the shoe shine stand. I was at Haley's for a couple of years, then a couple of years at the Grant County Journal addressing and sending out papers by mail to out-of -town customers. Then I went off to college.

The Newscast (also referred to locally as the "scandal sheet", since courthouse activity, police bookings, and divorce and other similar public records were duly reported in the paper) commenced business in Ephrata in 1946. At that time, the town had a population of only 1400, and when the competitor Grant County Journal published only weekly. Publisher and sole owner Joseph Patrick Brennan, at the age of 47, was drawn to Ephrata for a couple of reasons. The first was his asthma, which he believed could be relieved by the dry air in the Columbia Basin. The second was the opportunity to compete in a market which was booming - by 1950 the population of Ephrata was to increase to over 4500, and the expansion caused by construction of the irrigation canals and the likelihood that Ephrata would be the new headquarters for the Bureau of Reclamation looked like a rosy future for an aspiring entrepreneur.

Born on September 28, 1899 and raised in Coeur d'Alene, Joe was the youngest of three children in the William and Mary Brennan family. They were Irish Catholic, and the children all attended the local Catholic school, The Immaculate Heart of Mary Academy. Joe graduated in 1917, and one of his first jobs was as a stenographer with the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Spokane. Other jobs in Idaho and Oregon would come and go over the years, mainly in the timber industry. Joe was trained as a log scaler, which required him to measure cut trees to determine the grade and quantity of wood destined for the saw mill. He also dabbled in mining. One venture was particularly memorable to him - a silver mining operation up Fourth of July Canyon, east of Coeur d'Alene. He would talk about his days as a prospector for the rest of his life.

Oldest sister Grace married in 1914 at age 22, and had three children in Coeur d'Alene (Catherine, James, and William) with her husband Richard Dawson, who was in the timber industry. The Dawson family moved to Oregon in the 1920's, and Joe occasionally worked with Richard Dawson in the woods. Grace died unexpectedly in 1934, leaving Richard to raise the three teenage children. In late 1939, Joe's father passed away, and Joe moved home to care for his mother until she passed in mid 1941. When war broke out later that year, Joe was too old for service but found employment in the spring of 1942 on the Alcan Highway project, building the primitive road from the United States to the Territory of Alaska. Once completed, Joe worked construction jobs in Alaska and Seattle, where his sister Evelyn had been living and working for several years as a school teacher. Evelyn never married.

It was from Seattle that Joe traveled to Ephrata, with a substantial grubstake in hand and a desire to try his hand at the newspaper business in a dryer climate. He rented office space on A Street, adjacent to the Dutch Boy Paint Store to the south. In the back of the office was a small room with a bed, and he shared a bathroom with the Dutch Boy Paint folks. His permanent residence, however, was the Bell Apartments on B Street (later to be named Basin Street). The Newscast newspaper "press" was an old sheetfed multilith offset lithograph unit. Legal size typewriter paper was used for the paper, and Joe would have to fan each ream of paper before inserting the paper into the machine, in order to reduce the instances of jamming. Paper jams, however, seemed to still occur at some point during every press run. Joe soon became a competitive newspaperman in the growing town of Ephrata.

In early 1946, Major James Mitchell and his wife Delores moved to Ephrata from Yakima. James Mitchell, age 63, was dying of lung cancer, and was given only a few months to live. The medical facilities at the Ephrata Air Base provided him end-of-life care, and Delores found work as a legal secretary at the law firm of Nixon and Wickwire. James passed on Memorial Day 1946, and Delores decided to stay in Ephrata. Born in 1905 in Pendleton, her mother had died when she was 12, and she married young at age 18. The marriage didn't last, and she eventually moved to Yakima and worked as a legal secretary. James, born in 1882, was a career army man, and had risen to the rank of colonel by the end of WWI. He then went to law school, got a law degree, and practiced law in Yakima. Not long after his wife unexpectedly passed away at age 46 in 1934, James married divorcee Delores Markham, who was then 23 years his junior. They had 11 good years together. After James' death, Delores secured an apartment at the Bell Apartments, and settled into life in Ephrata.

It wasn't long before Delores Mitchell and Joe Brennan were "an item" around town. There were a couple of relationship issues, however, that proved to be serious impediments to marriage. First, Delores was entitled to, and was receiving, military survivorship benefits. Those benefits would cease if she remarried. Second, Joe was a Roman Catholic, and Delores was a Presbyterian divorcee. Under the Catholic Church rules then in effect, marriage between a Catholic man and a divorced woman was not permitted. So, they didn't marry, but maintained separate apartments at the Bell Apartments. Joe was a member at the Ephrata Elks Club, and also the Lakeview Golf and Country Club. According to former carrier Jim Strobeck, Joe played golf on most Sundays, weather permitting, and Jim served as his caddy on many occasions. Jim was Delores' nephew (Delores Mitchell and Marda Strobeck were sisters), and Jim started carrying the Newscast in 1949. Joe and Delores had a 15 year relationship that was accepted by all in the community. However, the unique arrangement was a topic that never came up in family conversations, especially if the children were present. In those times, matters like that were not discussed.

Joe died on Monday, October 7, 1963 in his apartment. The cause of his death was cardiac arrest. His body was found at 5:30 p.m., when local businessmen went to his apartment to inquire about the reason for the non-delivery earlier in the day of the Newscast newspaper. His obituary was printed the next day in the Grant County Journal, with a nice commentary by Dave Johnson, Publisher of the Journal. Dave commented that Joe was "a sports fiend and ardent golfer", "a newspaperman and good competitor", and concluded with "Joe was an ethical competitor. We never traded blows, although there were many times our editorial opinion did not coincide. The community will miss Joe." Joe Brennan was buried in the family plot at St. Thomas cemetery in Coeur d'Alene, next to his parents.

After Joe was buried, his sister Evelyn approached Les Parr with a request to keep the Newscast going for awhile until the family (Evelyn and the three children of her deceased sister Grace) could decide what to do. Les agree, and ultimately bought the paper from the family, expanded it over the next few years, and then merged it in with the Grant County Journal, which he and Ken Herr purchased in 1968 from Dave Johnson. The Newscast ceased to be a daily paper at that point, and was changed to a weekly shopper edition of the Journal. Evelyn Brennan died in 1972, and is buried with her brother Joe and her parents at St. Thomas cemetery in Coeur d'Alene.

At he time of Joe's death, Delores Mitchell was the Executive Secretary to the Manager of the PUD of Grant County, and responsible for all secretarial staff. She had her own office, and was highly respected by all. One personal characteristic made her memorable to many who still recall Delores - her right leg was about an inch and a half shorter than the left leg, causing a pronounced limp and an awkward gait. The deformity was caused by a broken hip in 1944 that never properly healed, and subsequent fracture of the same hip some years later that could never be properly repaired. Delores worked for the PUD until turning 60 in 1965, and she then retired to Oregon, and then later to Spokane to be closer to her brother Lorin Markham. In 1995 she passed away in Spokane at the age of 90. Delores Mitchell is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Walla Walla, in a plot next to James Mitchell.