It's Still Sam Raddon's Record

The microfilm is brittle and scratched from years of use. But you can still make out the same words that Park City residents pored over that Saturday in November 1905.

The Park Record fit a lot into its four weekly pages. That week the first three pages contained no less than 90 separate editorial items, recounting everything from the number of tardies in the local schools to the score of the “socker football” game between Park City and Salt Lake City, as well as another 37 personal items.

On page three, there’s a story about a bizarre death in the Ontario mine. Andrew Nystrom, 37 years old to the day, drowned, yes, drowned, when he was overcome by “foul air” in the Ontario drain tunnel and fell into the flowing water.

That week, you learn, there’s a lively debate going on over a plan to beef up the city fire department. “Safeguard Main Street and you need fear no more such holocausts as many of us have suffered in the past,” says a letter to the editor, “for nowhere in our city is there that congestion of wooden buildings as on this street.”

Elsewhere you read that plasterers are putting the finishing touches on the new home of the Utah Independent Telephone Company. (Today, the building is the home of the No Name Saloon.)

As a slice of local history, it’s an intriguing document. Yet it’s only one issue of about 7,000 published since the newspaper began in February 1880.

Earlier this year, The Park Record celebrated its 125th anniversary. In that stretch of time, the paper has never missed an issue, an achievement unmatched in Utah weekly journalism.

Let’s put that in context: The production of your typical daily newspaper involves hundreds of people. If a few call in sick, it’s no big deal. But in many small-town weeklies, a handful of people carry the load. The publisher, editor and advertising manager may be the same person. Can’t you imagine the temptation of saying, just once in a while, “It’s a slow news week. Let’s just skip this issue. No one will notice?”

Producing a small-town weekly newspaper is a demanding, no, consuming job. You are expected to follow, understand and analyze all the important issues of the day. You walk a fine line between expressing your opinion, avoiding libel suits and alienating advertisers. You go home, after putting another issue “to bed,” feeling both relief and dread, knowing that your blunders will be out there for everyone to see. And if you divide the money you make by the number of hours you work, well, you don’t ever do that.

Following this routine every week for five or ten years makes you a survivor. Following it every week for 63 years makes you a legend.
Almost 58 years after his death, Samuel LePage Raddon still has as much tenure as editor and publisher of The Park Record as everyone else combined. Yet it was more than longevity that made him a shoo-in for the Utah Newspaper Hall of Fame. Raddon was eloquent, prolific, opinionated and tenacious. His never-say-die attitude helped lead this volatile mining camp through several boom-and-bust cycles and the destruction of the entire business district in a devastating fire. And, get this, journalism majors, he did it without a day of formal education.

A native of the Isle of Guernsey in the English Channel, Sam Raddon emigrated to America with his family in 1867. His father was an early convert to the Mormon Church but had already left the fold by the time of his arrival in Salt Lake City. Without the support of the church membership, the Raddons struggled. At the age of nine, Sam went to work in a furniture store.

By April 1871, 12-year-old Sam Raddon was delivering newspapers for a new Salt Lake City daily, the Salt Lake Tribune. Before long, he was working as a “printer’s devil,” basically, an errand boy, in the newspaper’s composing room.

In the days before mechanical typesetting, every character in every story was set by hand, plucked individually from wooden type cases divided into compartments. Young Sam started to learn the “boxes” and was soon able to set type. He became what was known as a compositor.
Sam had been a compositor for several years when, in February 1880, Tribune management helped another of its employees, James Schupbach, start a weekly paper in Park City.

“The Park Mining Record made its appearance on Sunday morning in that wide-awake camp,” the Tribune told its readers on February 10. “It is a handsome seven column journal well filled with mining, local and general news and has a substantial, thrifty appearance. Bro. Shupbach has done the camp proud and is there to stay, to grow with its growth and increase with its richness.”

In a 1942 letter to his son, Sam Raddon Jr., Sam recalls how he came to Park City that summer and the following three summers to work on The Record “as a sort of vacation from night work, still holding my position on the Tribune.” A sort of vacation?

As it turned out, “Bro. Schupbach” didn’t stick around to do “the camp proud.” But Sam Raddon did. In 1884, he turned his “vacation” into a full-time job, entering a partnership with J.J. Buser, who was then editing the paper. When Buser retired a year later, Raddon and a new partner purchased the plant on borrowed money “and, since that time,” he wrote in 1942, “the establishment has been under a Raddon management.”

In his stories, Sam Raddon comes across as a perceptive, passionate, ubiquitous observer of the local scene. He made no pretense about putting news, opinion and advertising into separate compartments. He was an unabashed promoter of local business, especially mining.

In a town populated with many European immigrants, Raddon, himself an immigrant, seemed to welcome the cultural diversity. However, at least in his early years at the paper, he had no affection for immigrants from across the Pacific. A wish list published in May 1886 included this entry:

“WHAT WE WOULD LIKE TO SEE ... All the Chinese made to leave Park City and their places supplied by competent and worthy white men.” Later that year, the paper called for all Chinese laundries to be moved off Main Street and into “Chinatown” (where the Swede Alley parking structures now stand).

Another favorite target of The Park Record of that era was the Mormon Church. The paper prefaced an 1886 story about the formation of a local Mormon ward with the headline: “A Branch of the Octopus is Planted in Our Midst.”

However, Sam Raddon’s granddaughter, Dixie Hethke, who grew up in the Raddon family home on Park Avenue, says these stories don’t represent the man she knew. She recalls a close relationship between her grandfather and a Chinese family that ran a café in Park City.

“He did have some things to say about the Mormon Church,” she acknowledges. “(But) I think he gets a little bad rap in some of it. He was not against the Mormon people, as some of these Records would make you think, but he was against some of their practices and their beliefs.”

If ever Raddon had a reason to skip an issue of the paper, it came in June 1898 when fire gutted the entire Main Street business district, roughly 200 buildings, including The Park Record office. Gone was the precious printing plant he had borrowed money to buy.

It may have been a disaster, but it was also the story of a lifetime. Raddon set up a tent in the ashes of the old newspaper office and arranged to use the printing presses of the Salt Lake Herald until he could replace his own. The Park Record of June 25 carried a riveting account of the blaze under the headline, “PARK CITY’S AWFUL FIRE.”

Although many people doubted Park City’s ability to rise from the embers, Sam Raddon wasn’t one of them. Work on a new Park Record building began on July 4 and was finished 12 days later. By the end of 1898, 63 new buildings were standing in the burned-out district.

Sam Raddon retired from active journalism in 1943 and turned over the paper to his son, LePage. However, he continued to write a column for the paper until shortly before his death in January 1948.

The Park Record remained in the Raddon family for another eight years. LePage died in February 1956, having outlived his father by only eight years, and his widow sold the paper two months later. The new publisher, who already owned two other regional weeklies, the Morgan County News and the Summit County Bee, moved the printing plant to Morgan. The 60-year-old wooden building, creaking under the weight of ice and snow, was torn down in the spring of 1958.

The sale of The Park Record came at perhaps the bleakest time in Park City’s history. The major mines were closed. People were moving away in droves, leaving their empty houses behind. The newspaper’s biggest issue each year commemorated not the start of the Christmas shopping season but the publication of the delinquent tax notices. To cut costs, the new owner combined The Park Record and the Summit County Bee in a single issue for several years.

Both Park City and The Park Record have changed dramatically in the last 50 years. The town’s resurrection began in 1963 with the opening of what is now the Park City Mountain Resort. The Park Record, rejuvenated by a lively rivalry with a competing paper beginning in the mid-1970s, is now the standard by which all other Utah weeklies are judged. (Technically, it’s no longer a weekly. It has published twice a week since the spring of 1996.) An eight-person editorial staff under the steady hand of Nan Chalat-Noaker provides in-depth coverage of Park City and surrounding areas that would make Sam Raddon envious.

Today’s leadership has given the paper a community presence that rivals the Raddon era. Owner Dean Singleton’s Media NewsGroup (which also owns the Salt Lake Tribune) provides the stability and the resources of a large organization. Chalat-Noaker, a veteran of 28 years in Park City journalism, has guided the editorial staff since 1996. Andy Bernhard recently celebrated his 18th anniversary as publisher.
So that means he’ll catch up to Sam Raddon, oh, around the year 2050.

In the 1970s and 1980s, David Hampshire edited four different weekly newspapers in Maine and Utah, including The Park Record. He says he missed Raddon’s record at The Record by only about 60 years.