Press celebrates 130th birthday — with gratitude

Happy birthday, Ironwood Athletic Club/PEAK Health and Wellness Centers.

When you’ve finished blowing out those 40 well-earned candles, call the fire marshal and stand back. A 130-candle conflagration is imminent.

Today is the 130th anniversary of the Coeur d’Alene Press. As columnist Dave Oliveria noted Friday, Feb. 20, 1892, marked the birth of this community’s newspaper. Back then it was a weekly. Founder and longtime editor Joseph T. Scott, operating from a rented room in the Wiggett building downtown, converted the weekly to daily in 1906.

It’s possible The Press is the longest continually operating business in Coeur d’Alene — or at worst, a mighty close second. Hecla Mining Company was founded Oct. 14, 1891, in Burke, Idaho, and reportedly made CDA its headquarters in early 1892. Whoever opened shop first, we can’t think of a better or a more appropriate partner to stake original business claims to this incredible slice of Earth.

Less than two years after Idaho achieved statehood, the Coeur d’Alene Press started reporting what was happening near and far. Mr. Scott has been dead for more than a century, and there’s nobody alive who can reflect upon the early years of Press publication. Yet area libraries and places of higher learning have extensive archives so you can look for yourself. The day will arrive, perhaps sooner than later, when all surviving issues of the newspaper will be digitized and preserved into perpetuity.

With the internet enabling almost instantaneous dissemination of news across the globe, we can’t help but look at all the candles on The Press cake and harken back to a time the late, great Duane B. Hagadone used to fondly recall. Hagadone said staff would tape pages of the paper, hot off the press, in the downtown newspaper office’s front window. He said crowds would gather to be the first to learn what was going on not just locally, but around the world.

“All I know is what I read in the papers,” Will Rogers once said, and Robert Singletary would agree with him. Singletary, this region’s crowned prince of local history, readily admits that what he knows about Coeur d’Alene’s past came from the pages of the Coeur d’Alene Press.

Indispensable? That’s a matter of opinion, of course. But like every other community newspaper in this country, The Press aspires to be a source of important information, rapidly but accurately relayed so citizens can make informed decisions that will improve their lives and help them understand their surroundings on a deeper and more meaningful level.

To all those who paved the way for this newspaper to survive and sometimes even thrive over the past 13 decades, we owe a debt of gratitude.

And to each and every one of you supporting The Press today, thanks for making it more likely it will serve the region for at least another 130 years.