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[Elbert Bede, editor of the Cottage Grove Sentinel and president of the Oregon State Editorial Association, contributes an article on his summer and fall vacation trips to Minnesota. Written in his well-known light vein, the article contains also some heavier stuff of value to Oregon newspapermen.]

I HAVE been asked to write a few words about my recent extended motor trip to the east and I'm not to be confined to strictly newspaper stuff.

It occurs to me that this is a request never made of a country editor 10 or 15 years ago. Country editors didn't at that time take extended motor trips about which to write. Gas couldn't be bought with vegetables taken in on subscription, and motor cars couldn't be secured by the simple method of trading in a little advertising space. Neither can they now, which indicates to me the wonderful progress in the newspaper business in Oregon during the brief space of years I have been a resident here, for many of the boys ride around in their highpowered benzine buggies and few there are who haven't at least a lizzie on the pay roll.

Wherever I go I endeavor to use my eyes a habit cultivated years before the short-skirted flapper came into beingand the result of my observations in the east-quite aside from mental notations as to the stockier build of the Oregon flappers-was to the effect that middle western papers do not come up to Oregon papers, either typographically or editorially.

In the Minnesota town where for a number of years I made my home while incubating ideas as to how I would set the world afire when I got to swinging an editorial pen of my own, I found at least one of the papers setting their ads just as they were set 20 years ago and apparently with the same type that had done yeoman service even before I decided that there were greener fields. The other paper had progressed some in younger hands, but it was not yet above cutting off at the waist-line a picture which came in the boiler plate and did not fit the column, running the head, shoulders and waist at the bottom of one column and the remainder of the picture at the top of the next column. In other offices where I had served time I found the same type that I had handled as a tyro, and tailor-made editorials on one of these papers were coming from a source that was willing to take advertising space for its services. The same ad that paid for this service now was doing duty at the same stand two decades ago.

There are, of course, many splendid country newspapers in these states, but I returned to Oregon convinced that the Oregon newspaper boys are the livest, the most progressive and the best off financially of any in the world. I found no dailies in any of the states I visited which compare with the metropolitan papers of Oregon.

There must be an explanation for this condition, and mine is that the livest and the most energetic from the eastern states have come to Oregon, while those who weren't alive couldn't come and thus we have the cream of the earth.

I greatly enjoyed digging up the files in the shops where I once had done some of the editorial work. I hardly recognized some of the stuff I once wrote. I don't wish to do any bragging, but I feel that I have progressed some myself since those days that are but a memory. Possibly it was the pall that my editorials cast upon the communities where I once operated which explains why some of the