Read about John Buchner, Linfield Class of 1963 member

John Buchner (John Edwin Buchner) of Albany, Oregon, is a member of the Linfield Class of 1963, and a 1959 grad of Albany Union High School. (He transferred from Linfield and graduated in 1963 with a University of Oregon bachelor of science degree in journalism.) His activities while a student at Linfield included serving as Linfield Athletics sports information director during the 1960-1961 academic year. He also was a sports reporter (sometimes sports photo photographer) for the McMinnville News-Register newspaper. His time with the N-R was when Paul Durham, Linfield football coach and athletic director, was the newspaper's sports editor and sports columnist.  John and his wife, Kitty Buchner, are Linfield sports fans and frequently attend Linfield home football games. They are also Oregon State University Beavers sports fans.

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Former Albany Democrat-Herald publisher John Buchner recalls covering Apollo training program in Oregon

By ANTHONY RIMEL 
Corvallis Gazette-Times 
July 19, 2019

Since 1971, a tiny chip of Oregon lava rock has sat on the moon — a tribute to the role Oregon played in helping prepare Apollo astronauts to walk on the lunar surface.

Astronauts visited Oregon in 1964 and 1966 to train in pressure suits on lava fields, which NASA scientists believed had similar terrain to the moon's surface, similarities that earned Oregon the nickname “Moon Country.”

One of those training missions inspired astronaut James Irwin to bring a piece of Oregon rock with him on the Apollo 15 mission.

John Buchner, who retired as the Democrat-Herald’s publisher in 2000 after more than 30 years with the paper, covered the first of those visits, in late August 1964.

Buchner, an Albany native who was working as a reporter for the Bend Bulletin at the time, said he was hired as a freelancer to cover the visit for the D-H because of his hometown connection.

“It was pretty exciting to have these people come to the area,” said Buchner, now 77 and still an Albany resident.

Although he couldn’t recall if he got to see any of the training firsthand, he did remember covering press conferences with the visit’s small team, including NASA engineers and astronaut R. Walter Cunningham, who was later part of the crew of Apollo 7, the first of the manned Apollo missions, in 1968.

“They were impressive individuals. Bend at that time was a small town in the middle of nowhere," Buchner said. "It was really exciting they were here.”

Then only a couple of years out of the University of Oregon, Buchner said he didn’t know if the people there fully understood the historical impact of the occasion.

“These were the people that were plotting the future,” he said.

Buchner’s first story on the visit, which ran in the Aug. 25, 1964, edition of the Democrat-Herald, said NASA officials chose Oregon for the testing because of the availability of different types of lava fields, the climate and the proximity of an airfield in Klamath Falls to testing sites.

“The space scientists wanted as cool a climate as possible, which ruled out similar lava flows in New Mexico and Southern California. Extreme heat would make spacesuit work difficult,” Buchner wrote.

He also quoted test director Earl LeFevers on the purpose of the tests: “to determine the capabilities of pressure-suited individuals to perform lunar-related tasks on terrain similar to that expected to be encountered on the moon.”

Buchner wrote that the tests were designed to measure how long it would take astronauts to perform tasks and determine what safety devices would be needed to protect them.

“The pressurized suits worn today by Cunningham and the two engineers are not the ones that will be used on the 1969 scheduled moon landing. The suits for the moon trip will be designed in part from information gathered here.”

Buchner said that first day of testing took place just west of McKenzie Pass in Lane County. That area of the old McKenzie Highway, near the Dee Wright Observatory, is just outside the southeast edge of Linn County.

In Buchner’s second article on the visit, dated Aug. 26, 1964, he quotes Cunningham talking about a fall he had trying to walk a 47% slope on a lava field.

“Cunningham said the main reason for the difficulty was that his pressurized suit was not designed for use on lava and his visor kept fogging, which blocked his vision.”

Buchner noted the second day of testing was on pumice fields near Gilchrist.

In his final story on the visit, Buchner wrote that Cunningham would be flying out after the third day of testing on obsidian flows in the Newberry Crater, leaving the fourth and final day of testing to the engineers.

Buchner quoted Cunningham as being interested in being the first man on the moon, but reported Cunningham acknowledged that there were 29 other “tried and true” astronauts just as interested.

“I don’t go around dwelling on the thought. I’ve got many other things on my mind anyway,” Cunningham said.

When the astronauts visited the second time, in late July 1966, they came with a larger group of 35 people, including 22 astronauts, but the D-H noted the visit only with short United Press International wire stories.

Buchner said by the time of that visit, he had moved on from the Bulletin and wasn’t available to cover the visit freelance for the D-H.

The astronaut trainings in Oregon are the subject of an ongoing exhibition titled “Moon Country” at the High Desert Museum, near Bend.

Heidi Hagemeier, director of communications for the museum, said the exhibit contains photographs of the visit and the piece of Oregon lava rock from which the piece taken to the moon was chipped.

Hagemeier said the exhibit also tells the story of how that chip of Oregon rock ended up on the moon — the astronaut James Irwin met Bend resident Floyd Watson during the visit and the two struck up a friendship. Watson eventually suggested Irwin take an Oregon rock piece to the moon, she said, and didn’t hear anything back until months after the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, when Irwin sent Watson a photo with the bit of lava rock on the moon circled in ink.

She said the photos of the visit are also special because they show astronauts “essentially in our back yard.”

“It really is remarkable if you think about it,” she said. “Bend at the time had a population of about 12,000. The whole nation was watching at that time.”

“Moon Country” will be exhibited at the museum until Nov. 10. Visit https://highdesertmuseum.org/moon-country/ for more information about the exhibit and the museum.

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Retired publisher John Buchner recalls the paper's biggest years

By Jennifer Moody
Albany Democrat-Herald 
March 28, 2016

In his 30 years with the paper, editor and publisher John Buchner brought it from mechanical to digital; from manual typewriters to computers to the Internet.

Buchner served as executive editor for the Albany Democrat-Herald for 10 years, general manager for another 10 and finally publisher and chief operating officer for 10 more.

(After that, he stayed on a time as Democrat-Herald editor emeritus.)

Cameras brought him into the business.

The Albany native received his first professional newspaper experience in high school. He belonged to the Riverside Camera Club, a 4-H group, and its leader, Merrill Jones, was a D-H photographer. In 1958 or ’59, Buchner said, Jones invited the 17-year-old to answer phones on the sports desk.

He also took pictures at various Friday night games. “They’d send me out to Lebanon, Sweet Home, Halsey, for the first half, and I would shoot, and then I ran in and took calls, and the sports editor went to the Albany game,” he recalled.

In those days, the paper was on Second Avenue and the darkroom was underneath the furniture building next door, through the basement where the press was.

Buchner did that job through the summer and a full year afterward, then went to Linfield College, where at first, he planned to study to be a social studies teacher. Then a fellow who’d been the photographer for the college’s sports teams graduated and Buchner stepped into the role. “And it was fun,” he said.

He transferred to the University of Oregon and majored in journalism. After graduation, he tried to get his D-H job back, but with no openings to pursue, he ended up applying elsewhere.

He held a reporting and photographer job for the Ashland Daily Tidings and later became a city editor for the Bulletin in Bend. The Bend owner helped him purchase the Stayton Mail with Frank Crow, where Buchner, at age 23, was editor, photographer, reporter, delivery boy, rack stuffer, check signer and janitor as well as part owner.

“One day a week I slept in because of exhaustion,” he told audiences at a men’s breakfast years later.

After two years, Buchner had the opportunity to go to the La Grande Observer to be the editor. A couple of years after that, he decided it was time to try a bigger market.

He wrote 25 letters to various papers and got three offers: part-time jobs at the Los Angeles Herald and from a paper in North Carolina, and a full-time offer as a copy editor for the Des Moines Register. He took the full-time job, but hadn’t even been there a year when Glenn Cushman, who had been hired in Albany from Bend, called him and asked, “Want to be executive editor of your hometown daily?”

When Buchner returned to Albany in 1968, the paper had just converted from hot lead to offset printing and cold type. The transition time was lagging, equipment kept breaking down, the presses ran late and circulation was sinking. It was, as Buchner remembered it, a great opportunity: “Anything you did, pretty much, was an improvement.”

Right away he was sent to Columbia University, to the American Press Institute, where he came back with some great ideas to improve circulation. One was to change what had been known as the Society or Women’s page to “People,” a full features section front that allowed more use of photography and longer features on education, food, entertainment, religion and government.

Another was to get the paper back on a reliable schedule, which Buchner helped do by getting a routine training schedule. Drawing on his photojournalist days, Buchner also believed photos drove circulation as much as news did. He emphasized large photos and the use of color.

“We added a color deck to the press during the ‘70s so we could have 4-color on the front and back page of the two sections,” he recalled. “Later, when I was publisher and Lee Enterprises purchased the D-H, corporate made the decision to move all Corvallis production to Albany and that’s when units from the Corvallis press were moved to Albany and added to the existing D-H press. Color was then possible on other pages and more pages could be printed at the same time.”

In Buchner’s early days as editor, the idea was to have one editorial staff member for every 1,000 papers in circulation. With the encouragement of publisher Glenn Cushman, Buchner increased hiring, taking the staff from about a dozen reporters and editors to 20 between 1970 and 1980.

The paper became a conduit for young, talented journalists statewide. “People wanted to work here,” Buchner recalled. “We were using color; trendy things they were learning about in school. It was a fun time, and we were growing, which allowed you to do those things.”

Circulation grew from roughly 12,000 in 1968 to close to 22,000 by the time Buchner retired. The town was in growth mode, which helped, he said, as did a door-to-door sales campaign. Fred Meyer, Bi-Mart and Rubenstein’s Furniture Store were just coming in, which helped drive advertising.

In 1972, the paper won the trophy for general excellence from the Oregon Newspaper Publisher’s Association. That was a particularly big triumph because in those days, the winner was not chosen from a size division but from every daily newspaper in the state.

The Democrat-Herald began acquiring other publications: the News-Times in Newport, the Outlook in Gresham, and the Nickel Ads. Cushman was away a lot, and needed someone on site to manage the business side of things. In 1978, Buchner became general manager.

When Capital Cities Inc. bought the paper, it was primarily a broadcasting company and more or less left the publications to do their own thing as long as they were making money.

In 1990, the Democrat-Herald was also a leader in promoting newspaper recycling. CapCities honored the paper’s efforts with a headline in its industry publication that year, “Resolve to recycle.”

The advent of the Internet meant the paper would have to change. The Democrat-Herald hired its first webmaster, Jim Magruder, in 1996, and began offering a World Wide Web edition, Mid-Valley OnLine, in 1997.

Nobody saw the Internet as a mortal wound – yet. Buchner acknowledged he could see it made print less relevant, but Albany was still well away from the Portland television market and not really part of the Eugene area, either.

“My view was we had a niche and we were going to survive a lot longer,” he said. “The geography was in our favor.”

The city changed a great deal in the years Buchner was with the paper. The opening of the Lyon Street Bridge in 1973 changed the way people traveled. The opening of South Albany High School in 1970 and the merger of the local elementary districts with their high schools in 1979 changed the geography of education. The arrival of Heritage Mall in 1988 changed the way residents shopped.

Buchner was at the paper when Ralph Miller came to Oregon State University as the basketball coach in 1970, when field-burning caused a massive pileup on Interstate 5 and forever changed the grass seed industry, when St. Mary’s Church burned in an arson fire in 1989.

He particularly remembers the paper’s coverage of the 1982 recall campaign for a Linn County commissioner who had been less than truthful about her background. She accused the paper of being a “yellow rag.”

“So we had a yellow ribbon party,” he said, chuckling.

Throughout all of it, Buchner has held to the philosophy that newspapers play an essential role in a community: to provide accurate information about the community to its public, and to provide a forum for people with different ideas about how things should go.

“I like the (Eugene) Register-Guard slogan,” he said: “‘A citizen of its community.’ To be relevant, you need to be. I never wanted to lose sight of that.”

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