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.
…
Former Albany Democrat-Herald publisher John Buchner recalls
covering Apollo training program in Oregon
By ANTHONY RIMEL
Corvallis Gazette-Times
July 19, 2019
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.
::::
Retired publisher John Buchner recalls the paper's biggest
years
By Jennifer Moody, Albany Democrat-Herald, March 28, 2016, with additional information added by Wildcatville in 2024
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 for three years attended Linfield College, where at first, he planned to study
to be a social studies teacher. Then Hal Cowan, 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 from Linfield to the University of Oregon and majored in
journalism. After graduation from the UO in 1963, 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 daily newspaper in
Bend.
In 1964, Bend newspaper owner Robert W. Chandler helped him purchase the
Stayton Mail weekly newspaper with Frank Crow. At the time 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 (working for the Stayton paper) I slept in because of exhaustion,” he told
audiences at a men’s breakfast years later.
The purchase involved Lawrence E. Spraker, Mail editor/publisher
since 1949, selling the 70-year-old Stayton newspaper to the North Santiam
Publishing Co. with Crow as president, Buchner, vice president and Chandler,
secretary-treasurer. Nancy Renne Chandler, wife of Chandler, was a silent
partner.
(See FOOTNOTE about the Chandlers.)
Crow, a Linfield classmate of Buchner, graduated from Linfield in 1962. His background included working in the Seattle Times advertising department.
==> For a time, Linfield presented Buchner-Crow Award for outstanding work in journalism by students working on the Linfield student newspaper and yearbook. According to an Oregon Statesman (Salem) story in 1966, the award was “given by two Linfield alumni who are now in the newspaper business in Stayton, John Buchner and Frank Crow.”
After two years in Stayton, 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.”
FOOTNOTE:
Nancy Jane Renne Chandler and Robert Wilbur Chadler were born respectively in Sacramento, Calif. (Oct. 23, 1921) and Marysville (May 12, 1921.)
She grew up in East Nicolaus, Calif., and he near Yuba City, Calif. The two cities in California’s Sutter County are about 20 miles apart.
Both died in Bend, she at age 66 on Feb. 22, 1988, and he on July 16, 1996, at age 75.
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