The West Old & New Vol. III Issue II February 2014 | Page 11

Thanks for the Memories
Edna B.
By Deanne Kendrick

In 1950, when I was twelve years old, I was trilled to get my first steady job, tht
of folding the local weekly newspaper. And, though I didn't know it when I was
hired, the job came with a huge bonus; Edna B. She was the owner, editor and
publisher of the paper, "The Camas-Hot Springs Exchange," and she was a force
to be reckoned with. Even to my shallow, self-absorbed adolescent mind she
stood out as an amazing person. Publishing the paper singlehandedly would have
been a daunting task for anyone, and Edna was already sixty-seven when I started
working for her. She gathered the news, wrote articles, a weekly Ednatorial, sold
the advertising, did the lay-out, and typed it all on an old hot-lead linotype, where
I believe, the print appears backwards as you type. The linotype machine would
balk, spit, jam and otherwise cause her grief until she could get it running again.
She hoisted huge heavy reams of blank newsprint onto a high feeder platform on
the big, noisy press; then haul the printed newspapers to my folding station. She
also delivered the issues to all points of sale, and mailed out the copies to the rural subscribers, tightly rolled and wrapped in brown paper. She did this for thirtyfive years.
The paper was called the Camas-Hot Springs Exchange because at the time of it's
inception, Camas, where Edna and my family lived, had been the original town,
with the nearby community of Hot Springs developing later. The paper was professional and impressive with a minimum of four
pages, sometime more, on regular-sized newsprint. During her thirty-five years as a publisher, she was also the postmistress of
Camas and had gas pumps and a dry-goods store. What a woman!
Edna was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. She was born in and around Jefferson, Missouri on November 4, 1882. Her
father, William Gannaway, had lost everything in the Civil War, including his plantation and slaves. He moved the family to Jefferson City, Missouri after the 'unpleasantness', where Edna and her two siblings were raised. He died when Edna was eighteen.
She attended a Normal College, as teaching colleges were called at the time, where she endured financial hardships, and told me of
going through college with only one dress.
In 1909, she read in a local paper that the Flathead Indian Reservation was being opened for homesteading, and she submitted )