Salem Weekly, our city's much-beloved (and for some conservatives, much-hated) alternative newspaper that published from April 2003 to October 2018 still lives on in a certain sense -- thanks to Jim Scheppke, a retired librarian who led an effort to have almost all of the Salem Weekly issues professionally bound, then donated to the Willamette Heritage Center, where they can be reviewed by the public.
Yesterday afternoon some people with ties to Salem Weekly and the binding project met at the Willamette Heritage Center to admire the volumes. We chatted about how much Salem Weekly meant to us, expressing thanks to Scheppke and A.P. Walther, the Salem Weekly publisher, for preserving the issues with the help of some donations from Mark Wigg and me.
Jim Scheppke and A.P. Walther
We had to wear archival gloves while thumbing through the Salem Weekly issues. They can be viewed by anyone. All you have to do is contact Kylie Pine, Curator of the Willamette Heritage Center: 503-585-7012, [email protected]
Kylie Pine (standing)
Helen Caswell, who died fairly recently after a bout with cancer, got much praise at yesterday's gathering. Helen wrote so many stories for Salem Weekly, she used at least four pseudonyms. She and Walther were the beating heart of Salem Weekly. Their hard work and dedication will aways be remembered by everybody who knows how much the paper contributed to Salem.
I wrote a Strange Up Salem column for Salem Weekly from May 2013 to May 2015. They're available in a Hinessight blog post, "Here's all of my Strange Up Salem columns." Naturally I perused the issue where a column first appeared, which merited a cover image.
Brian Hines
Until yesterday I didn't know who had drawn the hand holding a pen, which has a sort of nicely creepy Edgar Allen Poe feel to it. Walther told me that Sarah Torres drew the image, which wasn't used for its initial purpose, then was retrieved by Walther for the cover, which he designed.
Here's a closeup of the cover. My first column was called "I Know What You Want." It started with:
At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach.
What I’m talking about is a stranger Salem. Meaning, a city with sights, sounds, people, places, and other delights that make us go ooh, ah, and give me more rather than ho-hum, so lame.
On November 23, 2018 I wrote a blog post, "Salem Weekly closes down. Sad day for our town." For sure. The Statesman Journal is a poor excuse for a hometown paper: few local stories, no letters to the editor, no opinion section.
Wikipedia's Salem Weekly page describes how the publication got started, which originally was called Salem Monthly.
The Salem Monthly traces its origins to a coffee house in downtown Salem, Oregon known as the Coffee House Cafe. Dating back to the mid-1990s, the Coffee House Cafe served as a popular meeting place and hangout for Salem's youth culture. In its later years of operation, the cafe began publishing a newsletter to engage customers in Salem's community and cultural affairs. Inspired by the reaction to the cafe's newsletter, cafe owner A.P. Walther decided to start up a publishing operation for an alternative newspaper in Salem, Oregon.
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