Editor William Dean Singleton Enterprise Archive Photo

1972-1989 

Other changes were also in store for the early 1970s.  For the first time in 27 years, the town again had competing newspapers after William Dean Singleton launched The Clarendon Press on May 18, 1972.

The new paper brought with it one of the biggest changes the printing business had seen since Joe Warren had introduced the Linotype more than half a century earlier. Hot metal type was a thing of the past. The Clarendon Press set “cold type” using Compugraphic equipment which exposed the image of each letter on a reel of photographic paper. The paper strips were then developed in a darkroom process, and wax guns were then used to paste down the columns.

Singleton had established the Press through a partnership with Carol Koch and Ed Eakin, who owned the Quanah Tribune-Chief. As a result, printing for the Press was done primarily in Quanah, although it was occasionally printed at Nortex Printing in Wichita Falls. Both plants used the offset method.

In November 1974, George Wayne and Ruby Dell Estlack sold The Donley County Leader & The Clarendon News to Singleton. Singleton, then running the Azle, Texas, newspaper, attempted to publish two papers a week for a time in Clarendon under the direction of editor/publisher Jerry Sparks. The Press came out on Thursday, and The Donley County Leader & The Clarendon News was published on Sunday. The bi-weekly schedule was short lived. The final Sunday issue of the Leader was published on March 2, 1975, and The Donley County Leader & The Clarendon News was merged with The Clarendon Press for Thursday publication.

By 1976, ownership of the paper changed again with the dissolution of the Singleton- Eakin-Koch partnership. Koch and Eakin became sole owners of the Press. Singleton kept the Azle News, and would eventually go on to bigger papers. Today, he is the publisher of The Denver (Colorado) Post and is the CEO of MediaNews Group, which owns dozens of papers. In 2001, he was named the “Publisher of the Year” by the industry magazine Editor & Publisher.

In Clarendon, editors continued to serve short terms after Koch and Eakin became sole owners. Bob Litton was on the job in 1977, followed by Ruth Hancock in late 1977 and early 1978. In 1978, Clarendon marked its 100th anniversary of its establishment, and the Press was there to document the celebration with Jeanice Weatherly as editor and Helen Woody, who had started in 1972 as a typesetter, as general manager.  The two ladies and their staff published a three-section, 44-page special edition to document the history of the community in June of that year.

Helen Woody purchased The Clarendon Press, The Donley County Leader, and The Clarendon News from Eakin and Koch on August 1, 1978. The paper was then back under local ownership, and printing operations were moved back to Oxbow Printing in Childress. 

Woody’s biggest accomplishment as editor came in 1982 when Donley County celebrated its 100th anniversary. In addition to weekly historical articles leading up to the celebration, Woody and her staff put together a massive 192-page tabloid special centennial edition. The project included reprints from old newspapers, rare photographs, and newly penned family and subject histories. It remains one the most comprehensive local histories produced about Donley County.

Woody and her husband, J.C., were also responsible for giving the paper a new home. In June 1983, they moved The Clarendon Press into a building J.C. constructed, and the paper is still that location today at 105 S. Kearney Street.

The eight-column format first adopted by the Leader in 1968 came to an end during Woody’s tenure with the advent of the Standard Advertising Unit (SAU) in 1984. The SAU was designed by the American Newspaper Publishing Association to standardize broadsheet column widths and make the medium more attractive to national advertisers. The majority of broadsheet newspapers nationwide adopted the SAU by 1985. The Clarendon Press adopted it on July 5, 1985, and it remains in use at the paper in 2003.

1990-1996 

By the late 1980s, much of the newspaper industry was moving more and more to computers. Woody contacted a local man to assist her in transitioning the Press to the computer age. Robert C. Williams helped set up the newspaper’s subscription list on a PC database in April 1988, and four months later it was announced that Woody was selling out to him. Woody stayed with the paper until the sale of The Clarendon Press, The Donley County Leader, and The Clarendon News became final in January 1989. She then helped the community publish a 448-page Donley County History before moving to Nevada to retire.

Williams ended the reign of the Compugraphic in Clarendon and brought typesetting truly into the digital age with PC computers running Ventura publishing software. Most newspapers were running – and still run – Macintosh computers. The Clarendon Press was one of the first papers in the Panhandle region to use PC computers.

A year after taking ownership, Williams renamed the paper The Clarendon News (Series Three) on January 4, 1990, citing surveys which said tourists placed historical interests at the top of their list of values.

Williams also made another change in the production of the paper when he left the Oxbow plant in Childress and began having the paper printed at Palo Duro Offset Printing in Canyon in 1993. The new printers produced a much cleaner newspaper using a Goss Community press and a 3M Pyrofax Deadliner positive plate-making system.

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