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Alfred and ‘the kindhearted editor’ By Bill Miller Jun 12, 2022 12:30 PM A A Alfred Howlett was just about through. He said he was just getting too old and it was time to quit. But others were telling a different story. Alfred Cobb Howlett had been a newspaper columnist, reporting Eagle Point marriages, deaths and all important happenings of the day — what the Oregonian newspaper once said was “sort of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of his hometown.” Born in Maine in 1832 to Methodist minister James Howlett and his wife, Mary Cobb, Alfred accompanied his father to the California gold fields in 1849. Alfred followed his father’s footsteps and, in 1859, the Methodist Episcopal Church assigned him to a preaching circuit in Northern California. When not riding the circuit, Alfred farmed and tried a little mining. In 1861, the church sent him to Oregon, where he rode the Eugene Circuit for two years before being sent north to Oregon City. There, in 1863, he married Sarah Elizabeth Cooke. Sarah was 4 years old when she came across the Oregon Trail with her family in 1852. After their marriage, they spent two years between Jacksonville and Grants Pass, before being sent back to California, where they both taught school in Yreka. They returned to Southern Oregon for good in about 1865. Still conducting weddings, funerals and Sunday church services, Alfred was already writing and sending articles to newspapers and magazines throughout Oregon. When Medford’s first newspaper, The Monitor, went to press in 1885, Alfred was occasionally on its pages. But it was the arrival of the Medford Mail newspaper in 1892 that established Alfred, now known as A.C. Howlett, as a valley favorite. His weekly column, “Eagle Point Eaglets,” was eagerly read for the next 32 years. Of the couple’s 13 children, six had died before 1900, five in less than two weeks during the 1881 diphtheria epidemic. In 1900, they bought a small home across Little Butte Creek from the flour mill and settled in. By the end of 1901, Alfred enlarged the house and advertised a new hotel, The Sunnyside, named because it sat on the sunny side (south) of the creek. While Alfred continued his church work, Sarah ran the hotel and served dinners, doing all the cooking herself. In 1909, when the Medford Mail merged with the Medford Daily Tribune, managed and owned by George Putnam, Alfred’s newspaper column smoothly moved to the new Medford Mail Tribune. Trouble came in 1923 when Alfred told readers he had thought to stop writing his column at the end of January. “When it comes to a man of my age, tramping over our town … I will have to throw up the sponge and quit. … I don’t want to do that, for that kindhearted editor, who always meets me with a smile might not like that.” The other side of the story came out much later. Because an irritated Alfred noticed that suddenly someone was cutting, rearranging and rewording all of his columns, he quit. George Putnam, the “kindhearted editor,” asked Alfred what was wrong and, with the answer, went to the newspaper composing room and was told, “grammar and composing was not up to standard, and much of the column was not important.” Putnam said he didn’t give a hoot how it was written, but ordered it all put in the paper just as it was. Alfred continued his columns until just a week before he died in 1924. Sarah continued to manage the hotel until her passing in 1936. “It wasn’t all sadness and hardship in those days,” she said. “We had our jolly times too.” Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at [email protected].