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Memo founder passes; community journalism important to Pry

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Memo founder passes; community journalism important to Pry

Thomas Pry, 1940 to 2011

MILES VANCE
After hospitalization for an infection, Tom Pry - co-owner with Marcia Pry of Pry Publishing and founder of the Mid-county Memo - unexpectedly passed away in January in Mena, Ark. where he had been living. He was 70 years old.

Tom Pry was born 1940 in Donavan, Mo., the son of an Air Force officer who eventually settled in California. His first newspaper job was reporting for the Sacramento Bee. Tom met future wife, Marcia Carp, at a journalism class in Fresno before the two of them moved to Oregon in 1966. They were married in Newport that year, and both attended Portland State College (now University). Tom worked as a copy editor at The Oregonian and as editor of the Milwaukie Review before the couple purchased the Sellwood-Moreland Bee (now The Bee) in 1974, and Pry Publishing was born. The Prys eventually purchased several publications, such as the St. Johns Review and the Northwest Neighbor and started others including the East Bank Focus, Portland Family Calendar and Hollywood News (which they renamed the Hollywood Star). They launched the Mid-county Memo in May 1985.

During their 20 years of newspaper ownership, the business grew from the Pry's basement into a local publishing empire that included seven community newspapers and a typesetting and graphics shop with a commercial web press, grossing over a million dollars a year and employing more than 50 people full time. For most of its run, the company operated from a building in the Sellwood neighborhood on Southeast 13th and Tacoma Street. In 1990, as the company grew, it relocated to a larger building downtown on Northwest Hoyt Street, in what is now the Pearl District.

Tom had a light and humorous manner with his workers. He instructed his writers in the then-new skill of computer use, and invariably told them, “Don't show fear in front of it.”

Tim Curran, hired as Mid-county Memo advertising representative in early 1988, recalls, “Tom and Marcia always cared about doing good work. They had an entry-level journalism operation. Tom mentored reporters and photographers, some veterans, most a little green.”

Tom really did know his stuff as far as researching and writing, and he often suffered through some of the foolish things that the young people who staffed his papers did and wrote. In general, both he and Marcia gave people enough room to make mistakes and improve, or to make enough mistakes to prove they did not belong in the business.

“Marcia oversaw the newspaper ad sales staffs,” Curran added. “They trained dozens of journalists and sales people over the years. Some still in the business.” Curran eventually purchased the Memo from the Prys in 1991.

Miles Vance, who worked for the Prys for two years and currently is sports editor at the Beaverton Valley Times shared this Tom Pry work anecdote: “It was early on in my two-year term with the Hollywood Star and Mid-county Memo, and I was working late on deadline from the old satellite office on Overton Street in Northwest Portland. I was late with some of my stories, as was often the case back then, and as I was trying to save something onto a floppy disk on the old-school Tandy computers we used back then, I got a disk error message.

“I tried and tried to get things to work right with no success, so I called Tom at the Bee and he drove down to help me, probably at 10:30 or 11 p.m. at night. He came in and sat down at my computer, and worked and worked to get access to the story I had most recently added to the disk - but with no success. Frustrated, Tom popped the disk out, dropped a couple choice expletives, and then threw the disk Frisbee-style into the brick wall behind the computer.

“After the disk dropped to the floor, I told Tom that it had not only contained the most recent story I'd been working on, but all the other stuff for the upcoming issue of my two papers. He had a look of utter shock on his face, realizing he might have wiped out 2-3 weeks worth of work right on the cusp of deadline. He followed up with a sheepish apology, and then suggested we both head home and see how things looked in the morning.

“I agreed, but before I left, I put the disk on the floor and covered it with a stack of phone books some 3-4 feet high in hopes of flattening it out and salvaging some of my work. And indeed, the next morning, I went to the office, removed the phone books, stuck the disk into the computer and was able to recover everything from the day before.”

Vance and Curran also remember Tom and Marcia for their famous shouting matches across the main newsroom at Pry Publishing, those exchanges occasionally ending with Marcia yelling, “Bleep you Tom,” and his reply, “Bleep you too Marcia,” followed by both storming away in opposite directions to their separate offices. Somehow, their marriage survived that stuff and endured. Vance said, “It was not an arrangement I understood or wanted to emulate, but somehow, it seemed to work for them.”

Nevertheless, they always agreed about the importance and relevance of community journalism.

In 1994, the Prys sold the five remaining newspapers, the graphics and commercial printing business to Mike Roeper's MR Communications for $650,000. It dissolved in bankruptcy a few years later, but not before Roeper sold the papers to the people then working for them.

In his private life, Tom loved to collect what other people, including his wife, called junk. To Tom, they were treasures. And he was famous for picking up and keeping “road kill,” stuff he would find on or near Oregon's highways and byways.

Tom later worked for the Oregon State Legislature as a copy editor, and for Providence Medical Center and a drug testing company. After Marcia's death in 2001, he moved to Indiana, and later Arkansas, to live with relatives. He continued to engage in volunteer activities with worthy causes until the end of his life.

His sisters survive him, Paula Cox of Mena and Jacque Cramer of Rio Vesta, Calif.

A memorial service is planned for this spring in Portland, at a date and time yet to be determined.

Lee Perlman and Miles Vance contributed to this obituary.
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