DUANE
Get the App
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. It's 1884, and two co-workers over at the San Angelo Enterprise, a man named J. G.
Murphy and a man named W. A. Guthrie, look at each other one day and decide they're going to buy the whole weekly newspaper operation.
Just like that. Two fellas, one paper, and a whole lot of West Texas to write about. They called their new venture the Standard.
The first edition, four pages, rolled out on May 3 of that year. Four pages. Now, don't let that modest number fool you, because what was in those pages was anything but modest.
Frontier scalpings. The life of the Fort Concho soldier. This was not a paper concerned with garden parties.
This was the edge of things, and Murphy and Guthrie were printing it down and handing it to people still living it. Within six months, the Standard had doubled, eight pages now, growing right alongside the territory it covered. It stayed a weekly for a good long while, all the way until 1905, when something new stepped out of the pressroom, the first issue of the Evening Daily Standard.
The paper had gone daily. And through all of it, through the frontier years and beyond, the newspaper and its leaders played major roles in the development of San Angelo and the surrounding areas. That's what the marker says, and there's something quietly enormous in that plain language.
A couple of co-workers bought a press and started talking. And San Angelo grew up partly in the reading of it.
What the marker says
In 1884 J. G. Murphy and W. A. Guthrie, co-workers at the "San Angelo Enterprise", bought the weekly newspaper operation and began the "Standard". The first four-page edition was published on May 3 of that year. Early stories included coverage of frontier scalpings and the life of the Fort Concho soldier. The "Standard" became an eight-page newspaper within six months and continued as a weekly until 1905, when the first issue of the "Evening Daily Standard" appeared. The newspaper and its leaders have played major roles in the development of San Angelo and surrounding areas