1937: The Assassination of A California Newspaperman; Who Dispatched His Own Obituary: True Story Deadly Newspaper Rivalry

After the 1934 Baseball Opening Day in Sacramento, California, Claude McCracken (42), an athletic and charismatic sports reporter, accompanies his best friend, crime reporter and photographer Eddie Kessler to a vice raid in the Red Light District. Eddie is shot taking photographs of the arrests.and perishes in a hospital corridor. Eddie's death shatters Claude's appetite for big-city journalism.Claude therefore accepts a job as editor of a struggling newspaper in Alturas, California -a remote ranching town of 2,500 souls near the Oregon border. He brings his nurse wife Frances and big-city ambitions to a drpression-era community still scarred by the aftermath of the First World War and memories of the Modoc Indian Wars of the 1870s.A young resident of Alturas is Harry French (27), He is the awkward, overly-devoted son of Gertrude Payne French, the formidable editor of Alturas's established newspaper, the Plaindealer. Harry works as a Depression-era sales tax collector, squeezing money from struggling neighbors and liquor stores while dreaming of succeeding his mother as Editor of his family's newspaper.Claude's provocative journalism threatens the French family's promenance and financial livelihood. Where the Plaindealer prints "Signs of Spring Seen About Town," Claude aggessively promotes Roosevelt's New Deal, labor unrest, and distant rumblings of war in Europe and Asia. The battle for newspaper circulation and advertisers escalates into caustic attacks and mutual slurs against the other party. The two papers engage in a rage of community warfare, until a fatal evening when this newspaper war fought with harsh ink set in lead, ended in a fuselage of real bullets. It is a story of an escalating newspaper rivalry in a small town. It resulted in the death of an editor and the shooter sentenced to be executed by the rope. The story is worthy of retelling in an era of polarization and outright hostility and violence towards the Press.