PORT ANGELES — History Tales will take a look at a history of the North Olympic Peninsula’s media during a lecture and question-and-answer period at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.
The North Olympic History Center’s History Tales will feature “Strait Press: A History of News Media on the North Olympic Peninsula,” which was launched in January 2019.
Author Bill Lindstrom; newspaper owner and broadcaster Brown Maloney, who commissioned Lindstrom in 2015 to write the book; and John Brewer, president of the History Center and retired editor and publisher of the Peninsula Daily News (PDN), will be at the First United Methodist Church, 110 E. Seventh St., Port Angeles.
After introductory comments from Maloney, Lindstrom and Brewer will join a question-and-answer period on the book.
Copies of the book will be available for sale, and a book-signing will held.
The history written by Lindstrom, a veteran journalist for more than a half-century (including a two-year stint at the PDN), encompasses nearly 100 media sources on the Peninsula, including 82 newspapers, dating to 1860.
Publications wrestled with such controversial issues as a three-decade struggle to establish Olympic National Park, the proposed Northern Tier Pipeline, the promise of a railroad, the sinking of the western portion of the Hood Canal bridge and numerous elections.
The reader will learn the role mastodons and vampires have played on the Peninsula.
Strait Press not only is about newspapers, but also radio. The reader will learn about the significance that 25 water heaters played in establishing the Peninsula’s first radio station, which broadcaster was still on the air on his 90th birthday and another still broadcasting in 2020 in his 85th year.
Brewer called “Strait Press” a “fascinating excavation of underappreciated events and individuals. Historian-sleuth Bill Lindstrom and his painstaking research and his yield of captivating, rescued-from-obscurity stories takes us on an educational, thoroughly enjoyable journey.”
Among the nuggets uncovered include two writers nominated for a Pulitzer prize; one received the award, one did not; one newspaper owner is part of a quad-marriage ceremony; one building has been home to the same paper for 102 years; two writers were known, respectively as “The Rare-bitter” and “Wandering Scribe” and what soon-to-be well-known author spent a night in a Peninsula jail.
Lindstrom, 77, had been a journalist for more than 55 years when he retired in 2008. Among others, he has worked for the Daily Olympian in Olympia, Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles and the Daily World at Aberdeen. He wrote his first book in 2014: “John Tornow: Villain or Victim?,” a non-fiction account of a man alleged to have killed his two nephews in 1911.
“Strait Press” is self-published by iUniverse, Bloomington, Ind. It is available in hardcover and softcover through the publisher and at retail outlets. It also is available in e-book format through Kindle and Nook.
For more information, contact the author at or 360-581-9451 or Maloney at or 360-457-1450.
