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59TH BIRTHDAY
CALDWELL TRIBUNE
TALES PART II
UNCLE BILL SAYS
THE WORK PLACE
OBITUARIES
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This Website was made possible by writers of the past and present.

Dates of the original Oregonian
publications are noted.

By Leone Cass Baer
Uncle Bill believes that writers are born, not made. "You either write or you do not write.", he says.
And by writing I do not mean putting a vocabulary on paper. Only God can make a singing voice, dancing feet, fingers that play tunes, and a writers style. I may add that only God can make a good cook, too.
As published in The Oregonian on February 1st, 1923.

William J. Cuddy
1854-1925

 

Uncle Bill never wrote a mean thing about anybody in his life. "excepting", as he says, "in politics, which don't count."
If he has a big ambition, it is to write a historical novel some day, when he finds time. He loves Oregon and says he wouldn't be caught dead elsewhere.
As published in The Oregonian on February 1st, 1923.

If you lack the punch, the style, the ability to paint pictures in your writing, your hundredth story will be as bad as your first, and if you have the gift, your first one will be good. Of course, one develops with years, but you have absolutely got to have something to start with besides an urge to put words on paper. What is taught in a school of journalism is mere ritual that should be forgotten in actual work. - W.J. Cuddy As published in The Oregonian on February 1st, 1923.

Tales Part One

Just call him "Uncle Bill"

By Leone Cass Baer
I sit at the desk next to the oldest veteran in the editorial department of The Morning Oregonian. He was christened, back in 1854, William John Cuddy, but in the intervening years he has become just Bill or Uncle Bill, and when some stranger comes looking for Mister Cuddy we all have to think fast to remember that Bill has another name. For a gent who claims Worcester, Mass., as his birthplace, Uncle Bill could pass anywhere for a Kentucky colonel. He looks like one and he talks like one. He wears a picturesque wide black hat, a collar of the Ben Harrison dynasty with high points that frame his chin, and a black, string tie. He is the exchange editor and he writes editorial paragraphs and in odd moments, just to keep his hand in, he goes upstairs and reads proof.
As published in The Oregonian on February 1st, 1923.


Editor of the weekly was "Uncle Bill" Cuddy, a roguish, chuckling wag with a walrus mustache who prowled through the composing room all week lifting and saving paragraphs of type that would interest his weekly readers. He also regularly contributed pithy paragraphs to the editorial page, and when he succeeded in slipping one of double meaning past the innocent eye of the editor, his delight was shared all over the plant.
Uncle Bill's desk was always piled high with papers he was saving, but let anyone move one, even from the bottom of the pile, and he would roar his indignation. His left eye was blind, and he smoked cigars. On at least one occasion, he laid his cigar down on his desk at his blind side, and a heap of papers was ablaze before the heat of the conflagration attracted his attention. As published in The Oregonian on May 30th, 1948.

Career begins at an early age
Uncle Bill has always been on a paper. He was ,you might say, born on one, for his father, David was foremanImage, Man standing by an old printing press, gif 20k of a job printing shop. Uncle Bill's father died at the outbreak of the civil war and to a stepfather was passed the job of raising Bill. It didn't take somehow and he lived here and there with one relative or another, going to school and selling papers, until he was 14 years old, when he got a job as office boy on an evening paper. That was in 1868. Soon he got into the composing room and begun to be a printer. Along about then he took Horace Greeley at his word and proceeded westward as far as Omaha. Here he fed presses and carried papers.
"When I was feeding press on the old Tribune and Republican in Omaha," remarked Uncle Bill. "I chummed with the composing - room 'kid.' He was my age and we had really the same hours. I loafed there and intending to be a printer someday was much interested in the printers. They were a tough lot, out of both sides in the civil war and printers had a social code of their own making. As published in The Oregonian on February 1st, 1923.

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