by Gabe Young The Rogue News has been around for a very, very long time (see our online archives at theroguenews.com for copies from recent times and decades past). Every so often we catch word of a former staff member who has gone on to do great things. However recently, we got ahold of a former Rogue News writer that intrigued us like no other: 92-year-old Edmund Dews. A student at AHS from 1937-40, Dews was especially fond of literature and history. Ill for much of that time due to complications from a burst appendix, his physical state was not always conducive to physical activities, so he instead spent much of his time working on school publications. Dews was the editor of the Rogue Annual (yearbook) and in addition wrote a column for the Rogue News called “The Lithia Lowdown.” Because of his involvement in both publications, he spent many hours in the printing room. He described how papers were made back then, a far cry from the digital design tools used today. “The linotype was one of the complicated, high-tech machines that
had a keyboard very much like a typewriter a keyboard very much like a typewriter keyboard that the linotype operator used,” Dews recalled. “The machine itself took hot lead and created a cold lead letter corresponding to the key that had been pressed on the linotype [keyboard]. It was a large, heavy, complicated machine, looking in size almost like a small car and the linotype operators were among the best-paid workers in town.” The means of making a newspaper are not all that has changed since the 1930’s. Dews fondly recalls Ashland as being a town of 5,000 people, whose biggest employers were the timber industry, lumber mills and the Southern Pacific Railway. With the Oregon Shakespeare Festival opening in 1935, he attended its first-ever plays and subsequently spent much time volunteering in the festival’s box office and publicity department. Though he graduated from AHS in 1939 and began attending SOCE (now SOU), he continued to take some classes at the high school the following year- specifically math and science courses that he missed out on taking previously due to his illness. These subjects Dews places high importance upon, sharing “I never hesitate to recommend that [young adults] should become at least a little bit familiar with elementary science and mathematics… Not enough young people are at home in quantitative and numerical subjects and my advice is they should seize whatever good opportunities they have with good teachers in high school.” His love for science continued as his education progressed, and he transferred from SOCE to Stanford to study atmospheric physics and history. He then used that training to become a weather forecaster for the Air Weather Service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and was stationed on a number of islands in the Pacific. In addition, he took part in forecasting the atomic bomb tests in the Bikini Atoll.
Following his service, Dews continued his education at UCLA and Oxford before working as an atmospheric researcher in the Air Force Research Laboratories in Boston, Massachusetts. He then joined the RAND Corporation, a global policy think tank, in Santa Monica, California, before retiring in Ashland. Through it all, he continued to write and edit, and gave much credit to his time at AHS. “My experience with the high school publications carried forward in a number of interesting ways,” explained Dews. “[After high school] at SOCE, I was one of the co-editors of the yearbook there. My aviation cadet class in the Army Air Corps decided to prepare a yearbook and I was the editor of that. When I worked with the Army Air Force in Boston, there were a number of publications that I was asked to edit. Then later on for a brief time, because of my interest in foreign scientific publications, I was an editor with one of the international scientific publishing houses in New York City. The experience I had with publications in high school played- I think I can say- a significant part in my later work, gave me an advantage- a leg up- and I think was a very rewarding experience altogether.”
photos courtesy of the 1939 Rogue Annual