Feature

The Source Weekly Turns 25

If this newspaper were a human, it could now officially rent a car… and maybe even move out of the parents’ basement!

In many ways, the story of the Source Weekly is the story of Bend—once small and scrappy, now a bit more citified… and populated by a Portlander or two or three.

The Source Weekly, dubbed the “Deschutes Source” during its early days in 1997, has survived 25 years of fires, droughts, political upheavals, recalls, opt-outs, walkouts, occupations, media hemorrhages and even a global pandemic—emerging as now the only newspaper in Central Oregon to be owned locally, by people who live and work inside the same brick walls that have recorded so many of Central Oregon’s ups and downs.

What is a community newspaper, and what keeps one going?

The answer lies, at least in part, with the first part of the title: Community. A newspaper survives and thrives because a community circles around it and supports it. In our 25 years, we have served our community by keeping our publication free, with no internet paywalls barring our stories from the rest of the wide world. In turn, advertisers and readers come back time after time, continuing to invest in our mission of bringing smart, informed and sometimes even smart-ass coverage of news, arts, culture, outdoors and other stories. In a time when media outlets continue to fall by the wayside—when so many find so many reasons not to trust the journalists whose job it is to seek out and report the closest approximation of the truth they can find—you, readers, are what keeps it all going.

So as we celebrate this silver anniversary of 25 years, pat yourself on the back, too. You are the community in community newspaper, and we salute you!

PARTY ON US! Join us Wed., Aug. 10 from 6-9 pm at the Deschutes Historical Museum for an anniversary celebration featuring live music and entertainment—free and open to the public.

Read on for more from contributors and staffers of days gone by.

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From Coast to Coast

32 years of marriage. 25 years of the Source. The story of this humble weekly newspaper starts with the love story of Angela and Aaron Switzer.

By Kyle Switzer

Twenty-five years of the Source Weekly means a regular ebb and flow of staff. There have been several editors, hundreds of journalists and a constant flow of sales reps. However, the two owners from the beginning, the two that always have managed to quietly massage their paper forward, are Aaron and Angela Switzer—my lovely parents.

I have always enjoyed the story of them growing up and meeting, so for the 25th year anniversary, unbeknownst to them, I took a trip home to report and secretly publish the story of how they met and got married.

“Angela met Aaron in 1983 when she was 16. They went to the same high school here in Georgia,” my grandma, Kay Sanders, reported over the phone.

They grew up a block away from each other in Tucker, Georgia. There’s old stories of them sneaking out at night, meeting in the middle of the kudzu forests and braving cottonmouth snakes. They both dated throughout high school, my dad more of the troublemaker—my mom the quiet opposite.

They separated after Angela got into Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Aaron went to the University of Georgia. They remained distant friends for years, keeping in touch on occasion.

“Even though he was far away we always kept in touch,” my mother Angela explains. “He’d visit with friends, we’d meet in Austin, Texas, or even Mardi Gras; he always had a great way of making sure we had fun.”

In 1986, Angela was in Salem, Oregon, working an internship, and Aaron had recently “left” college.

“Your mother had a different boyfriend at that time, they were sea kayaking, living the dream,” Aaron describes. “I remember I was still at home, working fast food, and I remember telling myself, ‘I’m not going to be average!’ I was 20, and I didn’t really have much of a plan for what I wanted to do. I was biking a lot from Athens, Georgia, to Atlanta. I remember thinking to ride across the country would be the same as stringing together a ton of these rides—but I really had no plan.”

At the start of October 1986, getting dropped off in Tennessee, he began the 2500-mile journey, solo biking to the West Coast, dragging his long, thin body through the country with his bike and a tent. The stories mirror Jack Kerouac’s cross-country adventures— the dividing line between the East of youth and the West of the future... camping on the side of the road, moving through each state in a slow rhythm.

When I asked him what he did when he wasn’t riding, my dad said he read a lot, moving from the Russian classics; Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, into the Victorian era of Dickens and Brontë. “I loved the Victorian period, I read all that stuff,” my father explained. “I also had six cassette tapes and a Walkman—I listened to a lot of Kate Bush.”

After several months on the road, he finished his trip at the door of my mother’s apartment in Salem. My mother still had a boyfriend, but my parents hung out nonetheless.

“She had such a bright future going on; I didn’t think she wanted anything to do with me,” my dad remarked, “So I left her my bike—I was so romantic back then, then took the Greyhound home, it took four days. I was so broke; I left with literally $5 in my pocket.”

My mother tells the story of their time in Salem

In the following year, Angela wrapped up school in Dallas and Aaron lived in Atlanta; reading, playing Ultimate Frisbee, and saving up enough money to fund cross-country bike trips through Europe. They kept in touch until finally, legend has it, my mom visited Aaron’s apartment in Georgia, but their time was cut short by the arrival of Aaron’s new girlfriend. “After the trip across the country, I had been trying to move on,” my dad explains, “but I secretly always liked Ang.” This brought some immediacy into their time together. It wasn’t long until they finally started dating again.

In 1990, after being together for a couple of years, Aaron proposed a bike trip down the West Coast, starting in Florence, Oregon, and finishing in Cabo, in Mexico. “I wanted to do this trip with him, but I hadn’t done much biking in my life,” my mom mentioned, “but Aaron told me you get in shape on the road. He just kept saying it would be fine. For the first part of the trip, we rode down the entire Oregon coast and it rained almost every day. Aaron was in way better shape than I was. I wouldn’t say I liked it at first—plus Aaron didn’t stop to enjoy the scenery. We’d climb up a mountain and he’d wait two seconds and then ask if we were ready to keep riding. But he always stayed pretty close next to me, and we’d talk, and he took most of the gear at first, so that made things easier.”

When they rode into Yosemite, Aaron sporadically proposed on top of Half Dome. “I was surprised,” my mother said. “I remember telling Aaron, I’m only 23, I got so many things I want to do, I don’t know if I can get married yet, and he said, 'OK, I’ll just do those things with you!' So, we decided to get married.”

My dad confirmed this is actually how they spent the first years of their marriage together. The two moved to Bend, then Portland for a couple of months, then back to Bend, then Boise, Idaho, as Angela bounced between work as an archeologist. In 1994, during their three years in Boise, Aaron started his master’s at Boise State University studying Victorian Literature. He was also working as a journalist for “Boise Weekly,” along with writing manuals for the printer company HP. In 1997, Aaron was awarded his master’s and the two would move to Bend to immediately start the Source Weekly—and 25 years later they still work in the back room, operating their local paper together.

As Aaron put it, “The great thing about your mom was, I followed her around as she did all the things she wanted, then eventually it was my turn, and I took the wheel!”

Aaron Switzer during his bike tour from Florence, Oregon, to Mexico.

Angela and Aaron Switzer outside the Source Weekly building as they get ready for a party.

The Switzer family in earlier days, from left, Aaron, Angela, Kyle and Sean, with the family dog, Finn.

Angela Switzer

The Column That Got Away

Pub crawling, impersonating Neil Patrick Harris and other hijinks from Source days gone by

By Josh Beddingfield

The Bend I remember of the late ‘90s and early 2000s was a place at constant war with itself. In some ways funny—the battles over roundabout art for instance. And in some ways serious—the election campaign of Les Stiles comes to mind. The sneaky implosion of the Old Mill to make room for a shopping experience. It was a town becoming a city and it was often a wild ride.

This played out at the Source as well, sometimes behind the scenes. This was, of course, an era when daily newspapers still mattered and “The Bulletin” took itself very seriously. There was no lack of enmity, professional and personal, between people at “The Bully,” as I liked to call it, and those of us in the scrappy alternative weekly game. Many of the reporters who I met from The Bully tended to be earnest journo school grads trying to springboard their careers to “The Oregonian” or the “Sacramento Bee.” And they almost always took pains to tell me they were not like their editorial overseers—mostly stuffy, Chamber-of-Commerce mouthpieces who viewed our side of the street with open contempt. I can’t say that didn’t flow both ways.

But we all had to drink beer somewhere, even though the Bend of that era had only two breweries— Deschutes and Bend Brewing—until the McMenamins Old St. Francis reopening. It was there, at a grand opening event, that I made the acquaintance of one young editorial writer whom I will call Chris. Roughly speaking, we were counterparts on opposite sides of a heated City Council campaign that was shaping up as an epic battle to replace the old guard of Oran Teater and other conservatives with an earnest progressive slate, years in the making. This Chris was, to put it mildly, shitfaced on the beer and in the company of the only Bulletin reporter whom I truly cared for. I’ll call him David.

As I recall it, David had introduced us by email. Something about the high lords wanting to mix with the scruffy rabble. And in that email correspondence we had agreed upon a friendly wager on the election. I had bet that so-and-so would receive more votes than the other so-and-so. I had been right, and I wanted the free beer I was owed.

I disliked this person immediately when we met face to face. If he wasn’t wearing a bow-tie, I’d make another wager he owned at least a few. He had the smirky manner of a prep-school kid who was used to pontificating on things. He was explaining to me that he believed our bet had been a tie on account of a third candidate getting more votes than our two rivals.

“Let me get this straight,” I might have said, “you’re going to weasel out of a bet with someone who has no qualms about putting that in print, say, tomorrow?”

If you know Aaron Switzer, the Source publisher, you can imagine the glee he greeted my story with. What a fabulous chance to ruin the career of a young Bully smart-ass. We laid immediate plans for a glorious column about the drunken and dishonorable nighttime habits of the earnest kiss-asses up there on the hill. Just as I was really getting going, I received an email: Chris was very sorry for what he had done. Very sorry and alcohol was to blame.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I was. It would have been the glorious pinnacle of my equally smartass career as political reporter and columnist. But I just couldn’t kick a dog when he was groveling. It still pisses me off he deprived me of that column.

And then, a Doogie Pub Crawl

It was all Lee Perry’s fault. When you see someone as extraordinarily decent whispering conspiringly in the corner of a dark fern bar, though, it’s hard to imagine they are up to no good. Especially if they are the designated driver and your table is full of writers drinking their way through a company-funded night of bar reviews. A reasonable explanation might have been that Lee was ordering extra bread so that no one got too hammered.

So I didn’t give it any thought when the waitress turned to me with a rather wide-eyed expression on her face. Like someone who has seen a ghost. Or a celebrity. But I did when she picked up a menu a few minutes later and meekly approached me with it. “Excuse me, but um do you think I could have your autograph?”

“Of course!”

I turned my head to Lee, who had sidled into the booth next to me and whispered, “Who am I supposed to be?”

“Neil Patrick Harris.”

A dim image of the actor who had played Doogie Howser, MD came to mind. I had actually been tentatively mistaken for him once or twice. in a “You look kinda like that actor who played Doogie Howser if he had spent too much time in the sun and cut his own hair” kind of way. This was before Harris’ fame had increased and he had come out as gay. The comparisons stopped by then—no one would mistake my general wardrobe of dirty Carhartts and holey Western shirts for Harris’ dapper slim-fitting suits.

“Is Neil with an A or and I?” I whispered to Lee.

“I dunno.”

I took a guess, probably wrong, and wrote a dedication to the waitress on the back of the menu. Something about her being the best waitress in Bend. She backed away holding it clutched like a precious object and we went on with fern bar drinking.

When it came time to write our bar reviews, I’m sure it was Aaron Switzer’s and not my idea that I write a satirical column pretending to be a miffed Neil Patrick Harris. I agreed to it only because elsewhere in the article it mentioned the mistaken identity story. The gist of the column was that Harris was a secret—and clearly rather alcoholic—resident of Bend who had had enough of his cover being blown. He just wanted to drink in peace.

Like most of my satirical columns, they at least amused the hell out of Switzer and myself. The public’s reaction was always a crapshoot. But a few days later, we received a letter in the mail (Yes, the actual snail mail as it was done in those days) with a return address from near the top of Awbrey Butte. I believe the stationary was monogrammed, but that could be my imagination.

I’m pulling it from memory, but it went something like this:

“Dear Mr. Harris,

I have had the opportunity to socialize with many rich and famous people such as yourself. And I have never found any of them to be so rude and unappreciative of the love of their public fans. You should be ashamed of yourself.

If you would like to do something positive for the community, instead of just complain, I would be happy to teach you how to host a celebrity cocktail party.”

Sincerely,

Awbrey Butte guy

Absolutely not for publishing. No permission given to publish.”

Just a pro tip, but letters to a newspaper are publishable. I am proud to say that I argued against publishing the letter over the objections of my guffawing office-mates. And I never did learn how to host a celebrity cocktail party.

Source Weekly Archive

The Ice Sculpture Incident

A former editor recalls a “wet” night at the awards show

By Renee Alexander

In the late ‘90s, the Source was nominated for a Drake Award for advertising. We were all delighted to attend the Drake Awards, an annual event that was put on by AdFed of Central Oregon and always had a fun theme. It was the closest thing we had to a red-carpet event in Bend, and the Source staff—mostly 20-somethings at the time—were not accustomed to fancy soirees. Publisher Aaron Switzer had decided to spring for a limousine, so we could arrive in style.

Dressed in our fanciest outfits, we all gathered at the Source office, giddy with excitement. And waited. And waited. And waited. Our limousine never arrived. Fortunately, Scott Donnell had a VW bus, so we all piled into it. There weren’t enough seats, so we sat on each other’s laps and on the floor of the van while Scotty D acted as our chauffeur. Upon arrival, we put on an impressive imitation of a clown car scene, stumbling out the sliding side door and adjusting our outfits in plain view of a crowd of Bend’s movers and shakers.

Inside the event, we took full advantage of the adult beverages at the bar, becoming increasingly festive as the night wore on. By the time our awards category was called, we had nearly forgotten that we had been nominated. As I recall, we won, though it may have been only an honorable mention. But to us, it might as well have been a gold medal. We made a scene and determined that more drinks were called for. By the time we left the event, we were plastered and overly pleased with ourselves. My last memory, before piling back into the clown van, was surrounding the ice sculpture and giving it a group lick.

Note: these are the facts as I remember them, which is not necessarily the same as the facts as they happened. But that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

An early Source issue touts tall trees, with a feature by Renee Alexander (then Menius).

What’s 25 Years When You’re 94?!

The Source’s longest-running contributor looks back on “Natural World”

By Jim Anderson

Holy Cats—25 years is a long time when you’re enjoying yourself!

If my memory serves me correctly it was that long ago that Source Weekly publisher Aaron Switzer and his dear wife, Angela, asked me if I’d be interested in writing a weekly nature column for a newspaper they had created. Was I? You bet! I believe my stuff appeared in the table of contents as “Nature” when it first began. Today, it runs under “Natural World.”

Has it been fun? You better believe it! Not only did doing the nature column give me the opportunity to share the Big Love of my Life— the Nature of the world around me—but also to tell my neighbors how they, too, could see what I was seeing, and why it is so important to keep our world healthy.

Without a doubt, the most fun I have writing for this unique paper and its wonderful crew is the feedback I get from readers. For example, the piece I wrote on the Lined Hummingbird Moth drew responses from all over the country, probably because of the Source’s presence on the web. I’m still receiving emails from people sharing stories about the hummingbird moths in their backyards which I now know live on the East Coast, West Coast and just about all states in between.

Readers ask me questions, share their nature encounters and request bird and bat house plans—I love it!

What I’m hoping for now is that my ancient 94-year-old brain will keep functioning well enough to keep Nicole Vulcan, the current editor of our paper, happy and our readers enjoying my exploration of the Nature of our World.

Thank you, Aaron and good pals!

Source Weekly Archive

Source contributor Jim Anderson hangs out with one of his wild friends.

Source Weekly Archive

My first issue: Molly Ringwald.

By Phil Busse, Editor, 2012 – 2015

Source Weekly Archive

Just a few months before stepping into the Editor job a decade ago in 2012, I had seen Molly Ringwald present a confessional talk at The Moth; she talked about being a mom, and about recognizing that her middle-school daughter was a bully, and her abject frustration as that went against her entire life-philosophy and, as she saw it, all she had represented in the series of mid- ‘80s John Hughes films that had made her famous. She proclaimed that her roles in movies like “16 Candles” and “Pretty in Pink” and “Breakfast Club” were fundamentally about anti-bullying and about acceptance. Admitted, it was a much deeper reading and significance of Molly Ringwald than I had ever considered. Coincidentally, Molly Ringwald was touring the West Coast with a jazz band, and scheduled to play the Tower Theatre the same month I was scheduled to start my job at the Source. Even before becoming one of the most recognizable faces of the silver screen in the 1980s, she had played stages as a kid as part of her dad’s traveling jazz band. Although she has since returned to acting (playing Archie’s mom in “Riverdale”), at the time, in 2012, she largely had been in celebrity hibernation for the previous 15 years or so— and her jazz tour and talks at The Moth were a halfstep back to public life. We were pleased to welcome her back—and to do so in as grand fashion as a weekly newspaper in Central Oregon could do. As one of my first acts as the editor, I decided to dedicate the entire issue to Molly Ringwald; some in earnest, some tongue-in-check. Our production manager at the time, Jen Hornstein, designed a captivating cover for the issue showing the freckled-face Molly Ringwald in an oversized gold locket. One of the staff interviewed her. We pointed out her contributions to music (mainly introducing American teenagers to Psychedelic Furs). We reviewed local eateries by matching menus to which character from “Breakfast Club” we thought would most enjoy the food (like, Ringwald’s Claire at the now-closed local sushi joint, Boken); and, we wrote about how Molly Ringwald and Generation X had grown up from disaffected MTV teenagers: “They are CEOs of companies that put community in front of bottom lines,” we wrote. “They recycle. They fret about and prioritize good parenting. They garden, and have ushered in a deeply sincere lifestyle of seventh-generation sustainability. They elected the nation’s first Black president, and, perhaps most spot-on to the Breakfast Club’s themes, have shifted a national attitude away from bullying and toward magnanimous acceptance of any creed, ethnicity or sexual orientation.” (Mind you, this was three-and-half years before Donald Trump’s presidency and nearly eight before the January 6 insurrection.)

In many ways, that Molly Ringwald issue set a tone for my three-year tenure; after all, the central function of the Source is, at one level, to provide information about civic and cultural happenings, but also at a higher level as a platform to test-drive new thoughts. To coin a phrase, the Source is about considering how Bend fits into the larger global culture, while doing so with a decidedly local flavor—and it has been doing so for a quarter-century, which is its own cultural phenomena.

Ten years ago the Source was all about this heartthrob.

Good Times in Lil’ Ol’ Bend

The Source’s first arts editor recalls the days before the Old Mill and the six-figure population

By Tanya Ignacio

I’m not going to lie: I cried as I drove into Bend on a hot summer day in the summer of 1998. As we crept along Highway 97–which was then just Third Street–in a poky parade of bumper-to-bumper RVs and cars, I started to second-guess my decision to move to this small central Oregon town with my partner. I had not moved to Bend to get stuck in tourist traffic.

I’m glad I stopped and stayed and didn’t keep driving like I wanted to that hot afternoon, because I discovered the Bend that I still remember fondly today. I might not have found it if I hadn’t wandered into the low brick building on the corner of Georgia and Bond with my résumé and a stack of clippings in hand. I had spent the past few years writing dance and performance art reviews for “Willamette Week” in Portland (while mostly supporting myself by writing software manuals for a couple of start-ups). I figured there were at least a few community theater shows I could write about while I tried to find a full-time job.

I spoke briefly with Editor Aaron Switzer and was very surprised to be offered the position of arts & culture editor. I thought it was a bold move on his part as I was unfamiliar with the arts and music scene in Central Oregon, and had never written about music or visual art. But I learned that the paper was only a year old, so everyone else was pretty new at their jobs. I also discovered that there’s no better way to get to know a place than to write for the weekly paper.

Central Oregon was a smaller, quieter place when I started writing for the Source. In the late 1990s, the Old Mill District was under development and the Les Schwab Amphitheater, now the Hayden Homes Amphitheater, wasn’t yet open. Seeing big-name music acts generally involved a drive to Portland or Eugene. Bend has always been about local talent, then mostly of the folk, folk-rock and country variety, and Bend was on the tribute band circuit (Helles Belles, anyone?). Munch & Music was a focal point of the summer. You could still smoke in the D&D.

Bend was in a sweet spot of its growth. It still had that small-town feel and had a lot of scrappy creative energy. Ideas could come to fruition without a lot of money. Small coffee houses and bars, bands, dance/ theater/literary events and performance spaces popped up and people showed up for them. The Source Weekly arose during that moment, appearing just when such an enterprise might take hold and thrive. (Working for the Source back then was sort of like being marooned with the cast of Gilligan’s Island, only the “island” was a hot-in-the summer, freezing-in-the winter brick building that I was sure was going to collapse on us with the next earthquake. “Getting off the island” meant getting the paper done and to the printers every single week. Aaron played a cunning version of The Captain. A rotating cast of characters vied for the best Gilligan award (if you wonder if you might have been a Gilligan, you probably were), Paul was the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Howell who appeared like Santa Claus once a year or so to bequeath of us with new computers or his benevolent presence. Every single sales person was a Ginger. All of us played The Professor at various point points. I might have been Maryann.)

As much fun as it was to write about the bigger and bigger acts that were starting to perform in the newer larger venues (Bob Dylan, Modest Mouse, The Pixies), writing about local musicians, artists, writers and theater events was what I loved best. They are the heart of a local arts scene. In this small community, I felt the obligation to be critical, but not unkind in my reviews. I think I mostly succeeded.

As Bend and Central Oregon changed, so did I. Putting out a paper week after week is hard. I got tired of the grind. I had a baby and life pulled me in a different direction. In 2006, we moved to Portland so I could go back to school. I’m now a nurse-midwife in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fairbanks has similarities to the Bend of the late 1990s and early-aughts, which is why I think I have stayed. (It doesn’t have a weekly paper though, but probably could use one.)

Source Weekly Archive

Back in the day, when Bend wasn't as steeped in culture.

—Tanya Ignacio was Arts and Culture editor, then Managing Editor of the Source Weekly from 1998-2006. For a year or so, she also laid out the paper. In 2006, she left journalism and went back to school and is now a nurse-midwife in Fairbanks, Alaska, where she has lived with her son since 2010.