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UTAH PRESS ASSOCIATION Felt, who had served intermittent terms as USPA's president from 1897 through 1906 while associated with three different publications. Jakeman first appeared on the Utah journalistic scene in Richfield, where on August 15, 1884 he founded the Sevier Valley Echo. It survived until May 5, 1885. Three days later, Jakeman unveiled the Manti Home Sentinel, which was labelled by contemporaries "a spicy sheet" and which he published for four years. The paper was alternately commended and chastized. "Editorially, it is quite a creditable sheet," said the Deseret News. The Enquirer in Provo, however, referred to it as "The Manti Snide Sheet." Even while in Manti, the busy Jakeman in 1887 launched the Nephi Ensign, which he sold a year later. Not long thereafter, on June 4, 1890, he began the County Register in Eph-raim. Though it drew alternating brickbats and bouquets from contemporaries, it lasted only a year. Nonplused, Jakeman and his journalist-wife, Ellen, then began the Spanish Fork Index, which within months was suspended ~ the result, neighboring editors averred, of "malnutrition." After two years of obscurity, perhaps to recover from the financial shock of his several unsuccessful ventures, Jim Jakeman became a newsmaker rather than reporter. He was charged with "disposing of a printing plant which he had mortgaged without the knowledge of the mortgagee" and jailed in Park City on counts of forgery and swindling. But he evidently had the newsman's version of the feline's nine lives, for he survived the bout with John Law and even began another Spanish Fork paper, the short-lived Star, in 1892. It was printed in neighboring Payson. Almost simultaneously in 1895 he and Ellen became owners of the Southern Utonian at Beaver and the Mercur Miner and the Stockton Sentinel in geographically side-by-side gold camps on the west side of the Oquirrh mountain range. The Utonian folded in 1896; the mining newspapers survived for many years, though the Jakemans were involved in their publication for but a matter of months. In 1899 Jakeman became co-publisher of the Sandy Senti- 296 |
