By Hank Nuwer
When Ketchikan Daily News publisher Sid D. Charles died in 1959, he had just taken a few weeks off for illness.
Prior to that, he was a working stiff in newspapers from a youth nearly to his last trademark briar pipe puff at age 88. He hailed originally from St. Cloud, Minnesota, with a birthdate of September 6, 1870.
And 55 years of that total he lived and worked in Alaska. He also for a time owned and operated Alaska Fishing News and papers in Juneau and Petersburg. He also worked for other papers in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau as an editor, as well as in Portland for the Oregonian.
While at the Oregonian, he married Mary Burdon of remote Yamhill, Oregon in 1900, and that union lasted until she died in 1958 a few months before him.
The couple spent a couple years in Tacoma working for the now defunct Tacoma News as city editor when he took a post in Fairbanks in 1904 when it was an edgy, on-the-make mining town. He held an editorial contract from the fledgling Fairbanks News.
Upon arrival in Fairbanks, some burly gentlemen informed Charles he was being arrested. He protested. They were adamant. The pranksters took him to a dance at the Masonic Club. The orchestra serenaded him with “The Conquering Hero Comes.”
In 1926 Charles had just shuttered the Petersburg Herald but refused to make public his reasons. He then began a short-lived venture called the First City News, partial to the interests of the canneries and fishermen of Ketchikan. His politics from the start were hardcore Republican.
In June of 1926, aboard their boat “The Bell” while it was moored at the Ketchikan city float, a gasoline fire erupted. Charles received lifelong burns and scars to his face and hands. Mrs. Charles sustained minor burns.
After recovering, he worked as an editor in 1926 and remained under the old editors for eight years. Under new ownership in 1934, the publisher replaced Charles with Ketchikan native Roy Anderson.
Before the year was out, Charles published and edited the weekly Alaska Fishing News and, eventually, put out three issues a week.
Alaska Fishing News became a daily as World War Two ended in 1945, and Charles expanded and renamed his paper the Ketchikan Daily News in 1947. Critics lampooned the paper as the “Daily Fish Wrapper.”
Charles continued to make salmon prices his editorial concern, but now he joined other Ketchikan notables opposed to Alaska statehood.
The Ketchikan Daily News saw its opposing Ketchikan Chronicle close in 1957.
Charles had cut down his hours by then but still kept a hand on the throttle while his heirs ran the business side of the paper.
Voters favored the statehood measure overwhelmingly in 1958. Charles and the salmon industry lost the statehood fight,
Sid Charles lived long enough to realize the 49th State was now a fact on January 3, 1959.
The “Conquering Hero” Charles accepted defeat gracefully and enjoyed a meal of crow while hospitalized, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.
First published in the Cordova Times, January 10, 2025