300 Honor R. C. Hoiles At 90th Birthday Event

Publisher R. C. Hoiles, celebrating 65 years as a newspaperman, was honored on his 90th birthday by the Orange County Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi November 22 at a dinner in Anaheim for more than 300 persons,

Hoiles, president of the 15-newspaper Freedom Newspaper group began his newspaper career as a $2 per week printer's devil in Alliance, Ohio.

"That's all I was worth," Hoiles says today, because I took the job to learn the newspaper business. Seventeen years later I was making $10,000 a year, and that's all I was worth then."

Hoiles bought half interest in the Alliance paper and later added newspapers at Bucyrus and Mansfield before moving to Santa Ana in 1935 where he purchased The Register. His other newspapers are in Pampa, Odessa, Harlingen, McAllen and Brownsville in Texas; Clovis, New Mexico; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Bucyrus and Lima, Ohio; Gastonia, North Carolina; and Anaheim, BreaLaHabra, Turlock and Marysville in California,

Highlight of Friday night's dinner was a 20 minute film about the honoree produced by the Orange County Press Club. There were recorded greetings from Gov. Ronald Reagan and President-Elect Richard Nixon. Hoiles received proclamations of commendation from the California State Senate, the Orange County Chamber of Commerce as well as from the press club and a distinguished journalism award from the Orange County chapter of Sigma Delta Chi.

Among the special guests helping the press club and Sigma Delta Chi salute Hoiles was Roger Tatarian, vice president and editor of United Press International from New Yark who greeted the honoree on behalf of all the news service organizations which serve the Freedom Newspapers.

Master of ceremonies was Dr. F. A. Harper, president of the Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park. Other speakers were Ralph Juillard, general manager of the Texas Valley Group of Freedom Newspapers and Robert LeFevre, founder and dean of Rampart College, Larkspur, Colorado.

R. C. Hoiles was born in Alliance, Ohio in 1878. He attended Mount Union college, helping pay his expenses by selling newspaper subscriptions. He taught school briefly before entering the newspaper profession with his late brother, Frank, at the Alliance Review. After a disagreement over policy, R, C. sold his interest to his brother and started on his own with the purchase of the Bucyrus (Ohio) Tolegraph-Forum.

Often considered a highly controversial publisher, Hoiles has been a consistent critic of governmental interference in the lives of individuals, and has based his editorial policy on defense of individual liberty.

Among his more celebrated bouts with government was his editorial defense of the Japanese Americans in California during World War II when they were uprooted from their homes and placed in concentration camps in Arizona and Utah.

Hoiles and his wife of 63 years have three children, Clarence Harrison who is co-publisher of The Register and executive Vice President of Freedom Newspapers, Inc., Harry Howard Hoiles, publisher of the Gazette-Telegraph in Colorado Springs, and Mary Jane (Mrs. Robert C. Hardie) whose husband is publisher of the Appeal-Democrat, Marysville.