Newspaper publishers sometimes go to extreme lengths to get out the news. Few were as determined as Angela Hutchinson Hammer who set up a print shop in an open corral to publish the Casa Grande Valley Dispatch.
Angie, as she was called, was already a seasoned publisher and considered this outdoor foray into printing a mere stopgap in her pursuit to bring all the news to the public.
1913 had been a hard year for Angie and her three sons, but when the first issue of the Casa Grande Valley Dispatch went to press on Jan. 1, 1914, she hoped her troubled times were over.
Born Nov. 30, 1870, Angie was the second of five daughters of William and Sarah Hutchinson. Her engineer father built and operated stamp mills in mining communities across the West.
In 1881 when he headed for work at the Silver King Mine in Arizona, Angie and three of her sisters were left behind in a Virginia City, Nevada, orphanage until the threat of Indian attacks abated in Arizona Territory.
The Hutchinson family moved to Phoenix in the late 1880s. Angie found work folding fliers for the Phoenix Republican newspaper, and eventually learned to set type. She graduated from Miss Clara A. Evan’s Teacher Training School and began teaching in Wickenburg in 1889.
In 1896, Angie married building contractor Joseph Hammer. Their son Louie was born in 1897, Bill arrived in 1899, and Marvin in 1902. By 1903, the marriage was over and she was left with $500 and three young boys to support. When the Wickenburg Miner newspaper came up for sale, she purchased it for $250.
Unfortunately, the Miner’s ancient printing press dated back to the 1830s and Angie soon realized the list of advertisers she had purchased, as well as roster of subscribers, was inflated with false figures.
Bartering with advertisers and subscribers by taking fruits and vegetables as payment for ads and copies of the paper, the Miner began to prosper. She bought out a competing paper, the News-Herald.
Angie contracted with small mining communities in the area to print a front page for each town, attached to the regular issue of the Wickenburg Miner. Her “desert newspaper chain” consisted of the Eagle’s Eye in Aguila, the Wenden News, the Swansea Times, and the Salome Sun.
Wickenburg’s population hovered just over 500 around the time the town incorporated in 1909, and the 15 local saloons did a rollicking business. Angie backed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, encouraging voters to dry up their town. Her editorials were so outspoken against saloon owners that fights broke out between her supporters and bar patrons. She received threats to herself and her press.
The town voted the saloonkeepers out, setting Wickenburg’s leading political figures against Angie. Fearing for her children’s safety, she hired a manager for the paper, took her sons to Phoenix, and opened Hammer & Sons Print Shop. But newspaper ink was in her blood.
In 1913, Angie moved her printing equipment to Casa Grande and went into partnership with Ted Healey to produce the Casa Grande Bulletin. On Sept. 11, 1913, the first issue of the Bulletin hit the streets. Angie’s money bought the paper stock and supplies, although any profits were split equally between her and Healey.
At the time, Casa Grande was torn between two factions proposing diverse water remedies for the agricultural area. Angie backed the Casa Grande Water Users Association that argued for construction of a dam at San Carlos, while Healey preferred pumping ground water or paying for water provided by canal companies. Each expected to use the Bulletin to support their cause. The partnership fell apart.
Angie learned that Healey planned to abscond with her printing equipment . Under cover of darkness, she and her boys hid the printing press in a horse barn, leaving behind the subscription list Healey claimed was worth $15,000 as payment for his half of the business. On that first day of 1914, the Casa Grande Valley Dispatch came to life in the open-air corral.
Three years later, a banker offered Angie a chance to buy the Bulletin as Healey was ready to sell. Using her printing machinery and equipment as collateral, she went into default when the economy turned sour during World War I. The banker told Angie women were not cut out for newspaper work.
Retaining her subscription list, she tried in vain to keep the Dispatch running by having it printed in Phoenix. But by spring 1918, she could no longer make a living with the paper and closed its doors.
Two years later, she started up the Dispatch again and the business flourished. In 1923, the Arizona Gazette lauded Angie’s paper as “one of the most alert and readable of our contemporaries.”
Angie sold the Dispatch in 1924 telling her readers she had “enjoyed the work even though it took me through troubled times and to the threshold of disaster.”
She bought the Messenger newspaper in Phoenix and established the Messenger Printing Co. with sons Bill and Marvin.
Angie had served as immigration commissioner for Pinal County since 1915, promoting Arizona tourism through her newspaper. She sat on the State Board of Social Security and Welfare from 1938 until 1943. She was also active in the Phoenix Business and Professional Women’s Association, the Phoenix Pen Women’s Association and the Phoenix Writers Club, although she confessed her “happiest days were spent in the middle of a hot controversy as editor of a local newspaper.”
In 1938, she turned over the Messenger Printing Co. to her two sons and returned to Casa Grande to care for her son Louie’s children after his wife’s death. Angie died in Phoenix on April 9, 1952.
“Born with a terrific zest for living and a love for her fellowman, Mrs. Hammer was ever ready to pick up the cause for the side she believed to be right,” boasted the Arizona Daily Star upon her selection as the first woman elected to the Arizona Newspapers Association Hall of Fame in 1965. “She was the embodiment of the pioneer woman.”
