OBITUARY - TED NATT

Submitted by: Jenny Tenlen

Source: "The Oregonian", Portland, Multnomah Co., Oregon. 21 Sep 1999, p. E13.

MEMORIAL SERVICE WILL BE FRIDAY FOR LONGVIEW JOURNALIST TED NATT

Summary: The publisher who led the Longview Daily News to a Pulitzer Prize dies
in the crash of his helicopter

Ted Natt, scion of a prominent Northwest newspaper family who led the Longview
Daily News to a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for its coverage of the eruption of Mount
St. Helens, has died. He was 58.

Mr. Natt vanished Aug. 7 while flying his two-seat helicopter home in stormy
weather from a memorial service for writer Willard Espy in Oysterville, Wash.
Hunters found Mr. Natt's body Saturday in the wreckage of his helicopter a few
miles east of Astoria.

A memorial service for Mr. Natt is scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at St. Stephen's
Episcopal Church in Longview, Wash. A reception will follow at St. Rose Catholic
Parish Hall in Longview.

Mr. Natt, nationally known as a small-town editor strongly committed to quality
community journalism, had deep roots in the Longview-Kelso area. He was born
March 28, 1941, in Portland. His mother, Martha Sue McClelland Natt, was the
daughter of John M. McClelland, a newspaperman who came to Longview from
Arkansas in 1923 to found The Daily News.

Mr. Natt's father, Air Force Col. Theodore Manfred Natt, was a career officer
who moved the family around as young Mr. Natt was growing up. But as a boy, Mr.
Natt spent summers with his grandfather in Longview, and he developed a lifelong
dream of running The Daily News.

Mr. Natt graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Oregon in
1963, and he remained a strong supporter of the school and an advocate for
improving journalism education.

After graduating, Mr. Natt worked at several papers, including The Oregonian,
the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, and the Sentinel Mist in St. Helens, which was
owned by the family media chain, then being run by his uncle, John McClelland
Jr.

After his uncle moved to Bellevue, Wash., to start a new daily, Mr. Natt took
over as publisher of The Daily News in 1977. The Natt family purchased the paper
from Mr. McClelland in 1986.

John McClelland III, Mr. Natt's cousin and a longtime writer at The Daily News,
said as an editor, Mr. Natt was "sensitive to the underdog." Among his many
daily columns, Mr. Natt condemned bigotry against Asians living in the community
and supported revitalizing a rundown Longview neighborhood called the Highlands.
Especially after winning the Pulitzer, Mr. Natt became known nationally.

"Ted was an outstanding smaller-market, nonmetropolitan editor and publisher,"
said Butch Alford Jr., editor and publisher of the Lewiston Morning Tribune in
Idaho. He said Mr. Natt demonstrated that "excellence in journalism can come in
large packages from smaller daily newspapers."

Respect for the newspaperman was echoed locally -- even among political figures
Mr. Natt was known to criticize.

"He put together a pretty darn good newspaper," Cowlitz (Wash.) County
Commissioner Joel Rupley said last month.

Mr. Natt was best known for his front-page column, "Views of the News," which he
reluctantly gave up this summer after his family sold The Daily News and he
retired. Indiana-based Howard Publications Inc. purchased Westmedia Corp., owned
by the Natt family and Daily News employees.

"He has been a huge influence in the community," Rupley said, "both in
identifying issues and advocating positions on those issues."

Mr. Natt also was active in regional and national professional journalism
organizations, serving as president of the Associated Press Managing Editors in
1984 and on several Pulitzer juries.

In his farewell column in The Daily News on June 25, Mr. Natt wrote, "Were we
happy to have readers reach the same conclusions we did? Surely. But we were
just as pleased to have a reader reach a different conclusion too. It is an
informed electorate, fully capable of independently thinking about public
matters, that assures our future as a free people."

Survivors include his wife, Diane; sons, Ted Jr. of Alexandria, Va., David M. of
Longview and Morgan of Eugene; daughter, Lorena Sue Natt Mattson of Evanston,
Ill.; and five grandchildren.

Disposition is by cremation.

The family requests memorials to the Columbia Maritime Museum in Astoria, where
Mr. Natt was immediate past board president.