The Power of the Press
A Seattle job recruiter is overwhelmed by the sheer reach of local newspaper advertising after placing a short notice for canal workers.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In Thursday morning's Intelligencer, J. M. Dunn of Seattle inserted a five-line advertisement under 'New Today,' asking for men and teams to go to Seattle to work on the promised canals between Lake Washington and Lake Union, and between Salmon Bay and Lake Union. Toward evening he met a reporter and said: 'I never knew the power of advertising until today, and I would not have believed until I SAW it demonstrated how generally advertisements are read. I put in the shortest kind of a notice this morning and expected two or three answers. But I have been literally overrun with applicants. They kept me busy from 8 o'clock in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, and I had to leave the hotel from sheer exhaustion.' He secured a good part of the labor he desired.
“I never knew the power of advertising until today, and I would not have believed until I SAW it demonstrated how generally advertisements are read.”
While job boards have moved from newsprint to digital, the anecdote captures a fundamental Seattle reality: the city's growth is often driven by massive infrastructure dreams—like the ship canal—that draw in a wave of laborers, a cycle that continues today.
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