If the event had been held at Bill’s Tavern, perhaps a few more people would’ve shown up. But the crowd of roughly 70 that squeezed into the Cannon Beach History Center Jan. 14 had a good time reminiscing about the Upper Left Edge newspaper cum literary magazine that published in Cannon Beach for ten years.

The event marked the presentation of bound copies of all issues of the paper and honored its editor-publisher, Billy Hults, who is being treated for cancer.

Besides Reverend Billy (the Church of the Rastified Cowboy Buddha), others who helped produce the paper were up-front at the gathering: Sally Lackaff (who sometimes did the art right on the layout sheets), Peter (Professor) Lindsey, Gary (Dr. Karkeys) Keiski, June Kroft of “June’s Garden,” Peter (Spud) Siegel, this reporter (who wrote from an outpost in Ilwaco, Washington), and Watt Childress, who revealed he got his start in writing for publication in the Edge. “Uncle” Michael Burgess, the paper’s “voice of reason” and writer of a popular “therapy page” horoscope and advice column, couldn’t be present because he was teaching a writing class.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,” Hults said to shouts and applause as he arrived to join his former, unpaid newspaper staff.

The little paper’s wide readership was illustrated by Lindsey’s story about being on the guest list at a Portland event. The ticket taker asked, “You aren’t the famous Professor Lindsey of the Upper Left Edge by any chance?” Lindsey said he was completely stupefied.

Childress recalled his first impression of Hults thusly: “Billy walked into Bill’s with a big stack of papers. Folks swarmed around him, reached in to snatch up copies of the broadsheet like he had just arrived at a potluck with delectable finger food…Billy is a folk artist. He has a knack of bringing together people in the pursuit of happiness.”

Although he was publisher and editor, Hults said he never edited the stories and columns in the paper.

“I don’t edit; either I printed it or I didn’t. I don’t edit – that’s pretentious,” Hults said. “If I can write better than him, then I’ll write it. If she writes better than I can, then I don’t touch it.”

But he admitted to one minor editing attempt that backfired.

“I tried to edit Professor Lindsey one time. I thought it was just a spelling error, but no, it was a word I had never heard of. But he had.” Hults mistook “copse” as in a group of trees, for “corpse” and changed it, mangling the meaning of the sentence.

Hults said he was proud of some of the things the monthly paper accomplished. Several staff members continued the careers they had begun at the “Edge” by publishing books and writing for other publications.

The attention the paper paid to some local police officers caused the then-police chief to initiate community policing in Cannon Beach, Hults recalled, adding that the “Edge” helped stop the development of a condominium project on the estuary north of Seaside.

Eventually, it became too expensive to publish the paper.

“We went through three doublings of the price for pulp,” Hults said. “We took it from 200 some-odd dollars to $800, $900, and we just didn’t have the advertising to support it.”

Some of the ads in the paper weren’t actually sold, Lackaff added, but were for items or services staff members personally enjoyed. “We hoped they would like the ad and pay us for it,” she said.

“I shake my head when I think how cheap and easy and fun it was to exercise my First Amendment rights and publish a small-town newspaper,” Hults wrote in his last editorial.

Nancy McCarthy contributed material for this story.