Coolidge Examiner
The Coolidge Examiner is a weekly newspaper based in Coolidge, Pinal County, Arizona, first published on March 7, 1930 — fifteen years before the city of Coolidge incorporated. It was launched as a souvenir issue for the dedication of Coolidge Dam, and its founding copies were presented to former President Calvin Coolidge, for whom both the dam and the town were named, to a Phoenix publisher, and to humorist Will Rogers. Published by Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc., the family company behind the Casa Grande Dispatch, the Examiner now appears within the Thursday Casa Grande Dispatch and online through PinalCentral.com, serving a desert farming and growing exurban community between Phoenix and Tucson. The Coolidge Chamber of Commerce notes that the paper has marked more than ninety years of local news, telling the stories of local people while keeping government officials in check.
A Souvenir First Issue for Coolidge Dam
Publisher and editor Ted Healy issued the first Coolidge Examiner on March 7, 1930, as a souvenir for the dedication of Coolidge Dam on the Gila River, the centrepiece of the San Carlos Irrigation Project. Healy claimed it was the first newspaper both published and printed in Coolidge. According to the 1980 Arizona Newspaper Association directory, quoted in later profiles, the first copy off the press was placed in the hands of former President Calvin Coolidge at the dedication, the second went to Charles A. Stauffer, publisher of the Arizona Republican in Phoenix, and the third to Will Rogers, the celebrated comedian and commentator. It is an origin story few American weeklies can match: a newspaper whose launch edition was literally handed to a former president at the event it was created to commemorate.
Ted Healy and the Paper's Predecessor
The Examiner effectively replaced the Coolidge News, published by Al and Marge Wilke from April 1928, according to the Arizona Memory Project's summary of the paper. Healy was an experienced Arizona newspaperman who had worked at papers in Nogales and Phoenix. In 1913 he had co-founded the Casa Grande Bulletin with Angela Hutchinson Hammer, the publisher of several Arizona newspapers who later became the first woman inducted into the Arizona Newspaper Association Hall of Fame. Political differences split that partnership: after Healy took over the Bulletin in 1915, he ran it under a slogan advocating pumping-plant irrigation for the reclamation of what he called a great inland empire. Water — its scarcity, its politics and its promise — was therefore in the Examiner's DNA from the start, in a region where disputes over water rights, including between white settlers and Indigenous communities, permeated public life and appeared frequently in Healy's newspapers.
A Local-News Weekly with a Blanket Slogan
The Examiner was published weekly and prided itself on focusing on local news. Its slogan — “Circulation covers Casa Grande Valley Like a Blanket” — made a geographic claim as well as a commercial one: the paper positioned itself as the record not just of the townsite of Coolidge but of the agricultural valley spreading around Casa Grande and the Gila River irrigation country. Coolidge itself was a young community, founded in 1925 as the irrigation project took shape and not incorporated as a city until 1945, so for its first fifteen years the Examiner served a town that was still formally unincorporated — the newspaper predates the municipality whose government it now covers. The Arizona Memory Project of the Arizona State Library holds the paper in its digital newspaper collections, and the Examiner's Library of Congress record (LCCN sn94050579; OCLC 31730384) anchors its bibliographic identity, with digitised issues including its first volume from 1930.
Into the Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Family
The Examiner's modern ownership runs through Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc., the family-owned company headquartered in nearby Casa Grande. That company's roots in the Examiner's story are personal as well as corporate: its flagship, the Casa Grande Dispatch, descends in part from the Bulletin that Healy himself co-founded in 1913. Donovan M. Kramer Sr., the son of an Illinois weekly editor and publisher, bought the Dispatch with his wife Ruth in the early 1960s — Casa Grande Valley Newspapers dates its Dispatch ownership to 1963 — converted it from a weekly to a daily in the 1970s, and bought weekly newspapers in Eloy, Coolidge, Florence and the White Mountains, later opening papers in Arizona City and Maricopa. When Kramer died in 2009 at 84, obituaries in the trade press credited his newspapers with covering their communities with a sense of purpose rooted in decades of family ownership. His widow Ruth continued to manage the business until her death in 2025, when the Dispatch passed to their children; company listings name Ruth Kramer as president and Donovan Kramer Jr. and Kara K. Cooper as co-publishers.
The Examiner Today: Inside the Dispatch and on PinalCentral
Today the Coolidge Examiner is published within the Thursday edition of the Casa Grande Dispatch, according to the Coolidge Chamber of Commerce's listing for the paper, which gives its address as 353 West Central Avenue in Coolidge and directs subscribers to PinalCentral.com. Media directories list it as a weekly published on Wednesdays, reflecting its long-standing print day, while its content now flows primarily through the shared PinalCentral platform alongside the group's other titles: the Casa Grande Dispatch, the Maricopa Monitor, the Florence Reminder and Blade-Tribune, the Eloy Enterprise and the Arizona City Independent. Casa Grande Valley Newspapers describes itself as publishing six community newspapers, specialty publications and news websites, printing everything at its plant in downtown Casa Grande.
Coverage: Water, Growth and County Government
The Examiner's historic preoccupations remain Pinal County's live issues. Water and irrigation — the subjects Healy campaigned on a century ago — still shape Coolidge's farming economy, now joined by the politics of growth as the city sits in the corridor between the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas. Editors who have worked the Coolidge beat for the group have described crime, economic development and rural living as the subjects most on residents' minds, and have noted how differently development lands in a small community: where a new national retailer in a big suburb is a convenience, in Coolidge it can be read as proof that the city has arrived, changing how residents view their own community. The paper's coverage portfolio — local government, schools, public safety, agriculture, business, sports and community announcements — is the standard weekly mix, sharpened by that small-city sensitivity to change.
Digital Presence and Archives
Online, the Examiner lives at pinalcentral.com under its own section, carrying Coolidge news, sports, obituaries and public notices, and the group offers subscriptions covering print and digital access across its titles. For researchers, the paper's early decades are unusually accessible: the Arizona Memory Project provides digitised Examiner issues from 1930 onward, Newspapers.com's archive begins in 1930 and lists some 6,680 scans, and Chronicling America-derived listings cover the paper from March 1930. Those archives document Coolidge from its dam-dedication infancy through its incorporation and postwar growth, in the words of the paper that was there at the dedication.
Significance
More than ninety years after a souvenir issue was handed to Calvin Coolidge, the Examiner endures as Coolidge's hometown record — no longer a standalone print weekly in its original form, but a named, continuing publication within its county's dominant local news group. Its story links several strands of Arizona journalism: a founder who also co-founded a neighbouring daily and partnered with a Hall of Fame publisher; a launch tied to one of the state's great irrigation works; and absorption into a family company that has kept Pinal County's community papers under one roof for six decades. For a city younger than its newspaper, that continuity is the point: Coolidge had a paper before it had a city government, and it still has one.
