OROVILLE — Newspaperman, state assemblyman and state senator and circa 1886 Oroville High School graduate Charles Hastings Deuel is being honored posthumously as a 2024 Oroville Union High School District Hall of Fame inductee.
The son of Butte County pioneers who came to California during the gold rush, Deuel was born in Forbestown, California in 1868 and moved to Oroville in 1882.
When he was 18, Deuel was hired by the Oroville Mercury as a printer’s apprentice. He quickly became a reporter and ultimately to acting editor, a role he fulfilled for four years. In 1891 he became the editor of the Gridley Herald until he retired in 1897, at age 31, to join V. C. Richards as co-owner of the Chico Record, where he became part owner. He and Richards maintained ownership of the Chico Record for 48 years until they sold it in 1945.
Charles Hastings Deuel. (Contributed by Oroville Union High School District)
In December 2021 when Deuel was posthumously inducted into the California Newspaper Publishers Association Hall of Fame, Chico Enterprise-Record Editor, Mike Wollcot wrote, “Think about that — he began as publisher of the newspaper 20 years before the United States entered World War I and was still there in the final days of World War II. During that period, which included the turn of the century, the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression, and the two deadliest wars in the history of our planet, he built this newspaper into an empire all its own. The Record became one of California’s most reputable newspapers, a legacy we strive to uphold to this very day.”
In 1917, he was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to the Butte County Exemption Board, serving as secretary and working on the Selective Service Act.
In 1924 while still the publisher of the Chico newspaper, Deuel was elected to the California State Assembly. He served in the state assembly until 1930 and in 1931, he was elected to the California State Senate, a seat he held until his death in 1947. During his tenure, he served as a Democrat and as a Republican.
As a senator Deuel was a strong advocate of prison reform and introduced many bills on prison reform including one creating the California Vocational Institute in Lancaster, California. After he died in 1947, the name of the institute was changed to the Deuel Vocational Institution, in a bill signed by then-governor Earl Warren.
While serving as an assemblyman and the senator, Deuel was active on the Judiciary, Motor Vehicles, Revision of Criminal Law and Procedures, Banking and Loan, Commerce, Navigation, Conservation and Insurance committees. In 1933 while he was a senator, Deuel was named chair of the University and Teachers Colleges Committee.
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Following Deuel’s death in 1947, in the book “The California Legislature,” Secretary of State Joseph Beck wrote, “To the individual who has inhabited the Senate Chamber of the State of California longer than any other citizen of the State, the passing of Senator Charles Deuel marked the departure from that beautiful old room of the most kindly and most sympathetic presence it has ever known.”
Deuel married Bertha Marian Norman of Gridley in 1899 and they were together until his death. They had one son and two daughters.
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