Happy birthday, Jackson Hole Daily.

Jackson Hole’s most popular daily newspaper turns 30 years old today.

Publishing a free daily newspaper in Jackson Hole sounded like a great idea at the time — Dec. 1, 1978 — then-editor Paul Bruun said.

Too bad there was nobody (almost) in town to appreciate the vision.

“I remember when we went to do the listings for all the restaurants and bars, most of them weren’t open,” Bruun said. Now retired from the helm, Bruun remains with the Jackson Hole News&Guide family as the Outdoors columnist for the weekly paper.

“We had promises for advertising, but a lot of the places weren’t open,” he said. “The ski area then didn’t open for another couple of weeks.”

Facing deadlines, Bruun made call after call, formatting information into the various pages, calenders and listings.

“I woke Pat Mahin up to get the hours for the Mangy Moose and he said don’t worry about it,” Bruun said.

Perhaps it was just as good Jackson was a ghost town because it took awhile to get the well-oiled machine rolling.

The paper was what’s known as a quarter tab — half the dimensions of the tabloid-size Jackson Hole News&Guide of today. The Jackson Hole News and Jackson Hole Guide competed in the weekly class back then and both cost money.

The Jackson Hole Daily was a sister publication of the Jackson Hole News and was made and printed in that paper’s plant on Scott Lane. The Daily was free and only a dozen pages.

That didn’t make the inaugural edition a breeze, though.

News came in over the teletype, or wire, formatted for radio broadcast. Publisher Michael Sellett selected that subscription, which featured short reports, because of the small size of the paper.

But that meant to assemble a reasonable newspaper story, even for a small daily, the editor had to comb through every iteration and update in the radio format and piece together the new parts.

Bruun did so and passed on the results to Keko Heino, the typesetter. She would type in the story, which her machine spit out in column format, fit to be laid out in a newspaper.

“We had stuff in it we hadn’t done before, like the weather forecast,” Bruun said of the first edition. “We just kept trying to get all the ads together. What we were trying to do is get everything as up to the minute as we could.”

Artist David Whitlock was Bruun’s sidekick in charge of advertising and graphics. Bruun, a sports aficionado, recalls relief at some breaking news.

“I was so delighted the Heisman Trophy thing came out,” he said of the deadline bombshell. Billy Sims, a junior running back from Oklahoma, won the 44th trophy.

Page one featured some action by the United Nations, Bruun recalled. At the time, a condo at the Jackson Hole Racquet Club was being advertised for $46,750.

That evening, pressman Steve Admire waited and waited for the editorial team to finish. Then he waited some more. Then he went to sleep in the newspaper’s conference room.

“That thing didn’t start to print until 5 or 6 in the morning,” Bruun said.

Plans had been for the presses to roll the evening before.

Dave Lorenzo, who was scheduled to do the deliveries, was off on his regular job by then. So Bruun dragged Whitlock “like Sleepy the dwarf,” around town to deliver the new publication.

There were 2,000 copies circulated that day.

Bruun emphasized that 30 years ago there was no ESPN, no USA Today, no CNN. Fax machines were rare and the Internet was a long way off.

“There was none of that,” Bruun said.

The product, however, stirred great interest. The Daily, perhaps the world’s smallest, had it all.

“How delighted people were,” Bruun said, “at the crossword puzzle, the Peanuts cartoon, the little synopsis of stock-market quotations, the gold prices. That was fun.”

Today the Daily thrives under the leadership of Managing Editor Dava Zucker and a staff of copy editors and layout artists. Four-color photography and advertising are standard, and the publication covers everything from world and national affairs to business, local entertainment, opinions, sports, weather and art in a 15-inch-tall tabloid format.

It features four pages of local reports supplied by the newsroom at the Jackson Hole News&Guide and edited by Tim Dudley and Noah Brenner. Advertising sales and design is shared by workers in respective departments in the News&Guide.