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Newspaper owner and printer William Alan Roth was born in Lewistown, Illinois, on June 16, 1931. He graduated from high school in McCammon, Idaho, and attended Southwest Missouri State College. In 1950 he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served in Scotland. He moved to Genesee, Idaho and with his parents bought the Genesee News in 1954. After his father’s death, Roth and his mother bought the Kendrick Gazette in 1968. They created the Gazette News for the two communities. In the early 1970s they moved to Kendrick, Idaho. His mother retired in the mid ‘70s and died in 1990 at the age of 84.

Due to health issues Roth retired from the newspaper business for several years but he continued to run the print shop. Later he sold the Gazette News to the Whitman-Latah Republic. Roth re-established the Kendrick Gazette after heart bypass surgery and the Republic’s failure in 1987. He sold the paper in 1998 to the Latah Eagle, though he continued to work on commercial printing jobs until his death in May 2000.

As the owner of an old fashioned printing press Roth expanded his activities into a literary venture called Two Magpie Press. In addition to booklets and poetry broadsides, Two Magpie Press published a little magazine called aag-aag!, which only lasted two issues. Stanley Kunitz, Robert Bly, Ron McFarland, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Michelle Higgins, and Carolyn Gravelle are only a few of the well-known writers published by Two Magpie Press.