(Courtesy of the Columbia University Libraries)
Carl William Ackerman (1890-1970), Columbia University B. Litt. 1913, was Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism from 1931 to 1956. He spent from 1960 to 1962 researching and writing a biography (unpublished) of Hokan Bjornstrom Steffanson, 1883-1962, the Swedish-American industrialist and financier.
Ackerman was a champion of freedom of the press. His professional career was forged in both major World Wars. While working as a correspondent in World War I with the United Press, Ackerman came to attention when he published Germany, The Next Republic?, a book that discussed the possibility of a successful democracy in post-Kaiser Germany.
When the book was printed in 1917, at the height of World War I, this sentiment was considered quite radical. The London Times Literary Supplement commented: "For the serious student of affairs the importance of the book lies in the large mass of information which it contains as to the struggle which was going on all the time in Germany between the two great parties, the Pan-Germans and the party of comparative moderation which centered round the Foreign Office." Mexico's Dilemma was considered "topical," "limited in scope and subject," and of "little relevance." Trailing the Bolsheviki was similarly received. As a biography, Dawes, the Doer was panned as "poorly handled," whereas Biography of George Eastman was called by the New York Tribune "objective in the sense that it holds strictly to the drama of events in justification of its hero. This makes it eminently readable, even exciting at times, purely as an epic of success achieved, a sort of `Pilgrim's Progress' of business."
Mr. Ackerman was an outspoken advocate of a journalism foundation in the United States "dedicated to the study of the daily newspaper and government." He explained, "We need scientific studies of the press by the press, and for the press, which will contribute to the progress of journalism as the great educational foundations have advanced medicine."
Ackerman married Mabel VanderHoof in 1914, and was the father of Robert VanderHoof Ackerman. Writings by Ackerman: Germany, the Next Republic?, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917.; Mexico's Dilemma, Doran 1918, Gordon Press, 1976; Trailing the Bolsheviki, Scribner, 1919; Dawes, the Doer (biography), Houghton, 1930; Biography of George Eastman, Houghton, 1930. Ackerman authored numerous articles, pamphlets, and reports on journalism and related affairs.
(Courtesy of United Press International.)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Sevellon Brown III, veteran Washington correspondent and reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, died Wednesday at Rhode Island Hospital. He was 70,
Brown worked at the Journal-Bulletin from 1939 to 1968 when he retired because of ill health.
He was born in Washington on April 23, 1913, the son of Sevellon and Elizabeth Barry Brown.
His family had an association with the Journal-Bulletin that began in 1904 when his maternal grandfather, David S. Barry, left his post as Washington correspondent for the New York Sun to become editor-in-chief of the Providence newspapers.
Two years later, Barry returned to Washington as Journal-Bulletin correspondent. In 1919, he was elected sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate.
The elder Sevellon Brown succeeded his father-in-law as Washington correspondent after service in World War I. He then moved to Providence as managing editor and later became editor and publisher of the newspapers.
The younger Brown, known as Jeff, was Journal-Bulletin Washington correspondent from 1939-1942 and as bureau chief from 1942 to 1944.
After World War II and service with the OSS in London, Brown returned to the Journal-Bulletin as assistant to the editor (his father) from 1946 to 1949, then as associate editor from 1949 to 1953. He was appointed editor on Feb. 4, 1953 and held the post until his retirement.
For several years he served on the advisory board of the American Press Institute, chaired the American section of the International Press Institute, served on Columbia University's Pulitzer Price selection committees, and on the committee that selected Nieman fellowships for Journalists at Harvard.
Brown was a board member and later president of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and chaired the New England Associated Press News Executives Association.
He is survived by his wife, the former Janice O. Van DeWater, two daughters by a previous marriage, five grandchildren, and a brother, Barry Brown, of Washington.
A memorial service was scheduled at 1 p.m. Friday at Swan Point Chapel. Burial will be private.
(Courtesy of Mississippi Writers & Musicians)
By Jennifer Phillips (SHS)
“The South is so often damned for social backwardness, for reaction entrenched in smugness and lethargy, that it is a pleasure to introduce a young Southerner who represents a totally different school of thought and action.” Saturday Evening Post Feb.23, 1946, on Hodding Carter’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize
William Hodding Carter II, the son of William Hodding and Irma Dutarte Carter, was born on February 3, 1907, in Hammond, Louisiana (USM-McCain Library and Archives). As a young child, Carter spent his summer days with his grandmother in the Mississippi Delta along the Mississippi River. At the age of eighteen, Hodding Carter moved away to attend Bowdoin College in Maine, were he received his B.A. in 1927. Carter then transferred to Columbia University to study journalism for one year before taking a teaching fellowship at Tulane University in 1928. Upon completion of his fellowship at Tulane, Carter began writing for the New Orleans paper, Item-Tribune. He then took a job working as the Night Bureau manager for United Press in New Orleans. His competence and determination brought him to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1930 as the Bureau Manager of Associated Press (Current Biography 1946).
On October 31, 1931, Hodding Carter married Betty Werlein. However, their happiness immediately met with turmoil. In April of 1932, Hodding Carter was fired from his job at Associated Press for “insubordination.” The supervisor who made the decision to release Carter from his position wrote a letter to Carter. Carter says that the letter stated that he “had some good qualities, but I would never make a newspaper man, and I ought not waste any time getting into another business” (Carter 3). The man’s attempt to persuade the young writer from a career in journalism failed miserably. The young couple moved back to Carter’s hometown of Hammond, Louisiana, where they intended to open a daily paper, the Daily Courier. An attack on his abilities had only made the Carter more determined, “We had to prove to our families and ourselves and the man who had written the letter that the letter was wrong.”(Hodding Carter in his biography Where Main Street Meets the River). The main goal of Carter’s Daily Courier was to focus on the wrong doings of Congressman Huey Long. Carter’s newspaper was so strong that “theirs was the only district in the state [Louisiana] that never sent a Long henchman to congress,” (Time Magazine 20May46). Amidst the battle against Huey Long, the Hammond Daily Courier took the time to print such articles as the birth of Hodding and Betty’s first son, William Hodding Carter III, on April 8, 1935 (Current Biography: 1946).
In 1935 Carter attended a literary conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While there, he met David Cohn, a Greenville, Mississippi, writer and author. Cohn convinced Hodding that Greenville needed his talents as an experienced newspaperman. On July 7, 1936, Hodding Carter drew up an outline for his new paper, and, with help from William Alexander Percy, author of Lanterns on the Levee (yet unpublished), the Delta Star was up and running (Waldron 69).
In 1938, Carter and Betty bought out the only other daily in Greenville, the Democrat Times, and merged the two papers to form the Delta Democrat-Times. The paper was a steady success, and Hodding gained more recognition for his talents as a editor and writer.
On September 29, 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier met with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. On the 30th, the Munich “Peace in our times” Pact was signed. Hodding’s feelings on this matter were so stong in opposition to the pact that he signed with the National Guard (Waldron 87).
In April of 1939, Carter was offered one of the prestigious Neiman Fellowships at Harvard University. After much debate and long conversations with his wife, Percy, and other shareholders of the Delta Democrat-Times, Hodding decided to accept the fellowship. In October of 1939, their second son, Philip Dutartre Carter, was born. In January of 1940, Hodding and Betty set off with their two boys to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While at Harvard, Hodding had time to think about an offer Ralph Ingersoll had made to him–to be the editor of Ingersoll’s creation, PM. On June 1, 1940, Carter reported to work in New York, New York. While Carter did gain some recognition at PM, he wanted to return to the Delta and his newspaper. On September 21, 1940, he was on his way out the door and back to Greenville, Mississippi, to take up his old job (Where Main Street Meets the River).
In November, 1940, the National Guard mobilized, and Carter was, once again, on the move– this time to Camp Blanding, Florida. While there, he became Public Relations Officer for the regiment. He also suffered an accident while training that cost him his sight in one eye. Sent overseas with the war, Carter wrote for the Middle East versions of the patriotic papers, Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt. In 1945, Hodding Carter received an Honorable Discharge from the United States Armed Services and returned home to Greenville, Mississippi (Current Biography: 1946).
Upon arrival home, Carter took up his fight against Senator Theodore Bilbo. He wrote a series of articles dealing with racial, economic, and religious problems in Mississippi. His editorials were published at a very rocky time in the South, and Hodding’s articles stood apart from other debate and speculation on the status of African-Americans in society at the time. The magazine PM stated in an article published on August 5, 1945, that “The chief reasons for the silence are the fear of being labeled a ‘nigger lover’ or the feeling–even among many of those unsympathetic with such views–that the South should present a united front un racial matters” (Current Biography: 1946). Widely acclaimed and criticized, Hodding received national recognition as a writer when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in May of 1946. In August of ’46, Carter established a second paper, the Delta Star, which received attention when Hodding published an article dealing with the beating–death of a black boy by five white boys (Cox Mississippi Almanac).
Tragedy struck the Carter family on April 27, 1964, when Hodding and Betty’s third son, Thomas Hennen Carter, shot himself while playing Russian Roulette. That same day, Hodding had been hospitalized for separating his retina. He was temporarily blind (Waldron 305).
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill. Hodding continued to contribute editorial to the Delta Democrat-Times, which his son now ran unofficially. He also contributed two articles to the New York Times Magazine dealing with the South’s judicial system and the degradation of the Confederate flag (Waldron 317). In 1965, Hodding gave the very first Carlos McClatchy Memorial Lecture at Stanford University. In June of 1966, when son Hodding Carter III came back from Harvard, Hodding officially handed the paper over to him. Betty and Hodding spent the summer in Maine, trusting “Young” Hodding to take care of the business without his father watching over him.
In 1968, Hodding was asked to give the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He was so ill that he was unable to speak, and his wife was forced to read from notes he had prepared for himself. He also received the Tenth Annual First Federation Award for his service to Mississippi (Waldron 321). He was not able to travel to Columbia University in 1971 when he received the Columbia University Journalism Award.
Eventually, Hodding Carter’s condition deteriorated even more. On April 4, 1972, Hodding Carter died. Both of his sons wrote editorials about him in the Delta Democrat-Times. The following day. Philip, who runs the paper today, recalled, “We called him Big because he was; Hodding Carter was the biggest of his clan, a legend, first of all in his own tribe.” (Waldron 325).
“If I have gained anything in life, it is a belief in the soul and the destiny of man.”
Hodding Carter
(Courtesy of The New York Times)
By Karen W. Arenson
November 22, 1997
Grayson Louis Kirk, the scholarly president of Columbia University whose ill-fated decision in the spring of 1968 to turn 1,000 police officers in riot gear against student protesters became an emblem of the generational conflict characterizing the Vietnam War era, died early yesterday morning.
He was 94 and died in his sleep at his home in Bronxville, N.Y., his son, John G. Kirk, said.
For many years, the university grew and prospered under Dr. Kirk's leadership. An exponent of broad, liberal education of the sort Columbia offered, he proved adept at relating to the trustees and to raising money. Under him, the university quadrupled the size of its endowment. It also expanded its library, introduced new academic programs and built more than a dozen new buildings.
But toward the end of his tenure, Dr. Kirk was widely viewed as no match for the enormous pressures for social change surging through the institution in the late 60's. He resigned shortly after the student protests of 1968.
Dr. Kirk became the university's president in 1953, succeeding Dwight D. Eisenhower after his election as President. A portly, pipe-smoking man, he presided over a period of enormous growth for the university. But as the 60's swept by, Dr. Kirk repeatedly found himself and Columbia at the center of public controversies: for deteriorating relations with the surrounding community, capped by the university's decision to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park; for taking a controlling interest in a cigarette filter whose sale would bring revenues to Columbia; and finally, for the way he handled the student demonstrations of 1968. Those demonstrations were directed against the building of the gymnasium and the university's affiliation with a consortium that did military research for the Government.
Students took over five campus buildings and the president's office. The pressure built as the police stood outside the campus gates while faculty and student negotiating committees tried to end the protest. Finally, on April 30, 1,000 helmeted police officers swarmed onto campus and began dragging away the protesters, kicking and beating those who did not move fast enough. Hundreds of students were arrested and dozens injured. Dr. Kirk said the decision to call in the police was ''obviously the most painful one I ever made.''
As the students left, they chanted: ''Kirk must go, Kirk must go.''
A second campus protest a month later resulted in another battle between student protesters and police, but Dr. Kirk resisted leaving office, declaring repeatedly that he would not bow to the protesters and resign.
But in August 1968, just four months after students had first occupied his office, he stepped down, saying that he hoped his retirement would ''insure the prospect of more normal university operations.''
He became president emeritus, and said he would continue to help raise money for the university.
As college administrators everywhere faced campus protests and challenges to their authority, the actions of Dr. Kirk and Columbia administrators were closely examined. The Cox Commission, a panel established by Columbia's faculty to investigate the campus uprisings, said that Columbia's administration and trustees had ''too often conveyed an attitude of authoritarianism and invited mistrust.''
The 222-page report, delivered in October 1969 and written largely by the panel's chairman, Archibald Cox, a Harvard Law School professor and former Solicitor General of the United States, was sharply critical of Dr. Kirk's tenure.
''The hurricane of social unrest struck Columbia at a time when the university was deficient in the cement that binds an institution into a cohesive unit,'' the report said.
It took Columbia to task for the ''unhealthy relations'' with the largely black community of Harlem, pointing to its ''indifference'' to the poor and the manner in which the university had expanded its presence in Morningside Heights.
But the commission pointed to equally poor relations on the campus itself, and criticized the administration for its handling of the student protests. ''The trauma of the violence that followed police intervention intensified emotions, but support for the demonstrators rested upon broad discontent and widespread sympathy for their position.''
After Dr. Kirk stepped down, the university began to try to change the imperious manner emanating from the president's office. In sharp contrast to Dr. Kirk's continued resistance to expanding the governance of the university to include more input from students and faculty, Andrew Cordier, his successor as acting president, said he would stress ''the human values and participatory possibilities of university life.''
Grayson Kirk grew up in a bucolic Middle Western town far removed from the turmoil-ridden urban campus he would later inherit. He was born on a farm in Jeffersonville, Ohio, a town of 800, on Oct. 12, 1903. His father was a farmer, his mother a schoolteacher.
Although he first wanted to be a foreign correspondent, he moved into educational administration as a young man, serving briefly as a high school principal even before he graduated from Miami University in Ohio. After earning a master of arts degree at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and studying at the Ecole Libres des Sciences Politiques in Paris, he completed a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1930, where he taught for a decade.
Dr. Kirk arrived at Columbia in 1940 as an associate professor of government. With Columbia as a base, he moved in and out of international affairs. He took a leave in 1942 to head the security section of the State Department's political studies division, and then left again in 1944 to serve on the United States staff at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. He also participated in the establishment of the United Nations Security Council in San Francisco in 1945.
Back at Columbia, he became the director of Columbia's new Institute for European Studies, and from there, took charge of planning for the installation of Eisenhower as Columbia's president in 1948. A year later, Dr. Kirk was made provost.
A man of few words, he said he found administration ''better that I had anticipated.'' He said he had had to take an earlier train from Scarsdale -- the 8:15 A.M. instead of the 9:07 -- and had had to give up golf and his woodworking shop in his home cellar. ''It's full of headaches, as I expected,'' he said in 1950, ''but more interesting that I thought it would be. And then, too, I'm pretty good at delegating things.''
When Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in 1952, Dr. Kirk was an easy choice as his successor at Columbia. He had served as acting president of the university when Eisenhower took a leave to head NATO forces in 1951. When Eisenhower left Columbia on January 5, 1953, Columbia's trustees asked Dr. Kirk to step out of the boardroom for a few minutes. Minutes later, he was named Columbia's 14th president.
Under him, Columbia's endowment ballooned from about $100 million to more than $400 million. And in 1966, he initiated a $200 million, three-year capital-fund drive. In the first 14 months, with Dr. Kirk's active solicitation of alumni and others, Columbia raised more than $70 million in gifts and pledges, which was said to be a record at the time.
Academically, the university expanded, too. It introduced a variety of new research programs and institutes, from the Southern Asian Institute to the Division of Urban Planning in the School of Architecture. With a $10 million grant from the Ford Foundation, Columbia also created a Center for Urban Community Affairs, aimed at improving employment, education, health, housing and cultural opportunities in Harlem.
During Dr. Kirk's tenure, the university also doubled the size of its library to four million volumes and added more than a dozen new buildings, both on its Morningside Heights campus and farther afield, including the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and the Lamont Geological Observatory in Palisade, N.Y.
But as the 1960's unfolded, Dr. Kirk found himself increasingly embroiled in controversy. He was criticized in 1967, when Columbia tried to profit from a cigarette filter whose value many found questionable. He drew fire from students and Harlem residents for Columbia's plan to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park, which was seen as a symbol of the university's distance from the Harlem community and its interests. He was attacked personally for his membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses, a consortium of universities doing research for the Government.
But even as student protests mounted, there were signs that Dr. Kirk had at least some understanding of the problems facing the nation and campuses like his. In a speech at the University of Virginia in early April of 1968, just weeks before Columbia erupted in battle, Dr. Kirk called for the United States to get out of Vietnam ''as quickly as possible,'' saying that none of the country's social, economic or political problems could be managed until the war was ended.
''In many ways, our society is in a more perilous condition than at any time since the convulsive conflict between the states a century ago,'' he said. Disrespect for law and authority had reached such a level of acceptance, he added, that ''its natural concomitant, resort to violence, has almost achieved respectability.''
But if he understood the nature of the problem intellectually, he showed little capacity to deal with it practically. Less than two weeks later, students occupied his office.
Although President Kirk said he would put the issue of the gym before the trustees, and the university initially resisted bringing in police for fear of worsening tensions, it ultimately filed trespassing charges against the students occupying five buildings, and the police charged in to clear the buildings.
But protests continued, and student demands for Dr. Kirk's resignation escalated. The president said that since he was 64, he had discussed retirement with the trustees before the protests began. But, he declared, ''I am not going to resign under fire, because that would be a victory for those who are out to destroy the university.''
But his presidency encountered growing difficulties. He was accompanied by heavy security. And in June, rather than risk disruption of commencement ceremonies, he stayed away and let his academic vice president preside.
Then, in August, he announced that he would step down, saying that ''campus events'' prevented him from devoting enough time to raising money as would be desirable.
The trustees accepted his resignation ''with deep regret,'' and stressed that it was voluntary.
Dr. Kirk served out his terms as president of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Association of American Universities, and continued to help raise money for Columbia.
But after 1968, Dr. Kirk largely faded from public view. His wife, Marion Sands Kirk, died last year. He is survived by his son, John G., as well as by four granddaughters and two great-grandchildren.
But whenever the events of the '60's are replayed, as on the 25th anniversary of the Columbia protest in 1993, Dr. Kirk and his legacy are remembered. There were campus protests around the country, but Columbia's was one of most explosive.
Correction: December 3, 1997, Wednesday An obituary on Nov. 22 about Grayson L. Kirk, the president of Columbia University who called the police to confront student protesters in 1968, misstated his role in that year's commencement. Dr. Kirk presided; he did not stay away. But the address traditionally given by the president was delivered instead by Prof. Richard Hofstadter to reduce the chances that the ceremony would be disrupted.
(Courtesy of The New York Times)
By Deirdre Carmody
June 17, 1981
John S. Knight, founder of the Knight publishing empire and editor emeritus of Knight-Ridder Newspapers Inc., died last night of a heart attack at the home of a friend in Akron, Ohio. He was 86 years old. Dale Allen, executive editor of The Akron Beacon Journal, the first Knight newspaper, said that Mr. Knight had been hospitalized for two or three days with a heart condition after attending the 150th anniversary celebration of another of his papers, The Detroit Free Press, about a month ago.
Mr. Knight retired in 1976 as editorial chairman of the Knight-Ridder chain and divided his time between working in the offices of the Akron newspaper and in Miami at the chain's corporate offices one floor above The Miami Herald, another of the chain's papers.
As principal stockholder he owned just under 20 percent of the Knight-Ridder stock. His brother James owns about 10 percent of the outstanding shares.
In the early years of American journalism, publishers tended to be strong-willed, competitive men whose personalities and political philosophies dominated the newspapers they produced.
As times changed there emerged a new generation of publishers whose primary interest was to buy newspapers and create newspaper groups, and they turned American journalism into a full-fledged industry.
John Shively Knight belonged, in a sense, to both breeds. He inherited The Akron Beacon Journal from his father in 1933 and went on to assemble the Knight-Ridder newspaper group, which became the chain with the largest weekly circulation in the country.
By 1981 it included 34 daily newspapers in 17 states with an aggregate weekly circulation of 25 million. It also included four television stations, and in 1980 its revenues were $1.099 billion.
But, unlike many publishers who had little to do with the editorial side of their papers, Mr. Knight wrote a weekly opinion column for years on an ancient typewriter in his office. The column, entitled ''The Editor's Notebook,'' won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for ''distinguished editorial writing.'' His opinions earned him descriptions by friends as ''crusty'' and ''blunt.'' Two More Pulitzers
Two Knight newspapers, The Detroit Free Press and The Charlotte Observer, also won Pulitzers in the same year as Mr. Knight. It was the first time that one publisher had carried off three of the journalism prizes.
''I'm a bleeder,'' Mr. Knight once said in describing his own writing habits. ''I used to sit here and struggle with the typewriter, smoking cigarettes and drinking soft drinks and ruining my gut. I'd go home from the office drained. This was work.''
One of his campaigns was for freedom of the press around the world and against censorship. His belief was that ''if the peoples of the world can come to know and understand one another through the freedom of international news exchange, many of the causes of war will have been eliminated.''
Mr. Knight was a firm believer in local control by each of his newspapers, as well as strong coverage of local news. He used to say that he wanted each of his papers to have its own ''character.'' Summing up his beliefs to fellow publishers in 1969, he said:
''Your first duty is to the citizen who buys your newspaper in the belief that it has characer and stability, that it is at all times a defender and protector of the rights and liberties of our people, that it does not yield to the pressure of merchant or banker, politician or labor union.''
Mr. Knight was born in Bluefield, W. Va., on Oct. 26, 1894. When he was 6 years old, his family moved to Akron, Ohio, where his father became advertising manager of The Beacon Journal. By 1915 the father had acquired full control of the paper.
As a boy, John worked at the newspaper on summer vacations; on election nights he sold extras on street corners. He attended high school in Akron, then the Tome School in Maryland and Cornell University. He left Cornell in his junior year to enlist in the Motor Transport Corps but was later transferred to the 113th Infantry, rose to Lieutenant and saw action in the Argonne. Just before the Armistice he joined the Army Air Corps.
After raising cattle for a brief time in California, Mr. Knight went to work at The Beacon-Journal in 1920 as a sportswriter. Five years later he became managing editor, and in 1933, upon his father's death, he inherited the paper.
Four years later he bought The Miami Herald and acquired and then discontinued The Miami Tribune. In 1938 he bought The Times-Press, the rival Akron paper, which left him with a monopoly in that city. In 1940 he bought The Free Press, Detroit's only morning paper, and in 1944 he bought controlling interest in The Chicago Daily News for $2.2 million, although he sold The Daily News in 1959. Public Triumph, Private Grief
By 1973 he owned 15 daily newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. The following year, he consolidated his group by merging with Ridder Publications, thus adding ownership or substantial interest in 19 more dailies in the West and Middle West.
While his public life prospered, however, his private life was marked by grief. His first wife, Katherine McLain, died in 1929, eight years after their marriage, leaving him with three young sons. In 1932 he married Beryl Zoller Comstock, who died in 1974.
In the closing weeks of World War II, his eldest son, John S. Knight, was killed in action, two weeks before the birth of his own son. Another son, Frank, died of illness in 1958. In December 1975, Mr. Knight's grandson, John S. Knight 3d, who was an editor of The Philadelphia Daily News, was murdered in a robbery in his apartment.
The surviving son, Charles Landon Knight of Akron, is president of Portage Newspaper Supply Company, a Knight-Ridder subsidiary. In 1976, Mr. Knight married Frances Elizabeth Augustus, widow of Ellsworth H. Augustus, a Cleveland civic leader and millionaire industrialist.
Like Mr. Knight, she owned racing horses. The Knight stables in Miami were called the Fourth Estate Stables and most of the horses were given names related to newspapers, such as Wire Editor and Extra, Extra. She died in January.
Mr. Knight, who had held the title of chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the company, relinquished his last post as editorial director in 1976, saying, ''There is a time to quit. I quit when I was doing well.''
But he remained an avid reader of newspapers and continued to send editors notes chiding them for mistakes or offering words of praise for a job well done.
(Courtesy of NCPedia)
McKelway, Benjamin Mosby
By Betty J. Brandon, 1991
2 Oct. 1895–30 Aug. 1976
Benjamin Mosby McKelway, newspaperman, was born in Fayetteville of Scottish ancestry. His father was Alexander Jeffrey McKelway, Presbyterian minister, journalist, and child labor reformer; his mother was Lavinia Rutherford (Ruth) Smith, the daughter of the Reverend Benjamin Mosby Smith, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. Journalism and the ministry drew numerous members of McKelway's family. His great-uncle, St. Clair McKelway, was editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, his brother St. Clair was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his brother Alexander Jeffrey was a Presbyterian minister and navy chaplain during World War II. Successive generations inherited not only one another's names but also dominant character traits, especially determination and optimism.
At the time of McKelway's birth, his father was pastor of the Fayetteville Presbyterian Church. In 1898, when Alexander McKelway assumed the editorship of the Presbyterian Standard, the state organ of the church, the family moved to Charlotte. The senior McKelway's affiliation with the National Child Labor Committee in 1904 prompted moves to Atlanta in 1906 and permanently to Washington, D.C., in 1909, when he became the organization's chief congressional lobbyist. Although the McKelways lived modestly, they retained a Scottish housekeeper and, as an intimate family, frequently entertained relatives.
Vacations at eastern seashores, football, and hunting highlighted Benjamin's upbringing. Nicknamed "Bo," he possessed a "winning and forceful personality" which enchanted his younger brothers and sister who emulated his example as the oldest male. McKelway attended Western High School in the District of Columbia and entered Virginia Polytechnic Institute with ambitions to be a "scientific farmer." Service in World War I in 1917 and 1918 as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Infantry interrupted his education. A newspaper career apparently attracted him first in 1916, when he was briefly a reporter for the Washington Times, which employed his father as an editorial writer in 1917. Although McKelway studied at George Washington University and the University of Virginia, he was never graduated from college; instead, he began a practical apprenticeship as news editor and editorial writer with the New Britain (Conn.) Herald in 1919 and 1920. In 1921 he initiated his distinguished fifty-five-year association with the Washington Star. From 1921 to 1946 he rose through the paper's ranks as reporter, city editor, news editor, managing editor, and associate editor. Selected as the first nonfamily editor in 1946, he retained that position until 1963, when he assumed the title of editorial chairman, which he held for the remainder of his life.
His colleagues honored him by electing him president of the Associated Press (1958–63), president of the Grid-iron Club (1958), and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (1949–50). A resolution of tribute by the board of directors of the Associated Press in 1963 emphasized McKelway's devotion to freedom of the press, the shibboleth of his career. The theme of his 1964 Pulitzer Memorial Lecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was resistance to any form of press censorship.
His role in the inspection of German concentration camps and his advocacy of the Nazi war crimes trials demonstrated that he had acquired his father's commitment to public service and social justice. Although McKelway identified with no political party, as a concerned citizen of the District of Columbia he campaigned for presidential suffrage for District residents and promoted civil rights before the cause was popular. As a trustee of the District of Columbia Public Library, the Rockefeller Foundation, George Washington University, the National Geographic Society, and the Washington National Monument Society, McKelway supported education and philanthropy. He served as president of the Washington Board of Trade in 1945 and 1946. Social memberships in the National Press, Gridiron, Alibi, Cosmos, Chevy Chase, and Metropolitan clubs reflected his gregariousness. A member of Delta Tau Delta, he was an adviser to the Pulitzer Prize Committee and was honorary president of Sigma Delta Chi. He continued his family's affiliation with the Presbyterian church.
In 1920 he married Margaret Joanna Prentiss, who died in 1974. He was the father of three sons: Benjamin Mosby, Dr. William Prentiss, and John MacGregor. John maintained tradition as a reporter for the Washington Star. McKelway succumbed to kidney failure at Sibley Memorial Hospital and was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C. A portrait of him on a sailboat in Maine hangs in his son John's home.
Stuart H. Perry (1874-1957) was a newspaper publisher and authority on meteorites. He made extensive collections of meteorites and donated many specimens to the United States National Museum (USNM). In 1940, Perry became an Honorary Associate in Mineralogy, USNM, a title he held until his death.