Pulitzer Prize Board 1954-1955

(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).

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

Turner Catledge Dies at 82; Former Editor of The Times

Turner Catledge, former executive editor of The New York Times, died at home in New Orleans yesterday of a long illness after a stroke. He was 82 years old.

In a journalism career that spanned five decades, Mr. Catledge began as a reporter covering floods and murders, went on to the White House and national politics and for 17 years oversaw the work of several hundred reporters and editors.

Mr. Catledge expanded the coverage of foreign and national news in The Times and stressed the importance of writing, as he put it, ''in terms of people and how they lived.'' 

Under Mr. Catledge, the paper also stepped up its reporting on religion and other specialized subjects, began devoting more space to biographical material about people in the news and covered politics with the general reader in mind, rather than the political specialist.

''I had no master plan, no magic formula for solving the paper's problems,'' he once said. ''I was dealing with people - talented, sensitive, sometimes stubborn people - and they were constantly surprising me, one way or the other. I proceeded by trial and error, always pragmatic, trying to learn from experience.''

Editors and reporters who worked with the tall, courtly Southerner say that in addition to changing the content of the newspaper, he also passed along to a generation of developing journalists a passionate concern for fairness in news coverage and the need for a strong sense of ethics.

''Turner Catledge made a vital contribution to American journalism,'' said Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times. ''His was a unique talent with an unfailing sense of mission. He never lost sight of journalism's ultimate purpose - to inform the reader, to bring him each day a letter from home and never to permit the serving of special interests. His love of his craft and his deep affection for those who practiced it well have left an enduring imprint on The Times.

''He was loved and we will miss him.'' Mr. Catledge, who was born on a farm in central Mississippi and worked his way through college as a waiter, had a beguiling manner that helped him build a large and effective network of news sources as a reporter and win the friendship of several Presidents.

He liked to entertain friends and colleagues with homespun anecdotes and imitations of Southern politicians. When he addressed large groups, he once told a reporter, ''I ad-lib a great deal and I syncopate it.''

Colleagues said it was a combination of gifts - intelligence, enterprise and courage - that made Mr. Catledge an esteemed newspaperman. In 1926, he investigated fraud in Tennessee's Democratic primary so vigorously that followers of the state Democratic Party's leader, Edward Hull (Boss) Crump, beat him until he bled.

Opportunity, in the form of two Memphis city detectives, knocked on Mr. Catledge's door one morning in 1927. Alarmed by the fierce pounding, his widowed mother, Willie Anna Turner Catledge, answered the door of the apartment that she shared with him.

The detectives demanded to see Mr. Catledge, then a 26-year-old reporter for The Memphis Commercial Appeal. Even though she was afraid that he was being arrested, she woke him; he was sleeping late because he was exhausted from two weeks of covering a vast and devastating Mississippi River flood.

By plane and car he had been across six states to chronicle the destruction -taking pictures, telephoning his reports back to Memphis, even doing newscasts for his newspaper's radio station. A Meeting With Hoover

The detectives rushed Mr. Catledge to the elegant old Peabody Hotel and into a suite that was occupied by Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, who had just arrived in Memphis. President Calvin Coolidge had sent him down from Washington to oversee relief efforts in the flood area.

Mr. Hoover, who had been told by the Mayor of Memphis that The Commercial Appeal's reporter was highly knowledgeable, began bombarding Mr. Catledge with questions about the flood.

He gave detailed answers, and the Secretary paid careful attention to the eager young man with the shrewd eyes, pink-cheeked good looks and easy Southern courtesy.

Mr. Hoover was impressed - so impressed that he later wrote a letter about Mr. Catledge to Adolph S. Ochs, then publisher of The New York Times and grandfather of the present publisher. 

Mr. Hoover suggested that The Times hire Mr. Catledge as a reporter, and it did - but not until 1929, after Mr. Hoover had repeated his recommendation, this time as President of the United States.

Before long, Times executives, too, were impressed with Mr. Catledge's talents - so impressed that they made him deputy chief of the Washington bureau, from 1936 to 1941; national correspondent, 1943-44; an aide to the managing editor, 1944-51; managing editor, 1951-64, and executive editor, 1964-68. He was a director of The New York Times Company from 1968 to 1973 and a vice president from 1968 to 1970 before retiring.

Reminiscing about his editing years, Mr. Catledge once wrote: ''My career was not without drama, but the hardest decisions tended to be those within the organization, within the family, decisions regarding policy and people, decisions that demanded a crusading spirit less often than a careful balancing of complex issues.'' A Visit to Pacific Island

Mr. Catledge was a valued friend and counselor to three publishers of The Times, as well as chief steward of their family-controlled enterprise. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Mr. Ochs's son-in-law and successor as publisher, found Mr. Catledge to be a congenial traveling companion even under difficult circumstances. When they were visiting the Pacific island of Peleliu in 1944 shortly after American soldiers had occupied it, a Japanese sniper's bullet narrowly missed them.

Undisturbed, Mr. Sulzberger remarked to their Army escort, ''I don't think all resistance has stopped.'' Mr. Catledge, with a skilled reporter's reflexes, took shelter behind a jeep.

In later years, Mr. Catledge used to eat sandwich lunches in Central Park with Arthur Hays Sulzberger's son-in-law and successor as publisher, Orvil E. Dryfoos. And he was fondly nicknamed ''Professor'' by Mr. Dryfoos's successor, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. 

Mr. Catledge's ideas and convivial nature also led him to be active in the Associated Press Managing Editors Association and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which he served as president in 1960 and 1961. He helped to establish another journalistic organization, the American Press Institute, and was on its advisory board for many years.

As he noted in his autobiography, ''My Life and The Times,'' Mr. Catledge also had his flaws and foibles. During his rough-and-tumble apprenticeship in Southern journalism, he sometimes stole photographs of newsworthy people from their homes. As a writer, he was not notably polished. As an editor, he noted in his autobiography, he was often irritable about small errors.

Mr. Catledge was born on March 17, 1901, in Choctaw County in central Mississippi. In his ''Who's Who'' biography he gave his birthplace as Ackerman, a lumber-milling town, but he was actually born on his paternal grandfather's 300-acre farm near a hamlet called New Prospect. 

The people of that part of Mississippi are known for being tough and shrewd; many of them are small cotton and soybean farmers scratching a living from the red clay soil. The Catledges were farmers, while the Turners, Mr. Catledge's family on his mother's side, had gone into shopkeeping.

From his father, Lee Catledge, a political enthusiast who became Mayor of Philadelphia, Miss., Mr. Catledge acquired a passionate interest in politics. And from his mother, a strong-willed seamstress who ran a boardinghouse in Philadelphia, he acquired much of his ambition and drive.

Mr. Catledge spent most of his boyhood in Philadelphia, a cottonginning center in east central Mississippi. The town's high school gave Mr. Catledge a sound grounding in Latin, Greek and English composition.

Mr. Catledge went on to major in business at Mississippi State University near Starkville, 50 miles north of Philadelphia. His family was financially hard pressed, and while he was an undergraduate he worked as a waiter to help make ends meet. When he went on dates, he used to borrow clothes from a student who was better off - John C. Stennis, who later became a United States Senator from Mississippi.

After graduating in 1922, Mr. Catledge went to work running The Tunica Times, a small weekly newspaper in Tunica, in the northwestern corner of Mississippi. At the owner's behest, he published articles designed to make local blacks feel at home and not want to move to the North. He also wrote a series of articles denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.

''I thought very little about the plight of Negroes during my early newspaper career,'' Mr. Catledge wrote in his autobiography, which was published in 1971. ''Separate but equal was the law of the land, and it did not occur to me to challenge it. My thinking changed slowly, as did the nation's. When the great Supreme Court decisions of the 1950's came down, outlawing various forms of segregation, I realized that they were right, that segregation in public institutions and facilities cannot be tolerated.''

From Tunica, Mr. Catledge moved 100 miles southeast to Tupelo, Miss., a cattle-marketing center, where he served briefly as managing editor of The Tupelo Journal, a biweekly paper, at a weekly salary of $22.50.

Seeking greater opportunities, he soon moved on to the nearest big city, Memphis. He arrived there by train during a blizzard in February 1924 with $2.07 in his pocket.

After a brief stint on The Memphis Press, Mr. Catledge went to work for The Commercial Appeal and soon impressed his bosses and coworkers with his touch typing, his vocabulary and his large repertory of hymns, in addition to his reportorial skills.

In 1927 Mr. Catledge took a job as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, where, he later recalled, ''I learned to write better, to dress better, to act better - in short, to behave in a more civilized style than prevailed among Memphis newspapermen.'' It was in Baltimore, he wrote, ''that I first learned there are better things to drink than corn whisky.''

After two years The Times beckoned, and Mr. Catledge went to work briefly as a Times reporter in New York, covering Jewish affairs and later serving as a general-assignment reporter. Then he joined the Washington bureau, where his first job was covering the House of Representatives. 

Soon after arriving in the capital, he paid a call on Mr. Hoover in the White House. The President asked how much The Times was paying him, and when Mr. Catledge told him $80, Mr. Hoover remarked that it was too little. Mr. Catledge said the salary was not all that important, but the President admonished him, saying, ''You don't want to be too idealistic where money is concerned.''

Although Mr. Catledge was a lifelong Democrat, he tried to be impartial in his Washington reporting. ''I am a Democrat for the same reason the Pope is a Catholic,'' he liked to say. ''I was born one and subsequent developments persuaded me to remain one.''

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned Mr. Catledge to the White House and, saying that he did not get along with Arthur Krock, the longtime head of the Washington bureau, he proposed to bypass the bureau chief and disclose news directly to Mr. Catledge. Out of loyalty to Mr. Krock, Mr. Catledge refused the President's offer. 

The following year, Mr. Catledge covered Mr. Roosevelt's attempt to ''pack'' the Supreme Court with additional justices who would be sympathetic to the President's views, which Congress refused to approve.

After the attempt, Mr. Catledge and Joseph Alsop, then a Capitol Hill correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune, wrote a book about it entitled ''The 168 Days.'' It became a best seller.

In 1941 Mr. Catledge, still seeking greater opportunities, left The Times to work for The Chicago Sun. He began as chief correspondent, then became editor in chief. But he felt out of place on the paper.

''We just didn't fit,'' he later said in an interview. ''I'd become so much a part of The Times.'' So after 19 months, he recalled in his autobiography, he went back to Washington with The Times, taking a cut in his annual salary, from $26,500 to $12,000. 

In January 1945, Mr. Catledge moved to New York, and for seven years was the chief assistant to Edwin L. James, the managing editor. Mr. Catledge had begun as an assistant to Mr. James with the primary assignments of adding youth and vigor to The Times's editing and reportorial staffs and improving its internal organization.

Mr. Catledge duly set about trying to bring more unity among what he later called The Times's ''many pockets of bureaucracy'' and its ''various dukedoms'' - notably the Washington bureau - which he said were ''fiercely jealous of their prerogatives.''

He handled the problem in various ways, including the initiation of daily editors' meetings and the relaxation of jurisdictional boundaries within the newspaper.

In addition, Mr. Catledge tried to improve the paper's foreign news coverage, although it was already widely admired. In his memoirs he recalled urging Mr. James to increase coverage of Latin American affairs.

''I argued that we had a responsibility to develop an audience,'' Mr. Catledge wrote, ''that our readers should never be surprised by anything that occurred in the world.'' And, in due course, Times readers were served larger helpings of staff-written news from Latin America.

When Mr. Catledge became managing editor in December 1951, after the death of Mr. James, he assumed overall supervision of the paper's daily news staff. He did not direct the editorial page or the Sunday sections; their chiefs reported directly to the publisher.

In various ways, Mr. Catledge tried to brighten the paper. He particularly wanted reporters to write shorter sentences. In this effort his chief aide was one of his editor-proteges, Theodore M. Bernstein, who was named an assistant managing editor. Decision on Article on Cuba

Mr. Catledge also spent much time and energy on personnel matters, including the advancement of outstanding staff members. Among them were Clifton Daniel, a foreign correspondent, who became his chief assistant and succeeded him as managing editor, and A.M. Rosenthal, also a foreign correspondent, who was named metropolitan editor by Mr. Catledge and is now executive editor.

It was as managing editor that Mr. Catledge made the decision on how to handle one of the most debated articles ever published by The Times, a report by Tad Szulc that counterrevolutionaries were training in the United States and in Central America for an invasion of Cuba in 1961.

The article was published 10 days before anti-Castro forces backed by the Central Intelligence Agency landed in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. While some executives of the newspaper argued that the article should be withheld out of concern for national security, Mr. Catledge contended that The Times was obliged to present the story. But he deleted from the article the reporter's characterization that the invasion was ''imminent,'' because he felt the newspaper should not be making a prediction. He also replaced all references to the C.I.A. with the term ''United States officials.''

President Kennedy accused The Times and other newspapers of disregarding national security in their reporting of the anti-Castro activities. But Mr. Catledge said in his autobiography that the President later told him privately, ''If you had printed more about the operation you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.''

Mr. Catledge wrote that, in hindsight, he thought the newspaper should have printed more than it did and, ''if we had, we might have caused a cancellation of the invasion.''

''But,'' he added, ''that judgment is based on knowledge I did not have at the time - that the invasion was in fact imminent and, most important, that it was destined to utter failure.''

In 1964, when Mr. Catledge became executive editor, he undertook overall supervision of the Sunday sections as well as the daily paper. Then, in 1968, he was named a vice president and became in effect a senior adviser to James Reston, his successor as executive editor, and to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who had become the publisher. In 1970, he retired to live in New Orleans.

Mr. Catledge was a member of the Century Club in New York, the Metropolitan Club in Washington and the Boston Club in New Orleans, among others, and held honorary degrees from Tulane and Washington and Lee Universities and the University of Kentucky.

Mr. Catledge was married in 1931 to Mildred Turpin, whom he had met when he was a young reporter in Baltimore. They were legally separated in 1949 and divorced some years later.

In 1957, while in San Francisco to deliver a speech to a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Mr. Catledge met Abby Ray Izard of New Orleans. In his memoirs he wrote: ''Mrs. Izard fell under the spell of my oratory, which I repeated, in various settings and forms, during the next seven months until she became Mrs. Turner Catledge.''

Mr. Catledge is survived by his wife; two daughters by his first marriage, Mildred Lee Sampson of Stratford, Conn., and Ellen Douglas Catledge of McLean, Va.; a sister, Bessie Catledge Porter of Memphis; four grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

No funeral service is planned. The family suggests that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to the Turner Catledge Fund for Journalistic Studies, Mississippi State University (care of the Development Office), Mississippi State, Miss. 39762.

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

Grayson Kirk, 94, President of Columbia During the 1968 Student Protests, Is Dead

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)

A Writer and a Businessman

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.