This article first appeared on January 2, 2019 in The Archbridge Institute’s ‘American Originals’ series.
Along with five younger siblings, Adolph Ochs was raised in poverty in Knoxville, Tennessee, by his scholarly but financially unsuccessful father and inspirational mother. In 1869, at the age of eleven, he developed an interest in the newspaper business, delivering papers and then learning to set type. Over time the high school dropout’s ambitions grew. When he came into the business, most newspapers were primarily used to promote political propaganda for one side or the other, serving as outlets for outrage and opinion. Adolph Ochs changed all that, first in Chattanooga, then in New York City. Today his many descendants have absolute control of The New York Times, considered by many to be the greatest American newspaper, one that has led the world in journalistic innovations. Here is his remarkable story.
Beginnings
Adolph Simon Ochs was born March 12, 1858, in Cincinnati to Julius Ochs and Bertha Levy Ochs. Their first child died young; after that, Adolph and his five successive siblings came along. Julius had come from Germany at the age of nineteen, Bertha at sixteen, and they had met in Nashville. Julius was a thoughtful, educated man who spoke six languages and was a leader of the small Jewish community. He had been a drillmaster for the Union Army during the Civil War. But Julius was a repeated failure as a businessman, except for a brief success with a dry goods store in Knoxville right after the war where he and Bertha hoped to help “rebuild” the war-torn city. He bought a big house and the family had servants. But the war had caused merchandise shortages and high prices— soon prices fell and Julius’s inventory had to be sold at a loss.
Buried in debt, the family moved to an unpainted shack. Unlike Julius, Adolph’s mother, Bertha, was a real Southerner— she barely escaped arrest for trying to smuggle medicine to Confederate soldiers in Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. Adolph and his siblings thus grew up in an environment where their father debated the moral issues of the day, and in which both sides had to be heard, given their “Yankee” father and “Dixie” mother.
While Julius tried to support his family of eight on his $1–2 per day income as a justice of the peace, in 1869 eleven-year-old Adolph convinced his parents to let him get a job. Adolph became a paper boy for the Knoxville Chronicle, each morning staining his fingers with ink as he folded fifty copies of the paper as they came off the press, then walked four to five miles to deliver them. In a pun on his last name, pronounced “Ox” (and meaning that in German), he soon became known to the other boys as “Muley.” Muley Ochs contributed his $1.50 per week income to the family’s meager funds.
Young Adolph then spent three years trying other pursuits. First, he worked in a drug store, but the aromas did not compare with the pungent odor of printers’ ink. Then he ushered at the Opera House, developing a lifelong taste for the theater. After that, his parents sent him to Rhode Island to learn storekeeping and bookkeeping at the grocery store of a prosperous uncle. Showing his first signs of entrepreneurship, Adolph noticed all the thirsty people at a big political parade in Providence and sold hand-squeezed lemonade and orangeade to the crowd. But Adolph was homesick, and missed the newspaper business, returning to Knoxville at the age of fourteen.
Upon his return to Knoxville, Adolph walked into the office of the Chronicle’s publisher, Captain William Rule, who didn’t recognize the former paper boy (writers and editors worked at night; delivery boys the next morning). Adolph asked him for a job, and the publisher asked what Adolph could do. “Well, I could sweep up some.” Rule found him a broom and hired him at $1.50 a week. Adolph listened to reporters and overheard attempts to sell advertising space. Within a few months, he was promoted to “printer’s devil,” one of those who ran to the telegraph office, picked up beer and sandwiches for the hard-drinking printers, and cleaned the press roller after each run of newspapers. Now known as “Ochsie,” he developed a reputation as a humble hard-worker. People liked him.
Against his parents’ wishes, he quit school soon after he turned fifteen, believing he could learn more working at the paper than going to school. In the same year, he began to learn how to set type by hand. His shift was finished at 11:30 each night, but Ochsie was afraid to walk past the cemetery on the way home. So he hung out with the press and printing foreman until 2 a.m., who then walked Ochsie home. By the age of sixteen, Adolph Ochs was an experienced printer, a valuable skill anywhere in America.....MUCH MORE
His confidence building, Ochsie dreamed of being a publisher, but one who would print both sides of every story, being fair even to those with whom he disagreed. His idea was a radical departure from the propaganda sheets of the day. His hero was Horace Greeley, the highly regarded and thoughtful publisher of the New York Tribune.
After two years perfecting his printing skills, in 1875 the seventeen-year-old Adolph decided to head west to California, where he could get in on the gold rush and make his fortune, securing a better life for his family. At the same time, he could purchase a newspaper and try his ideas. On his way to California, Adolph decided to get experience on a major paper, Henry Watterson’s Louisville Courier-Journal. His friends and bosses at the Chronicle threw a going-away party for him, and publisher William Rule wrote this in the paper:
Mr. Adolph Ochs, for some years past an attaché of the Chronicle office, leaves on the westbound train today, on a protracted visit to Louisville and other points. Mr. Ochs carries with him the well wishes of all connected with this office, and we would recommend him to all with whom he may come in contact, as a young man well worthy of their confidence and esteem.At the Louisville Courier-Journal, Adolph was quickly hired, and within a month was promoted to assistant foreman of the composing room. Despite his age, he earned the respect of his workers because he wasn’t arrogant, he listened to them, and he knew how to have a good time, loving to dance and party. His father feared he was becoming too much of a “ladies’ man.” Now known to his colleagues as the more respectable “Dolph,” he asked for exposure to writing and editing— neither of which he was very good at. Nevertheless, the editors sent him to the courtroom to copy information, and his colorless reports were accurate and carefully spelled. When his parents wrote him that his siblings didn’t have the clothes to go to school, he sent home his entire savings of $56.
Homesick, at the age of eighteen he moved back to Knoxville to be with his beloved family. This time, he got a job as a printer at the Knoxville Tribune, and became fast friends with the editor, Colonel John MacGowan. MacGowan encouraged Dolph’s innovative ideas about what a newspaper should be, fair and unbiased. Dolph also befriended the paper’s business manager, Franc Paul, who had started and bought several newspapers around the South, and always had an itch to try it again....
The mini-series:
The Times of London Answers The Question: "Is The Pope Catholic"
"How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results" (GOOG; EVIL)
Michael Crichton On Speculation By (and in) the Media
And the story that triggered this ramble:
Media: "News discovery app SmartNews valued at $1.1B"
