Koenigsberg had a Tremendous Influence on Course of Newspapers

Troops break down their camp near Three Mile Creek in western Mobile, Ala.

Discovering the many fascinating characters who passed through the offices of The Mobile Press Register is what makes researching the newspaper’s history fun.

One such character was Moses Koenigsberg. Not many people know his name today, but Koenigsberg had a tremendous influence on the course of newspapers of his time.

Moses Koenigsberg

Born of Polish parents in New Orleans in 1876, Koenigsberg grew up in Texas with a desire to go into newspapering. He issued his own monthly newspaper at the age of 9. Seeking to be a war correspondent, Koenigsberg ran off to join a small band of Mexican revolutionaries who were gathering near Laredo, Texas, in 1890. An argument with one of the Mexican recruits resulted in Koenigsberg being stabbed in the leg. That ended his revolutionary adventure.

Soon after Koenigsberg began reporting for The San Antonio Times. A story exposing corruption among prosecuting attorneys, who were taking fines from prostitutes, got him sued and fired. Although the suit was dropped, Koenigsberg became a reporter with The Houston Age and then an editor of The Texas World. He left Houston to become a reporter for The New Orleans Item. Back in San Antonio, he launched The Evening Star in 1892. He was just 16 years old.

Koenigsberg job hopped seeking to move up the journalistic ladder. In the late 1890s, he was operating a news service for The New York Sun in St. Louis. As relations between the United States and Spain reached the breaking point in April 1898, Koenigsberg looked for a reporting job that would get him to the Cuban war front.

Koenigsberg thought he’d worked out an agreement with The St. Louis Globe-Democrat for a reporting stunt in which he’d take a message of encouragement from the U.S. government to insurrection leader Gen. Calixto Garcia in Cuba. When the U.S. Army objected, the Globe-Democrat backed out and left Koenigsberg stranded in Tampa.

With the goal of joining a Gulf Coast military outfit headed for Cuba, Koenigsberg hopped a train to Mobile, where troops were gathering. His first stop would be the offices of The Mobile Register.

At the Register, Koenigsberg learned that some of the newspaper’s reporters had enlisted in the Army to fight the Spaniards. Other reporters became war correspondents and joined the soldiers who began arriving in Mobile for encampment in April.

The demand for war news also had caused the Register to put out a Monday morning edition. The long tradition of giving the paper’s workers most of Sunday off had dictated that no Monday morning edition be published. But the demand for war news overcame that tradition.

Register Editor Erwin Craighead hired Koenigsberg to provide coverage of Alabama troops as they moved on to Miami and Cuba. Craighead told Koenigsberg that the surest way of getting to Cuba with the troops would be to join the Gulf City Guards, commanded by Capt. John D. Hagan, a close friend of Craighead’s and an ardent admirer of the Register.

Koenigsberg made his way to the western suburb of Crichton where Alabama troops were encamped along Three Mile Creek. Dressed in a tan derby, pleated shirt and suede-topped shoes, Koenigsberg became a point of sport among the “hillbillies, wharf rats and city dudes” who made up the Guards.

A general free-for-all developed as the troops attempted to relieve the reporter of his clothes. Officers broke up the fight and confined Koenigsberg to his quarters. The troops shipped out to Miami in June 1898 and Koenigsberg went with them. But Miami was as close to Cuba as he would come.

The war ended before the Register’s ability to cover it could be tested.

In 1903, the 27-year-old Koenigsberg became managing editor of William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American and began a long association with Hearst. Five years later, Hearst named him publisher of The Boston American.

In 1913, Koenigsberg founded the Newspaper Feature Service, Inc., the first syndicate to supply a complete budget of features and comics seven days a week. It was Koenigsberg who conceived of the idea of a daily comic strip.

Two years later, Koenigsberg consolidated all of Hearst’s syndicates under the name King Features. The “Koenig” in Koenigsberg is German for king.

Koenigsberg also promoted innovation. In 1925, he sponsored the talkies and two years later a television demonstration.

In 1927, Koenigsberg, then president of International News Service and Universal Service, negotiated a deal with Benito Mussolini in Italy to write for the Hearst wire services. On Oct. 15, 1927, Editor and Publisher magazine published a photo of Koenigsberg standing beside Il Duce. Well into the 1930s, Mussolini was a paid feature writer for the Hearst newspapers.

In 1928, Koenigsberg had a falling out with Hearst and a year later he purchased The Havana Post and Telegram. In 1930 he became general manager of The Denver Post and the following year became executive director of the Song Writers Protective Association.

Koenigsberg died of a heart attack at his home in New York in 1945.

Press Register Moves to a New Home in 1934

The Mobile Press Register moved into this building in 1934.
This photo is from the Eric Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama, and appeared in Mobile Bay magazine.

The building as it looks today at the northwest corner of St. Louis and Hamilton streets.
Photo by Larry Bell. 

The Mobile Press Register expects to have its employees in new digs in downtown Mobile by the end of summer 2014. They will be moving into the former Kress Building at 18 S. Royal Street, just south of where it meets Dauphin Street.

Almost exactly 80 years ago, the newspaper moved into another renovated older building.

After the Mobile Press acquired the Mobile Register in 1932, the owners decided to consolidate the two newspaper offices. The Press had started in a converted church building at the northeast corner of Jackson and St. Michael streets. The Register operated out of a building at the corner of St. Joseph and St. Michael streets.

The Press especially needed a better space. Working conditions in its building were hot and filthy as the Linotypes’ lead pots spread heat and fumes throughout the building. All of the desks had fans in effort to keep those sitting at them cool.

The building’s arrangement was also inefficient. Photo engravings for the Press were made at the Gulf States Engraving Col., which occupied the second story of building on St. Michael Street, next to the Press. Gulf States delivered the engravings across the roof to the newspaper.

In May 1934, the Press Register moved into a 40,000-square-foot building formerly used as a car dealership. The building at the northwest corner of St. Louis and Hamilton streets was owned by the McGowin family, who also happened to be major stockholders in the newspaper.

In 1944, The Mobile Press Register moved again, this time to another former car dealership building at the northeast corner of Government and Claiborne streets. (See the Jan. 4 post.)

Chasing Ads and Readers Not a New Problem

Newspapers today are faced with finding ways to replace revenue lost from rapidly declining advertising and subscriptions. Newspaper classified advertising alone, which accounted for about 40 percent of newspaper industry ad revenue in 2000, had dropped 77 percent by 2012.

On Alabama’s early frontier, The Mobile Register faced a similar problem. Not with replacing lost revenue, but with finding it in the first place.

In 1820, Mobile County had a total population of only 2,672 people, and 836 of those were slaves. That wasn’t much of an advertising or subscription base.

There were businessmen who wanted to buy ads and subscriptions, but the problem was that there just wasn’t much hard money to do so.

The shortage of cash on the frontier forced the Register to adopt a system of credit that often brought it grief.

The newspaper made frequent calls on its subscribers and advertisers to pay what they owed. It issued calls so frequently, in fact, that customers often didn’t take the newspaper seriously. “Lest our patrons should suspect it to be the case with us,” the Register said in 1822, “we assure them, ‘in right good earnest,’ that we are really in want of funds.”

To make ends meet the Register found other ways of making money.

An important source was job printing. The job office printed bill heads, bills of lading, checks, dray receipts, tickets, circulars, cards, notes, insurance policies, labels, handbills, posters, wedding invitations, books, pamphlets and all the forms of paperwork needed in business and society.

During election campaigns, the presses ran almost constantly to print campaign materials. For lawyers, the job shop published and sold a digest of city ordinances.

From the earliest days of the town, businessmen needed a place to gather to smoke and exchange news of ship sailings, cargoes and distant markets. At first, hotel lobbies, the post office and saloons filled the need. The Register and other newspapers soon began to provide more accommodating quarters called reading rooms.

For a subscription fee of about $10 a year, the Register supplied businessmen with newspapers from around the country and from abroad, as well as maps, charts, periodicals, books, shipping lists and prices current (market reports) from the principal markets. Furniture and tables provided businessmen a comfortable place of examining the materials.

In our digital age, The Mobile Register won’t be producing a variety of print products to find more revenue. Just how the Register and other newspapers ultimately will solve their revenue problems can’t be predicted, but there’s no question that it is going to be fascinating to watch.

Some Reporters, Editors Led Interesting Lives Before Going Into Newspapering

Close play at third, Fenway Park, Red Sox vs. Yankees, Boston Public Library

One of the things that made working at The Mobile Press Register exciting in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s was that many of the reporters and editors had led interesting lives outside of journalism before going into newspapering.

One such staffer was Mobile native and sports editor Pat Moulton. He starred in football and baseball at Auburn University before signing with the Boston Red Sox in 1927.

He later played with Atlanta in the Southern Association, Selma and Montgomery in the Southeastern League and Shreveport and Fort Worth in the Texas League. He managed the Henderson team in 1934 and 1935 before retiring to become a sports writer.

Moulton was a popular character in the Press Register newsroom. A steady stream of sports personalities Moulton had met during his professional baseball days visited the newsroom and many of them became the subject of his column, “Heard in the Showers.”

Moulton also liked to play practical jokes. One of the objects of his humor was Sam Willingham, the religion editor.

In the bottom drawer of his desk Willingham kept the “cuts,” or photographic engravings, of the community’s religious leaders. One day, as a prominent minster stood by Willingham’s desk with an article for the religion page, Willingham opened the drawer to pull out the minister’s cut. To his great embarrassment, the drawer was full of whiskey bottles.

Big Shots of The Mobile Press Register

The above photo was taken in 1944 in the publisher's office of what was then The Mobile Press Register's new building at the northeast corner of Government and Claiborne streets. The men in the photo were the newspaper's top management at the time. From left to right:

T. C. McLemore, mechanical superintendent. McLemore, who was also a shareholder, was in charge of the production facilities.

William Jefferson Hearin, Jr., general manager. Hearin began at the newspaper as an 18-year-old retail advertising solicitor and essentially ran the newspaper as co-publisher by 1965.

Ralph Bradford Chandler, publisher. Chandler had founded Scripps-Howard's Birmingham Post and put together the collection of investors who in 1929 started The Mobile Press, which absorbed The Mobile Register in 1932.

Joseph Alex McGowin, chairman of the Board of Directors. After the death of Mobile Press founder Joseph F. McGowin, his two sons Joe Alex and Leonard held and voted together their father’s shares in the newspaper. The McGowin family was deeply invested in the Port City’s real estate, financial, automobile and construction firms.

George M. Cox, executive editor. His father had worked as a Linotype operator at the old Mobile Register and his grandfather had been one of the owners of The Mobile Daily News in the 1890s. At age 11 in 1918, George Cox began hawking newspapers on downtown streets. In his teens, he became a copy boy after school and worked until 10 p.m. During the summers, he worked part-time as a reporter.After he graduated from Barton Academy in 1924, Cox became a police reporter for the Register and News-Item and eventually became the executive editor of the Press Register.

Political Disputes Become Personal as Publisher, Congressman Nearly Come to Blows in 1925

Stories of 19^th century newspaper editors being challenged by their opponents to settle disputes with a duel are legendary. Rarely do you hear of newspapermen in the 1900s being challenged to settle a matter of honor with a duel.

But in the mid-1920s, Mobile Register publisher Frederick I. Thompson received a personal

John McDuffie

challenge that many of those involved thought might lead to violence. The challenge came from John McDuffie, U.S. representative from the First Congressional District of Alabama.

Thompson and McDuffie were already political enemies, backing different factions of the Democrat Party. They also disliked each other personally.

When an editorial in the Sunday, May 31, 1925, Register seemed to imply that McDuffie was connected to bootleggers in Mobile, McDuffie determined to settle his differences with Thompson face to face. McDuffie boarded a train June 5 in Mobile for Birmingham, where Thompson was staying at the time.

In Birmingham by 7:30 a.m., McDuffie went to the Comer Building where Thompson had his offices. There he stood on the corner waiting for Thompson.

“I stood there…unarmed. I never carried a pistol and had no idea of using one,” McDuffie later said. “But I did have the intention to meet him as he came to his office and have it out, man to man.”

Comer Building in Birmingham

After McDuffie had waited for more than an hour, his close friend, Theodore K. Jackson Sr., a Mobile Attorney, persuaded McDuffie that it wasn't dignified for a U.S. congressman to lie in wait for another man.

Jackson got McDuffie to go to the Tutwiler Hotel where they were joined by two more friends, Tom Bragg and Robert Mangum, both Alabama Power Co. officials. Early that afternoon, McDuffie wrote Thompson a letter demanding a retraction of the Sunday editorial or to meet him in the lobby of the hotel and hinting at fisticuffs to settle their dispute.

Thompson wrote back that McDuffie wrongly interpreted the editorial. Thompson also refused to meet him at the Tutwiler, informing McDuffie that he conducted all his business from the Age-Herald building where McDuffie was welcome to come by. McDuffie refused and wanted Thompson to meet him at a place he considered neutral.

The two men continued to exchange letters by messengers into the next day, but the best McDuffie could get out of Thompson was a letter confirming that the Register had never intended to reflect on McDuffie’s personal honor or intimate that he was controlled by bootleggers in Mobile.

McDuffie left Birmingham feeling that he had “made a fizzle of the whole thing.”

A few years later, McDuffie had a revenge of sorts. Many of his associates were backers in creating The Mobile Press in 1929. In 1932, the Press absorbed the Register and helped drive Thompson out of the newspaper business. Eventually, McDuffie’s daughter, Cornelia McDuffie Turner, joined the newspaper’s staff and served as the Press Register’s society editor for many years.

Business Leaders Essential to Success of Mobile Press Over Competitor Register

Merchants National Bank, the tall building in the background, opened its new headquarters in 1929, the same year the stock market crashed and The Mobile Press began publication. Officers of Merchants bank and two other banks in Mobile were investors in the Press. Such backing helped ensure the Press' eventual success over its competitor, The Mobile Register.

The Mobile Register usually gets most of the attention from historians, but it is really The Mobile Press that won the newspaper wars during the Great Depression and survives until today.

The idea for The Mobile Press was born at a conference in Mobile of engineers and executives of the Alabama Power Co. and the International Paper Co. Over lunch at the conference, Mobile attorney Thomas M. Stevens told Alabama Power President Thomas W. Martin of his desire to establish a newspaper in opposition to publisher Frederick I. Thompson’s Mobile Register.

Martin suggested Stevens consult Victor H. Hanson, publisher of The Birmingham News, which in 1927 had absorbed Thompson’s Age-Herald. Hanson, unwilling to undertake the Mobile venture himself, contacted Ralph Bradford Chandler, founder of Scripps-Howard’s Birmingham Post.

Hanson highly recommended the project to Chandler and got him to meet with Stevens in Hanson’s Birmingham office in January 1928.

Intrigued with the idea of starting a newspaper in Mobile, Chandler spent the next few months surveying the possibilities in the Port City and negotiating with those willing to back the venture. In an indication of the intensity of feelings against Thompson among business leaders, Chandler secured an agreement from the presidents of the three Mobile banks to underwrite $100,000 from Mobile investors provided that Chandler also furnish $100,000.

Walter D. Bellingrath

To finance his share of the newspaper, Chandler approached wealthy Mobile capitalist Joseph Frederick McGowin. McGowin, born on a farm in Brewton, Ala., in 1867, became a successful lumber mill operator in his 20s and moved in 1891 to Mobile where he bought a bankrupt wholesale hardware business and transformed it into a highly profitable enterprise.

By the late 1920s, he was one of Mobile’s pre-eminent citizens as the head of real estate, financial, automobile and construction firms. He also served as one of the directors of the Merchants National Bank.

Besides backing Chandler, McGowin also bought shares in the newspaper company. Other stockholders included some of the city’s most prominent citizens: 

• Former Mayor Albert P. Bush
• Merchants National Bank President Ernest F. Ladd
• First National Bank President D. Paul Bestor Jr.
• Coca-Cola bottling magnate Walter D. Bellingrath
• Drug and real estate businessman J. C. Van Antwerp
• Alabama, Tennessee and Northern Railroad President John T. Cochrane
• Attorney Thomas M. Stevens
• Musical instrument and citrus dealer W. H. Reynalds
• Lumber and hardware supplier W. B. Patterson
• And about 17 other businessmen and professionals.

The stockholders of the Press represented an informal interlocking directorship of the city’s major businesses, banks and industry. Even with all those business and political forces working against him, however, Thompson proved to be his own biggest obstacle. But that is a subject for another post.