Elvis to Play with Country Music Stars in 1955 Mobile

Mobile Register May 4, 1955

Not sure who this Elvis Presley fellow is, but if he hangs around with the Grand Ole Opry musicians, then he might be worth giving a listen to.

You can read a personal account of Elvis' performance here.

Veterans Day Salute to Press Register Staff Who Served Their Country

Paul Hannie at a machine that turned coded perforated tape into photo typeset copy.

Paul Hannie (1926-2009) handled the layout of my pages when I was an editorial page editor at The Mobile Press Register. He also was one of the many World War II and other veterans who worked at the newspaper during my time there.

During World War II, Paul served with the U.S. Navy Air Corps and was based in the south Pacific with Black Cat Squadron of PBY Catalinas. The name "Black Cat" was derived from the matte-black paint scheme and night-time bombing operations conducted by the PBY Catalinas.

For his action during the war, Paul was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, which is presented for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight.”

Advertising executive Burt Schwarz (1914-2003) was another World War II veteran. He talked to me briefly one day about his service and told me about being captured by the Germans. Burt was not Jewish, but feared that his German captors would think his last name sounded Jewish and that they would execute him. He, of course, survived the war.

We had many other veterans on the paper including more recent veterans John Sellers and Bill Sellers, who were not related.

The newspaper never did a good job of telling its own stories and it is a shame that we never told the stories of the World War II veterans among us.

Do you know of other service men and women at the newspaper? Did they ever tell you their stories?

Suburban Growth Meant Switching from Bicycles to Motorcycles to Deliver Newspapers

From the 1966 Spanish Fort Bulletin.

This photo from the History of Spanish Fort Alabama Facebook page reminded me of how newspaper youth carriers switched from using bicycles to motorcycles to deliver The Mobile Press Register.

The switch came for a couple of reasons. After World War II, Mobile's population became too spread out for carriers to cover the distances on bicycles. The papers also became heavier with many more pages.

That the Press Register allowed him to also deliver the Spanish Fort Bulletin is a surprise. Such suburban weeklies were beginning to take bites into the daily's revenues and circulation.

We don’t know much about the history of newsboys for The Mobile Press Register and I would like to see their stories told. Does anyone know Chuck Lackey?

The Good Old, Old Days and the Merely Good Old Days in the Newspaper Office

In the photograph on the left above, editor Erwin Craighead works at his desk in The Mobile Register in 1897. (Photo courtesy of the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama.)

About 90 years later, Press Register photographer Ron Colquitt snapped the photo on the right of me toiling away at my editorial page editor job on The Mobile Press.

Craighead composed his editorials by longhand, while I wrote mine on a computer. But otherwise, Craighead would have found much that was familiar about the newspaper office of the 1980s.

How much will we old timers find familiar about the digital newspaper office?

Register Fights Great War with Editorial Cartoons

This year marks the centennial of the start of World War I, which began on July 28, 1914, and lasted until Nov. 11, 1918. America entered the war in April 6, 1917.

The war pitted the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire against the Allied forces of Great Britain, the United States, France, Russia, Italy and Japan. The Great War, as it was known by those who fought it, resulted in the deaths of more than 9 million soldiers.

As long as the Europeans were fighting among themselves, The Mobile Register opposed the United States getting involved in the war.

After German submarines in February 1917 resumed sinking all merchant ships, including American ships, supplying the allies, the Register demanded the United States declare war. As a port, Mobile's livelihood depended on seaborne commerce.

With a U.S. declaration, the Register made the anti-German syndicated cartoons of J.H. Cassel, such as the one above, and Rollin Kirby an almost daily feature in the newspaper.

Unlike during the Spanish-American War, the Register did not prepare for independent coverage of the Great War. Such coverage had become far too expensive, so the newspaper depended on the Associated Press for reports on the war.

English-born Journalist Covered 1889 Murder Trial Still Talked About Today

Tom McGehee, who is the museum director for the Bellingrath Gardens and Home, put me on to this story.

He is writing an article for the October edition of Mobile Bay Magazine about Nettie Chandler, who wrote the popular “Betty Letters,” for The Mobile Press Register in the 1930s. The letters from the fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicled the goings on of Mobile society. Nettie’s sister Mary also worked for the newspaper.

The Chandler sister were cousins of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick, who was accused of poisoning her much-older husband James, a wealthy Liverpool, England, cotton broker in 1889. She was born Florence Elizabeth Chandler in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862. She was the daughter of William George Chandler, a partner in the banking firm of St. John Powers and Company, and at one time mayor of Mobile.

Earlier this year in The London Mail, author Kate Colquhoun reported on the case, which became a cause célèbre that scandalized Victorian England and attracted international attention. Colquhoun also just published a book on the case titled Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery and Arsenic.

One of the reporters covering the Florence Maybrick trial was 19-year-old John C. “Jack” O’Connell, who would later work for newspapers in Mobile, Montgomery, New Orleans and New York.

According to his New York Times obituary, O’Connell was born in Liverpool on July 7, 1870. His father, John, had been a cotton broker when Englishman William Steenstrand’s cotton firm attempted to corner the market on cotton and raise prices. Steenstrand failed, cotton prices fell and O’Connell’s family was thrown into poverty. [The New York Times story said this happened in 1881, but the event known as the “Steenstrand failure” actually occurred in 1890.]

At age 14, O’Connell started on The Liverpool Daily Post as an editorial messenger boy and studied stenography in his spare time. He became a junior reporter on the Post and moved up to local correspondent and then to circulation agent in Crewe, a railroad center of Cheshire.

Apparently discontented with working for the newspaper, O’Connell signed on a sailing vessel as a seaman and sailed around the world. In 1893, he shipped from Liverpool on a timber ship bound for Mobile. In Mobile, he contracted malaria. The ship sailed without him and O’Connell stayed in Mobile under the care of the British consul.

He worked on the Mobile docks for two years helping to load timber and cotton ships.

Then he went to work on a New Orleans newspaper before returning to Mobile in 1896 to work as a court reporter for The Mobile Daily News.

During the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1897, he aided sufferers as a member of the Can’t-Get-Away Club. Every day he took medicine and food to the homes of people with the fever.

During the Spanish-American War in 1898, O’Connell acted as correspondent for The New York Sun and The New York Herald. He distinguished himself for his expose of unsanitary conditions in Southern Army camps during the short-lived conflict.

In 1898, he joined The Mobile Register where he moved through the posts of the telegraph editor, city editor and managing editor. In 1912, O’Connell and a group of local businessmen bought controlling interest of the 14-year-old Mobile Item, with O’Connell serving as editor.

He eventually left Mobile, perhaps in 1916 when Mobile Register owner Frederick I. Thompson bought the Item, to become the managing editor of the afternoon edition of The Montgomery Advertiser. He also edited “Alabama Farm Facts,” the Advertise’'s agricultural and livestock weekly.

O’Connell became active in Alabama politics and worked in the gubernatorial campaign of William W. Brandon, who was inaugurated in January 1923.

Two years later, O’Connell moved to New York to take a post on the telegraph desk of The New York Times, where he remained for several years. Then he joined the staff of the reserve news department, serving there until his retirement in 1944. O’Connell died April 1, 1945, at age 74.

O’Connell was another one of the colorful journalists who passed through the offices of The Mobile Press Register and whose stories make researching the newspaper’s history fun.

This building at 252 Government St. in Mobile was once the Chandler Mansion, family home of Florence Chandler. Built by the Chandlers in 1850, it was sold to the McGill brothers and opened as the McGill Institute, a Catholic school, in 1897. The building no longer exists.

1930s Newsboys Learned Lessons that Lasted a Lifetime

EDITOR'S NOTE: The story below is adapted from one I wrote for The Mobile Press Register in 1984.

Many prominent people in Mobile learned about work by delivering newspapers during the 1930s.

The paperboys shared many things in common. The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression and the newspaper carriers were young boys looking for a little money for themselves and their families.

W.C. Helveston, who was the Mobile County administrator from 1971-1995, recalled that “It was the only money I had. My people didn’t have any” money to give him to spend.

Kenny Crow Sr., who in 1984 was retired from Crow-Kennedy Electric Co., Inc., remembered winning $50 in a citywide subscription campaign for The Mobile Times.

“Fifty dollars in those days, cap’n, was a lot of money for a kid to get a hold of,” he said. “I really did it for the money. Nobody had any.”

For delivering about 200 papers in the Washington Square area, Helveston earned about $10 to $12 a week.

Andrew M. Wiik, who in 1984 was with the CPA firm of Wiik, Reimer, Lawrence & Dudley, had a much smaller route, making about $2 or $3 from his subscribers of the Times.

W.C. Helveston

Helveston was 13 years old when he began throwing papers from his bicycle for The Mobile Press in 1939. Later he switched to a route for The Mobile Register, which he said caused him to develop a life-long habit of reading the morning newspaper.

Helveston recalled that when the paperboys had to throw the Sunday paper they would just stay up all night Saturday. Helveston and the other carriers would take dates to see a movie and, after taking their dates home, they would go to the Electrik Maid Bake Shop, eat pastries and play pinball until it was time to get their newspapers.

Crow just got up at 3 a.m. Sunday to fold and load his papers.

The 10- to 12-page papers were small enough then, Helveston said, that the paperboy could roll the paper into a tube shape and crimp it into a half-moon before sending it sailing to the porch.

While Helveston rolled his papers into a tube shape, most others had to fold their papers into a square, recalled Maurice Castle, a newspaperboy for the Times from 1933-35. Castle, who in 1984 was the clerk of Mobile County Circuit Court, also was a former city editor of The Mobile Press.

Wiik, who began carrying papers when he was 16, said he just folded his papers in half. “I got pretty good where I could fold them in half and sail it,” he said.

During the 1930s, subscribers paid weekly, although a few did so monthly. Saturdays were devoted to collecting the 10 or 12 cents a week subscription cost.

A universal experience among paperboys, who bought their papers on credit from the newspaper, was the difficulty of collecting the money due them from subscribers.

“I had trouble at times collecting money,” said Crow, who delivered papers beginning in his sophomore year at McGill Institute. “Some people just didn’t have it.”

Crow explained that some people took the newspaper although they couldn’t afford the 10 cents a week because, while radio had passed its infancy and TV was yet to be, people depended on papers for the news.

Part of the paperboy routine for Times carriers was to solicit subscribers one or two nights a week, Castle said.

The papers offered prizes for the most subscriptions—baseball gloves and bats, bicycles and, in the case of Crow, money desperately needed in the Depression.

Robert Zietz, who in 1984 was head of the Special Collections Division of the Mobile Public Library, had a somewhat different experience from the other carriers.

Zietz began delivering The Mobile Register in Chickasaw when he was 9 years old. But rather than run his own route, Zietz delivered papers for Mrs. J.C. Davis, mother of the man who was the Chickasaw mayor in 1984. Mrs. Davis paid Zietz a weekly salary. She held the franchise on an entire district and paid others to deliver for her.

Zietz worked to get spending money like the other carriers, but instead of using a bicycle, he walked his route.

Quite different from the experiences of the paperboys who delivered papers to subscribers at their homes was that of the paperboys who sold papers on the streets.

Berkley Thompson, who in 1984 was retired from a highly successful newspaper supply business he founded, was one of the street sales paperboys.

Thompson began selling newspapers on the street at age 11 for The Mobile Register in 1931. By age 14 he became a street sales manager for The Mobile Times and later for The Mobile Press Register.

Between 1929 and 1932 the Register and the Press were separately owned and competition for sales was fierce. Street sales work was particularly rough.

At time, delivery trucks were overturned and bundles of newspapers would be set on fire, Thompson said.

On the four corners at Royal and St. Francis streets, paperboys staked out their territory and trespassing was cause for a fight, Thompson said.

Thompson said he had about 350 paperboys on the streets selling papers for the Register. Because it was during the Great Depression, many of the paperboys were not boys at all, he said, but big husky men looking to earn some money.

All of the paperboys from the 1930s thought their experiences were good for them and taught them lessons that lasted a lifetime.

“You had to be at the job,” Helveston said. “You always had to out on your route. You went out sick and in the rain.” Sometimes, Helveston said, he delivered his papers while he was sick, but then wen t home to bed and missed school.

Crow said being a paperboy taught him “how to sell.” Working for the underdog Times, which was therefore harder to sell, Crow said he learned how to confront people, how to act.

Helveston said “It taught you how to manage a business. The better job you did, the more money you made.”

Helveston died in 2013 at the age of 86.

Taking a Research Break...

I’m taking a break during the summer from regular blogging in order to focus on researching and writing a history of my Dad’s experiences during World War II.

I still will post as I have time or as the mood strikes me.

'Passionate Pilgrim' an Improbable Sojourner

Alma Reed serenaded by los Hermanos Hernadez, New York City, 1936.
Enrique Riverón papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

World War II absorbed thousands of men from the newspapering business for soldiering and brought many women into the newsroom, including one improbable sojourner to The Mobile Press Register, Alma Marie Reed.

Mrs. Reed’s “extraordinary life” is profiled in the biography Passionate Pilgrim by Antoinette May.

Mrs. Reed already had earned something of an international reputation as a woman reporter in her younger days.

Amazon.com

Born Alma Marie Sullivan in 1889 in San Francisco, Mrs. Reed (who married young and divorced young) shocked her family by becoming a reporter at the San Francisco Call. Reporting wasn’t considered an honorable vocation for women.

Author May says that writing under the pseudonym byline of “Mrs. Goodfellow,” Mrs. Reed crusaded through her articles and one feature story resulted in California sparing the life of a Mexican youth and reforming its laws on capital punishment.

That made Reed a heroine in Mexico and won her a tour of the country where she made many friends, including the Yucatan Gov. Felipe Carrillo Puerto, to whom she became engaged. Before they could be married, Carrillo was executed during the Mexican Revolution.

In Mexico, Mrs. Reed reported on the discovery of the Mayan temple Chichen Itza and its treasures for The New York Times. She developed a lifelong interest in archaeology and reported on many other discoveries around the world.

She even went on an underwater quest for the lost continent of Atlantis, setting a deep-sea diving record.

In the 1930s she ran a struggling art gallery in New York and her Greenwich Village apartment was a gathering place for foreign artists and intellectuals to discuss the cause of world peace.

The world was not at peace, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 not only sank U.S. battleships, but also Mrs. Reed’s gallery business as the public concerned itself with issues more serious than art.

When the New York art gallery went under, May says, an art collector in Mobile suggested that Mrs. Reed apply for a vacant position as art editor at the Press Register. At first rejecting the idea, Mrs. Reed eventually decided to go to the Port City.

Ann Battle Hawkins, officially the Society Editor during the war years, but forced by the manpower shortage to serve as “everything but the breakfast food editor,” told me more than 20 years ago that the 52-year-old Mrs. Reed contrasted sharply with the mostly young Press Register staff.

“She was a little intimidating to the younger people,” the late John Fay told me many years ago. Fay worked with Mrs. Reed for a few months in 1946 before replacing her as arts editor. She walked through the newsroom like a ship under full sail, Fay said.

Mrs. Hawkins said Mrs. Reed had a “right pretty face,” but “dressed differently than other women,” favoring long, flowing skirts, flamboyant shawls and large hats. A tall woman, Mrs. Reed’s flowing skirts served to cover her ample girth.

She said that editors who handled Mrs. Reed’s copy “swore that she wrote in Sanskrit.”

One-time Living Today Editor Tommye Miller recalled how Mrs. Reed’s desk was piled so high with papers that she could barely be seen behind them. She said one day Executive Editor George M. Cox ordered her to clean off her desk. Mrs. Reed declined saying she had “a date with destiny.” Cox responded, “I wish you would keep it.”

Jeanette Keyser Maygarden, who was the Women’s Department editor from December 1941 to August 1951, remembered how Mrs. Reed often held soirees in her apartment for young people on the newspaper’s staff. After consuming the finger-food Mrs. Reed offered, the young staffers where then required to listen to her reading poetry.

Besides working for the newspaper, Mrs. Reed produced a weekly radio show discussing cultural events, her biographer says. And when the International Peace Conference was scheduled to open in San Francisco in 1945, Mrs. Reed got a consortium of newspapers to sponsor her coverage of the event.

Mrs. Reed left the Press Register about October 1946, returning to New York in an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish her gallery. In 1950, at age 60, she moved to Mexico to write a weekly column for the recently established, English-language Mexico City News. She died in November 1966, a colorful footnote in the long history of journalists at the Press Register.

From Newsboy to World Renowned Biologist

Former Press Register colleague Sam Hodges pointed me to the autobiography of Edward Osborne Wilson, who was a teenage newsboy for The Mobile Register in the 1940s.

A young Edward O. Wilson collects insects with a net
behind his grandfather's home in Mobile in 1942.
Photo from the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Wilson grew up to become a biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist and author. His is considered to be the world's leading authority on ants.

In his autobiography, Naturalist (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), Wilson recalls his time as a newsboy:

By the fall of 1942, at the age of thirteen, I had become in effect a child workaholic. I took a job with backbreaking hours of my own free will, without adult coercion or even encouragement. Soon after the start of the war there was a shortage of carriers for the city newspaper, the Mobile Press Register. Young men seventeen and over were departing for the service, and boys aged fifteen to sixteen were moving up part-time into the various jobs they vacated. On the lowest rung of unskilled labor, many paper routes came open as the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds moved up. Somehow, for reasons I do not recall, an adult delivery supervisor let me take over a monster route: 420 papers in the central city area.

For most of that school year I rose each morning at three, slipped away in the darkness, delivered the papers, each to a separate residence, and returned home for breakfast around seven-thirty. I departed a half-hour later for school, returned home again at three-thirty, and studied. On Monday nights from seven to nine I attended the meeting of my Boy Scout troop at the United Methodist Church, on Government and Broad streets. On Sunday mornings I went to service at the First Baptist Church. On Sunday evenings I stayed up through Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. On other nights I set the alarm soon after supper, went to bed, and fell asleep.

Four hundred and twenty papers delivered each morning! It seems almost impossible to me now. But there is no mistake; the number is etched in my memory. The arithmetic also fits: I made two trips to the delivery dock at the back of the Press Register building, each time filling two large canvas satchels. When stacked vertically on the bicycle front fender and strapped to the handlebars, the bags reached almost to my head and were close to the maximum bulk and weight I could handle. The residences receiving the papers were not widely spaced suburban houses but city dwellings, apartment buildings with two or three stories. It took perhaps a maximum of one hour to travel back and forth to the Press Register dock, load the papers twice, and make two round trips in and out; the delivery area was only a few minutes’ ride away. That leaves three and a half hours for actual on-the-scene work, or an average of two papers a minute—during which I reached down, pulled out the paper, dropped it, or threw it rolled up for a short distance, and passed on, moving faster and more easily after one satchel was emptied.

The supervisor collected the week’s subscription money from the customers on Saturday, twenty-five cents apiece, so I didn’t have to work extra hours that day and had time to continue my field excursions. I made thirteen dollars a week, from which I bought my Boy Scout paraphernalia, parts for my bike, and whatever candy, soft drinks, and movie tickets I wanted.

At the time it did not occur to me that my round-the-clock schedule was unusual. I felt fortunate to have a job and to be able to earn money…I still assumed, without any real evidence, that the same level of effort would be required of me as an adult.

You can read more about Wilson on the Encyclopedia of Alabama website. You can learn more about his work at the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

Edward Osborne Wilson in 2009.

Associated Press Comes Late to the Port City

The Associated Press set up its Mobile bureau inside the Press Register building on Sept. 1, 1945.

According to the Press Register, this was was the first time any news service had assigned a full-time staff in South Alabama.

If true, that seems amazing since the news service had been around since 1848.

In the years after World War II, the newspaper came to depend on the AP and other news services for reports on national and international events.

In recent years, the AP's revenue has suffered along with that of its member newspapers. Gary Pruitt, the AP’s president and CEO, reported at the agency’s 2013 annual meeting that “In the past five years, as newspaper revenues have fallen by 40 to 50 percent, AP has reduced its rates by the same amount.” The news agency had millions of dollars of bank debt.

U.S. newspapers once accounted for 100 percent of AP revenue. They now constitute only about 20 percent of total revenue.

Somewhat cynically, Mary Junck, chair of the AP Press Board of Directors, told the annual meeting “We have tackled costs the same way you have—with a sharp pencil and an ongoing process of transforming the way we do business.” Translation: The AP has cut jobs and frozen pensions.

What will be interesting to watch is whether the AP will continue to have the same kind of influence over news coverage, news style and other news issues in the digital age as it had in the print age.

1897 Question: Do Typewriters Lower the Literary Grade of Work Done by Reporters?

 

Chicago Daily News stenographer at her typewriter in 1922.
Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum, Library of Congress

Journalism historian W. Joseph Campbell noted that among the issues to be discussed at the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association annual meeting in New York in February 1897 was: Do typewriters lower the literary grade of work done by reporters?

By that year, typewriter models had become easier to use and were gaining favor with reporters. But not everyone welcomed the new technology.

“Just as some journalists expressed skepticism about the Internet,” wrote Campbell, “some veteran reporters in 1890s resented the noisy, intrusive typewriter.” They still preferred to write their stories by longhand.

One Mobile Register reporter, George Jeremiah Flournoy, looked on the typewriter as his mortal enemy.

At age 13, Flournoy, who had been given the nickname of “Gummy” because of his fondness for chewing gum, was a scorekeeper for the Mobile’s amateur baseball games in the late 1880s. He also wrote accounts of the games for the city’s newspapers.

Although his formal schooling ended at the third grade, Flournoy landed a job as a copy reader for The Mobile Item. He worked until 2 a.m. each morning, caught a couple of hours of sleep in the press room and then carried newspapers to subscribers. With a bit of hustling he could earn about $23 a week.

In the 1890s, Flournoy went to work as a police and society reporter for The Mobile Daily News. By 1897, he had switched over to gathering news for The Mobile Herald. Flournoy worked again for the Item after it was acquired by the Register in 1916.

Fellow newspapermen called Flournoy “the best leg man in the business,” a term applied to reporters who used the telephone to call in their stories to the “rewrite man.” The rewrite man actually wrote the story from the notes the reporter gave over the telephone.

Flournoy never mastered the use of a typewriter, or the English language for that matter. He either phoned in or handed most of his material to the rewrite man. He let the copy desk worry about grammar, style and punctuation while he turned out the news.

Newsies of Mobile Deserve to Have Their Story Told

Each New Year newspaper carriers presented their subscribers with a "memorial" souvenir booklet of well-wishes for the year ahead. The purpose, of course, was to get a tip.

In the above photo, carriers of The Mobile Daily Item and their supervisor pose for a photo to go on the front of their memorial. In 1916, Mobile Register owner Frederick I. Thompson bought the Item and kept it as separate afternoon paper to complement the morning Register.

Compare these well-dressed newsies to those in a previous post photographed by socialist photographer Lewis Hine who visited Mobile in 1914. One of the newsboys in the Hine's photos is selling the Item.

What do you think accounts for the difference in the way the newsies are dressed in the different photos? Did the boys in the Hine photos simply have on their working clothes? Did the boys in the above photo have to turn in these dress clothes after the photo was snapped?

We don't know much about the history of newsboys in Mobile and they deserve to have their story told.

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.