Cutting edge of digital communications in 1980

In 1980, the MPR was on cutting edge of digital communications with its use of Teleram portable computers.

A later article than the one above explained that "with Teleram, a story is composed on the remote terminal screen. When it is in the form desired by the reporter, he calls a telephone number which goes directly into the MPR’s main computer. When the phone answers, the reporter puts his phone receiver into a special cradle, the Teleram talks to the main computer and story is filed into the newspaper’s front-end system in seconds.

"With Teleram, a story can be written, filed, edited, set into type and printed on the presses in minimal time."

Five years after this article appeared in the employee newsletter Pressing Matters, Teleram Communications Corp. went bankrupt. Although Teleram had been a pioneer in the portable computer business, analysts said it could not keep up with bigger companies with more market strength and cheaper, better computers.

Historic Register locations now empty spaces

A vacant lot today occupies the southwest corner of Royal and St. Michael streets. But from the early 1800s till 1932, a building known as the Lafayette Hotel occupied the space and contained the offices of The Mobile Register.

The building is believed to have been constructed in 1804, and that the city entertained the Marquis de Lafayette there on his visit to Mobile in 1825.

During its ownership by William R. Hallett in 1830s, the building was known as the Lafayette Hotel and the sketched image above is how it appeared in 1860. In 1861, the title passed to Caroline Roper who changed the name of the building to the Roper House. The building continued as a hotel until purchased by the Mobile Register in July 1872.

Before the newspaper moved into the building, workmen gutted the building and then braced it with iron beams and pillars. On the first floor, accountants occupied the front rooms and the printing presses the rear. On the second floor were the offices of the publisher and editorial staff. Compositors, who sat at type cases 20 hours a day in shifts, occupied the entire third floor, one great room facing Royal Street. The news and telegraph room occupied the third floor.

The building remained the home of the paper until the consolidation of the Register and the Press in 1932. The iron work shown in the sketch was removed before 1935.

Connected to the back of this building and running along St. Michael Street to St. Joseph Street was the building housing The Mobile Item, which was acquired by the Register and became the News-Item. The site of the building is now a plaza.

Mobile News-Item Building fronting on St. Joseph Street at St. Michael.

Site of the Mobile News-Item today.

The Mobile Register in the movies

In a scene from To Kill a Mocking Bird, Scout and Atticus Finch sit in their home each night and read the Mobile Register.

How often do you see a memorial to war reporters?

The National War Correspondents Memorial, part of Gathland State Park in Maryland, is a memorial dedicated to journalists who covered the Civil War. Civil War correspondent George Alfred Townsend built the arch in 1896 as a tribute to his fellow journalists, and it was dedicated October 16, 1896.

The monument contains the names of three men who reported the war for the Mobile Register: Peter W. Alexander, Felix G. de Fontaine, and Henry Watterson, famed editor of the Louisville Courier Journal after the war.

Cartoonists a Part of Newspaper's Long History

Cartoonists are journalists, too. Below are a few of the cartoonists and illustrators who were on the staff of the Mobile newspaper. Do you know of others?

Kentuckian J.D. Crowe began his journalism career cartooning for the Eastern
Kentucky University newspaper, the Eastern Progress. His professional journalism began at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1982. He joined the Mobile Press Register in 2000. Today, he is the statewide cartoonist for the Alabama Media Group. You can see more of his works on his profile page.

The Mobile Press and the competing Mobile Register employed
cartoons in their battle for dominance from 1929 to 1932. This
one criticizes the Press for its supposed backing by the Alabama
Power Company. Many power companies financed newspapers
during the period. No artist's name appears on the cartoon.

After Iowan artist John Keith Henry left the U.S. Coast Guard in 1945, he worked
as and illustrator and cartoonist for the Mobile Press Register. He moved to
Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1948. This image is from a blog maintained
by his son, Robb Henry at John Keith Henry Drawings and Paintings.

Many Mobilians grew up reading Walter Overton’s Southland Sketches.
The Texan studied at the Arts Students League in New York and privately
in Boston, Italy and France. Overton also was a newspaper man as well as
an artist and traveled to the southern coastline in the 1930s. After crossing
Perdido Bay, through Summerdale and making camp in Fairhope,
Overton fell in love with South Baldwin County and spent 40 years publicizing
the region. He started creating weekly sketches in the late 1930s that he sold
exclusively to the Mobile Press Register, where the sketches
were published for 37 years.

Society News Helped Define a Sense of Place

Society Department in the 1939s. From left, Helen DuBois Johnson, Amalia Stevens Burns,
Alice Lesesne Beville and Ann Battle. Note the one telephone for the office and the very clean desk tops.
Of course, there were no personal computers in the 1930s.

After the Press and Register combined in 1932, Frances Durham became The Mobile Press Register’s first society editor.

The Society Department reported a good deal of high society news such as the coming out of debutantes and the activities of Mardi Gras societies. But the department also made room for feature stories of general interest. At some point it became the Women’s Department and eventually Living Today with its staff writing many of the feature stories in the newspaper.

This remained the case until 1992, when news in the section was “democratized” to carry more stories about society doings in general and far less about high-society elites. An advertiser and reader backlash resulted in the paper starting a Thursday section called High Profile, which was run by a society editor and carried more of the old society news type of stories.

In 2009, the Press Register began publishing the weekly lifestyle magazine ‘Zalea, which covered much of the Mardi Gras and other high-society news.

As elitist as content might have during most of the department’s existence, it did give readers a sense of place and uniqueness about Mobile. Modern editors tended to bring the Press Register up to big-city journalism standards and drive out everything that made it unique.

Until the 1990s, the Living Today department occupied a cramped, L-shaped space on the second floor of the Press Register building on Government Street. Photo courtesy of Carol Cain Warren.