 |
Nieman Fellows Class of 1939
First row: Osburn Zuber, Edwin W. Fuller Jr., Edwin Lahey, Archibald
MacLeish (Curator), Herbert Lyons Jr., Frank Hopkins. Second row: Arthur Wild
(Director of Harvard Public Relations), Irving Dilliard, John Clark, Edwin
Paxton, Louis Lyons.
|
Hilary Herbert Lyons Jr. had cherished a desire
for journalism as a student at Mobile’s elite, private University Military
School, but his father opposed his son going into newspaper work.
Rather than discourage his son directly, the
elder Lyons went to Press Publisher
Ralph B. Chandler and asked the publisher to hire his son and work him so hard
that he would never want to work for a newspaper again. The scheme, however,
had an effect opposite from that intended by the senior Lyons and the young
Herbert began a distinguished career as a journalist.
After graduating from University Military
School in 1927, Lyons attended journalism school at Columbia University in New
York. During the summers after his second year, he worked at the Press as a replacement reporter for
vacationing staffers and became a regular reporter after earning his degree.
When the Nieman
Foundation awarded its first journalism fellowships in 1938, the selection
committee named Lyons as one of nine recipients. After studying economics at
Harvard University for nine months, Lyons returned to Mobile to write
editorials for the Press. But his
ambitions were greater than the opportunities Mobile offered, and he left the
Port City to join the staff of The New
York Times.
