Press Reporter in the First Nieman Fellows Class

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.

Register Established Early Radio In Mobile

In radio’s early years, the broadcasting of news grew rapidly, but it was the growth of advertising on the new medium that alarmed newspapers publishers nationwide. 

A large part of radio’s increase in advertising during the Great Depression came at the expense of newspapers, which suffered a decline in ads. After 1933, both newspaper and radio advertising fell off.

Publishers responded to the changes created by the new medium by buying and starting radio stations themselves. 

During the height of his fight with Mobile Press publisher Ralph B. Chandler, Mobile Register publisher Frederick I. Thompson launched WODX, 1410 AM, with the first broadcast at 8 p.m. on Feb. 7, 1930, from the Register building.

Not surprisingly, the initial broadcast featured Thompson’s City Hall protégé Mayor Harry T. Hartwell as the principal speaker. Other program guests included state Senator John Craft, city commissioners Cecil Bates and Leon Schwarz, Mobile Board of Revenue President Arthur D. Davis, J. C. Prine, Estes D. Baker, M. A. Boykin, H. E. Booth, and Thompson himself. After these speakers were done, the station played a musical program that included “On Mobile Bay” until 2 a.m.

After the merger with the Press, the new owners sold the station to Thompson’s co-owners, Hunter Watkins and William Pape, and it broadcast under the call letters WALA.

Photos from the Erik Overbey collection in the McCall Library at the University of South Alabama.

Were You a Member of the Sunshine or Nom de Plume Children's Clubs?

Many Port City Baby Boomers may have memories from when they were school children of Disa Stone reading to them at Leinkauf, Old Shell Road and at other schools and hospitals.

Disa Stone’s real name was Elsa Chandler and she was the wife of Ralph Chandler, publisher of the Mobile Press Register. The name “Disa” was a child’s mispronunciation of Elsa that stuck with her and “Stone” was a translation of Stein, her German maiden name.

A small, thin, energetic woman, Elsa worked as hard as her husband at the Press Register. She loved children, but had none of her own. So she gave her time to others’ children.

At the newspaper she conducted two clubs for children designed to introduce them to literature and to help them write. Younger children joined the Sunshine Club, while older children participated in the Nom de Plume Club.

The two clubs’ members met at the newspaper’s office on Saturdays to hear stories, to read their own writings and to talk about improving their writing.

The reporters, however, often found the children to be a nuisance as they hung over reporters while they typed, or the children would occupy reporters’ desks if they got up. Sometimes a piece of lemon would come flying past a reporter’s head as the kids fished the lemon slices out of glasses of lemonade and threw them at one another.

The Chandlers divorced in 1949, but Elsa continued her work with children in Mobile’s schools. She died in 1974.

Do you have memories of Disa Stone visiting your school, or were you a member of one of her children's clubs?

Port City Problems and Newspaper Circulation Grew in World War II

A human flood washed over Mobile during the Second World War bringing drastic, sweeping economic and social change. Thousands of men and women from the farms and small towns of the rural South flowed into Mobile to take the jobs offered by a wartime economy.

Between April 1940 and March 1943, the population of the city rose from 78,000 to 125,000.

Shipbuilding, aluminum production, chemical plants and a major U.S. Army Air Corps base brought waves of people who changed a leisurely paced small Southern city into a chaotic, overcrowded metropolis.

Housing became inadequate. People lived in tents, trailers and shacks, overwhelming public services.

With the war workers came their children who overwhelmed the school system. By the 1942-43 school year, the school system had to operate in double shifts of four hours each. More than 2,000 children attended no classes at all.

Mobile Press Register Publisher Ralph B. Chandler understood the seriousness of the problems the city faced. On the news pages of the paper he exposed the problems. On the editorial pages he proposed solutions. Behind the scenes he worked to make the proposals a reality.

The paper published a rental directory and appealed to homeowners to make spare rooms available to those with no place to stay. Poignant stories pulled at Mobilians’ heartstrings: a wife who came to Mobile to join her husband being forced to sleep two nights in the bus station; an ill woman who took a cot in the city jail rather than sleep on the streets; a man who camped in a tent outside the home he was evicted from.

The Press Register’s circulation grew rapidly with the population, which demanded newspapers to read. In January 1939, the Press Register had a circulation of 43,985. By January 1942, circulation had grown to 65,193, in increase of about 48 percent.

The newspaper had problems keeping up with the demand for its editions, especially after 1942 when publishers faced rationing of newsprint because its production used too much material, transportation and labor critical to the war effort.

The presence of the Brookley military air base allowed the Press Register to get extra supplies of newsprint.

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.

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.

Public decides which news has value

Society Department. 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.

Although Mobile, Alabama, had a population of about 70,000 in the 1930s, it was still a small town in many ways. The Society Department at The Mobile Press Register reflected the slower Southern lifestyle of the Port City.

When 18-year-old Ann Battle joined newspaper in 1935, her first job in the Society Department was to write the gossip column “Polly Puts the Kettle On.” The column concerned weddings, club meetings and parties.

She worked for the Society Department only in the afternoons. In the mornings, she covered the Chamber of Commerce and trials in federal court. On Saturday afternoons, Battle had to be at the paper to read proof sheets, check the spelling of names and making sure the Sunday pages went together correctly.

In the Society Department, Battle had to contend with the legendary Chandler sisters, Miss Nettie and Miss Mary.

The sisters, who were no relation to Press Register publisher Ralph Chandler, had worked on the Register for many years covering society news. When the Press and Register merged in 1932, they were not picked up by the new paper and went to work for The Mobile Times, a short-lived daily, for a few years before joining the Press Register.

Miss Nettie, being 10 years older than her sister, dominated the relationship. Miss Mary dismissed herself as “just a period after Miss Nettie’s name.”

On the Register, Miss Nettie had begun the popular “Betty Letters,” letters from the fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicling the goings on of Mobile society. She continued the feature at the Press Register.

But Miss Nettie couldn’t type and wrote the letters in longhand, which the composing room staff refused to take. So Miss Mary learned to type, with two fingers laboriously, while Miss Nettie dictated.

Many male journalists derided such work then, just as some historians do today. But the women of the Society Department produced news that people were willing to pay to read. The public, as always, decided which news had value.

A genteel reporter with a nose for hard news

The first reporter hired by publisher Ralph B. Chandler when he began The Mobile Press in 1929 was Frances Ruffin Durham.

A genteel woman with a nose for news, Durham graduated from St. Joseph’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She broke in as a police reporter on The New Orleans States during World War I, when male reporters were in short supply.

She had to persuade editors at the States of her worth. One of those editors was Semmes Colston, grandson of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes. Colston disliked women on newspapers and didn’t hesitate to say so.

One of Durham’s first assignments took her to the New Orleans city dump. She wrote a touching story about waifs who had changed a field of refuse into a garden spot. Other newspapers around the country picked up the story and Durham’s city editor conceded that “the new girl belongs.”

When World War I ended, Durham came to Mobile. Political opponents of liberal Frederick I. Thompson, publisher of The Mobile Register, relied on her reporting their views in Victor Hanson’s Birmingham News and Frank P. Glass’ Montgomery Advertiser. She also reported for the weekly Mobile Post until Chandler hired her for The Mobile Press and contributed features to Georgia newspapers. H. L. Menken’s American Mercury, among others, published her fiction.

With the merger of the Press and the Register in 1932, Durham became the first society editor of The Mobile Press Register.

Personal Sidebar

The above photo of Durham was taken by Wilson Burton, a photographer at the Blue Light Studio in Mobile. He later became the photographer for Hammel’s Department Store and remained there for years. The Mobile Press Register published a feature article about him on June 22, 2008. You can also view some of his photos online. His cameras were donated to the University of South Alabama.

Burton was married to one of my cousins, Gladys Pierce.