The 1930s: Media: People in the News

THE 1930s: MEDIA: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

In April 1930 Frank R. Birdsall, editor and publisher of the Yazoo City Sentinel in Mississippi, was shot and killed by Mayor John T. Stricklin because Birdsall had published damaging reports about Stricklin just before the local mayoral election in February.

In February 1937 Walter J. Black introduced Book Digest magazine, which published condensed versions of nonfiction best-sellers; he developed the idea after noticing the immense popularity of Reader's Digest condensed books.

In 1938 O'Brien Boldt, editor of the Daily Dartmouth, developed a plan to send Adolf Hitler a Christmas present of four test tubes containing samples of Jewish, Negro, Mongolian, and "Aryan" blood contributed by undergraduates and to challenge Hitler to tell the difference. The plan fell through when no "pure Aryan" blood could be found.

In July 1939 colorful, well-known New York World-Telegram columnist Heywood Broun advertised for a job because his contract expired in December and would not be renewed. With thirty-one years' newspaper experience, he ended up at the New York Post, working for one-quarter of his previous salary.

American Fiction Guild President Arthur J. Burks gave encouragement to pulp writers hurt by the Depression when he announced in early January 1933 that Dell Publishing Company's three pulp magazines were accepting new material and that Clayton Magazines were again paying authors on acceptance of their stories.

Seward Collins, editor of the American Review, revealed in November 1936 that he and Dorothea Brande, his associate editor, had married secretly in Manhattan,

In October 1938, addressing the Eighth National Eucharistic Congress in New Orleans, Louisiana, Joseph Vincent Connolly, general manager of all Hearst newspapers, condemned the "diabolical paganism behind Nazi and Communist persecutions" and said, "the time to fight in America is NOW."

In August 1939 Eddie Cramer, a reporter for the Wilmington (North Carolina) Star-News, telephoned his city editor to report on an automobile accident in which he had been injured. A few minutes later Cramer died.

Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis's New York Evening Post confused and amused readers in March 1933 when it accidentally ran an advertisement for Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization upside down.

In January 1930 The New York Times ran a full-page testimonial to its reliable reporting from Charles Gates Dawes, vice president under Calvin Coolidge. According to Dawes, "The Times stands like a beacon light in what is at times pretty foggy weather."

In May 1932 Rudolph Dirks, creator of the comic strip The Captain and the Kids (originally called The Katzenjammer Kids), was replaced as cartoonist for the strip by a young understudy, Bernard Dibble, after United Features Syndicate acquired the syndicate contracts of the New York World.

In April 1936 Dorothy Dix (Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer), the popular author of the internationally syndicated weekly women's column "Sunday Salad," was honored at several parties by her friends and colleagues at the New Orleans Times Picayune, the first paper to first run her column, for her four decades of hard-headed domestic advice giving and commonsense writing.

In Kentucky Jack Durham, city editor of the Danville Advocate and local correspondent for the Associated Press, and Wesley Carty, reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, were fined and jailed in August 1934 after they refused, citing professional ethics, to tell a judge who was responsible for the hanging in effigy of a state representative.

In August 1939 James Lawrence Fly was appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the resignation of controversial Frank Ramsay McNinch, who Roosevelt had appointed two years earlier to "clean house."

In November 1938 Stanton Griffis, executive committee chairman at Paramount Pictures, announced that the company would soon begin telecasting from a highly effective, far-reaching transmitter in Montclair, New Jersey. The transmitter was developed at Allen B. DuMont's laboratories.

In March 1933 chemist Charles Holmes Herty produced the first significant run of newspaper made from southern pine trees at his plant in Savannah, Georgia. Paper made from the pines is cheaper, stronger, and lighter in weight than paper from spruce pulpwood.

Harrison Holliway, manager of Los Angeles radio stations KFI and KECA, challenged social taboos in December 1938 by broadcasting the medical program Why Not Have A Baby? During the program an anonymous obstetrician gave plain-spoken answers to questions about prenatal care, paternal and maternal hygiene, sterility, and danger of miscarriage.

In October 1935 Kansas City Star editors replaced Moon Mullins comic strips that featured a snake charmer with one of her reptiles coiled around her neck with Moon Mullins strips from 1927 and 1929 because publisher George Baker Longan had a snake phobia.

In 1936 cartoonist Reuben Lucius' s "Rube" Goldberg comic strip gained national popularity after he added a new character: Lala Palooza, a fat, rich, and stupid female clown.

In January 1937 Charles Fulton Oursler, editor in chief of Liberty magazine, filed a libel suit against Mary McFadden, divorced wife of Liberty publisher Bernarr "Body Love" McFadden, because she had accused Oursler and her former husband of conspiring to kidnap Charles Lindbergh's child as part of a plan to increase magazine sales.

In April 1932, during a presentation of a melodrama from radio station WAE in Hammond, Indiana, sound expert Roland G. Palmer fired a pistol when the script called for a gunshot—and accidentally shot off two of his fingers.

In March 1933 publisher Joseph Medill Patterson promised in his New York Daily News that "whatever [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] does or doesn't do, we're going to be for him. We're going to withhold hostile criticism for one year at least."

After his life was threatened by fascists in London, New York publisher George Palmer Putnam returned to the United States in early 1930 with the manuscript for an antifascist book by Francesco Nitti, nephew of former Italian prime minister Francesco Saverio Nitti.

In a March 1931 editorial New York Herald Tribune publishers Mr. and Mrs. Ogden Reid condemned New York tabloids and daily newspapers, including the Hearst daily New York Journal, for printing sensational and damning speculations about the murdered vice-investigation witness Vivian Gordon. The woman's sixteen-year-old daughter had read the papers and then committed suicide.

In March 1937 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt announced at a gathering of writers, editors, and critics that Ladies' Home Journal would publish the first installment of her autobiography, This Is My Story.

David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant who worked his way up from the duties of messenger boy, was elected president of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in January 1930. He succeeded James Guthrie Harbord, who became board chairman, and Owen D. Young, who became head of a new executive committee.

When William C. Shepherd, managing editor of the Denver Post since 1912, was elected to succeed the late Frederick G. Bonfils as president, editor, and publisher in February 1933, the newspaper claimed that it would "continue to be TH E PAPER WIT H A HEART AND SOUL."

In September 1934 cartoonist Otto Soglow dressed as his Little King and made a cross-country tour to celebrate the debut of his well-known New Yorker comic strip in Puck, a weekly funny paper published throughout the United States in Hearst newspapers.

In October 1935 Scripps-Howard executive editor John Sorrells forced Indianapolis Times editor Talcott Powell to resign after Powell's accusing several county officials of corruption led him into personal battles with local politicians.

In March 1937 New York Times photographer George Strock helped catch the New York Examiner in reprinting Times photographs without permission. He snapped an angled shot of Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts on a hospital stretcher with cigarette in hand and had the art editor blot out the cigarette; the Examiner printed the same photography also without the cigarette. The next day The New York Times published the retouched photograph alongside the original under the headline, "HERE IS A STUDY IN PICTORIAL JOURNALISM PRACTICE TOR PEOPLE WH O THINK;"

Claiming homesickness for California aggravated by the high cost of living in Manhattan, Edgar Marshall Swasey resigned in June 1932 as publisher of the New York Evening Journal, the largest Hearst newspaper, to resume his former work as western advertising representative for the Hearst American Weekly.

In April 1931 New York Herald Tribune editor Stanley Walker publicly apologized for using the word Negress, a word considered inappropriate by leading African American newspapers. In the future, when race must be designated, Walker said only the word Negro should be used, unless the reference involves crime; then the description colored would be used.

Former Stars and Stripes cartoonist Abian Anders "Wally" Wallgren's comic strip Hoosegow Herman, based on his misadventures while he was a U.S. Marine private during World War I, began national syndication in October 1938.

In July 1934 William, Edward, and Henry Woodyard became owners of the largest weekly newspaper chain in the United States when they acquired eight weeklies on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, and linked them with their fifteen county-seat weeklies in West Virginia.

In late February 1933 well-known wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko won a libel suit against the New York American, which had printed his picture next to one of a gorilla—with the caption "Stanislaus Zbyszko, the Wrestler, Not Fundamentally Different from the Gorilla in Physique"—as an illustration for an article on evolution.