Adolph S. Ochs

Adolph Ochs was born to Jewish German immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1858. Following the Civil War, the family moved to Tennessee, where Ochs attended public schools and worked as a paperboy, office boy, grocer’s clerk, and druggist’s apprentice. At 19, Ochs borrowed money to buy a controlling interest in The Chattanooga Times, and soon brought the struggling small-town newspaper to prosperity; in 1896, he did the same thing with the then-bankrupt New York Times. Ochs’ hiring of Carr Van Anda as the managing editor, his insistence on an ethic of objective journalism, and a 2-cent price decrease all helped rescue the NYT from oblivion and increase its readership by nearly 100-fold over the next few decades. Ochs died in 1935.