My grandmother Edith O’Keefe Susong loved to tell the story of how she first got into the newspaper business. She would say that in early October of 1916, she put on her hat and went downtown to take charge of The Greeneville Democrat, the smallest of three newspapers in our heavily Republican county in East Tennessee. She had been a schoolteacher and knew absolutely nothing about newspapers but had two children to feed, and “if a rabbit has to climb a tree, he’ll climb a tree.” This was one of her favorite expressions, and was always delivered with a slightly exasperated tone, as though it were utterly self-evident. During her first week on the job, one of the other newspapers in town tartly observed that as the Democrat was now being managed by a woman, “It will not be alive when the roses bloom again.”
At this point in the tale, my grandmother would take a deeply satisfied breath and say, “Four years later, I owned both the other papers, and do you know why?” It was always my part to gasp that I did not. She would then fix me with her most piercing look and say, “Because they were drunk, and I was sober!”
She consolidated the three papers into a daily, The Greeneville Sun, and was the publisher for nearly 60 years. In 1974, she hung the copy for “Cheerful Chatter”—her weekly column—on the hook, was sick for two days and died, surrounded by her family and greatly mourned by her beloved Greene County.
For as long as I can remember, The Greeneville Sun—circulation 15,000—has been a member of my family. Usually, the Sun was like a difficult but revered uncle who could order my father to abandon his supper at a moment’s notice to obey some capricious demand. At other times, the paper was like a sibling who smelled of ink and had a personality as distinct and familiar as that of my brothers and sisters. I have resented the Sun and I have loved it, but more than anything else I am bound to it, as my family has been for almost a century.
My father is the publisher, my younger brother is co-publisher and my older brother is editor. My mother now writes “cheerful chatter,” which she insists in putting in the lower case as a tribute to my grandmother. One brother-in-law and one sister-in-law are also working at the family business. I have lived in New York City for nearly a third of my life and get to Greeneville only a few times each year. Yet when I try to imagine what it would be like to drive into my hometown only to find another family owning the Sun, I find the prospect inconceivable.
Since 1986, my wife—Susan E. Tifft—and I have spent untold hours studying two extraordinary newspaper families, which resulted in two books: The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, about the family that owned The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, which is the saga of the Ochs and Sulzberger family. The Binghams were a proud and respected family that shattered after three generations, while the Ochs/Sulzberger family, now in its fourth generation at the helm of the Times, embodies the power of a newspaper to inspire family unity and sacrifice.
For the ever-dwindling number of small-town newspaper families, both the failure of the Binghams and the success of the Ochs/Sulzbergers are cautionary tales, with lessons to learn and comparisons to draw. What, we ask ourselves, is the secret of preserving a family tradition, of keeping a shared sense of purpose that is essential if the paper is to pass to another generation?
Certainly these questions have been asked in my family, and it is a complex riddle. As with the families behind The Courier-Journal and The New York Times, the answers for my particular family begin with untangling threads from long ago. If I have learned anything, it is that the past is alive in the present.
I was born in 1946, 30 years after that October morning when my grandmother had first set out for the Democrat, and even as a very small boy I began to be aware that something was different about my family. My father, for reasons that were obscure to me, almost never got through supper without being called to the telephone, almost always by someone outraged about an item in the paper. My world had two basic anchors: the house I lived in with my parents and our siblings, and “the office,” as the Sun was called, which included the house next to the paper across a narrow alley where Edith and her mother, Quincy Marshall O’Keefe, still lived.
The house was a two-story white frame home literally built around a two-story log cabin. The center of the action was the kitchen and the small study behind it, where my grandmother would hammer out her endless flow of columns and what she called “personals”—tidbits of benign gossip about who had company and who had gone on a trip. They were the most popular items in the paper, next to “Cheerful Chatter.”
The acquisition of Greeneville’s other two newspapers had not ended my grandmother’s problems by any means. W.R. Lyon, the former owner of the Sun, waited three years until Edith had paid off his note, and on the very next day went into competition against her, which lasted for years. But my grandmother had a gift for small-town newpapering. She quickly grasped that the community did not need a partisan paper but one that would appeal to all Greene Countians, so The Greeneville Democrat-Sun became The Greeneville Sun, and its declared political affiliation changed to independent from Democrat.
Many times, though, Edith’s painstaking groundwork would go up in flames because of a scorching editorial by her mother, Quincy, who was a warrior who took few prisoners. My grandmother told me of one particularly despairing moment when, unbeknownst to her, Quincy had slipped a devastating editorial into the paper that was a bitter assault on a person my grandmother had patiently cultivated. Distraught and furious, my grandmother had marched across the alley and found her mother in her bedroom, smoking a cigarette and as cool as ice.
“Mother, how could you have done this?” she said. “Now all my hard work is for naught and I’ll have to start all over again.”
Quincy looked at her and gave the response she always gave in such situations. “Well, why don’t you just take me out and kill me?” Repentance there was none.
Quincy Marshall O’Keefe had waited all her life for such an opportunity, and she rarely shrank from speaking her mind. Her fundamental political perspective was that America was headed down the drain of permissiveness and corruption that had destroyed Rome. She had no patience for scoundrels, big government, malfeasance and what she regarded as stupidity. She was against such horrors as suffrage for women, on the grounds that they would merely waste the vote by doing whatever their husbands told them.
When I knew Quincy, she had become “Granny” and was still capable of ferocity, though she preferred to treat her great-grandchildren to her famous buckwheat cakes. She was well into her 80s by then, but as fearless and plain-spoken as ever. She died in 1958 at 92 and in 1979 was named to the Tennessee Newspaper Hall of Fame, where her picture hangs just down the row from Adolph Ochs of The New York Times.
My grandmother Edith Susong had two children, Alex and Martha, my mother. My uncle Alex, for whom I am named, fled Greeneville as soon as he could and lived his life in New York as a banker. My father, John M. Jones, comes from Sweetwater, Tennesee, a similar small town about a hundred miles southwest of Greeneville. His family was in the textile business, and my father—the oldest son—was expected to join the firm. Instead he joined an uncle’s paint company, married my mother and had my older brother, John Jr. Then came World War II, and he volunteered for a group that later became known as Merrill’s Marauders, the precursor to today’s U.S. Army Rangers, whose mission was to go behind Japanese lines in Burma and attack them. Amazingly, he survived and returned in 1945 with every expectation of returning to the paint business.
By then my grandmother had survived W.R. Lyon and other competitors, the Depression and the war, but all those battles had finally caught up with her. She was weary and not well, and she asked my father to come to Greeneville to help her, just for a year, so he could see whether newspapers appealed to him.
He knew no more about newspapers than my grandmother had known in 1916, but he was intrigued. After only a few months, he fell completely in love and agreed to stay permanently, but not as an employee. He bought the stake in the paper that had belonged to Quincy, which had come in exchange for her financial help when my grandmother bought the Sun decades earlier. John M., as my father was called, and Edith then began a partnership that was to endure with virtual total harmony for nearly 30 years.
The Greeneville Sun of the 1950s and 1960s was a paper of its day, for better and worse. The worst was its acceptance of racial prejudice. My family was conservative, which is to say they believed that separate but equal was the best arrangement. I am not proud of that. I am proud that when the civil rights movement came, my father and grandmother were instrumental in ensuring that Greeneville became an integrated place without the violence and insults that plagued so much of the South.
While Greeneville was a tranquil hamlet where I was given almost total freedom to wander and roam from the time I was eight, a frisson of potential violence always lurked just over the horizon. My father bought a .38 caliber pistol and kept it in a filing cabinet at home after a man walked into his office and casually pulled a gun while warning him not to run pictures of strikers destroying some cars in a local dispute. (As it happened, the photographer had been so nervous that he had forgotten to take the lens cap off his camera.)
To me, the newspaper was a second home, peopled by faces I had always known. My first job was carrying proofs of ads all over town so that people like Charlie Justis down at C.W. Justis Appliances could make sure the items and the prices were correct. Which was rare. My next job was making pigs, a task that was incredibly dangerous for a kid, though neither I nor anyone else seemed to notice. The fundamental technology for newspapers in those days was to type the words on a linotype machine, which would create a line of type from molten lead. I would gather these used lead slugs and melt them in a furnace, which was in the corner of a small, grimy room. I would then pour the molten lead into molds to create pigs, the heavy lead bars that were the raw material of the linotype process. The job was not unlike asking a 12-year-old to tend a blast furnace.
Finally I graduated to running the linotype, and I still carry the scar on my wrist from a “squirt,” when there was a gap in the line of steel slugs used to make the imprint, and the molten lead spurted through like a fountain. I really didn’t mind, as I was getting a graduate education in life from people like J.C. Johnson, the skinny head pressman who was always smeared with ink, but who waltzed elegantly with my grandmother every year at the Sun Christmas party. Or Floyd Melton, who taught me to operate a linotype and now runs the high-tech advertising composing room of today’s Greeneville Sun.
Do such memories bind me to that place and to that newspaper? Without question. As do memories such as the biannual Sun Election Parties. Politics in Greene County had long been a bruising spectator sport, so it wasn’t surprising when people began to gather outside the Sun on election night to get the most recent returns. Over the years, as the crowd grew, my grandmother began piping out recorded music. By the late 1950s, the Sun Election Party had become a huge affair, with Main Street closed in front of the paper, a flatbed truck straddling the street and free country music. The service clubs sold hot dogs and drinks. My grandmother and my father would function as generals, guiding the tabulation of returns as they were reported, precinct by precinct, reading them out loud between songs, which always included Tiny, the chain-smoking sports editor, singing a lovelorn ballad called “Foggy River.”
Those balmy August nights, with cheering and jeering and—it seemed—the whole county in attendance, are a piece of the best of America that has been lost to technology. With television, the returns were available at home, and the custom died out.
Throughout these years, there was rarely a time when I climbed into a car with my father that he didn’t have a talk with me along the lines of, “This thing is there for you and your brothers and sisters, but if you don’t want it, I’ll sell it. But I think you would be making a big mistake.” It was, for all of us, a full-court press that lasted most of our childhood.
My grandmother took a somewhat different tack. She plied us with stories, such as the one about how she got into the newspaper business and about Granny calling her a deluded fool over prohibition.
But none of these influences was as powerful as simply seeing my father and grandmother work, which they did with a daily joy. My father rose at 6:30 and went directly to the office, returning around 8 for breakfast. He returned again most days for a quick lunch, then returned once more for supper until the phone rang.
My grandmother, on the other hand, made breakfast last most of the morning. Each morning, as she sat at the breakfast table, a stream of people would come in the door to say hello to Miss Edith, sometimes bringing the personals that she would then batter out on her old typewriter in the little room off the kitchen.
In 1966, when she celebrated her fiftieth year in the newspaper business, she expressed her thanks directly to the people who had supported her all those years: “The people of Greene County are MY people. Shoulder to shoulder, we face the past, the present and the future in a world of fear, confusion and challenge. Thank you, my good comrades, for my golden yesterdays and the shining faith I hold for tomorrow.” When she died in 1974, at 84, I saw my father weep for the first time in my life.
Through a circuitous route, which included a long period of flight from the family business, I found myself the editor of The Greeneville Sun in 1978, and came to know the newspaper and the town in a new way. Greeneville, of course, is vastly changed from the sleepy village of my childhood. The downtown, which was packed with people on the Saturday mornings of my youth, became a virtual ghost town, and the bypass, with its strip malls, is now the commercial center. But the fundamentally tolerant cast of the town hasn’t changed. One day, as I returned from lunch, I saw a group of white-clad people standing in front of the paper and I recall thinking, “I didn’t know there was a circus in town.” We were being picketed by the Ku Klux Klan, in full regalia, something never seen in Greene County in my lifetime. They were angry because I wouldn’t allow them to advertise for members in the Sun. We covered the picketing, quoted them and ran a picture that we put on the front page. That group was never heard from again.
I decided to leave Greeneville in 1983. I had met my wife while on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and, although she said she would marry me, she was also determined to accept a new job writing for Time magazine. After much soul-searching, I concluded that I could live happily in New York but she could not live happily in Greeneville.
It has proved a good decision in every respect. My departure cleared the way for my brother John to return to the paper as editor, and he has been a better editor for the Sun than I would ever have been. My brother Gregg came to the paper straight from college and has been co-publisher with my father, which has also been a huge blessing. At my father’s prodding, The Greeneville Sun has become one of the most technologically advanced papers in the state. He also saw the opportunity presented by other small papers in our area and, over time, the family business has grown to include three small dailies, several non-dailies, radio stations, a regional business publication and regional magazines focused on running, outdoor life and tourism. Thanks to Gregg, we provide Internet access in several East Tennessee counties and have active websites at all our papers. Our papers win their share of prizes each year, but the measurement that makes me proudest is that, relative to the population, the Sun has led the state for years in penetration of its market. In other words, in Greene County, a lot of people feel they need the Sun.
We are now focused, as a family, on the transition that faces us. My parents are in their mid-80s, and the question of what happens after them is unanswered. But our family adopted the Sulzberger/New York Times model of inheritance, which means that everyone shares equally, as compared to the Graham family model at The Washington Post, in which those running the paper have an extra measure of control. In our family, any three of us could theoretically force a sale, and those running the paper will be working for their siblings. Although this arrangement might appear destabilizing, in our case it fosters a sense of shared power and interdependence that binds us together.
In 1986, I wrote an article about the break-up of the Bingham family and the sale of their Louisville papers and brought it to Greeneville for my father to read. He took it into his study and came out ashen. It was his ultimate nightmare, and I am sure the Bingham story has spurred us to look at our family more critically, to avoid their fate.
Why do some families sell their papers and others resist? Sometimes there is no choice. But once I asked an investment banker who specialized in putting family papers on the block how he managed to persuade these longtime newspapers to give up their whole way of life. He tapped his forehead and said, slyly, “If I can get them on the yacht up here, it’s done.” One of his minions came to see my brother Gregg once when my father was out of town to suggest that Gregg should lead his siblings in a revolt to sell the paper, regardless of my father’s wishes. Gregg escorted him out of the building.
My family is not immune to tensions and pressures. We are quite, quite human. But my parents forced us cousins to get to know each other, with such stratagems as putting us in the same car each Christmas and going to see the University of Tennessee play in a football bowl. (For years, we thought we traipsed off to bowl games each year because our parents had become rabid football fans.)
I cannot say what will happen to The Greeneville Sun. Often, when I am in Greeneville, I go to Oak Grove Cemetery and visit the graves of my grandmother and other loved ones. The family’s patriarch, Civil War general Thomas D. Arnold, has an impressive monument, and Quincy Marshall O’Keefe lies at peace beside her patient husband. But it is my grandmother Edith’s stone that I am always drawn to most powerfully. I have conversations with her. We talk about the paper, usually. When I join her, I hope that another generation of the family will come visit me and talk to me about the paper that is our shared legacy, still.
Alex S. Jones and his wife, Susan E. Tifft, are co-authors, most recently, of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. A longer version of this article originally appeared in the May 2000 issue of Brill’s Content.