7 days Archive

This is what Downtown looked like along Pennsylvania Street in 1910, seven years after the founding of The Indianapolis Star by Muncie industrialist George F. McCulloch, who made his fortune in electric rail cars. Within six months of its debut, The Star's circulation stood at 70,836. -- Star file photo   Special section • Star Century: 100 years of The Indianapolis Star   STAR BUILDINGS Here's a brief look at homes of The Indianapolis Star during its 100-year history. EAST OHIO STREET The Star's editorial and mechanical departments originally were located in an eight-room house in the 100 block of East Ohio Street. The business office was next door. Holes were hacked in the walls to link the two operations. MONUMENT PLACE The Indianapolis Morning Star reported on Sept. 24, 1903, that the business office had been relocated to the southwest corner of Market Street and Monument Place. The editorial and mechanical departments joined them the next year. PENNSYLVANIA STREET The Star moved to its present location at 307 N. Pennsylvania St. in 1907. The first of two major remodeling programs under Eugene C. Pulliam's direction occurred in 1950 at a cost of more than $2 million. The News was moved into a building adjoining The Star to form The Star-News Building. Although the structure now housed merged departments of the morning Star and the evening News, the editorial staffs of the two papers remained separate and fiercely competitive. Ground was broken in July 1967 for a three-story addition on Pennsylvania Street. This $10 million expansion and remodeling program was completed in 1971, in time for the city's sesquicentennial celebration.

For a century, the journalists of The Indianapolis Star have -- day after day -- chronicled the history of our community.

But this history-writing institution has a history of its own.

Like the saga of the surrounding community, The Star's story is one of key moments -- beginnings, larger-than-life characters and change, always change.

The changing Star and the changing community: Their histories intertwine.

An electric start

A nearly forgotten transportation revolution spawned The Star.

As the new century dawned, Indianapolis was on its way to becoming the interurban rail capital of the world. Hundreds of electric rail cars arrived and departed every day from a giant terminal on West Market Street.

George McCulloch, a Muncie businessman, had made his fortune in the interurban business and decided to plow that money into a newspaper called The Indianapolis Star.

McCulloch paid a balloonist $650 to drop red stars on the city in the days leading up to the launch on June 6, 1903. Others were dropped from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, which had been dedicated the previous May.

The Star began reporting the news at a time of transition and challenge.

That first edition captured a slice of each -- locally, nationally and internationally.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who had replaced William McKinley after his assassination in 1901, provided a front-page "greeting" to the new newspaper -- although he refused to be directly interviewed.

Also on the front page, the Russian monarchy was trying to explain a massacre of Jews, and an Indiana senator was being called to Washington for a conference on onerous trade tariffs.

On the home front, a woman was suing for $5,000, claiming her foot was burned by hot water jugs during medical treatment in Fort Wayne; and Indianapolis mayor Charles A. Bookwalter announced city taxes would be cut.

Indiana's transformation from agriculture to industry made labor unrest a major story in The Star's first year. A record 172 strikes involving more than 22,000 workers occurred in 1903, many in the state's vast coal fields.

Key events in a new revolution in transportation also occurred that year, a transformation that eventually would doom the interurban network.

Many automobile makers already crowded Indianapolis in 1903, the same year Henry Ford organized the Ford Motor Co. in Detroit.

Indianapolis was a city of more than 170,000 when the 12-page first edition of The Star hit the streets. And McCulloch moved quickly in that first year, absorbing the rival Indianapolis Journal and moving the paper twice.

But by 1904, having depleted his wealth on this newspaper venture, McCulloch sold The Star to Richmond millionaire Daniel G. Reid, who'd made his fortune in tin plating, railroads and steel.

The education of a publisher

By the end of World War II, Eugene C. Pulliam was already a newspaper titan. Now, he was about to get the education that would solidify the strident views that would shape him, The Indianapolis Star and the community.

Pulliam had outsmarted and outbid newspaper luminaries such as Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, Roy Howard of Scripps Howard and Samuel Newhouse to acquire The Star in April 1944. Four years later, he gained control of The Indianapolis News, giving him a major platform in a city that now had grown to about 400,000 people.

Having bought 51 newspapers in his lifetime, Pulliam decided to return to his journalism roots: reporting. His beat would be the world.

He and his wife, Nina, started a series of foreign trips in 1947. In barely three months, they visited and sent dispatches from Europe and the Middle East. A month later they were off to the Far East, including war-ravaged Japan, and later to Central America and back to Europe.

The starkness of good and evil he saw sparked Pulliam to change the motto of his newspapers in 1951.

For The Star, what had been "Fair and First" became a Bible verse that remains today as part of the paper's nameplate: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty."

Pulliam explained the change in an editorial. "We the people derive our rights and our liberties from God. Governments derive their rights from us. There is no law of man above the law of God. It is in this faith that free America was born. It is in this faith that America will live in freedom."

Words slay empire

Eugene C. Pulliam didn't much like having lawyers involved in his newspapers, according to his biography. They seemed too eager to kill stories for fear of libel suits.

In the end, it was the legal judgment of a lawyer from California regarding the meaning of words -- the essence of newspapering -- that helped undo the Pulliam empire.

At his death in 1975, Pulliam left the controlling interest in The Star's parent company, Central Newspapers Inc., in the hands of a three-person trust, instead of directly turning it over to his family.

He was trying to protect his legacy, having already seen other newspaper dynasties unravel because of family disputes. Around the newspaper, "the trust" was regarded as an impenetrable barrier that could be broken only if the company was "seriously threatened" by a "substantially complete loss" of its market value.

The trustees when Pulliam died were his wife, Nina; son Eugene S. Pulliam (known as "Young Gene"), and William Dyer Jr., general manager of The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News.

Fast forward to 2000. Dyer had died in 1993, Nina Pulliam in 1997, and "Young Gene" in 1999.

While Central Newspapers had increased revenue and profits each year for nearly a decade, the stock price had stagnated.

Across the continent in California, another unbreakable trust suddenly wasn't. Times Mirror Co. and its flagship paper, The Los Angeles Times, had been sold by Chandler family trusts to the Tribune Co.

California attorney Robert E. Denham delivered the formal opinion that those trusts' shares could be sold.

Within a month, Central Newspapers Chairman Louis A. "Chip" Weil III was approaching the company's trustees and beneficiaries about a sale. He had concluded the company faced one of two futures: gobbling up other media properties in order to boost the stock price, or selling out.

The trustees soon concluded that Central Newspapers was "seriously threatened" by a "substantially complete loss" of its market value.

Barely three weeks after it was officially announced that The Star was up for sale, Gannett Co. had bought Central Newspapers for $2.6 billion.

The source of legal advice in the deal: attorney Robert E. Denham.

The dynasty of personal journalism built by Eugene C. Pulliam died at the hands of his own words.

"Why in the hell should I want to sell newspapers?" he once told Time magazine. "If I wanted to make money, I'd go into the bond business. I've never been interested in the money we make, but in the influence we have."

Call Star reporter Bill Theobald at 1-317-444-6602.