Adolph Ochs | |
---|---|
Born |
Adolph Simon Ochs March 12, 1858 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
Died | April 8, 1935 Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S. |
(aged 77)
Resting place | Temple Israel Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, U.S. |
Occupation | Publisher |
Spouse(s) | Effie Wise |
Signature | |
Adolph Simon Ochs (March 12, 1858 – April 8, 1935) was an American newspaper publisher and former owner of The New York Times and The Chattanooga Times (now the Chattanooga Times Free Press).
Ochs was born to a Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 12, 1858. His parents, Julius Ochs and Bertha Levy, were both German immigrants. His father had left Bavaria for the United States in 1846. Julius was a highly educated man and fluent in six languages that he taught at schools throughout the South, though he supported the Union during the Civil War. Ochs' mother Bertha had come to the United States in 1848 as a refugee from the revolution in Rhenish Bavaria, and had lived in the South before her 1853 marriage with Julius, sympathized with the South, though their differing sympathies didn't separate their household.
After the war, the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. In Knoxville, Adolph studied in the public schools and during his spare time delivered newspapers. At 11, he went to work at the Knoxville Chronicle as office boy to William Rule, the editor, who became a mentor. In 1871 he was a grocer's clerk at Providence, Rhode Island, attending a night school meanwhile. He then returned to Knoxville, where he was a druggist's apprentice for some time. In 1872, he returned to the Chronicle as a "printer's devil," who looked after various details in the composing room of the paper.
His siblings also worked at the newspaper to supplement the income of their father, a lay rabbi for Knoxville's small Jewish community. The Chronicle was the only Republican, pro-Reconstruction, newspaper in the city, but Ochs counted Father Ryan, the Poet-Priest of the Confederacy, among his customers.