Texas Newspaper Foundation is proud to announce Arthur H. “Art” Kowert, Roy Robinson, William Dean Singleton and Carmage Walls as the 2012 inductees in the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame.
The induction ceremony will take place on Friday evening, Jan. 20, at the Texas Press 2012 Midwinter Conference at the Hyatt Regency DFW Airport Hotel, 2334 North International Parkway, DFW Airport, TX 75261.
In 2006, the Austin-based Texas Newspaper Foundation created its own hall of fame to induct up to four exemplary men and women of the newspaper business each year. The first four, Roy Eaton, Alfred H. Belo, James Roberts and Staley McBrayer, were inducted in January 2007.
Like Eaton, Belo, Roberts and McBrayer, the 2012 class of inductees' clearly outstanding achievements and contributions to the newspaper industry and to their communities were recognized by a selection committee that met Nov. 11 and picked four individuals from a field of 24 nominees.
Serving as members of the selection committee were the following TPA past presidents: Phil Major, Decatur, chair; Jerry Tidwell, Granbury; Alvin Holley, Livingston; Terry Collier, Fredericksburg; and Bob Brincefield, Brownwood.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
ART KOWERT
Arthur H. “Art” Kowert, late editor and publisher of the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post, began his career in the newspaper business with the Fredericksburg Standard in June 1934 after receiving a bachelor of business administration degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he also was a member of the university’s first swim team and played trumpet in the Longhorn Band.
Early on at the Standard, he wrote sports, general news and worked in the advertising department, but when editor Robert Klett died in 1940, Kowert took over the paper’s leadership. It was a position that he would hold until January 1980 when he was named publisher and Terry Collier, who joined the newspaper in 1973, became editor. In 1984, the Fredericksburg Standard acquired The Radio Post, and the names of the two newspapers were combined.
During his 69 years in the newspaper business, Kowert served as president of the South Texas Press Association, 1944-45, and in 2000 received that organization’s prestigious Chester Evans Award.
Kowert served as president of Texas Press Association in 1953-54 and presided over the association’s Diamond Jubilee Convention at Fort Worth in 1954. At the TPA convention in 1984 at Corpus Christi, he was presented the association’s Golden 50 Award for his 50 years in the newspaper business. In 1994, TPA named him Texas Weekly Publisher of the Year. In 1995, the Headliners Foundation of Texas presented him with the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award.
In 1968, Kowert and a group of Central Texas newspaper publishers established a central offset printing plant in Fredericksburg and for many years served as president of Hill Country Community Press, which today prints more than a dozen newspapers.
Long active in civic and church work, Kowert was president of the Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce, the Fredericksburg Independent School District board of trustees, the Lions Club and Bethany Lutheran Church Council. The chamber of commerce honored him with its Outstanding Young Man Award in 1944, its Outstanding Boss Award in 1958 and its Outstanding Chamber Man Award in 1988.
Kowert was awarded the Silver Beaver Award by the Boy Scouts of America Capitol Area Council in 1950 and the Lamb Award from the National Lutheran Committee on Scouting in 1959 for distinguished service to boyhood in the Lutheran Church.
Kowert served on the Fredericksburg Centennial in 1946, the community’s 125th anniversary celebration in 1971, the Marktplatz Redevelopment Commission and on the original committees to begin Night In Old Fredericksburg and the Easter Fires Pageant.
In 1982, the Texas Highway Department presented him with its Road Hand Award for his long support of improvements to the state’s highway and transportation systems. In 1997, Kowert and his wife, Elise, were presented with a Stars of Texas Award by the Gillespie County Historical Society for their historical preservation work.
Kowert served as family photographer for President Lyndon B. Johnson while he was a U.S. senator and vice president, and in retirement, mostly at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall. Kowert was present for every news conference at the ranch during the Johnson presidency and when press conferences were held in Fredericksburg.
Kowert died Feb. 19, 2003, a day after finishing his “Around the Square” column, which he had written every week for the Standard since May 26, 1948.
ROY ROBINSON
Regarded as an innovator, mentor and problem-solver, Roy Robinson is often sought out by fellow Texas newspaper publishers for counsel and advice. He grew up in the back shop of his father’s Goodland Daily News in northwest Kansas, officially entering the newspaper business at 21 as city editor of The Lamar (Colo.) Tri-State Daily News. Since then he has worked through the many challenges the owner of a small rural newspaper can face.
An outstanding newspaper publisher who has distinguished himself in Texas, Colorado and beyond as a member of the National Newspaper Association, Roy Robinson served as president of Texas Press Association, Colorado Press Association, West Texas Press Association in 2004-05 and North & East Texas Press Association in 2007-08. He received WTPA’s prestigious Harold Hudson Award in 2006 and NETPA’s exemplary Sam C. Holloway Award in 2005 and Tom Mooney Memorial Award in 2006.
A member of the Texas Newspaper Foundation from 2005 until June 2011, Robinson was the guiding force behind the creation of the foundation’s Hall of Fame. He has been a leader in every community he has served, from Woodland Park, Colorado’s home rule charter commission to his role as president of the Methodist Sunday school class in Graham, Texas. His service with senior citizen centers, museums, art centers and chambers of commerce is extensive, and he served as a member of the Selective Service Board before the military draft ended.
Robinson and his wife, Carol Lee, purchased the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, Colo., in 1966. He also edited the Cripple Creek (Colo.) Gold Rush from 1965 to 1978. Robinson published the Eagle Valley (Colo.) Enterprise, then the Westminster Window and Northglenn-Thornton Sentinel in suburban Denver before joining MediaNews Group in January 1997 as publisher of the Fort Morgan (Colo.) Times.
He was elected president of Colorado Press Association in 1972 and later was awarded honorary life membership by the association.
Robinson came to Texas in 1998 as vice president of Graham Newspapers Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaNews Group. He served as publisher of The Graham Leader, the Breckenridge American, Jack County Herald, Jacksboro Gazette-News, Lake Country Sun and The Olney Enterprise. He also was responsible for the company’s four radio stations, KWKQ-FM and KSWA-AM in Graham and KLXK-FM and KROO-AM in Breckenridge.
On Jan. 31, 2009, Graham Newspapers Inc. purchased the Star Group newspapers: Burleson Star, Alvarado Star, Crowley Star, Joshua Star, Keene Star and South Tarrant Star in Everman.
Robinson has been active for more than three decades on National Newspaper Association committees and as a judge for NNA’s annual better newspaper contest. He completed the NNA Publishers’ Boot Camp in 1997.
He is a member of the Rotary Club in Graham and was charter chairman of the Graham Convention and Visitors Bureau Advisory Board. He is a past Exalted Ruler in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. His personal honors include a citation for meritorious valor at Soldiers Memorial Park in Sherman County, Kan., in 1956; Citizen of the Year in Woodland Park, Colo., in 1972; honorary life member of the Woodland Park Chamber of Commerce, in 1978; and Citizen of the Year in Eagle, Colo., in 1988.
The Robinsons are parents of Robert Robinson of Pueblo, Colo., and Michelle Koening of Centennial, Colo., and they have two grandchildren.
After a lifetime of service in the newspaper industry, Robinson will retire on Nov. 25, his 72nd birthday.
WILLIAM DEAN SINGLETON
William Dean Singleton is the founder and chairman of the board of MediaNews Group, the second-largest newspaper company by circulation in the United States.
“With more than 50 daily newspapers in 11 states and more than 90 published products, MediaNews Group engages a weekly print audience of over 18 million people,” according to Scarborough Research, MediaNews Group analysis of Audit Bureau of Circulation reports and internal records.
Singleton began his newspaper career at 15, serving as a part-time reporter in his hometown of Graham, Texas, and bought his first newspaper at 21.
He built MediaNews Group through the acquisition of newspapers, many on the verge of reorganization or closure. He pioneered the practice of clustering newspapers and centralizing such functions as advertising sales, business operations, production, and in some cases, editorial. He also adopted and developed pooled-asset partnerships with other media companies, such as Gannett and E.W. Scripps Co.
Singleton vexed journalists throughout the late part of the 20th century. In the 1970s, the newsroom staff of the old Fort Worth Press threw beer cans at him and in the 1980s, a former editor of the Trenton (N.J.) Times told the Columbia Journalism Review that under Singleton’s cutbacks, “The public lost a watchdog and gained a bulletin board.” In the late 1990s, Singleton began shifting his view that rather than merely a cost center, the newsroom is an asset. He lured Gregory Moore, former assistant managing editor of the Boston Globe, to the Denver Post and together the two worked to improve the paper’s journalism.
Singleton’s holdings increased rapidly over the last decade with the acquisition of dailies in Salt Lake City, Detroit, St. Paul, Minn., and San Jose, Calif.
Singleton serves as chairman of the board of directors of The Associated Press and is former chairman of the board of the Newspaper Association of America, on which he served as a member from 1993 to 2004. He also serves on many boards in Colorado, including The Helen G. Bonfils Foundation, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Winter Park Recreational Association, Rocky Mountain Multiple Sclerosis Center, and National Sports Center for the Disabled. He is a former member of the University of Denver board of trustees.
Singleton and his wife, the former Adrienne Casale of Fairfield, N.J., have three children: William, Paige and Adam.
CARMAGE WALLS
Carmage Walls, who died in 1998 at his home in Houston, was associated with Texas newspapers from the 1940s until his death. He touched the lives of thousands who lived in communities served by his newspapers and who benefited form his charitable interests. He nurtured the careers of some of Texas’ most outstanding newspaper leaders of the past 60 years.
Walls, the self-educated son of a Georgia sharecropper, became a nationally known newspaper entrepreneur and operator beginning in the 1930s. As a newspaper investor and manager, he was instrumental in charting new and exciting territory for newspapers, especially community newspapers.
Walls had high professional standards. He believed newspapers owed their readers and advertisers the very best newspaper each community could afford. He trained publishers to understand that each had a responsibility to give back in service to the communities they served. As a result, publishers working for Walls-owned newspapers have for generations been active in the Texas Press Association and Texas Daily Newspaper Association, and they have helped lead the lobbying and other public interest work for the two associations.
Walls and his newspapers were pioneers in newspaper technology. They demonstrated from the 1950s on that offset printing could save money and produce quality newspapers, and they made early forays into computerized newspaper production. Walls also invented and streamlined many of the newspaper buying and financing techniques that made it possible for people of ordinary means to build their own companies. In these and other ways, Walls helped to ensure the long-term economic health of community newspapers everywhere.
From the time he began managing and buying newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s, he was involved in the purchase and operation of many scores of newspapers, mainly in the Southeast and in Texas. Texas newspapers touched by Walls' ownership and management include Galveston, Beaumont, Baytown, Brazoria County and many others. At his death, Walls left his newspaper ownership in Texas in two companies: Southern Newspapers, Inc., and Galveston Newspapers, Inc.
Under the management of Walls’ widow, Martha Ann Walls, and his daughter, Lissa Walls Vahldiek, those companies own and operate 15 newspaper operations, 11 of them in Texas: The Bay City Tribune, The Brazosport Facts, Del Rio News-Herald, The Galveston County Daily News, Kerrville Daily Times, Lufkin Daily News, Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel, New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, Paris News and the Seguin Gazette Enterprise.
However, Carmage Walls’ greatest legacy in Texas and elsewhere has been in the men and women he trained as newspaper operators and journalists. A number of them are still leaders in the Texas newspaper industry. Those include his immediate family – his widow and his daughter – as well as an extended family of operators and owners, including three generations of the Hartman family, James Nabors of Lake Jackson-Clute and many others including Dolph Tillotson, Bill Hartman, Jim Hale, Jim Chionsini, James B. Boone Jr., Leon Brown, Greg Shrader, Bill Cornwell, Mike Graxiola, and others.
Often, protégés of Walls took what they learned from him and created their own companies, many of which have done business in Texas, including Hartman Newspapers Inc., Boone Newspapers Inc., Worrell Newspapers Inc., Smith Newspapers Inc., Granite Publications Inc., and many others. Walls also was associated with Jefferson Pilot Insurance’s purchase of newspapers in Texas, and he helped manage those newspapers for a number of years.
Walls was born in rural Crisp County near Cordele, Ga., in October 1908. He was one of 11 brothers and sisters. The family moved in 1912 to Orlando, Fla., where Walls began his newspaper career in 1923 inserting Sunday comics at The Orlando Sentinel.
Walls had little formal education. He dropped out of high school and worked his way through most of the newspaper’s departments while taking correspondence courses in typing and bookkeeping. In 1931, he became head bookkeeper, at age 24, and he was named business manager of The Sentinel three years later.
In 1931, Walls began his association with Charles E. Marsh, a millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropists who at that time lived in Austin, Texas. Marsh and E.S. Fentress formed a partnership in 1924 that owned the Austin American-Statesman and later bought a number of other newspapers. Still later, Marsh and Eugene Pulliam formed another partnership, General Newspapers Inc., which bought the Orlando paper.
Walls came to Marsh’s attention when the older man noticed that Orlando’s collections on accounts receivable surpassed that of all of his other newspapers. He wanted to know why, and the answer was Carmage Walls’ hard work and attention to detail. Walls’ friendship and business association with Marsh lasted until Marsh’s death in 1964.
In 1940, Marsh bought a one-third interest in The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph-News with brothers Martin and Peyton Anderson, and he asked Walls to become general manager of the new acquisition. Five years later, Marsh asked Walls to become president of what then remained of General Newspapers Inc. “I was told to build it up to greater action,” Walls later recalled. Marsh summed up his plans for Walls this way: “I want to make a wholesaler out of you instead of a retailer.”
So began Carmage Walls’ career was a buyer, seller and manager of newspapers. In 1947, Walls moved the headquarters of GNI to Gadsden, Ala., where the new company had just purchased The Gadsden Times.
In 1950, Walls bought his first Texas paper, the Baytown Sun, for General Newspapers Inc. Fred Hartman, legendary editor and Texas newspaper leader, became publisher, forming a lifelong relationship with Walls and his family. In 1951, Walls formed his own company, Southern Newspapers Inc., and in 1952, the Baytown paper became part of SNI. Throughout the next four decades, the company continued to buy, sell and operate newspapers in Texas, as it does today.
In 1954, Walls married Martha Ann Williams of Gadsden, and that partnership lasted until his death. Molly and Carmage Walls supported one another in everything they did, often flying across the country in a small plane piloted by Carmage, counting cars in a grocery store parking lot in some community where they believed the newspaper might one day be for sale.
The couple had a son, Cooper, and a daughter, Lissa. Martha Ann Walls is president of Southern Newspapers Inc. today and Lissa Walls Vahldiek is its chief operating officer. Cooper has sold most of his newspaper interests and is no longer active in the business.
In 1967, Walls sold his interest in The Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser and in the same year bought The Galveston County Daily News from the Hobby family of Houston. In 1973, Walls moved his family to the NASA-Clear Lake area, and the family has lived in Houston since that time.
By 1984, Carmage Walls had accumulated enough personal wealth to be named to the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. He, however, never sought not wanted such attention. He preferred instead to focus on the communities served by his newspapers and especially on the lives of the young men and women who came his attention through his newspaper work.
Walls not only encouraged his newspapers to support important charities in the communities they served, he and his family created a number of charitable trusts and foundations to offer support and money to causes he saw as important. Many of these supported Walls’ special interests – medical research and education, especially the education of young journalists.
These charitable efforts include:
- The Carmage and Martha Ann Walls Foundation, which between 2001 and 2011 has donated more than $800,000 to various projects and charities in communities served by Southern Newspapers Inc. and Galveston Newspapers Inc.
- The Walls Family Endowed Scholarship at Trinity University, San Antonio.
- The Carmage and Martha Ann Walls Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Journalism at the University of Texas, College of Communication.
- The Carmage and Martha Ann Walls Distinguished Chair in Tropical Diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston.
- The Walls Medical Research Foundation, which was predecessor to The Carmage and Martha Ann Walls Foundation. It provided support to UTMB-Galveston research from the early 1980s to 2000.
- The Carmage and Martha Ann Walls Endowed Scholarship in Print Journalism at the University of Alabama. |
