AP at 175, Part 5: Expansion, 1946-60
The Associated Press (AP) celebrates its 175th birthday in May 2021. To mark this milestone, the AP Corporate Archives has assembled a concise visual history of the organization, offered here in an eight-part monthly blog, “AP at 175.” This is the fifth of eight installments.
Valerie S. Komor
Director, AP Corporate Archives
The AP began planning coverage of the post-war world well before the war’s end. On assignment from General Manager Kent Cooper, Assistant General Manager Lloyd Stratton (1905-1961) visited every command theater and 17 countries during 1943-44, laying the groundwork for the organization’s post-war expansion and the creation of an entirely new department, World Services. Stratton led World Services from its inception in 1944 until 1960 when Stan Swinton was named director, responsible for distributing news and photos to more than 80 countries, a scale larger than any previously contemplated.
Frank J. Starzel (1904-94) was appointed general manager in 1948, replacing Kent Cooper. Starzel, who joined the AP in New York in 1929, was first assigned to promote AP's newly established feature service, and in 1934 was named night city editor before becoming assistant general manager in 1943. Although World War II had ended, Starzel’s tenure as general manager, 1948-1962, encompassed new world upheavals and new challenges for AP staff. In order to cover the Korean War, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement, journalists faced the hazards of war, the dangers of working behind the Iron Curtain, and the challenges of reporting on the struggle for racial justice in the United States.
Working behind the Iron Curtain, William Oatis, Prague COB, was charged with spying and imprisoned for over two years. Other AP reporters arrested during this period were Alfred Chlapowski, arrested in Warsaw in 1954, and Endre Marton, AP correspondent in Budapest, who was arrested by the Hungarian government. William R. Moore, an AP war correspondent, was killed in Korea in 1950 and photographer Frank Noel was captured by the North Koreans and held captive for 32 months.
The 1950s brought technological innovations including the installation of Teletypesetter (TTS) service all over the United States, extension of the radioteletype (RTT) and Wirephoto services to 87 countries, and creation of a six-wire TTS system that cleared full New York Stock Exchange lists in 23 minutes or less.
TTS service, inaugurated in 1951, allowed type to be set automatically at the newspaper printing plant from copy edited at the filing end. By 1955, a new global RTT circuit was in place, making it possible for AP World Services to deliver page printer news simultaneously through 24 time zones around the world.
The covers of the February 1946 AP World and the March 1946 El Mundo de la AP both show AP Chief Photographer Murray Becker with a new version of a sequence camera which Becker developed for the AP. The sequence cameras was originally an aerial camera widely used by the armed forces during World War II. Becker converted the camera for everyday use by AP photographers. Noting that it was the only one of its kind in existence at the moment, he described its functionalty in the AP World article: “…it has a 14-inch telephoto lens, can be prefocused from 25 feet to infinity, operates from a light, portable battery, non-manually, and will take two pictures a second.”
U.S. President Harry S. Truman holds up an Election Day edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which, based on early results, mistakenly announced "Dewey Defeats Truman" on Nov. 4, 1948. The president told well-wishers at St. Louis' Union Station, "That is one for the books!" (AP Photo/Byron Rollins)
Cecily Brownstone cooks in her Greenwich Village kitchen, 1947. (AP Photo) Brownstone (1909-2005), AP’s first food editor, was hired in November 1947. For the next 39 years, she produced two columns and five recipes a week for AP. In 1972, AP published Cecily Brownstone’s Associated Press Cookbook.
Associated Press advertisement marking the inauguration of wireless AP service to India and promoting AP's news and photo services worldwide, circa 1946.. (AP Photo/Corporate Archives)
AP Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas accompanies actress Lucille Ball as she practices the part of a door-to-door saleswoman in Los Angeles, June 1950. (AP Photo)
Bob Thomas (1922-2014) began his AP career in 1943 in Fresno before moving to the Los Angeles bureau in 1944 to cover the Hollywood beat. In a 1997 oral history interview, Thomas recalled:
“When there was a vacancy in the Hollywood column, the bureau chief, Hub Keavy, pointed at me and said, ‘You’re crazy about pictures. You might as well do it.’ So I started at the tender age of twenty-two… it wasn’t easy being a Hollywood reporter for AP when I started out. The New York office viewed Hollywood coverage as a necessary evil, and they wanted as little of it as possible.”
Keavy prevailed, assuring AP General Manager Kent Cooper in New York that “…we’re going to have the best movie column any editor ever saw.” AP introduced Thomas’s new column “written from the capital of popular entertainment,” designed to keep readers informed of happenings in Hollywood” on October 29, 1945. The column marked the start of Thomas’s 66 years as AP’s premiere entertainment reporter.
Thomas was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and received two Guinness World Records for longest career as an entertainment reporter and for the most consecutive years of coverage of the Academy Awards (66 years).
Associated Press photographer Frank Noel, who was captured by Chinese Communists in Korea on Dec. 1, 1950, is pictured at an internment camp in China, Jan. 22, 1951. Noel displays an Associated Press picture envelope to ensure his identification. (AP Photo)
Frank E. (Pappy) Noel (d. 1966), was a Pulitzer Prize winning AP photographer whose foreign assignments included Manila, Singapore, Rome, Calcutta, Berlin, Tokyo, the Middle East and the Pacific theater in World War II. In November 1950, while covering the Korean War, Noel offered to go for help to aid a trapped motor convoy near the Changjin Reservoir. He’d gone only a short distance when Marines on the scene saw the enemy take him away.
Noel spent 32 months as a POW and made three escape attempts during that time, one of them with Captain Zachary Dean who later referred to Noel as “a legend in the prison camp.” AP correspondents covering the truce talks were able to get a camera to Noel who took pictures of camp life that were published around the world. Noel was awarded a Bronze Star in 1955 for his coverage of the Korean War and courage while in captivity.
Lieut. Fred D. Soriano, Alcala, Pangasinan, Philippine Islands; Warrant Officer Vincent J. Cobalis, 2694 San Jose Ave., San Francisco, and Lieut. Bienvenida E. Salting, Philippine army, 692-p Leonois St., Sempoloc, Manila on April 8, 1952 in North Korea. (AP Photo/Frank Noel)
Allied prisoners of war clear obstacles during a 100 meters hurdle event at athletic meet in camp Number 1 somewhere in North Korea. Left to right are: Sgt. James Alt, Petersburg, W. Va.; Pvt. James A. Lord, Manchester, UK; Pfc. Charles R. Boyd, Preston, Ky.; and Pvt. Anthony Paul Eagles, Gloucester, England. Eagles was winner on June 25, 1952. This picture was taken by Associated Press photographer Frank Noel, a POW himself, and was released by US Army censors after enemy censors had released the negative. (AP Photo/Frank Noel)
Yashica-Mat Field Camera, 1953. (AP Photo/Corporate Archives/Santos Chaparro)
AP Photofax promotional brochure, 1955. (AP Photo/Corporate Archives)
Photofax was a facsimile transmission system which provided pictures ready for use without further processing by newspapers and television stations.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of a bus, touched off the Montgomery bus boycott and the beginning of the civil rights movement, is fingerprinted by police Lt. D.H. Lackey in Montgomery, Ala., Feb. 22, 1956. She was among some 100 people charged with violating segregation laws. (AP Photo/Gene Herrick)
In August 1958, Gov. Faubus called a special session of the state legislature to pass a law enabling him to close the public schools and lease them to private school corporations. Thus began Little Rock’s “Lost Year” of 1958-59.
Left to right: Dorothy Frazier, 13, Minnie Brown, 15, and Thelma Mothershed, 16, wait in a corridor of the U.S. Courthouse at Little Rock, Ark., where they were called to testifiy at a hearing on the integration problems at Central High School, Sept. 7, 1957. Thelma and Minnie were two of the students who were turned away by the National Guard as they attempted to enter the building on the first day of school. (AP Photo/William P. Straeter)
The Little Rock Nine leave school, Oct. 2, 1957. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls re-entered Central High School on Sept. 25, 1957, after days of violent protests by opponents of integration. (AP Photo/Ferd Kaufman)
Relman Morin is pictured in a phone booth at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., Sept. 20, 1957. (AP Photo)
“It was exactly like an explosion, a human explosion.”
“The terrifying spectacle of 200-odd individuals, suddenly welded together into a single body, took place in the barest fraction of a second. It was an explosion, savagery chain-reacting from person to person fusing them into a white-hot mass.”
These were the words that Relman Morin used to describe the violence that erupted outside Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957 as the first Black students entered the school. The nine students had entered through a side door. When the white mob outside realized that the Black students were in the building, they began a violent rampage. The police, fearing that they wouldn’t be able to protect the students, escorted them from the school.
Morin dictated his first person account of what he saw from a phone booth outside of Central High School to Little Rock COB Keith Fuller. The booth’s location provided him with a view of two stories breaking simultaneously: the attack on four Black newsmen (Newson, Wilson, Hicks, and Davy), and the entrance into the school of eight Black students. The students - Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls came to be known as the Little Rock Nine.
Morin (1907-1973) joined the AP in 1934 and was head of the Tokyo bureau when World War II broke out. Interned by the Japanese for many months, Morin made his way back to the United States on an exchange ship and went on to cover the War from London, Africa, Italy and Paris. Morin won his first Pulitzer for International Reporting in 1951 for his coverage of the Korean War. His second Pulitzer came in 1958 “for his dramatic and incisive eyewitness report of mob violence on September 23, 1957, during the integration crisis at the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.”
Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), at the Supreme Court in Washington, August 22, 1958. Marshall filed an appeal with the high court to vacate the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals order which would have delayed integration in Little Rock’s Central High School. (AP Photo)
Later that month, Marshall argued the case before the court and on September 12, 1958, a unanimous Supreme Court declined the Little Rock School District request to delay by more than two years the desegregation mandated by the Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board ruling.
Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, left, is embraced by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 20, 1960. (AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler)
Marilyn Monroe poses over the updraft of a New York subway grating while in character for the filming of "The Seven Year Itch" in Manhattan on September 9, 1954. (AP Photo/Matty Zimmerman)