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.”

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).

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.

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. 

“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.”

Text and photo editing by Francesca Pitaro, AP Corporate Archives.

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