Death of a Stone

Death of Stone

Every hour of every day, millions of people are reading stories in some 1,200 newspapers--stories which begin with two letters, A. P. The man who, more than anyone else, made those two letters a symbol of accuracy and impartiality, died, last week, in his Manhattan home, with his wife and daughter at his bedside. He was 80 years old. He had outlived his two sons, had lived "from the lightning rod to the radio," as he said last year. He had been fighting death since Christmas Day. The only book he ever wrote was Fifty Years a Journalist. But his monument, the Associated Press, is a great unbound volume, an unceasing history attuned alike to hamlet and metropolis.

Melville Elijah Stone was the son of a Methodist minister. At the age of nine he learned to set type. ... At 28, he organized a company to publish the Chicago Daily News as a penny newspaper. Pennies were not then in wide circulation in Chicago, so Publisher Stone had several barrels of them shipped from the Philadelphia mint. He also persuaded merchants to sell some of their goods at penny-stimulating prices--49-c-, 98-c-, etc.

In 1893, after a brief banking interlude, Melville Elijah Stone became general manager of the Associated Press of Illinois, Inc. and soon made it dominant in a field which had been confused by three conflicting news services. The present Associated Press was incorporated in 1900. By sending Associated Press correspondents abroad and by making alliances with European news agencies, General Manager Stone gave the U. S. more complete and impartial foreign news. Previously, most of the despatches had come through London and hence were British-colored.

Nonpartisanship was almost a mania with General Manager Stone. If he had political opinions, no one else in the Associated Press knew them. When his son Herbert went down with the German-torpedoed Lusitania, he insisted on A. P. neutrality.

He left the office of general manager in 1921, but continued as counselor to the A. P. until his death.

"His unrelenting insistence upon impartiality, accuracy and absolute honesty in news created standards that have become universal in American journalism, and for that all Americans stand tremendously in his debt," said Karl August Bickel, president of the rival United Press.