Early Life and Career
Ochs was born to German Jewish immigrants, Julius and Bertha (Levy) Ochs, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father had left Bavaria for the United States in 1846. He was a highly educated man and fluent in six languages which he gave instruction in at schools in the South. He sided with the Union during the war. Bertha, who had come to the United States in 1848, a refugee from Rhenish Bavaria and the revolution there, had lived in the South before her 1853 marriage with Julius, and during the war 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.
Read more about this topic: Adolph Ochs
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The extrovert and introvert, the realist and idealist, the scientist and philosopher, the man who found himself by refinding his life history and the individual who discovered his being in fantasy, these are the differences between Freud and Jung.”
—Robert S. Steele. Freud and Jung: Conflicts of Interpretation, ch. 10, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1982)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)