Chronicle founder Foster built dream with oil windfall

Marcellus Elliot Foster, founder and for 25 years editor and publisher of the Houston Chronicle, was reared in Huntsville in Walker County in a family that was, in his words, "as poor as Job's turkey."

"My earliest recollection . . . is of being poor folks, and being chunked by rocks by boys who lived at the top of a hill . . . My next recollection is of selling cakes in a bakery shop, and never being allowed to eat one."

Born on Nov. 29, 1870, in Pembroke, a farming hamlet in western Kentucky, Foster was the son of a Confederate officer whom the Civil War ruined financially. In 1873, when their son was 3, the Fosters packed up and moved to Texas to build a better life.

Times, however, remained hard, and little Marcellus had to go to work as soon as he was old enough. One of his first jobs was as a printer's devil on the town newspaper, the Huntsville Item. Intelligent and energetic, Foster quickly became adept at setting type by hand, a tedious job that gave him an appreciation of words and writing. After becoming a reporter on the Item, Foster would set his articles in type as he wrote them in his mind.

After high school, Foster won a scholarship to Sam Houston Normal Institute (now Sam Houston State University) in Huntsville, graduating in 1890. With money squirreled away from the scholarship, he financed an additional year's study at the University of Texas in Austin.

Returning to Huntsville, Foster re-joined the Item as a printer and reporter. He also became the local correspondent for the Houston Daily Post, where his reports on events in Huntsville so impressed the editor, Rienzi M. Johnston, that he offered Foster a reporting job in Houston at $10 a week.

So it was that one day in 1895, the diminutive (about 5-foot-5), curly-haired, red-faced Foster, 25, arrived in Houston.

"It wasn't much of a town, but to me it looked like a real city," Foster recalled later. "I had been a country weekly reporter, and I wanted to learn city ways and city reporting. I'm sure I proved a great disappointment for many months."

If so, it didn't affect his advancement. After just four years at the Post, Foster, by then known as "Mefo," was promoted to the august position of managing editor. At the time, he was the youngest person to hold that title on a daily newspaper in Texas.

Foster had scarcely taken his new position in September 1900 when out of the night of Sept. 8-9 came the biggest news story he would ever encounter: the Great Galveston Storm that nearly destroyed the island city.

One of the Post's first stories on the storm began: "The most appalling calamity in the history of modern times has befallen Galveston."

For two weeks, Foster and his team of Post reporters focused on the chaotic aftermath of the disaster.

The first task was to compile a list of the dead. It was no easy job, because between 6,000 and 8,000 people had died or disappeared. Many of the missing had fled to the mainland and had never returned. Confusion was such that there was no way to tell for sure who had died. Foster worked around the problem: He set up a place where survivors could register, and the Post began publishing their names.

Plundering of the bodies was widespread in the days following the storm. "It seems horrible to contemplate: to think that human beings can be so debased as to rob the dead, and not only that, but that they should mutilate the bodies in order to secure their ghoulish booty," a Post article said.

In that same issue of the Post, it was reported that "the orphan home on the beach is totally demolished; ninety-two children and eleven nuns were killed there; it is rumored that one sister escaped, but if so no trace can be found of her."

Barely four months later, in January 1901, another important story broke. At Beaumont, a well was gushing oil in unheard-of amounts. Called Spindletop, the well marked the beginning of the big-time oil industry in Texas. Foster journeyed to Beaumont to get the story.

The Post story had a no-nonsense headline: "Oil Struck Near Beaumont."

Foster's story began: "Beaumont is excited tonight and it has good reason to be. About three miles south of the city there is spouting an oil well the equal of which can not be seen elsewhere in the United States and in the world."

The article said when Foster visited with "Capt. (Anthony F.) Lucas (whose team drilled the well) . . . that gentleman was so happy over his strike that he would not talk. He merely hugged the reporter and pointing to oil as it sailed high into the air, said: 'It's equal can not be seen on this earth!' "

Despite his euphoria, Lucas was still selling options on the well. Foster bought one for $30, a week's pay. He sold it a week later for $5,000, more than three times his annual salary. For Foster, this windfall fueled a dream -- starting his own paper.

Foster had quarreled with Johnston and was unhappy at the Post. He also had recently befriended Charles A. Myers, a visitor from Indianapolis who had worked in the advertising and circulation departments of the Indianapolis Star. The two soon began planning a new afternoon daily in Houston.

Houston's existing afternoon paper, the Herald, "had not made much progress" and was barely surviving, Foster wrote later. He and Myers tried to buy it but were rejected, frostily. The two then raised $25,000, consisting of Foster's $5,000 plus $20,000 from other investors, to start a new paper.

Of Myers, Foster said, "He and I were opposite types. Myers watched every penny. I believed in extravagance as far as I could go. We balanced each other."

Foster's "extravagance" was evident from the outset. He hired one of his first reporters, Howard R. Burke of Tennessee, before discovering there was no money budgeted to pay him. When he discovered his mistake, Foster frantically telegraphed Burke, advising him to stay put in Tennessee. Burke wired back: "You are too late. You hired me by wire, and I am leaving by next train. I am best reporter in the world."

Foster must have managed somehow, because Burke became a mainstay at the Chronicle.

The other original news staffers were city editor Charles Bowen Gillespie, who had also worked for the Post, and a reporter, Charles Abbott, from Nebraska.

A printer, Oscar Roemer, set up the Chronicle's first commercial advertisement, for the Model Laundry. Thirty-seven years later, Roemer, still working at the Chronicle, recalled that he took special pains with the ad because "the Chronicle had a reputation to build."

To attract readers and advertisers, Foster set the price for the Chronicle at 2 cents, at a time when most other dailies cost 5 cents. The lesser price, however, meant that newsboys would need many pennies for change. Accordingly, Foster ordered 50,000 gleaming new pennies from the New Orleans mint. A keg filled with the coins was exhibited in a window of the Chronicle's quarters in the D.C. Smith Building at 1009 Texas Avenue between Main and Fannin. The Smith Building, which was razed long ago, was described at the time as "squalid."

Charlie Myers was appalled by the rent, $250 a month, but Foster said the cost could be recovered by renting unneeded space in the building. He was right.

At the time, it was questionable whether a town of 44,000 could support three daily newspapers. Foster and Myers acquired, on the installment plan, three typesetting machines and a rotary printing press capable of turning out 6,000 papers an hour.

Years after, Foster recalled the moments on Oct. 14, 1901, when the Chronicle's rotary press, named "Zaidee Lee" after Foster's wife and daughter, began to roll for the first time.

"The pressman who had come all the way from Michigan with the machine puffed up with pride. Everybody got out of his way. A tug here, a wrench there, an adjustment of a pulley . . . a blue flash from from the electric motor, and the big thing began began to grind, slowly at first, faster and faster, carrying the paper from a huge roll through the press, over the forms and back again, dropping them fresh and sweet with ink and dampness into a receptacle from which they were gathered up by the armload and passed through a window into the circulation room, where they were received by a yelling horde of newsboys."

The paper's masthead read: "The Houston Chronicle, Vol. 1 No. 1 - Eight Pages. Price 2 cents, on trains, 5 cents." The zero in 1901 was left out -- a typo, the first of many. On the front page was a succinct weather forecast: "Houston Weather for Tuesday: Warmer." There were two editions.

A boxed announcement on the front page of the first edition augured well for the business end of the operation. Apologies were offered for contracting for more advertisements than the paper could accommodate in eight pages. "Several advertisers," the announcement said, "consented to have the space they desired cut down, and one full page was cut out altogether." The announcement promised a larger paper soon to serve readers and advertisers.

The Houston Chronicle was in business.