Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was formed by the union of the Fort Worth Star and Fort Worth Telegram . It began with the January 1, 1909 issue. The Fort Worth Star was started on February 1, 1906. The Star purchased the Fort Worth Telegram in 1909.

A campaign by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the 1930s to preserve the stories of early West Texas settlers resulted in the newspaper receiving over 1,500 forms, letters, and notes from self-identified pioneers detailing their experiences on the frontier.

The Fort Worth Star was founded in 1906 by a group of newsmen, including Col. Louis J. Wortham (as publisher), Amon G. Carter, Sr. (as advertising manager), D. C. McCaleb, and A. G. Dawson; they also had the help of wholesale grocer and major investor Col. Paul Waples. By 1908, the Star was in financial difficulty, and Carter and Wortham decided to buy out their rival, the Telegram, an evening newspaper that traced its history back to the Fort Worth Evening Mail and the Fort Worth Mail Telegram and other papers beginning around 1879. The new paper, known as the Star-Telegram, began publication in 1909, and was later identified in the 1920s by a phrase on its masthead, "Where the West Begins." Carter and the paper stressed local news and served eighty-four counties with some papers delivered in the Panhandle by stagecoach. The Star-Telegram had a pre-electronic distribution area of 350,000 square miles, and daily home delivery as far as 700 miles west of Fort Worth. Carter and the paper successfully resisted takeover attempts by William Randolph Hearst, who sold the Fort Worth Record to the Star-Telegram in 1925.

In 1922, the paper began the first Fort Worth radio station, WBAP, "We Bring a Program." The Star-Telegram established the first television station in the southern half of the United States in the early fall of 1948 and did a remote broadcast of President Harry Truman’s whistle-stop campaign visit to Fort Worth. In 1954, WBAP-TV also did the first color cast in Texas, at a time when there were no more than 100 color television sets in Fort Worth and Dallas. Carter was majority owner and publisher of the paper until his death in 1955, when he was succeeded by his son, Amon G. Carter, Jr., who died in 1982. The paper, an active participant in the Fort Worth community, supported numerous local causes as well as efforts to create Big Bend National Park in West Texas and to establish Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University. The paper was sold in 1974 to Capital Cities Communications, Inc. The circulation at that time was 235,000 daily papers.

Under Capital Cities, which later became Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., when it purchased the ABC television network in 1986, the Star-Telegram won two Pulitzer Prizes. The first was in 1981 for photographer Larry Price’s photos of Liberian officials being slain by a firing squad. The second, 1985, was the coveted gold medal Pulitzer for meritorious public service. It was awarded for a news series that exposed a flaw in Bell helicopters that was a factor in numerous crashes over a seventeen-year period. In the 1980s the Star-Telegram pioneered the establishment of an electronic information service and built one of the most modern newspaper printing and distribution plants in the nation. StarText, an "electronic newspaper" begun in 1982, complemented the printed newspaper with updated news and information; it was available on computer via a local telephone call in the Fort Worth and Dallas area. In 1986, the newspaper opened a new state-of-the-art printing facility that enabled it to produce one of the most colorful and visually attractive newspapers anywhere. In the early 1990s, under publisher Richard L. Connor, circulation climbed above 290,000 daily and more than 350,000 on Sundays. Star-Telegram Operating, Ltd. was sold to Knight Ridder in 1997. Wes Turner is the Star-Telegram publisher; Jim Witt the Arlington Star-Telegram publisher; and Richard Greene is vice president, associate publisher.

By Kenneth R. Rendell

Fort Worth at the turn of the century, though still a cowboy town, had nearly all of the amenities of any other American town; a municipal water system, electric street lighting, a modern fire department, paved streets, sanitary sewers, streetcars and trolley cars, a permanent police force, a new jail, home mail delivery, a full-time county court, a home for neglected children, a weather bureau station, free public schools, a university and several colleges, cultural and women’s clubs, established churches, and a library. The 1880s and 1890s had been a period of enormous growth for Fort Worth; but following the interruption occasioned by the Spanish-American War, her civic and commercial development was even greater.

The year 1905, was a banner year for the "Queen City of the Prairie." On April 8, twenty thousand of her citizens went to the Texas & Pacific station to greet Theodore Roosevelt, who had come to go wolf hunting with two Fort Worth cattle barons. In 1905 also, Amon G. Carter, Col. Louis J. Wortham, A. G. Dawson, and D. C. McCaleb started the Fort Worth Star, with the first issue rolling off the presses on February 1, 1906. Carter, who had sold streetcar advertising cards and published an indexed telephone directory, "hit the streets as advertising manager, selling 1,450 column inches of advertising for that premier issue of the Star --so much, in fact, that the printers in the composing room did not have time to set all the type and were forced to publish an apology to the forty firms that were left out of the sixteen pages…"

The Star was not without its rivals and almost went under because of them. But the unflagging efforts of Amon Carter--and a second loan from the paper’s original backer--enabled the Star to buy out the Telegram --the city’s other afternoon paper--in 1909. Fifteen years later, when William Randolph Hearst gave up on his attempt to establish the Record’s supremacy in Fort Worth, that paper was acquired by Carter as well.

From the very beginning, when Amon Carter placed the slogan "Fort Worth…Where the West Begins" on the masthead of his paper, the Star-Telegram was a newspaper written for and about the people of West Texas. In 1906, the outlying counties were a vast hinterland, and copies of the newspaper got there by stagecoach. "Later when American Airlines established its Fort Worth to Los Angeles route, the pilot of the old Ford tri-motor would fly down low over a spread near Guadalupe Park and pitch out a bundle of Star-Telegrams to ranches whose homes were at least sixty miles from the nearest town. For almost half a century, the Star-Telegram was the one newspaper that catered exclusively to the scattered towns and ranches along the caprock, across the staked plains, and on a stretch of barren countryside that Star-Telegram editors refused to call either desert or wasteland.

"In time the Star-Telegram --under the imaginative direction of its circulation manager, Harold Hough--would distribute thirteen editions daily by train and bus and truck across 375,000 square miles--a territory as large as all of New England. It became the daily reading fare in 1,100 towns in eighty-four counties, packed with genuine, authentic West Texas news furnished by a network of 600 correspondents. They filled the newspaper’s columns with articles and information about those things, which meant the most to its readers…. On December 15, 1912, the company published a special edition of 250 pages, the then largest single newspaper in history…. A year later the Star-Telegram became the fourth largest newspaper in Texas. Within three years, its circulation topped 66,000 and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram stood alone as the largest newspaper in the state, a position it would hold until the early 1950s."

Meanwhile, events in Fort Worth itself kept the pages of the Star-Telegram full of tales of unprecedented growth and expansion. In 1901, the city had managed to raise enough capital to convince both Swift & Co. and Armour to build packinghouses there. From that point on, Fort Worth was the principal market for every head of cattle in West Texas; and as a result, its population grew from 26,688 in 1900 to 73,312 in 1910. With the meat packers came the railroads: the International & Great Northern and the St. Louis & San Francisco. Other major industries established in the Fort Worth area during the first decades of the century were the Bolt Works, the Texas Steel Company, the Burrus Mills, and the Medlin Milling Company. The Star-Telegram kept apace with this development and through the efforts of Amon Carter was largely responsible for it.

By the time of the first World War, the city’s police force and fire department were motorized, all wooden buildings on Main Street had been demolished, Lake Worth had been dammed as part of a major water supply project, and the park board had hired George Kessler to develop a master plan for a system which now numbers over 100,000 acres. Texas Christian University, which was founded in Fort Worth but subsequently moved to Waco, was lured back to the city after its buildings were destroyed by fire in 1910. Charitable and fraternal organizations such as the Masons, the Eastern Star, the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, and the Shriners, took root in Fort Worth during this period; and the Chamber of Commerce--a powerful force in the business industry--was established in 1912.

One year earlier, with the arrival of the first flying machines to visit Fort Worth--a spectacular event orchestrated by Amon Carter and the Star-Telegram --the city began a romance with aviation that persists to the present day. During World War I, again at Carter’s behest, fields at Hicks, Everman and Benbrook were established. In 1925, Fort Worth built an airport and soon afterwards National Air Transport began regular airmail and passenger service. Until the Depression, air traffic grew steadily, with 4,511 flights to and from Meacham Field recorded in 1929 alone. Among these early arrivals and departures were some of the nation’s most daring young stunt pilots and long-distance aviators.

In 1917, oil was discovered at Ranger and life in Fort Worth was changed forever. Coming as it did during a critical oil shortage, the discovery was of vital interest to a nation at war. Fort Worth became the headquarters for the hundreds of operators drilling at Ranger, Burkburnett, Desdemona, and other West Texas sites. Following on the coat tails of legitimate businessmen were fraudulent operators whose activities were uncovered in a series of sensational trials in 1922. Profits from the wells built luxurious ranches for oil-rich farmers and cattlemen, while skyscrapers housing company headquarters began to alter the skyline. The city’s population ballooned from 106,482 in 1920 to 163,477 in 1930; the suburbs grew. During this decade Fort Worth gained several refineries, a number of powerful banks, and several elegant new hotels. In 1921, the Star-Telegram’s circulation manager, Harold Hough, obtained federal approval to operate the first radio station in Fort Worth, WBAP ("We Bring a Program").

The impact of the Depression was not immediately felt in Fort Worth because of this tremendous growth. When economic conditions did begin to deteriorate, "Amon Carter and the Star-Telegram worked constantly to prevent the agony of the era from suffocating the hopes of their city. The newspaper, trying to maintain an optimistic front, even went so far as to suggest that the Depression was merely a monetary illusion. When the Texas State Bank closed its doors, a thousand angry depositors stampeded the First National Bank--fearful that their money was all gone. Carter wrote a front page editorial claiming that the ‘ridiculous spectacle [was] brought on by idle gossip, unfounded rumors and a state of hysterior [sic]’"

Utilizing New Deal funds, the city hastened its own recovery with the building of a new City Hall, the Will Rogers memorial Auditorium and Coliseum, a library, and other civic improvements. In 1936, Fort Worth celebrated the Texas centennial, with the Star-Telegram raising $65,000 for festivities produced by Broadway’s Billy Rose. Sally Rand was there, with her bubbles, and so was the singer Everett Marshall and Paul Whiteman’s band, all performing on the revolving stage of the Casa Manana show. At about the same time, TCU had a top-flight football team and Fort Worth produced the legendary golfer, Ben Hogan. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose son Elliot had radio interests in the city, made five visits between 1936 and 1943; and W. Lee O’Daniel became Fort Worth’s first governor of Texas.

The aviation industry in Fort Worth grew significantly with the onset of World War II. The government began manufacturing B-24 bombers at a huge factory operated by Consolidated-Vultec Aircraft (Convair), and opened Tarrant Field, where four thousand pilots were trained during the war. Amon Carter, as usual, had been instrumental in bringing Convair to Fort Worth. After the Armistice, Fort Worth managed to hold on to the industry as Convair began producing the formidable B-36 and Tarrant Field (renamed Carswell Air Force Base) became the home of the Eighth Air Force. In 1948, after a bitter rivalry with Dallas, the city won the right to build the Greater Fort Worth International Airport, now a hub for American Airlines. A year later, B-50 bombers left Carswell Air Force Base and set a course for the east. Ninety-four hours later, the "Lucky Lady II," having been refueled several times in mid-air, landed in Fort Worth after having made the Air Force’s first nonstop flight around the world.

Through Amon Carter and the Star-Telegram, Fort Worth became the home of dozens of factories, stores, branch plants, and warehouses that might otherwise have settled elsewhere. Though it is not true that he would take his lunch to Dallas rather than spend money there, Carter did maintain a healthy rivalry with that neighboring city. "Once when he was in the office of E. W. Sinclair in New York, he noticed a wall map on which pins showed the many operations of the Sinclair Oil Company, and asked if the pin at Dallas meant that Sinclair had bought the Pierce Oil Company. When Sinclair replied that, confidentially, it did, Carter simply moved the pin half an inch to the left, placing it in Fort Worth. Sinclair laughed and rearranged his business by establishing the southwest regional office in Fort Worth."

Carter was as influential in government circles as in corporate ones. Said John Nance Garner, Roosevelt’s vice president and a Fort Worth native, "That man wants the whole government of the United States to run for the exclusive benefit of Fort Worth." Carter became a national figure when he accompanied his friend Will Rogers on a flying trip around the country; and his narrow-brimmed, "Shady Oak" Stetson was a well known Texas trademark. Every important guest who visited Fort Worth during his time--from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and General Eisenhower to Charles Lindbergh, Otto Kahn, and Admiral Nimitz--was required to leave his own hat behind and take home a Stetson. Amon Carter died in 1955, and Carter Communications continued to publish the Star-Telegram</emph> until the paper was sold to Capital Cities Communications in 1974.