Older, Fremont, 1856-1935

Editor-in-chief and President of the San Francisco Call Bulletin.

Biography

Fremont Older was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, August 30, 1856. He began his journalistic career as a printer's devil in his home state in 1869. At the age of 16 he went West and worked as a printer for various newspapers in California and Nevada, and then in San Francisco as a reporter, and eventually as city editor of the Morning Call. From 1894, when he became editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, he steered the destiny of the paper for 24 years, engaging in fight after fight to break the political grip of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the State, to clean up San Francisco, and to expose injustice, crime and corruption. The most spectacular of Older's campaigns against political corruption was his report of the graft prosecution of Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz and political boss, Abe Ruef, in 1906. In 1917, Older undertook the last great fight of his career -the freeing of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. He became convinced that the two men had been convicted on perjured testimony and came out flatly in the Bulletin with the accusation that they had been framed. Advised by the owners of the paper to drop the case, Older resigned and accepted William Randolph Hearst's invitation to come to his newspaper, the San Francisco Call, and bring the Mooney case with him.

In 1929, at the age of 73, he became editor and president of the Call-Bulletin, a merger which had been accomplished with Hearst's purchase of the moribund Bulletin. Older died of a heart attack on March 3, 1935.