The son of Nathan Cole, a wealthy St. Louis, Missouri, politician and banker, he was 21 years old in 1881 when he and a colleague, Thomas Gardiner, put together the first issues of the new venture to be printed on the presses of the Mirror Publishing Company.
Later he was a real estate man and a Los Angeles city police commissioner.
[1] Cole worked on a St. Louis newspaper, then traveled west to Portland, Oregon, and to Woodland, California.
He came to Los Angeles specifically to start a newspaper, which ran into financial difficulty and was taken over by General Harrison Gray Otis in 1882.
Cole soon returned to Los Angeles, where he remained until he died on December 7, 1921.