Walter A. Strong
His father had mental health issues, quite possibly bipolar disorder, and needed intermittent institutional care beginning when Walter was twelve years old.
During their first year of residence at the West Side YMCA, Strong and his brother were newsboys for the Daily News, hawking papers after school on Madison Avenue streetcars for food money.
He was active in the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, where he formed lifelong friendships, and participated in a wide range of college sports and organizations.
In addition, Strong was given responsibility for overseeing the Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Fund Sanitarium, established by Jessie Lawson in 1887 for the benefit of poor urban children.
Located on the lakefront at Fullerton Avenue, the sanitarium provided free transportation, health care, and meals daily except Sundays throughout the summer.
Attendance averaged over 400 children daily, with “no one turned away for reason of class, color or condition.”[9] Strong oversaw the construction of a new home for the sanitarium, a Prairie-style building designed by Dwight H. Perkins, which opened in 1920.
In the first several decades of Lawson's ownership, the Daily News had become one of the most widely read newspapers in the world, eclipsing its rival the Chicago Tribune.
The couple had no children and Lawson increasingly spent time away from Chicago at the estate and dairy farm his wife had developed and managed for them in Green Lake, Wisconsin.
Strong spent the rest of the year raising the capital for a corporation he established to buy the Daily News in order to maintain Lawson's staff and preserve the paper's high journalistic standards.
As a result of Strong's efforts, the paper was acquired by the Chicago Daily News Corporation, of which he was the major stockholder, for $13.5 million – the highest price paid for a newspaper up to that time.
[20] The technology proved unworkable, but the experiment laid the groundwork for WMAQ-TV years later.Once he became publisher, Strong took immediate steps to build a modern newspaper facility.
Rejecting the parcel Lawson had chosen as too small, he instead acquired the air rights over railroad tracks that ran along west side of the river opposite the original site.
[22] Once that was settled, Strong sold the parcel Lawson had reserved for the Daily News to the utility magnate Samuel Insull, with the understanding that he construct a building that would include a new home for the Chicago Civic Opera.
Inside, the Daily News building featured a much-admired mural by John W. Norton and outside it had bas-reliefs depicting the history of journalism and a fountain honoring Victor Lawson.
Although it has since been renamed Riverside Plaza, according to the Tribune’s architecture critic, the Daily News Building remains “one of Chicago's finest examples of Art Deco architecture and a path-breaking work of engineering and urban design.”[23] Strong also strengthened the newspaper's international news service, which had correspondents in twenty-seven foreign countries and maintained offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Beijing, and Moscow.
[24] He expanded the role of the paper's overseas staff, as well, to include facilitating diplomatic initiatives to promote world peace and arms control.
For example, Daily News foreign correspondents assisted Salomon Levinson in his quest for an international treaty to make war illegal – an effort that culminated in August 1928, with the adoption of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
This meeting initiated the process that led to adoption of the London Naval Treaty by Great Britain, Japan, France, Italy, and the United States in April 1930.
Strong gave many speeches on the state of the industry, including an address at the University of Chicago entitled “Newspapers and the New Age.” He was a crusader for honesty in advertising.
In January 1931, four months prior to his death, he proposed to his fellow trustees that a stadium be built at Beloit's athletic field, presenting a small-scale model of his idea.
The city seemed incapable of imposing law and order, in part because the Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson, who was supported by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, maintained mutually beneficial relations with organized crime figures like Al Capone.
Although Dever served honorably for four years, he was defeated for re-election in 1927 by Thompson, who made a comeback with the support of the Hearst newspapers and anti-prohibition sentiment.
[28] It was Strong's vision that the new Chicago Daily News building would become a symbol of renewed civic pride and an agency for a better future for the corruption-plagued, gangster-ridden city.
In April 1928, with positive coverage and editorial support from the Chicago Daily News, Judge John A. Swanson overwhelmingly defeated the incumbent State's attorney for Cook County, an ally of Thompson.
The so-called Pineapple Primary held before the election was marked by political violence – bombings and murder – culminating in the assassination of Octavius C. Granady, a black attorney and Thompson opponent who was a candidate for alderman.
After the notorious 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Strong decided to make a private appeal to his friend President Herbert Hoover for federal intervention to stem Chicago's lawlessness and corruption.
Treasury and Justice Departments developed plans for income tax prosecutions against Chicago gangsters, and a small, elite squad of Prohibition Bureau agents (whose members included Eliot Ness) were deployed against bootleggers.
The original plan called for a simple barn and silo structure, but it quickly grew into something resembling a castle, with 16 bedrooms, 9 baths, 8 fireplaces and a Great Hall.
It had a Tudor style facade, a five-story tower with commanding views of the countryside, a circular library with a movable bookcase that revealed a secret passage, and a dining hall with an oak table so massive that it had to be installed before construction could be completed.
