Early Life and Career
Ochs was born to German Jewish immigrants, Julius and Bertha (Levy) Ochs, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father had left Bavaria for the United States in 1846. He was a highly educated man and fluent in six languages which he gave instruction in at schools in the South. He sided with the Union during the war. Bertha, who had come to the United States in 1848, a refugee from Rhenish Bavaria and the revolution there, had lived in the South before her 1853 marriage with Julius, and during the war sympathized with the South, though their differing sympathies didn't separate their household.
After the war, the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. In Knoxville, Adolph studied in the public schools and during his spare time delivered newspapers. At 11, he went to work at the Knoxville Chronicle as office boy to William Rule, the editor, who became a mentor. In 1871 he was a grocer's clerk at Providence, Rhode Island, attending a night school meanwhile. He then returned to Knoxville, where he was a druggist's apprentice for some time. In 1872, he returned to the Chronicle as a "printer's devil," who looked after various details in the composing room of the paper.
His siblings also worked at the newspaper to supplement the income of their father, a lay rabbi for Knoxville's small Jewish community. The Chronicle was the only Republican, pro-Reconstruction, newspaper in the city, but Ochs counted Father Ryan, the Poet-Priest of the Confederacy, among his customers.
Read more about this topic: Adolph Ochs
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“I taught school in the early days of my manhood and I think I know something about mothers. There is a thread of aspiration that runs strong in them. It is the fiber that has formed the most unselfish creatures who inhabit this earth. They want three things only; for their children to be fed, to be healthy, and to make the most of themselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The train was crammed, the heat stifling. We feel out of sorts, but do not quite know if we are hungry or drowsy. But when we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks, and the American instruments will make music in the merry cafe described by our friend Lange. And then, sometime later, we die.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)