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Frank Ernest Gannett was born on a farm in upstate New York, peddled papers as a boy, worked his way through Cornell by newshawking in his spare time. After graduation he accompanied the first U. S. Commission to the Philippines as secretary to its president, Dr. Jacob Gould Schurman, then Cornell's president later Ambassador to Germany. Back in Ithaca, Frank Gannett was by turns city editor, managing editor and business manager of the Daily News and editor of the Cornell Alumni News.
After brief terms on Pittsburgh and New York papers he spent his meagre savings on a half-interest in the Elmira Gazette, prospered slowly but surely. In 1912 he bought the Ithaca Journal, followed it six years later with two Rochester papers. These he merged into the Times-Union, which he still edits personally at his Rochester headquarters. Thenceforth round, beaming Publisher Gannett acquired other upstate papers, added small dailies in New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, briefly entered the metropolitan field by buying and then reselling Brooklyn's venerable Daily Eagle. Nearly two years ago he bought his only magazine, The American Agriculturist, from his good friend Henry Morgenthau Jr. when that farmer-publisher became Secretary of the Treasury. Oldest (93 years) farm publication in the U. S., it has a circulation of nearly 200,000.
Antithesis of the late hated Chain Publisher Frank Munsey, Frank Gannett gives his editors a free hand, signs his name to anything he asks them to publish in conflict with the papers' policies. For supervising his autonomous brood he draws an aggregate salary of $64,370 a year. Politically he is independent. A Hooverite and a Dry in 1932. he became a New Dealer through his interest in managed currency and his friendship with its No. 1 manager, Cornell's famed Professor George Frederick ("Rubber Dollar") Warren. Lately he has reverted to Republicanism. Still bone-dry in sentiment, he permits the editors of his individual papers to accept beer and liquor advertisements at their own discretion, notes with delight that none is so indiscreet as to do so. A boyhood job as barkeep's assistant in a hotel taught Publisher Gannett to say: "After watching booze ruin men, I made up my mind that if I ever got a chance I would fight it."
He has no immediate intention of retiring, makes work his hobby, was this year elected a director of the Associated Press to fill the vacancy left by the death of Adolph Ochs. A golfer, tennist, yachtsman and air traveler in his spare time, Publisher Gannett showed he was not without dash when, in 1931, he dived off his yacht Widgeon to rescue Mrs. Karl Bickel, wife of the then president of United Press.
*Total Hearst income for 1934, according to FORTNE's exhaustive audit, was $4,500,000 net.