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Birth:          10 Dec 1874 Liverpool, England
Death:          11 May 1950 La Jolla, Cal.

Notes
1981 book (see for details)
Ohio County Marr on familysearch
founder, with his father, of 4 newspapers now in the Scripps-Howard newspaper 
chain.
lexis: Commercial Appeal, 29 Aug 1992 p B8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_O._Andersson
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Alfred Oscar Andersson (1874-1950) was the publisher of the Dallas Dispatch and, 
briefly, of the Dallas Dispatch-Journal, daily afternoon newspapers of general 
circulation published in Dallas, Texas.

Andersson was born in Liverpool, England on December 10, 1874 to Alfred Carolus 
Andersson, a cotton broker, and Elizabeth Falk Andersson. The family moved to 
Kansas City, Missouri in the early 1880s. Andersson’s father died there soon 
afterward, and his mother moved the family back to Liverpool and then, in 1884, to 
Weimar, Germany, where Andersson attended school for five years. His mother married 
Dr. Henry J. Lampe in 1889 and the family returned to Kansas City. She died in San 
Antonio, Texas in 1931 at age seventy-nine, and Dr. Lampe died in 1910.

Andersson’s career in newspapers began during his teenage years when he worked at 
odd jobs around the shop where his stepfather published a German-language 
newspaper. He wrote and edited campus publications while a student at Princeton 
University from 1893 to 1895 and then returned to Kansas City to take a job on the 
Kansas City World, a Scripps-McRae newspaper. He then moved on to reporting and 
editing jobs on Scripps papers in St. Louis, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois.

In 1898 Andersson reported on the Spanish-American War from Cuba and Puerto Rico 
for the United Press, which then appointed him manager of the UP’s Kansas City 
bureau. In 1906 he scouted Texas for a suitable location to start a newspaper for 
Scripps-McRae. According to newspaper lore, he stopped at a downtown Dallas 
drugstore, noticed it sold fine cigars, and concluded “if those are the cigars the men 
here favor, this must be a good town.” As he contemplated starting a paper in Dallas 
he learned that another man was in town with the same idea and likewise with 
Scripps-McRae’s tentative promise to back it. Confronting Col. Milton A. McRae, he 
was told that Scripps-McRae’s support would go to the man who got a paper on the 
street first; Andersson then hastily threw together the four-page first issue of the 
Dallas Dispatch, deployed boys to sell the paper on the street, and the Dispatch 
became the Scripps paper in Dallas.

In 1911 he inaugurated the Houston Press, a Scripps-McRae newspaper in Houston, 
Texas. While editing the Press he retained editorship of the Dispatch and continued to 
live in Dallas. With a 1916 reorganization of Scripps-McRae properties in the South, 
he became editor of the Memphis Press in Memphis, Tennessee, the Denver Express 
in Denver, Colorado, and the Oklahoma News in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

In 1919 Andersson moved to Cleveland, Ohio to become general manager of the 
Newspaper Enterprise Association, a Scripps feature service. In 1921 he left the 
newspaper business for the first time and moved to San Antonio to enter the cotton 
business. His absence from newspapering was short-lived, as he returned to Dallas a 
year later and once again became publisher of the Dispatch, a position he held until 
retirement in 1937. But a year later Karl Hoblitzelle and others purchased the Dispatch 
and combined it with the Dallas Journal (which they simultaneously acquired from A. 
H. Belo Corporation, publisher of the Dallas Morning News) to create the afternoon 
Dallas Dispatch-Journal, and induced the reluctant Andersson to become its publisher. 
Andersson finally retired in December 1938.

Andersson was tall and spare and had a reserved manner and patrician features. He 
was described as “essentially a kind man, although his was not the heartiness 
associated with the back-slapper.” His newspapers tended to be crusading and 
somewhat sensational, often publishing several editions daily.

His first wife was Dorothy Smart, who died in 1911. Two years later he married Ruth H. 
Harper, whose father, Jacob Chandler Harper, was general counsel for the Scripps-
McRae newspapers.

Suffering from gradual circulatory failure and failure to completely recover from 
bronchial pneumonia, Andersson was stricken on a cruise and returned to the La Jolla, 
California home of his wife’s deceased parents, which the Anderssons had been using 
as a summer home and where he died on May 11, 1950 at age seventy-five. He had 
three children, one of whom, a son, was editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar.


Parents
ANDERSSON Alfred Carolus ()
FALK Elizabeth A. ()

Siblings
ANDERSSON Alfred Oscar (10 Dec 1874 - 11 May 1950)

Marriage To HARPER Ruth Holmes ("Toppie") (13 Jul 1890 - 4 Feb 1974)
    m. 13 Jun 1913 Cincinnati, OH

Notes

Parents
HARPER Jacob Chandler B. (17 Aug 1858 - 30 May 1939)
WAGGONER Alice Emily (26 May 1863 - 14 Jan 1943)

Children by HARPER Ruth Holmes ("Toppie") 13 Jul 1890 - 4 Feb 1974
ANDERSSON Alfred Chandler (23 Apr 1914 - 12 Dec 2004)
ANDERSSON Alice Ellen ("Polly") (25 Oct 1915 - 21 May 1998)
ANDERSSON Ruth Harper ("Bumps") (15 Mar 1919 - 1 Jun 2014)

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