In a career in publishing that crossed five decades and the New York-Connecticut state line, David E. Moore often held newsprint in his hands. Newsprint is in his family legacy too.
“That”™s J.P.,” he said of the young dark-haired, dark-suited man in a 19th century photo perched prominently above Moore”™s desk in his and wife Katherine”™s retirement apartment at The Osborn in Rye. “That”™s J.P. with Queen Victoria,” he said, pointing to another photo in his office, in which an older “J.P.” stands for a group portrait with England”™s imperial queen and the British prime minister.
“J.P.” is Joseph Pulitzer, America”™s first newspaper magnate and founder of journalism”™s prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer left a publishing empire and a financial fortune to his heirs and $2 million to Columbia University to establish its graduate school of journalism. He is Moore”™s maternal grandfather.
Pulitzer died in 1911, a dozen years before Moore, the youngest of five brothers, was born. Yet the grand-patriarch was an enduring force and presence in his family. “My mother was full of her father,” he said.
Moore was born in his mother”™s bed at Chatwold, the Pulitzer family estate in Bar Harbor, Maine. From the summers of his youth there, he recalls the “Tower of Silence,” his family”™s name for the four-story stone addition that the moody, physically ailing and extremely sound-sensitive Pulitzer had built as his retreat from the noisy world, ocean and people around him.
“He had a terrible personality,” said Moore, who served on the board of directors of the former Pulitzer Publishing Co. until he turned 80.
War veteran begins journalism career
A veteran of World War II, Moore completed postwar studies in international law and relations at Harvard University before returning to England and Western Europe in the U.S. government”™s Marshall Plan administration. Returning home, he took up the family practice of journalism at the former Greenwich Life publication in Connecticut.
“That was the Hungarian Revolution, in 1956,” said Moore, whose grandfather Pulitzer immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary. Moore had smaller events to cover on the local stage. “I went up there (to Greenwich) and I remember writing about parking. I was a parking maven,” he said.
Moore also did a jack-of-all-trades stint at the Port Chester Daily Item, one in the former Macy chain of Westchester and Rockland County newspapers that was acquired by Gannett Suburban Newspapers in 1964. “I covered sports one or two nights a week,” he said. “Rats used to run across the floor.”
“Then I got too big for my britches,” said the Pulitzer heir, “and thought I could do better in public relations.” He joined a PR firm in New York City. “I just hated it. I would have been fired, so I quit.”
Moore starts Harrison Independent
In 1962, Moore joined his family”™s third generation of publishers when he started the Harrison Independent. The newspaper now is part of the Yonkers-based Rising Publications chain of Westchester weeklies owned by real estate investor and Manhattan self-storage businessman Nick Sprayregen. Moore, long active in the Democratic Party, cherishes a note he received that year from President John F. Kennedy congratulating him on his start-up.
“It is always a source of pleasure to see a newspaper appear, in these days when it is so vitally important that our citizenry be well informed,” Kennedy wrote. “I know that you and your newspaper will be of great benefit to both your community and your country.”
Two years later, Moore acquired another community weekly, the Independent Herald of Westchester. “It was a slick glossy all about the Westchester Country Club,” he said with mild scorn. “This was about the time 287 (Interstate 287), the Platinum Mile, were being developed.” Looking to cover Westchester”™s transformation from country-club enclave to office-park magnet for companies, Moore changed his new acquisition to a business publication.
Another entrepreneur with a background in newspapers saw like opportunity in changing Westchester. The late John K. Smith, a former advertising manager at the Wall Street Journal, in 1968 was starting the Westchester Business Journal in White Plains. Joining him in the publishing venture was another ̩migr̩ from the Wall Street JournalӪs ad department, Edwin E. Powell. Smith assumed the duties of editor and publisher while Powell served as advertising director.
An opportunity to merge and grow
Moore that year merged his newspaper with Smith”™s and became the Business Journal”™s associate publisher. With the merger, Moore launched the Connecticut Business Journal, the forefather of today”™s Fairfield County Business Journal.
The Westchester Business Journal grew with the Platinum Mile office-park developments and featured a strong commercial real estate section, Moore recalled. In Connecticut, Moore focused on international trade and the maritime shipping companies clustered in Norwalk. For his coverage, the Connecticut Business Journal in 1980 received the President”™s “E” Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The award recognizes persons, firms and organizations that contribute significantly to the effort to increase U.S exports.
The Westchester Business Journal in its early years profited from an end to home-rule banking in New York, said Penny Singer, a freelance writer in Mamaroneck whom Moore in 1968 recruited for the Business Journal. “With the change in the banking laws, everybody could come into everybody”™s territory,” she said. “So the field for banking stories and banking ads and banking mergers was fabulous. I think for the Westchester journal, banking was our bread and butter.”
No longer “a little sleepy place”
The corporate office parks rising along I-287 and the newly formed Westchester County Association transformed the county from “a little sleepy place” to a metropolitan business center, Singer said. “This was a radical, revolutionary time,” she said. “The construction guys got bigger and bigger” as they built the corporate campuses that drew companies from the canyons of Manhattan. “The parade of companies coming in ”“ it was like an alphabet of companies. American Can, Texaco, PepsiCo, IBM, Swiss Re.”
“I think the Business Journal was poised at the exact right place,” said Singer, who left the paper after 17 years to report for the New York Times. The paper”™s business coverage “was good for the whole climate of Westchester. Westchester was ready for us and we were ready for them,” she said.
“It was an exciting time and those guys were on top of it,” Singer said of Moore and Smith. “They were really pioneers. It was their concept to have a regional business paper. They should get credit for that. It was a brand-new idea and dangerous in its day.”
When Moore and Smith began their joint enterprise, “Business wasn”™t a sexy subject at all,” said Singer. “It was a whole different world and they were the ones who took it out of the Dark Ages.”
Westfair buys papers in 1990s
Moore bought out his partner”™s interest in the paper when Smith, a hard-drinking aspiring novelist, sold his Bedford home and uprooted his family for an ill-fated move to Ireland. Moore in 1986 sold the business to a Pennsylvania-based publishing company. After a succession of short-lived owners, the business was on the brink of bankruptcy liquidation when its current publisher, Dee DelBello, and her former business partners in Westfair Communications Inc. purchased it in 1990.
In 1988, Pulitzer”™s grandson launched International Business magazine. Moore retired from publishing in 1995, when he sold the award-winning magazine to Labyrinth Group p.l.c., a small British media company.
At his home in Rye, Moore recalled an encounter at his newspaper office during the oil crisis of 1973, when gasoline shortages left long lines of anxious motorists at filling stations. One of Westchester”™s pioneer developers of the Platinum Mile ”“ Moore asked that his name be withheld ”“ told the publisher of his concern about the impact of the gas shortages on his office parks.
Now that I”™ve built them, will they now not come? That was the developer”™s fearful prospect.
They came. And Moore and the Business Journal were there to report their arrival.
