George M. Cohan
George M. Cohan was the theatrical equivalent of Norman Rockwell. Critics said that he was shallow, maudlin and jingoistic; the public found him rousing, entertaining and engaging. Cohan's musical comedy "Forty Five Minutes from Broadway" made its Broadway premiere on New Year's Day, 1906. The title song still has some currency, but the plot itself is a forgettable melodrama in which true love triumphs over greed. The setting was New Rochelle, a place presumably so backward that Kid Burns, a city sharpy, sings:
If you want to find a real hick delegation
The place where the real rubens dwell
Just hop on a train at the Grand Central Station
Get off when they shout "New Rochelle"
The burghers of New Rochelle were appalled over this dipiction of their city, according to a theatrical history I once read. On the morning of the premier, the book said, the New Rochelle Chamber of Commerce called an emergency session. It purportedly passed resolutions to institute a boycott and to send out press releases denouncing the play as "libelous to their community and its inhabitants."
For starters, there was no Chamber of Commerce in New Rochelle at the time. And neither of the two (of four) newspapers that have survived on microfilm mention the alleged uproar.
A late January edition of the Pioneer does contain a short report that Cohan "says in last Saturday's edition of The Spot Light that the editor of the New Rochelle Bee is angry because he dramatized his town." The Spot Light was a theatrical newsletter that Cohan himself published, largely to promote his own plays. There never was a New Rochelle Bee. In all likelihood, Cohan was, in the spirit if P.T. Barnum, trying to drum up a little controversy to sell tickets. The Pioneer does mention that "some New Rochelle people are interested to know just what part of this 'ere 'town,' as he calls it, George Cohan has been visiting in."
If Cohan did visit New Rochelle, it was likely at the Forbes residence on Fairview Place, where all six children — four boys and two younger girls — still lived with their mother, Mary Connor Forbes. (Their father, newspaperman George Morris Forbes, had been booted out of the house for his drinking years before, and was run over by a trolley car in New Jersey in 1904.)
The fourth son was my grandfather, Thomas Harold. He was a member of Cohan's company. The reason the play was set in New Rochelle, according to two Cohan biographies, was because the young member of the chorus was constantly chirping about it.
For a year or so, Cohan had notions of a play with near-to-New York locale," Ward Morehouse wrote in George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theater." Such a locale, say, as New Rochelle, N.Y., which, as of 1905, was a placid, uneventful, law-abiding, home-owning, God-fearing community of some 20,000 people. 'What would be the matter with New Rochelle?" Cohan asked, sounding out a young man of the "Little Johnny Jones" company, one T. Harold forbes, who lived there, and who returned home on the 11:40 every night. "Why-why nothing," spluttered T. Harold. "I think it would be great-great."
Yes, chuckled Cohan, and he wondered if he could convince Broadway that there really was such a place and that he hadn't just made it up. As he worked on his songs and story he went frequently to Forbes to check on details of suburban life and finally gave Forbes the chorus of a song he called "Forty Five Minutes From Broadway."
T. Harold, wide eyed and somewhat aghast, read it over and over again as Cohan watched him.
"Well?" said Cohan challengingly, "what's the matter with it?"
"Why nothing. It's fine-fine."
"Do you think any of the town boosters will get sore?"
"No-o, I don't think so." And quickly, "It will certainly put New Rochelle on the map."
"No doubt about that," said Cohan.
"And it's true, too," said T. Harold, warming up to the whole idea. "There are a lot of rubes there, particularly up North Ave. way, and they're still pitching a lot of hay."
"All right ,kid, but don't let them hear you say that; they might run you out of town."
When the new Cohan mucical play, "Forty-five Minutes from Broadway," went into rehearsal in the late summer of 1905 Cohan's local color authority, T. Harold Forbes, who was later to become a prosperous suburban newspaper publisher, was in the cast along with such famous folk as Fay Templeton, Victor Moore and Donald Brian. ..."
Before he got into newspapering full time, Harold, or "Spider," as he was known in theatrical circles, formed a song-and-dance duet with his wife-to-be, Carrie Bowman. They stayed on the vaudeville circuit until a respirtory problem forced him to retreat to the mountain air in 1914. He ran a local weekly in Livingstone Manor, N.Y., for a few years before returning to New Rochelle in 1919. He then bought the Paragraph and the Daily Star, which his brother Bert had launched in 1911. The Paragraph was shut down in June 1920; the Pioneer's 60-year run ended in October. The Press had died the year before.
"I started right out putting George M. Cohan methods into the old Star — not so much jazzing it up as making it really alive and up to date with what people in the community were doing and thinking," T. Harold told a reporter a few years later. Circulation grew. In 1923, he bought out the city's other daily, the Evening Standard. The Standard had begun publication as the Daily Times in 1908, superceding the weekly New Era.
New Rochelle had become a one-newspaper town.
The lead editorial of the merged Standard-Star — with the headline "New Rochelle, First and Forever" — left no doubt that local issues would be of paramount concern to T. Harold. After establishing his credentials as a native son, T. Harold wrote: "The Standard Star will be ready to serve that which is for the welfare of all; to support that which is right; unafraid to expose evil and jobbery and condemn that which is wrong. It will be an independent newspaper. It will be The People's Forum."
The paper's vision, however, did extend further than the arteries running off Main St. The second editorial — which observed that "there is too much talk on so-called popular subjects which at best are of minor moment" — was a plea for world peace.
T. Harold had formed a partnership with the owners of the nearby Mount Vernon Daily Argus in order to buy out the Evening Standard. A few years later, local tennis star Francis T. Hunter — whose doubles victory at Wimbleton was coincidentially the lead story in the first edition of the merged Standard-Star — bought out one of the Mount Vernon partners. Westchester Newspapers Securities Corp. became known as the Forbes-Hunter Group. In 1925, it launched a daily, the Times, in Mamaroneck. Harold's brother, George Plowden Forbes was publisher and 49 percent owner. Another brother, Charles Banks Forbes, ran the Building & Realty News in White Plains. The Mount Vernon paper, and the six other community weeklies that the group acquired, remained under the operational control of the previous owners.
In 1928, T. Harold explained what Frank Hunter and he had accomplished in Westchester County to the New York Sun's Edwin C. Hill, a newroom legend for his handling of the Titanic disaster story.
"We saw a pile of potentially good newspaper properties here in Westchester that were suffering from dry rot. . . ," T. Harold told Hill. "Some were doing well, but not nearly as well as they should have done because their plants were as antiquated as their journalism. We started out by borrowing a lot of money. That was Frank's job. They knew him on Wall Street. Then we picked and chose."
Hill commented: "Some veteran editors with mice in their whiskers, who had been sort of uprooted by the nervous energies of the youths, looked on while Westchester dailies and weeklies that hadn't changed a headline or put on a new comma since the days of President Arthur were suddenly and amazingly transformed into bright and sparkling newspapers radiating the very spirit of the new day. . . ."
The partner's success came from recognizing the changing economic ground rules. "Standardization has saved us a lot," T. Harold said. "One staff of reporters and photographers can operate for a string of papers." They merged, they acquired, they launched--and they went into hock with Wall St. money. But T. Harold was ever the local boy, even when he was directing the transformation of one of the sleepy weeklies.
"We made it a sixteen-page standard size instead of the old-fashioned, eight page country style. We put fine, glazed paper on the presses. We used plenty of cuts, almost all of local appeal and significance. We threw out all 'boiler plate' stuff — stale news and features — and used instead up-to-date live news of the locality about people and things — nothing too trivial. There wasn't a strawberry festival, a woman's club meeting or a local happening that we overlooked," said T. Harold.
Newspapers all over the country were discovering that an "independent" editorial stance was helpful in attracting and maintaining advertising accounts handed out by gentlemen of all political stripes. T. Harold was a Democrat in a county that had voted Republican since the election of 1896, when William McKinley defeated the Free Silver candidacy of Williams Jennings Bryan. His father had been a Republican in a Democratic county; his brothers had been Republicans who were often at odds with their party.
"We cut out politics," T. Harold said. "Our papers are not Democratic or Republican." Instead, he said, the papers were "solely devoted to the welfare and upbuilding of the communities that support them. We try to lead in all demands for local improvements and betterment."
The two partners owned all of the common stock of their newspaper group. In the Sun interview, T. Harold said that they would not accept less than a million dollars for the Mount Vernon paper alone. He had prospered to a degree that his father and brothers would have thought unimaginable. He built a mansion on Long Island Sound next door to the prestigious Larchmont Yacht Club, which was one of five club memberships that he held. He was also active in the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks and the Knights of Columbus.
Within months of the Sun interview, the Forbes-Hunter Group announced that it was merging with the Macy newspapers, which published four other dailies in Westchester county. For all intents and purposes, though, the transaction was a sale to Macy. New Rochelle was now without a newspaper that was published by a resident of the city for the first time since the Civil War.
T. Harold's efforts then centered on launching a new daily in White Plains, the county seat, with his brother Charles as the editor. The Daily Press, which was launched a few months before Wall Street's Black Monday in 1929, lost its struggle against the established paper--the Reporter--in 1934. George Plowden Forbes continued as publisher of the Mamaroneck Times until 1943, when he sold his 49 percent stake to the Macy chain.