< Previous10 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years WILLARD RICHARDSONTHE NEWS EARLY ON MOSTLY CARRIED ADVERTISEMENTS AND OFFICIAL NOTICES ON ITS COVER AND BACK PAGE. WHAT PASSED FOR ACTUAL NEWS APPEARED INSIDE ON THE TWO PAGES PUT TO BED THE NIGHT BEFORE THE PAPER WAS TO APPEAR.In 1843, having pooled their resources, they rented from Bangs several cases of letter type and the same R. Hoe & Co. Washington hand press on which The Daily News putatively had been born the previous year, and they leased the same weatherworn, two-story building on Tremont Street, just around the corner from The Strand, where The Daily News had been printed — and retained the editor, French.And with that, The Daily News, now more accurately named The News, reappeared on June 23, 1843, with a proposed circulation of twice a week and the caveat that it would in fact “be issued as soon as possible after the arrival of the New Orleans steamer.”The News was a larger sheet than its predecessor, at 12 and a half by 18 inches, half again as large as The Daily News, but still a four-page sheet.Cronican and Cherry offered an annual subscription for $4 in the depreciated currency of the Republic of Texas — about 80 cents in U.S. specie. Individual issues cost the equivalent of 2.5 U.S. cents.The News early on mostly carried advertisements and official notices on its cover and back page. What passed for actual news appeared inside on the two pages put to bed the night before the paper was to appear.French was one of two brothers of Bangs’ second wife, the former Caroline French, and both had accompanied the couple to Galveston in 1839, Bangs’ second stop on the island.He had first arrived in 1816 when Texas was the property of Spain, having joined a military excursion organized by one Francisco Xavier Mina, a Spaniard aggrieved by the rise to the Spanish throne of Ferdinand VII, an unabashed Francophile. Mina saw aiding the Mexicans in their fight for independence from Spain as a way of taking on Ferdinand.Things, however, did not go well for the filibusters; Spanish forces captured the lot, executing Mina and most of his crew, although sparing Bangs’ life given his ability to operate his press. After Mexico won its independence in 1821, Bangs was freed, yet remained south of the Rio Grande for several years, printing official proclamations for the new nation.Eventually, he made his way to Mobile where he wooed and married Caroline French before his 1839 return to Galveston.By then, Mexico was a sovereign nation and Texas was a sovereign republic, and the sovereign United States was still finalizing its borders.In fact, it was only in 1842, the very year The Daily News debuted, that the northern border with Canada east of the Rockies was established with the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.Bangs by then had acquired a second press: the Hoe Washington press on which both The Daily News and The News are believed to have first been printed.III. A SAVIOR’S ARRIVALCronican and Cherry’s little paper at first offered precious little to distinguish itself. Like most papers of the era — with the possible exception of Stuart’s well-regarded Civilian — The News served as little more than a vanity sheet and a vehicle for its publishers to advertise their services and pull in what advertising dollars they could.At the time, Galveston Island boasted no more than 300 homes and far fewer commercial buildings, all built along a grid extending from the harbor, which ran nearly two blocks farther inland than it does today.The roads were difficult to walk. As a visitor from England, a more established island, put it, there were “wide passages between the squares, which are ankle deep in fine sand during dry weather and almost deeper in wet, they being totally unpaved in any part.”The beached and rusting hulk of an abandoned clipper served as Galveston’s jail, which was rarely unpopulated.A hospital, in the days when infectious diseases were treated with little more than patience and isolation, stood a mile and a half west of all other structures.Drinking water, drawn from cisterns fed by shallow wells, bore an unpleasant taste, and feral hogs deemed the island theirs, contending only with similarly untamed dogs’ incessant bites and human beings’ flailing kicks.Soon enough, in early 1844, Cronican, perhaps fed up by all that, headed off to Corpus Christi after selling out to Cherry, who, finding himself all but immediately overwhelmed, hired a capable writer named Benjamin Neal, who had made the acquaintance of a former schoolmaster turned journalist named Willard Richardson when both were working at the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register.Neal invited Richardson to join The News.Richardson, despite the less than promising environment into which he had been recruited, took the job after being granted full authority to oversee the underwhelming editorial staff. Richardson, who brought in a refreshing philosophy, soon bought out Cherry’s share in the enterprise.Despite the island’s reputation as both a birthing place and a graveyard for startup newspapers — and despite the city’s scant population, and its unimproved roads, and despite recurrent competition and economic declines over which the paper had no say, and, too, despite the vagaries of ship arrivals from New Orleans bearing reports to crib — The News, largely due to Richardson’s guiding philosophy, came to be regarded as a metonym for responsible journalism.He announced that The News would henceforth stand independent of any political party — a radical departure at the time — and vowed that the paper would place news before views. Moreover, it would seek to dig up its own news to fill the pages.Come explore League City and Galveston County History. For more information go to www.VisitLeagueCity.comFrom registered Majestic Oaks to the survival of the Butler Longhorn breed, League City provides a colorful narrative in Northern Galveston County spanning more than175 years.Spend the day enjoying historical museums, a delicious lunch or dinner, shopping and relaxing.Take a stroll under 100-year-old Oak Trees in League City’s historic downtown district and experience a variety of colorful boutiques, specialty stores, antique shops and tasty restaurants located in historic downtown League City.Butler Longhorn MuseumSt. Mary’s Catholic ChurchFounder’s SquareWest Bay Common SchoolChildren’s Museum Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 1112 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years Richardson all but literally took that credo to the grave. Near the end of his life — he breathed his last on July 26, 1875 — he authored what is believed to be his final editorial for what was then known as The Galveston News. It read like an epitaph.“A generation has almost passed since the senior proprietor of The Galveston News entered upon that which has been his life’s work — the management of an honest, an upright, a truthful journal,” he wrote, and astute readers could all but hear a bell toll. “In reviewing that life’s work as written in the files of this journal, he is proud to aver that he has always battled for the right, been the foeman of corruption in high places and the uncompromising advocate of the material advancement of the people of Texas.”IV. WAR’S ARRIVALHis pages validated Richardson’s claim of personal advocacy for the people of Texas, with one glaring exception: He held at least one slave and ardently opposed abolition.Galveston, as a port, had begun to profit greatly — as, by extension, so did Richardson — from shipping commodities, among them cotton, with Texas by the middle of the 19th century a major producer of the plant.The work involved in growing the labor-intensive crop — the planting and chopping and picking of cotton from its bolls — often was performed by slaves, a large factor in its profitability.Less explicable is why Richardson held a slave, a man named Monroe, whom the publisher employed in driving a horse that, by means of a treadmill, powered the paper’s newfangled Hoe cylinder press, acquired in 1855.Then, five years later, the war arrived.Richardson, although an anti-abolitionist, was a pragmatist, and in the pages of The News he urged his readers to eschew secession. Yet, Texans in a statewide referendum voted to join the ill-fated Confederacy, whose April 1861 assault on the Union’s Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, ignited the Civil War.Early the following year, Union ships blockaded the island.Received wisdom held that should federal forces attack, the Confederacy would be able to do little if anything to protect the island, and so Gov. Francis Lubbock ordered all civilians to evacuate the island, a call Richardson heeded, loading onto rail cars his press and other essentials and moving The News to Houston.One islander, however, Ferdinand Flake, defied the order, staying behind and publishing Flake’s Bulletin, while also serving as a correspondent for The News as the war ground on. He already had proved generous as catastrophe befell The News when a fire destroyed the uninsured paper’s new offices shortly after Richardson arrived in the bayou city.Flake provided furniture, and other would-be rivals, including Edward Cushing, the editor of the Houston Telegraph, and Stuart, of the Civilian, similarly helped out, Stuart sparing a hand press, and Cushing contributing the paper on which to print The News.Flake later provided reams of copy to The News during the Jan. 1, 1863, Battle of Galveston, one of the Confederates’ last successful skirmishes.By then, the war had begun turning against the rebels, and for the most part telegraph lines west of the Mississippi River had been severed.Richardson soon ruefully had to acknowledge that news appearing in his paper today typically had appeared in the Telegraph yesterday.Only reader loyalty among the island’s evacuees sustained his sheet.Supplies, too, became increasingly hard to come by. The Union blockade curtailed deliveries by water other than by the rare successful blockade runner; some newsprint arrived from Mexico, although not much, and the paper’s pressmen learned to wet wrapping paper the night before the press run, and hope for the best.By then, the paper — little more than a two-sided handbill run off on the loaned letter press — appeared three times a week at best, and Richardson came to swap copies for food as hyperinflation gutted the value of the Confederacy’s legal tender.Yet, thirst for any news as to how the fighting was going eventually drove circulation. By late February 1865, thanks in large part to The Telegraph’s establishment of a de facto pony express to bring and share war updates, The News began to appear six days a week, albeit still just a single sheet printed on both sides.Yet, after the war ended that April and The News returned to the island, Richardson continued printing his paper six days a week as well as his prewar weekly for wider circulation and a triweekly as well. And, too, he revived the annual Texas Almanac, which The News had launched in 1857 and which briefly during the war had ceased publication.The triweekly held on until 1877; the weekly until 1894. The Texas Almanac continues to this day.V. A NEW PARTNERA 28-year-old former Confederate colonel named Alfred H. Belo — he had been with Gen. Robert E. Lee in Virginia at the headwaters of the Appomattox River on April 9, 1865, when the rebel military leader surrendered to the Union — soon found his way to Galveston, and Richardson, impressed with his bearing, invited him to join the paper.Belo, born in Salem, N.C., had served with distinction in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, twice suffering severe injuries, first at Gettysburg, on July 2, 1863, and then on June 3, 1864, at Cold Harbor, in Hanover County, Va., where an artillery round shattered his left arm, permanently rendering it useless.During the war, in addition to grit, Belo had demonstrated admirable administrative skills, which Richardson coveted, the war having fully taxed his managerial wherewithal and his publishing company’s accounts at the time in disarray.Belo was hired on as a bookkeeper in late August 1865 for a trial period of six months for which Richardson agreed to pay him $500 in gold.Within those six months, Belo had so thoroughly turned around the business operations — collecting debts and revamping the company’s accounting system — that Richardson offered to sell him an interest in the paper. Belo’s father, a North Carolina merchant still wealthy despite the ravages of the war, arranged for a loan, and so it was that Richardson, on March 1, 1866, six months after Belo’s arrival, named the former Confederate officer a junior partner in charge of the paper’s business office.Two years later, with Richardson having determined that Belo possessed the mettle and expertise needed to ultimately succeed the publisher, appointed him a full partner in what then became known as Richardson, Belo & Co.Texas had begun to rebound — largely due to Richardson’s ceaseless push for expanded rail service — and The News began to gain additional readership and advertising. By 1871, The News boasted the largest circulation of any Texas newspaper, and soon claimed more readers than all other dailies in the state combined.Richardson had begun his railroad campaign on April 17, 1856, publishing on The News’ front page a map he had drawn up to illustrate where he envisioned tracks should be laid.An adjoining article called for the state to invest in and operate the proposed network, something that the legislature dismissed out of hand, although Austin eventually did float a railroad bond plan, which voters approved by a handy margin.As one result, a railroad bridge soon connected the mainland to the island, bringing the Galveston, Houston & Henderson Railroad into the county seat.Richardson continued his push by urging that any railroad running from coast to coast — it was at the time a matter of great discussion throughout the nation — reach and then traverse Texas.“The great value of this road to Texas induces us to notice some of the manifest advantages over all others proposed to be extended to the Pacific coast region,” he wrote in The News. “The more northern routes pass through barren and uninhabited regions, while this passes through regions partially settled and often inviting dense settlement, on account of the extensive prairies or fine pasturage, rich valleys, and valuable minerals.”His argument prevailed, and in 1883 The News — too late for Richardson to read it — ran a front-page article announcing that the Southern Pacific Railroad indeed would route its stretch of the transcontinental railroad through Texas.Willard Richardson had died on July 26, 1875 — a passing that elicited laudatory editorials in papers large and small — and Belo, as planned, assumed command.Richardson left the paper’s new chief with a robust staff and correspondents spread across the state. He had written in January 1872 that, “as the railroad extension of our state brings distant cities, towns and counties into proximity with Galveston, we shall extend our corps of reporters and correspondents.”He made good on the promise by arranging for the state’s postmasters and telegraph operators to serve as correspondents. For good measure, he added a New York correspondent to the payroll.VI. A CHANGE OF COMMANDEditorially, the imperially bearded Belo, who carried himself with a military officer’s starched posture, hewed to Richardson’s philosophy while solidifying the company, which in 1881 he refashioned as A.H. Belo & Co.To mark the occasion, Belo had a sign mounted above the center column on the face of the paper’s offices at 2217 Market Street that read: “The Galveston News, Established 1842, Incorporated 1881.” Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 13Men stand in front of the old Galveston News building, to which is affixed a sign reading “The Galveston News, Established 1842, Incorporated 1881.” ROSENBERG LIBRARYALFRED H. BELOBelo had included in the incorporation charter a clause allowing for the company to establish a paper in rapidly growing Dallas.So it was that on Oct. 1, 1885, the first issue of the Dallas News — today’s Dallas Morning News, which also dates its lineage to April 11, 1842, conflating its far shorter history with that of The Daily News — rolled off the presses. By 1890, the north Texas municipality’s population for the first time topped Galveston’s, making it then the state’s largest city.Belo on Oct. 12, 1874, had hired an English-born 15-year-old named George Bannerman Dealey. The former colonel had asked the boy what experience he had; Dealey responded that in addition to pumping his church organ, he was employed in pulling a string that put in motion streamers to shoo flies inside the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s dining room, leading Belo to deem him sufficiently versatile for newspaper work and brought him on as an office boy.Dealey proved a quick study, and 11 years later was assigned to the Dallas paper.After Belo’s death in 1901, Dealey assumed full editorial control.He would go on to stridently oppose the Ku Klux Klan, which by the early 1920s had established a stronghold in Dallas.The Klan fought back, persuading advertisers, those sympathetic to the white supremacists, to cancel their paid promotions, and organizing boycotts against those business owners who persisted in hawking their wares and services in the Dallas News.The paper’s revenue soon began to plummet even as The Galveston News, too, fell on hard times as readers and advertisers alike perceived it as having become too reliant on content provided by the then Dallas-based Belo company and no longer truly local. They abandoned it in droves.By 1922, A.H. Belo & Co., now in the hands of the colonel’s daughter, Jeannette Belo Peabody, and his son’s widow, Helen Ponder Belo, and its reserves all but gone, received an unsolicited offer from Galveston businessman and financier W.L. Moody Jr. to buy the ailing Galveston paper.The bid proved a godsend for both papers.VII. A RELUCTANT DIVESTITUREOn March 1, 1923, The News changed hands — the first time in the paper’s then nearly 81-year history that an outsider had come in and taken over — and the proceeds from the sale allowed the beleaguered Dallas News to survive its fight against the Klansmen.Three years later, the paper had largely defeated the Klan, which Dealey at one point described in print as “a slander on Dallas.” Klan membership in Dallas fell from a high of some 13,000 in 1920 to 1,200 by the end of 1926, the year Dealey purchased A.H. Belo & Co. from its founder’s family.The Belo family, not wishing to publicly concede the damage the Klan attacks had done to the company’s fortunes, had put a brave face on the 1923 sale, contending that they had turned down any number of previous offers for the Galveston paper.“We were reluctant to think of parting with ownership of our original newspaper which is intertwined with the history of Texas and with which tender memories are associated, and we were firmly resolved that we would never permit it to pass to interests that could not be relied upon to maintain it in accordance with its honorable traditions or that would imperil the interests of the people of Galveston,” the Belo company said in a statement announcing the sale.“We have listened to and accepted Mr. Moody’s offer to purchase because we believed that the conditions that we had imposed upon ourselves were met by him. As he said in his own statement, ‘It is our purpose to continue The News on the high standard of conservation, accuracy and impartiality so ably maintained in the past.’”The sale was well-received on the island. Ad revenue picked up, as did circulation, and The News soon returned to profitability.In October 1926, Moody formed The Galveston News Inc., after also purchasing the rival Tribune.Moody, who was born in Fairfield in January 1865, had gone on to make his fortune in banking and insurance.By 1907, he had opened City National Bank, later known as Moody National Bank, and had a hand in establishing the American National Insurance Company, of which he took full ownership in 1908.Before Moody’s purchase of The News, the paper had begun to place more importance on sports, social goings-on, literature and other coverage considered innovative at the time. The additions were well received.In 1904, the Sunday edition included color comics.The News, after a period of retrenchment brought on by its pre-Moody slump, soon expanded coverage of mainland Galveston County with particular emphasis on Texas City, which grew as World War II spurred demand for products from its refineries and chemical companies, the industries that had come to define it.VIII. ARRIVING AT THE PRESENTThe Daily News, as it eventually had come to be known, in 1963 again changed hands when the Hobby family, the owners of the Houston Post, purchased it and its affiliated publications.Oveta Hobby, former Gov. William Hobby’s widow, oversaw The Daily News and commissioned the design and construction of new offices, at 8522 Teichman Road, where it continues to operate.Yet, the Hobby family’s ownership, marred by in-house decisions poorly received by Daily News readers, was short-lived. They had killed off the Tribune; had moved The Daily News to afternoon distribution, while reducing its publication from seven days a week to six; and had promoted their Post as the morning read — none of which went over well with subscribers.So it was that the paper was ripe for purchase.14 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years W.L. Moody Jr. at his desk. MARY MOODY NORTHEN ENDOWMENTDortheia ArmstrongChristopher SullinsSamantha KettererCatherine BoudoinPaul MottesheardJennifer ReynoldsIrene Alvarado • David BeanJanna Ceccacci • Matt deGrood • Steven MooneyMaureen Beans • Yvonne Mascorro • Donna RhoadesEric Satterly • Melanie Perry • Desiree Culver • John PireAllison Berry • Valerie Wells • Debbie Keith • Terry SullinsJawanna Dunn • Mary Valencia • Mike Rode • David KirbySkip McComb • Michael Bouras • Victor Lopez • Alex LinkyMichael Otems • Stuart Villanueva • Reid Caro • Errick BreauxAmanda Krivokopich • Wiley Robinson • Jana Knoell • Robert Salinas • Sean PattersonJohn Rodriguez • Marissa Barnett • Emily Capetillo • Tom Dawson • Jasie HughesKristi Quigley • Michael A. Smith • Corey Ellis • D’Lorah Collier • Bobby MorrowKevin M. Cox • Karen Knebel • Lamont Miller • Donna Bentley • Joseph HurstShelina Martin • Cindy Roberts • Patti Shelton • John Nagy • Darryl EatonDiane MearsJose SotoAngela Wilson • Broderick Wade • Melissa Rivera • Seames O’Grady Kaitlin Schmidt • Charles Elder • Kadie RoweAndrew Reinsch • John Pool • Boyd MalliaDustin Johnson • Joanna Mendoza Dave Mathews • Rene SchwartzMichael BluittLiliana DeleonJohn Wayne FergusonChere McCombDon JacksonArnold EllisLisa LoveJames LaCombe • Lynette Tisdale • Stephen Maradeo • Laura Elder • Ain McWilliamsThe Daily News may print on paper, but our most valuable assets pump blood, sweat and unbridled passion through their veins. On behalf of those who’ve come before us, those who are here today, and those who will carry the torch of The Daily News in the future, we proudly mark our 175th anniversary with the names of the employees of our newspaper. Respectfully, Leonard Woolsey, PublisherGeorgia-born B. Carmage Walls — who, armed with less than a high school education but with a remarkable eye for undervalued newspapers, had founded and built Southern Newspapers Inc. — purchased The Daily News in 1967 and immediately returned it to morning circulation, seven days a week.The paper became known as The Galveston County Daily News on Nov. 1, 1993, and two years later, on Christmas Day, 1995, made its online debut, one of the first newspapers in Texas to provide both print and digital editions.Walls’ career stands as an exemplum of the earnest pursuit of the American dream. Born in 1908 on a cotton farm outside the dirt-poor, south-central Georgia town of Cordele, he was one of 11 siblings.His newspapering career began inauspiciously and by happenstance. One day when he was 15, a decade after his father had moved the family to Orlando, Fla., he happened to accompany his cousin to the latter’s job stuffing inserts into that city’s Sentinel newspaper. A mailroom supervisor, seeing Walls standing idly by, offered him a job helping with the inserts.Walls, armed with the small paycheck that that modest labor provided him, decided to quit his studies.A quick learner and good with numbers, Walls rose in the Sentinel’s ranks, becoming head bookkeeper in 1931 when he was 24 — and he quickly got the paper’s accounts receivable caught up. Three years later, he became the paper’s business manager and earned the attention of Charles Marsh, an Austin-based entrepreneur with interests in a number of papers, including the Sentinel, under the umbrella of his General Newspapers Inc.Marsh in 1940 bought a controlling interest in the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph-News and named Walls general manager. Five years later, he promoted Walls to the General Newspapers presidency.Walls later founded his own company, Southern Newspapers Inc., through which the high school dropout became a multimillionaire; the fortune he eventually amassed placed him on Forbes magazine’s 1984 list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.One of Walls’ acquisitions was the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, which the former owner agreed to sell only if Walls also agreed to become its publisher.Walls did so, and during his tenure counted among his friends Texas-born President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a supporter of civil rights — and among his foes Alabama’s strident segregationist governor, George Wallace, against whose racist policies Walls fought on the Advertiser’s editorial pages.In 1967, Walls sold the Advertiser and bought The Galveston Daily News, for which he created Galveston Newspapers Inc., a stand-alone corporation, and moved to Clear Lake. He died in 1998. Fourteen years later, he was inducted into the Texas Newspapers Hall of Fame.After Walls’ death, his wife of 44 years, the former Martha Ann Williams, better known as Molly, took the corporate reins, which she held until her death in 2014.Today, their daughter, Lissa Walls, is Southern Newspapers’ chief executive and the sole shareholder of both Southern Newspapers and Galveston Newspapers, which today publishes the award-winning magazine Coast Monthly, in addition to The Galveston County Daily News, continuing a 175-year tradition, now both online and on paper.Dolph Tillotson, president of Southern and a longtime publisher of The Daily News, credited Walls’ leadership for the paper’s success.“These are difficult days for many newspaper companies, but through Lissa’s leadership we’ve kept our focus on quality content and innovation in print,” Tillotson said. “To me, her leadership is the reason our performance is far better than average among our peers.”Molly Walls, in 2008, predicted both editions would remain indispensable.“I don’t think the print product will go away because, well, I just think that people like to have something in their hands that’s black and white, and they can read it and reread it and maybe say a few cuss words and write a letter to the editor,” she said for a 2008 Texas Newspaper Oral History. “I think that it’s the solidity of the newspaper, to have and hold, that will keep it alive.” Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 17(LEFT) John Romero pastes up an ad in offset. DAILY NEWS FILE“I THINK THAT IT’S THE SOLIDITY OF THE NEWSPAPER, TO HAVE AND HOLD, THAT WILL KEEP IT ALIVE.”MOLLY WALLSB. CARMAGE WALLSTHE FOUNDERS18 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years Samuel Bangs, dead now more than a century and a half, certainly would have died 37 or so years earlier on were it not for the power of the press.Bangs was born around 1798 — accounts vary — near Boston — that is certain — where he learned the printing trade under a relative’s watch.The apprentice proved adept, and by the time he was 18 — a restless young man in a restless young nation — Bangs had made his way to Baltimore, where serendipity introduced him to a checkered Spanish colonel named Francisco Xavier Mina.Mina had recently fallen under the influence of a Mexican priest and an American army general, who convinced him to join Mexico’s fight to seek its freedom from Spain.Mina despised King Ferdinand VII’s fealty to the French, and after participating in a failed coup against the ruler, he fled to London, where in 1816 he met Father José Servando Teresa de Mier and Gen. Winfield Scott, the two men who convinced him he could gain vengeance on Ferdinand by helping to liberate Mexico.Mier was an ardent Mexican nationalist, and Scott reputedly promised him the United States, still irked by the Spanish sinking of the USS Maine, would support his filibuster.Mina, convinced, set sail, stopping first at Baltimore, where he recruited Bangs to run the hand press Mier had brought to run off broadsides to rally the Mexican revolutionaries, and then at Galveston.On Galveston Island on Feb. 22, 1817, Bangs produced on Mier’s press the first known document ever printed in Texas: “The Proclamation of General Mina.”By the time Mina left Galveston some months later, his armada boasted eight ships carrying 235 men under arms.Virtually all were doomed.AN IMPRISONED PRINTERWithin months of the group’s arrival in Mexico, most of Mina’s men had been captured or killed.Mina suffered both fates, captured in northern Mexico and some months later — in either October or November 1817 — executed by firing squad. Bangs, too, had been captured, but the Spanish valued his ability to operate Mier’s press, on which he was made to print Royalist tracts until Mexico in August 1821 won its independence, and the printer was freed.Yet, Bangs stayed on for a time, printing proclamations for the new government, before eventually returning to the United States, where he wooed and won the former Suzanne Payne but failed to find suitable employment. He returned to Mexico, with his wife, where he worked as a government printer in the northern state of Tamaulipas until she died there in 1837 of yellow fever.Bangs made his way to Mobile, Ala., where he married for a second time, to the former Caroline French, and, in 1838, headed back to Galveston with his bride and two of her brothers, fellow printers.Bangs took over the struggling Daily Galvestonian newspaper and named one of the brothers-in-law, George H. French, editor. When the paper soon foundered, Bangs, undaunted, produced a new paper, The Daily News, which first appeared on April 11, 1842, again with French as editor.SUSPENDED PUBLICATIONBangs’ second foray into newspapering didn’t initially go much better than had his first. The Daily News vanished for a year, during which time he sold it to two New Englanders who had arrived in Galveston after fighting in the Texas Revolution.The new owners, Michael Cronican and Wilbur Cherry, rented a press from Bangs — believed to be R. Hoe & Co.’s Washington Press No. 2369 on which The Daily News putatively had been printed — and, too, the building on Tremont Street in which it sat. And, too, they kept French on as editor of the paper, which they renamed The News.Yet, the ever restless Bangs stayed on the island only until 1845, when, with the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, he and his wife followed Army Gen. Zachary Taylor south to Corpus Christi, where with a financial partner he launched that city’s Gazette. When Taylor’s troops soon moved south to the Rio Grande, Bangs again followed him, and in Matamoros began publishing what would be his final paper, the Reveille, which included a Spanish-language supplement published by a Mexican who, not surprisingly, took Mexico’s side in the ongoing war.Taylor in a rage ordered the Reveille shut down and Bangs jailed, although the pressman was allowed to argue his innocence — that he had merely rented equipment to the offender — and was freed, once again, although he never resumed printing the paper.AN IGNOMINIOUS ENDSo ended Bang’s desultory career as a publisher. He and Caroline instead opened a hotel in Point Isabel but not until after Bangs had returned briefly to Galveston. There he loaded all of his possessions onto a ship bound for Port Isabel. It sank, taking all he owned, save for his pride and the clothes on his back.One day in 1849, Bangs set out from Port Isabel for Brownsville by stagecoach, only to be waylaid. The marauders ordered him and his fellow passengers to strip naked, after which Bangs either was freed or managed to flee.With the confiscation of the clothes off his back, Bangs now stood stripped to the same naked state in which he had entered the world half a century before.Thoroughly disillusioned — and broke — he abandoned Texas forever, moving to Georgetown, Ky., where he briefly worked in the pressroom of that city’s daily Herald.It was there, on May 31, 1854, that Samuel Bangs died. The erstwhile filibuster, printer, publisher and would-be hotelier was believed to be 56 years old.The restless founderSAMUEL BANGSBY TOM BASSINGTHE FOUNDERSA steadying hand on the helmWILLARD RICHARDSONBY TOM BASSING Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 19Benjamin Neal was a fine writer and an early partner in The News, as the Galveston paper came to be known a year after it debuted as The Daily News on April 11, 1842.Yet, his greatest contribution to the newspaper came by way of an invitation he extended to a former schoolmaster he had met when both were working at the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register newspaper.The colleague, Willard Richardson, had come to journalism in a decidedly roundabout fashion.Born on June 24, 1802, in Marblehead, Mass., he moved to Charleston, S.C., when he was 15.The state in which Richardson was born and the state he adopted jointly fashioned his world view. Both were among the original 13 colonies — the Province of Massachusetts Bay and the Province of South Carolina — which became the original 13 United States of America and as such tended to impart to their citizens an independent streak.The latter, a slaveholding state well after the institution had been abolished in the North, also tended to promote in its citizens an expanded view of states’ rights.Richardson embraced both.FINDING A HOMEThe future newspaper publisher and owner adhered to the philosophy of John Calhoun, a South Carolina Democrat who served as the nation’s vice president from 1825 to 1832 and in the U.S. Senate for all but two years between 1832 and 1850, all the while promulgating what he held to be the primacy of state law over that of the nation. Richardson would go on to support the same through The News.Richardson, after graduating from South Carolina College, started out as an educator, first in Tuscaloosa, Ala., before, in 1837, making his way to Texas, where he befriended Mirabeau Lamar, who would become the second president of the Republic of Texas, succeeding Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto.Richardson briefly worked as a surveyor of vast tracts of western Texas and then, after Lamar assumed the republic’s presidency, served in minor governmental posts.Neither occupation particularly suited him, and so it was that he returned to teaching, opening a school for boys in Houston.During that time, he made the acquaintance of Francis Moore, the editor of the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register, who invited him to join the editorial staff. It was there that he met Neal, who soon left to join The News.The Galveston paper by then was run by a man named Wilbur Cherry, who brought Neal on as a junior partner. Richardson, in 1844, accepted Neal’s offer to become the paper’s editor.SOON A PARTNERThe following year, Richardson became a partner in what was then Cherry, Neal & Co. He brought to The News a philosophy contrary to what was common to most Texas newspapers of the era: No longer would The News toe any particular political party line. Moreover, it would feature straightforward news as opposed to the pontifications that then passed for journalism.And, too, he saw the paper — Galveston being Texas’ predominant city throughout Richardson’s life — as something that should serve to benefit all who lived in the soon-to-be state.Willard Richardson was a staunch supporter and promoter of Galveston Island. COURTESYNext >