Changing Hands: The Batdorff era, 1917-1972

By LORAINE ANDERSON
landerson@record-eagle.com

December 14, 2008 12:00 am

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By the beginning of 1917, the year America entered World War I, the Bates family had come to a decision.

It was time to sell the seven-year-old Record-Eagle, the offspring of two pioneer weekly newspapers founded by Morgan Bates and Elvin Sprague in 1858 and 1865. Financial difficulties had hit the family even before the death of publisher Thomas Bates in 1912, after more than a decade of expansion.

Specific reasons are unclear. Thomas Bates' daughter, Mabel Bates Williams, referred to hard times "after the boom burst and father lost everything," in a letter decades later to her niece Janet Bates Courtney. The lumber era was in its death throes and United States was about to enter World War I.

The ownership change came without hoopla.

An unsigned Feb. 2, 1917, front-page "Letter to Our Readers," simply announced that the Record-Eagle and the defunct Grand Traverse Herald had been sold to the Traverse City Publishing Co. and that its new owners believed "Traverse City and the territory surrounding it present the opportunity for a bigger and better newspaper than the 'Record-Eagle' has been in the past."

The new publishing company was created by four men who had built the Battle Creek Moon Journal from "two rather ordinary newspapers," the letter informed readers. The president of the new company was Austin Corliss Batdorff, the Moon Journal's city editor for several years.

The story did not mention that Batdorff was only 24, or that his wife Mabel was expecting a baby any day -- Robert A. Batdorff, born on Feb. 17.

This was the first time the paper had been owned by anyone other than an established local resident. Robert's daughter, Linda Batdorff Dahl of Traverse City, said her grandfather Austin came to Traverse City because he wanted to own a newspaper but knew he'd never have a chance to buy the Moon Journal.

Moon owners Nelson Conine and George Dolliver liked the young man and heard the Record-Eagle was for sale. They backed him in the venture and became partners in the Traverse City Publishing Co.

The ownership change was announced on a historic day, thanks to President Woodrow Wilson's decision to break relations with Germany as the nation moved closer to entering World War I.

Thick, dark headlines, all letters capitalized, took up a third of the page: U.S Breaks With Germany

The first Extra came out at 11:30 a.m., the second at 4 p.m. with a Page 1 note from the publishers to let readers know the paper would churn out more Extras the next day, if warranted. Bright, crisp writing, short sentences and clear images replaced the older, staid and formal style of the Bates era.

The first year

What a first year it was for the new, young owner.

The United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, just two months after the newspaper changed hands. National Registration Day for men between 18 and 30 years old was June 5. The following month, the Oval Wood Dish Company, the city's top employer, moved to Tupper Lake in upstate New York, taking many of its best workers and leaving others behind, jobless.

This was news that affected people deeply, the stuff that had created newspapers two centuries before during the pre-American Revolution era. The early 1900s were a newspaper heyday. The radio was still in the birthing room, the TV not yet gleaming in inventors' eyes, the Internet impossible to envision.

Newspaper ads for epic films, such as "Civilization" and "Intolerance" playing at the Lyric, were signs of the times. D.W. Griffith is usually remembered these days for his racist "Birth of a Nation," but he also produced the epic masterpiece "Intolerance," a landmark silent movie about man's inhumanity to man. It ran during the massive Liberty Bond sale campaign in Traverse City. Thomas Ince's "Civilization," a cry for peace released before "Intolerance," is credited with keeping the United States out of World War I until 1917.

Nationally, the nation was moving closer to Prohibition, and the movement to win women the vote was simultaneously knocking on the door. Traverse City was beginning to experience some of the first coal shortages that would come with U.S. entry into the war in Europe. Some of the area's destitute actually went out on the tracks to collect coal dropped by trains.

The paper reflected the mood of the country -- sometimes mirroring prejudices, sometimes questioning them.

55 years

So, just who was this young fellow, Austin Corliss Batdorff, who headed the Record-Eagle for nearly half a century, until his death in 1963?

He was born Oct. 6, 1892, in Battle Creek, the son of Howard and Dora E. (Harrison) Batdorff, both descendants of pioneer families. His father was a well-known owner of a Battle Creek real estate business, according to a short biography in "Historic Michigan," by George Fuller.

The young Batdorff became a printer's "devil" after high school and began his career as a reporter and then city editor on the Battle Creek Daily Journal, which eventually became the Moon-Journal.

The Batdorffs already had one child, John, born in 1915, when they arrived in Traverse City. Robert was born Feb. 17, 1917, and would grow up in the business and become publisher in 1963 when Austin died. Daughter Marjorie would arrive within a few years.

The family lived first at 540 Sixth St. in Traverse City and later moved into the old Perry Hannah "cottage" on East Bay, across from the shopping plaza where Tom's East Bay is today.

The half-century-plus Batdorff era of ownership spanned social, political and technological transitions. Their five decades included economic declines and booms, two world wars, the gangster era of bootleggers and bank robbers, the second emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the creation of the National Cherry Festival, the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II, and the turbulent 1960s, with their assassinations, riots and Civil Rights struggles.

During that time, sweeping changes also occurred in newspapers and journalism. In 1972, the Batdorffs sold the Traverse City Record-Eagle to Ottaway Newspapers Inc., a subsidiary of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. That same year, the term "Watergate" would burst into the national consciousness, creating still more momentous changes in journalism -- and bringing the first president from Michigan to power.

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