Central Press Association
Overview
The Central Press Association was an American newspaper syndication company based in Cleveland, Ohio, that operated from 1910 to 1971. Founded by Virgil Venice McNitt, it was independent for its first twenty years and a subsidiary of King Features Syndicate from 1930 until it ceased operations. At its peak it supplied features, columns, comic strips and photographs to more than four hundred newspapers with a combined twelve million daily readers, and by 1925 it was described as the largest newspaper picture service in the United States. Its best known comic strips were Brick Bradford, Etta Kett and Muggs McGinnis, later titled Muggs and Skeeter.
Central Press is also a useful case study in how syndicates grew: by acquisition, by signing famous names for special coverage, and finally by absorption into a larger Hearst-owned distributor, under which it survived for four more decades as a specialist division serving small-town newspapers.
Founding by Virgil McNitt
Virgil Venice McNitt, who lived from 1881 to 1964, was managing editor of the Cleveland Press when he founded the Central Press Association in Cleveland in 1910. He remained the company's president and general manager for twenty years, until 1930. The new service entered a syndication market that was still taking shape, in which regional firms could compete with New York distributors by offering features and photographs tailored to daily and weekly papers outside the largest cities.
Growth came quickly through acquisition. In 1912 McNitt bought the Chicago-based North American Press Syndicate and merged it into Central Press, giving the Cleveland company a second major market's feature list and client relationships. The North American Press Syndicate name survived as a subsidiary identity, and strips originating with it were later counted among Central Press properties.
Famous Names: Bryan and Addams
Also in 1912, McNitt made arrangements to publish works by two of the most famous Americans of the era: William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee, and Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer and Hull House founder. Bryan was hired to cover both the Republican and Democratic national conventions of 1912 for Central Press, bringing a participant's authority to convention reporting at a moment when the Republican Party was splitting between President Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. McNitt also made a deal with Addams to circulate her Progressive Party platforms to newspapers across the country.
Other early features included cartoons by Bob Satterfield, a column by Edna K. Wooley and a sports column by Ed Bang. The mixture — celebrity political coverage, reform writing, cartoons, women's features and sports — was the classic early syndicate portfolio, designed so that a subscribing editor could fill several different pages from a single supplier.
Expansion in the 1920s
By 1925 Central Press features had twelve million daily readers, and the company was the largest newspaper picture service in the United States. Photographs were a growth business in the 1920s as improvements in halftone reproduction made pictures central to newspaper design, and a syndicate that could supply images at scale held a strong position with editors.
Acquisitions continued. In 1927 Central Press took over the Editors Feature Service, adding its strips and features to the catalogue, and in August 1929 it acquired control of Johnson Features. In 1929 the company also built a mechanical production plant in New York, forming a Central Press Association of New York, Inc. to operate it. McNitt had earlier, in 1920, founded a separate New York Central Press Association; that operation was absorbed by his new McNaught Syndicate, founded in 1922, and should not be confused with the Cleveland company that is the subject of this profile.
Sale to King Features
In 1930 McNitt sold Central Press to King Features Syndicate, the Hearst syndication arm. The Cleveland organization was retained as a separate division, with its staff and features continued intact; the New York production plant was not included in the purchase. Frank McLearn, managing editor of Central Press at the time of the sale, later became president and general manager of King Features itself — an indication of the standing Central Press personnel held within the Hearst organization. Leslie Eichel was another key figure of the era, shifted west as an editor in the reorganization.
Under King Features, Central Press's creative output narrowed. The company introduced no new comic strips after about 1934, and around 1937 King Features took over direct syndication of all Central Press strips. Thereafter Central Press functioned mainly as a production and service division specializing in material for small-town newspapers, a role it filled for more than three further decades.
Comic Strips
The strips that originated with Central Press, the North American Press Syndicate or the Editors Feature Service included some long runners. Brick Bradford, by William Ritt and Clarence Gray, launched in 1933 and ran until 1987, a science-fiction adventure strip about a time-traveling hero that became the company's most famous creation. Etta Kett, by Paul Robinson, a flapper-era humor strip taken over from the Putnam Syndicate, ran under Central Press from 1927 until 1974. Muggs McGinnis, later Muggs and Skeeter, by Wally Bishop, ran from 1927 to 1974. Big Sister, by Les Forgrave and later Bob Naylor, ran from 1928 to 1972, and The Old Home Town, by Lee and Harriet Stanley, from 1923 to 1966.
Shorter-lived properties included Chip Collins Adventures and Frank Merriwell's Schooldays, both associated with William Ritt, who wrote sports features and strips for the company and may have ghosted on the Merriwell feature; High Pressure Pete by George Swanson; The Figgers Family and Jimmy Jams by Victor E. Pazmiño; Goofey Movies by Fred Neher; and the panel Just Among Us Girls, created for the Editors Feature Service. William H. Ritt's dual role as sports writer and strip writer was typical of the versatile staff men on whom mid-sized syndicates depended.
Features, Columns and Sports
Beyond comics, Central Press distributed Lulu Hunt Peters's Diet and Health column, an early and influential newspaper health feature; Madame Rubinstein's Beauty column; Dr. Gary C. Myers's psychology series; Jess Cargill's editorial cartoons; Wil Davey's Hocus Pocus; and News Notes From Movieland, a Sunday movie column written under the Daisy Dean pseudonym that ran from 1916 to about 1936. Opinion offerings included Grove Patterson's The Way of the World, Patterson being editor of the Toledo Blade, along with features titled Who's Who, Timely Views and The Grab Bag.
Its sports department included writers Norman E. Brown, William H. Ritt, Jack Sords and Al Winfield, and Sords also contributed the Sport Side-Lights feature. Sports was a dependable syndicate category: smaller papers that could not staff national sports coverage could buy informed, ready-made copy, and Central Press's Cleveland base sat in the middle of the era's passionate Midwestern sports market.
Later Years Under King Features
Murray Rosenblatt served as managing editor of Central Press from 1946 to 1961, succeeding Frank McLearn in the managing editor's chair. The company marked its fiftieth birthday in 1960 with a celebration noted by the trade press, a considerable lifespan for a firm founded when syndication was young. Through the postwar decades it continued producing material for small-town newspapers, a niche the larger King Features list did not serve as directly.
Central Press finally ceased operations in 1971, sixty-one years after its founding and forty-one years after its sale to Hearst. Its surviving strips, by then syndicated directly by King Features for more than thirty years, were unaffected in practical terms; what ended was the separate Cleveland division and its small-paper service identity.
Legacy
The Central Press Association's legacy rests on scale, longevity and Brick Bradford. It demonstrated that a syndicate founded outside New York could reach twelve million daily readers and lead the country in picture service, that celebrity journalism by figures such as Bryan and Addams could be syndicated as a feature, and that a well-run regional service could remain useful to a national owner for four decades after acquisition. Its founder's parallel creation of the McNaught Syndicate also makes Central Press a hinge point in syndication history, connecting the Cleveland and New York branches of one newspaperman's career.
