Background

Gibbons was born on July 16, 1887 in Washington, D. C. , the first of three sons and eldest of five children of Edward Thomas and Emma Theresa (Phillips) Gibbons. His paternal grandfather, John Gibbons, a native of County Galway, Ireland, emigrated in 1856 to Georgetown, D. C. , where he developed a real estate business. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Phillips, who was born in Penzance, England, settled in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but removed to Washington and became a Treasury Department employee.

Education

When Floyd was eleven he was enrolled as a cadet at Gonzaga College in Washington. He subsequently attended public schools in Des Moines, Iowa, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, to which his father, a produce dealer and promoter of business interests, had taken his family, and the preparatory department of Georgetown University in Washington, from which he was dismissed for a prank in his fourth year of high school.

Career

Returning west, Gibbons secured a job shoveling coal at Lucca, North Dakota, where he helped the editor of the local weekly. Ambitious to be a reporter, he moved to Minneapolis and went to work for the Daily News in 1907. Successive positions on the Milwaukee Free Press (1909), the Minneapolis Tribune (1910), and the Socialist Evening World in Chicago (1912) led him to the Chicago Tribune at the age of twenty-five. In 1914 the Tribune sent him to report troop maneuvers along the Mexican border, and later that year he covered his first battle, an engagement between "Pancho" Villa's forces and those of Carranza in Mexico. Gibbons struck up a friendship with Villa, who outfitted a boxcar for the reporter and attached it to his headquarters train. Later, after Gibbons had agitated for a Pan-American conference on the Mexican question and had produced a series of articles on lack of preparedness in the United States, he was promoted to the Tribune's Washington bureau. In 1916 he reported Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and then accompanied the Pershing punitive expedition as an accredited war correspondent. Thereafter the Gibbons name was synonymous with turbulence. Assigned as London correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, he was aboard the Laconia when it was sunk by a U-boat, February 25, 1917. He was rescued 200 miles off Ireland and taken to Queenstown, where he cabled home a 4000-word account of the disaster which was printed throughout the country and quoted in Congress. On June 13, 1917, he crossed to France with General Pershing's staff. While assisting a wounded officer at the battle of Belleau Wood he suffered severe injuries, including the loss of his left eye; the white patch he wore thereafter became a Gibbons trademark. After a long convalescence he returned to the United States to give war lectures, and these turned into a series of personal triumphs. From 1919 to 1927 Gibbons directed the Tribune's foreign news service for Europe and North Africa and edited its European edition in Paris. He reported the Irish Revolution (1919), Polish-Russian warfare (1920), the French-Riff hostilities (1925), the Polish Revolution (1926), the Chinese-Japanese War (1931 - 32), the Italian-Ethiopian War (1935), and the Spanish Civil War (1936). Among his news exploits were his entry into Soviet Russia, where he wrote about the 1921 famine and secured an exclusive interview with Stalin. His domestic reporting included extensive articles on the depression and the New Deal measures for combating it. From the lecture platform he went into moving pictures, vaudeville, and radio, scoring one of the early radio successes as a news commentator. Employing a staccato delivery to average up to 217 words a minute, he became known as "the fastest talker on the air. " He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two in his farm home, "Cherry Valley, " near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. After a high requiem mass at Georgetown University, he was buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Washington.

Achievements

• One of radio's first news reporters and commentators, Gibbons was famous for a fast-talking delivery style. He lived a life of danger of which he often wrote and spoke.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Red Napoleon (Lost American Fiction)

    ( Published in 1929, this classic social-science-fiction ...)

  • The Red Knight of Germany: The Story of Baron von Richthofen, Germany's Great Wa

    (Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, also widely kno...)

  • The First Border Wall: The Great Militia Mobilization Along the Mexican Border in 1916 (1917)

    (Floyd Phillips Gibbons (1887 – 1939) was the war correspo...)

  • The Red Knight of Germany: The Story of Baron von Richthofen (War & Warriors Series)

    (This well written book presents the thrilling story of Ma...)

  • And They Thought We Wouldn't Fight

    (hardcover still in shrink wrap.)

  • the Red Knight of Germany

Connections

Gibbons's marriage to Isabelle Pherrman of Minneapolis (1914) ended in divorce ten years later. There were no children.

Father:

Edward Thomas Gibbons

Mother:

Emma Theresa Phillips

Spouse:

Isabelle Pherrman

References

• Floyd Gibbons,: Knight of the air,
• Adventurer Floyd Gibbons: Eye Street’s Eyewitness to History
• Floyd Gibbons, Your Headline Hunter: A Biography