Background
Gardner Cowles Jr. was born on January 31, 1903, in Algona, Iowa, United States; the son of Gardner and Florence M. (Call) Cowles. Known to all as Mike, he came from a family of newspapermen and socially conscious community leaders.
2507 University Ave, Des Moines, IA 50311, USA
In 1942 Mike studied at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, United States. He became a Doctor of Laws.
In 1957 Mike studied at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. He became a Doctor of Laws.
300 Pulteney St, Geneva, NY 14456, USA
In 1968 Mike studied at Colleges of Hobart and William Smith in Geneva, New York, United States. He received a Doctor of Laws degree.
30 Campus Rd, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504, USA
In 1950 Mike studied at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, United States. He became a Doctor of Humane Letters.
Gardner Cowles Jr. was born on January 31, 1903, in Algona, Iowa, United States; the son of Gardner and Florence M. (Call) Cowles. Known to all as Mike, he came from a family of newspapermen and socially conscious community leaders.
Gardner was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. He received honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Drake University, in 1942, Сое College, in 1948, Long Island University, in 1955, Grinnell College, in 1957, and the Colleges of Hobart and William Smith, in 1968. He was awarded honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from Bard College, in 1950, Cornell College, in 1951, and Mundelein College, in 1968. He received honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from Iowa Wesleyan College, in 1955, and Morningside College, in 1958, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Simpson College, in 1955.
Mr. Cowles returned to Iowa in the mid-1920s to begin his career at The Des Moines Register and Tribune, the newspaper base established by his father. The Register's financial success made possible the Cowles family's expansion into other areas of communications.
Cowles and his older brother, John, aggressively acquired radio stations during the 1930s, and in 1935 the family bought The Minneapolis Star and John Cowles moved to Minneapolis to manage it. During this period he became persuaded that a national picture magazine could be a great success, in part because of opinion polls by George Gallup, then a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Henry Luce, the founder of Time, had a similar idea.
Luce's magazine was Life, started in 1936, and Mr. Cowles's was Look, which came out in early 1937. Both magazines quickly became successful and bitter rivals, prompting Mr. Luce to buy stock in Look.
Though originally published in Des Moines as a monthly picture magazine, Look soon switched to biweekly publication and in 1940 moved its corporate headquarters to New York. Cowles, however, continued to supervise its operations from Des Moines, where he managed the family paper.
During World War II Mr. Cowles took a leave from publishing to become deputy director of the Office of War Information. After the war, he left Des Moines for New York to devote his full energies to Look, though he retained the title of president of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company.
In the next two decades, Mr. Cowles started a number of unsuccessful magazines, including Quick, a pocket-sized news digest that failed because advertisers did not like its size, and Flair, a chic and lavishly produced women's magazine that was guided by Mr. Cowles's third wife, Fleur Fenton. Flair foundered after being hailed as ahead of its time.
Among the other publications started by Mr. Cowles that proved to be costly failures were Venture, a hard-cover travel magazine, and The Suffolk Sun, a daily newspaper intended to share the Long Island market with Newsday. But there were also very successful investments.
In 1959, Mr. Cowles founded Puerto Rico's first English-language daily, The San Juan Star, and it won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing during its first year. Later he bought the monthly supermarket magazine Family Circle for $3.5 million in stock, as well as several newspapers and television stations. Other acquisitions included television stations in Memphis and Orlando, Fla., several Florida newspapers, and Florida real estate.
In the mid-1960s, Look, which had become more a feature publication with photographs than a picture book, passed its rival Life in circulation, reaching 8.5 million.
Cowles Communications, the corporation created by Mr. Cowles that was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, reached its peak in the late 1960s. At that time its holdings included Look, Family Circle, a group of trade magazines, a cluster of small newspapers in Florida, television stations in Orlando-Daytona Beach, Fla., Memphis and Des Moines, a cable television system, and the Cambridge Book Company, a book publisher.
But at the same time television's seizure of the national advertising that had been Look's principal source of revenue prompted a financial crisis at the magazine and at other mass-market magazines: Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and Life.
To keep Look operating, Mr. Cowles sold several of the company's other properties, including Family Circle, Florida newspapers, a book division, and the Memphis television station, to The New York Times Company for about 23 percent of the Times company's outstanding stock. The stock, which had limited voting power, was then valued at $50 million. Mr. Cowles was a director of the Times Company from 1971 to 1974. Despite his efforts, Look continued to lose money, and it stopped publishing in 1971. A few months later the original weekly Life folded, but it has since been revived as a monthly magazine.
After that, he progressively shed his business responsibilities, and in 1978 he dissolved Cowles Communications, the umbrella corporation for the companies he had assembled around Look. The block of New York Times stock was dispersed among the many stockholders of Cowles Communications. In recent years Mr. Cowles devoted himself mainly to overseeing the Cowles Charitable Trust, which had a net worth of $11 million.
Associates described Mr. Cowles as a man who leavened seriousness about the quality of his publications and his interests in the arts, politics and many other fields with a sense of fun and offbeat humor.
For many years he kept in his living room the Cardiff Giant, a stone statue once viewed by experts as evidence that a race of giants once roamed North American, though it was exposed later as a hoax. He also took wry pride in the fact that each of his three divorces was announced on the front page of The Register and Tribune.
Gardner married Helen Curtis, in November, 1926. They divorced in May, 1930. He married Lois Thornburg in May, 1933. They had four children, Lois Cowles Harrison, Kate Cowles Nichols, Gardner III, Jane. This marriage ended in August, 1946 and his third wife became Fleur Fenton on December, 1946. They divorced in November, 1955 and he married Jan Horchstraser (Jan Streate Cox) in May, 1956. They had a daughter, Virginia.