William Charles Reick

Background

William Charles Reick was born on September 29, 1864 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was the son of Charles William and Margaret (Turner) Reick.

Education

He received a high-school education with the idea of entering Harvard but instead joined the reportorial staff of the Philadelphia North American at nineteen.

Career

For five years he labored as reporter and correspondent; then his great opportunity came when a dog believed to be mad bit two children in Newark, New Jersey.

Reick was then Newark correspondent for the New York Herald, and his story of the incident led James Gordon Bennett, owner of the paper and always alert for coups, to order that the two children be sent to Paris at the Herald's expense and under the care of the correspondent, to be given the newly discovered Pasteur antitoxin for rabies.

Reick escorted the children to Paris and there met Bennett, who was so impressed with him that he first put him in charge of the London and Paris offices of the paper, and a year later sent him to New York as city editor, which in this case meant managing editor as well - an unusual advance for a man of twenty-five. Perhaps youth gave him confidence, for he assumed a firm and commanding attitude which previous editors had not ventured upon, because of the absentee owner's imperious character.

Reick was city editor of the Herald for fourteen years, and there became known as one of America's great journalists.

When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, the Herald had a fleet of dispatch boats provisioned and ready for service in the Gulf of Mexico, and its own correspondent aboard Dewey's flagship to send in the first full account of the battle of Manila Bay.

In 1903 Bennett made Reick president of the New York Herald Company, publishers of the Herald and the Evening Telegram. But he was unhappy away from the editor's desk, and early in 1907 he resigned and entered the service of the Ochs interests, which controlled the New York Times and Philadelphia Public Ledger. He spent some time with each paper, serving as president of the Public Ledger Company from 1907 to 1912.

In 1911, presumably with the backing of wealthy friends, he bought a controlling interest in the New York Sun, where he remained for ten years and, as other journalists declared, greatly improved the paper. Frank A. Munsey purchased the Sun in 1916, and in 1921 combined it with the Herald. Reick then became president of the company publishing the New York Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, and so continued until 1923.

He died in 1924.

Achievements

• He was decorated by the German Emperor in 1908 with the Order of the Crown of Prussia, second class.

Personality

He had an uncanny scent for news in advance, and ability to trace it to its sources.

Connections

He married Carrie L. Ridgway of Burlington, New Jersey, on December 4, 1894, and they had three daughters.

Father:

Charles William Reick

Mother:

Margaret (Turner) Reick

Spouse:

Carrie L. Ridgway