It’s not news to say that George Eastman exercised a lot of influence during his lifetime in Rochester; it would be almost impossible to imagine anyone doing so to a greater degree.
Even so, while in the archives* the other day I stumbled upon a measure of that influence that took me by surprise: the main story of his life to appear in the Democrat and Chronicle on March 15, 1932, the day after his death by suicide — almost certainly the single biggest breaking news story in the city’s history — was submitted in advance by none other than George Eastman himself.
The story comes from a lecture that Harold Sanford, the newspaper’s longtime editor, gave to the Fortnightly Club in February 1949. He’d been in local journalism for nearly 40 years at that point and was invited to give some remarks on his career and how the profession had changed.
Here’s what Sanford said:
Preparation for [Eastman’s] possible death had been my worry for three or four years before — when he went on his first African trip. He was Rochester’s first and greatest citizen. His death would be our biggest story. The manner in which it came made it still more important.
While he was on that trip I spent what time I could putting together a sketch of his life, his business and his philanthropies, mainly from the bulky envelopes of clippings we had filed away. On his return one of our reporters who knew him well took them out for him to read. He didn’t like the personal sketch — possibly because it included a sentence suggesting that since his father had conducted a business school he had inherited a spark of business ability from him.
“What you want,” he told the reporter, “is something you can print when I die. All right, I’ll have something prepared.”
A few months later Lewis. B Jones came in with the main personal sketch we finally used. It was well written, factual, interesting. Jones had been picked out of the Democrat’s staff years before to be the Eastman advertising manager. …
His sketch … [was] set in type, cast in three sets of matrices and put in different spots so that if one set was damaged the others would be available.
The day of Mr. Eastman’s death we cleared all advertising from pages 2, 3, and 4, used the pages prepared and the whole first page for the main story of his death, and tributes that came from all over the country.
To Sanford’s credit, he was clear about the attribution in an italicized note on the front page of the March 15, 1932 edition. He named Jones as “vice-president of the Kodak Company, and one of Mr. Eastman’s most intimate associates.”
Here’s the front page and the second page, on which the six left-hand columns make up the beginning (!) of Jones’ piece, headlined (in all capital letters) “George Eastman made photography simpler and aided fellow man.”
Sanford’s aside about Eastman’s father and namesake, George Washington Eastman, is telling. There is other evidence that the younger Eastman begrudged his father, a horticulturalist and business school director who died in April 1862, when Eastman was 7 years old. The father’s death forced his wife, Eastman’s beloved mother Maria, to take in boarders. George Eastman dropped out of school at age 13 to earn money for the family.
Lawrence Bachmann, who wrote an unpublished biography of Eastman in the 1970s based on dozens of interviews with people who’d known him, reported he was “reticent” on the topic. Elizabeth Brayer, author of his definitive biography, said that Eastman reportedly “harbored resentments toward his father, particularly for the debts he had incurred,” and that, “throughout his adult life, he would bristle if someone sought to insert ‘Washington’ as his middle name.”
The father, dead in Eastman’s young childhood, surely would merit no more than a passing mention in his obituary 60 years later. The fact that it piqued Eastman even in his old age shows how that early trauma stayed with him.
Whether the reader in this case was worse off for getting a news obituary written by a public relations man is hard to say. It’s inconceivable that even the most contrary staff reporter would have written anything other than pure hagiography; such was Eastman’s stature in Rochester. More interesting to me, though, is the fact that the daily newspaper brought a pre-written obituary to Eastman for his approval; took his rejection as a final editorial decision; and then accepted a pre-written piece by Eastman’s own PR man.
*The Sanford speech is located in Box 144 of the City Historian’s papers at the Rochester Public Library Local History Division. It is titled “Reflections, Personal and Otherwise, on a Forty–Year Residence in Rochester,” and was delivered Feb. 15, 1949.