Interviewee: John B. Oakes Interviewer: Kenneth Leish Date: February 17, 1961 Part I, Session #1

This is an interview with John B. Oakes, winner of the 1961 Catherwood Award for responsible and enlightened international journalism.

Mr. Oakes, could we begin perhaps by talking about your earliest interests in journalism?

Oakes:

I was born on April 23rd, 1913. My earliest interests in journalism came about because of my family background. I’d heard about newspapers and journalism from the time that I was old enough to first understand anything, I guess. My father was at the time I was born the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and he just about two years later left the Ledger, which was then owned by Cyrus H.K. Curtis, and came to New York to edit a magazine which was then being started under the aegis of the New York Times, called Current History Magazine. He in effect started it and was its editor until his death. It still exists, but under totally different ownership. He was editor of Current History Magazine from 1915. It started originally as a repository for documents and for authoritative articles dealing with the First World War and then it expanded into general political articles during and after the War until his death in 1931. It was published through this period by the New York Times but as a totally independent magazine.

And so, of course, with that background, obviously, I heard, lived and breathed newspapers right from the beginning, and various aspects of journalism. At school I was interested enough in the subject so that I remember starting a school newspaper in my first year of high school with the rather grandiloquent title of "The S-1 Criterion" ["S-1" being the designation of the class]. Some of my classmates, one of whom had a hand-printing set, and I organized this paper and put it out for, as nearly as I can remember, the better part of the year, perhaps even longer, on a bi-weekly basis. Anyway we got out a little paper which dealt with school news, school affairs, some fiction, and so forth. The school, I should mention, was the Collegiate School in New York, on West 77th Street, where I went from first grade right through to the last.

Did you do any summer work on your father’s magazine?

Oakes:

No, I never did that. The only thing I ever did for his magazine, I remember was once designing a cover for it, which rather pleased him. But I never did any work for it. I did immediately, though, of course, as soon as there was an opportunity, go out for the school annual, called the Dutchman-- this was a school originally founded by the Dutch, by the way--and I worked on that and was editor of that in my senior year. And when I went to Lawrenceville for a year, I was on the Lawrenceville paper. I was only at Lawrenceville one year, really to fill in before going to college. I was on the Lawrenceville paper and on the yearbook also for that one year, and then as soon as I got to Princeton, I went out for the Princetonian, for the daily paper at Princeton. I didn’t make it the first time; I did make it the second time I tried. We had competitions lasting several weeks at a time. And I was on the Princetonian during the rest of my college career, which was certainly my major extracurricular activity, and ended up being the, what they called, editorial chairman of the Princetonian, which meant being in charge of the editorial page. So my school career was full of journalism, too. Meanwhile, I, naturally, had it all in the family background.