Louis Bromfield served bravely in WWI. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor for his heroism. After the war he returned to New York City, working as a reporter. His first novel, The Green Bay Tree, received high praise in 1924, and in1927, Early Autumn won the Pulitzer Prize. All 30 of his novels were best-sellers, and many of them, such as The Rains Came and Mrs. Parkington, were made into successful motion pictures.
For the next 13 years, Bromfield and his family lived in France, a country he had come to love during his service in WWI. With WWII approaching, the Bromfield’s moved back to the U.S. Bromfield bought 1,000 acres near his hometown in Mansfield, Ohio. He opened a farm named “Malabar Farm.” For the next 20 years Bromfield continued writing and also developed new organic and self-sustaining gardening practices. Malabar Farm was among the first farms to stop using pesticides, it was a government test site, and was later made into a state park visited annually by 35,000 guests. In the 1980s, Bromfield was elected to the Ohio Agricultural Hall of Fame.
Eugene Field, Sr. was an American writer, best known for his children’s poetry and humorous essays. He was known as the “poet of childhood.” He worked as a journalist for the St. Joseph Gazette in Saint Joseph, Missouri, in 1875 and soon became editor of the Gazette. He became known for his light, humorous articles written in a gossipy style. It was during this time that he wrote the famous poem “Lovers Lane” about a street in St. Joseph, Missouri.
From 1876 through 1880 Field lived in St. Louis, first as an editorial writer for the Morning Journal and subsequently for the Times-Journal. After a brief stint as managing editor of the Kansas City Times, he worked for two years as editor of the Denver Tribune.
In 1883 Field moved to Chicago where he wrote a humorous newspaper column called Sharps and Flats for the Chicago Daily News. Field first started publishing poetry in 1879, when his poem “Christmas Treasures” appeared in A Little Book of Western Verse. Over a dozen volumes of poetry followed and he became well known for his light-hearted poems for children, among the most famous of which are “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “The Duel”. Field also published a number of short stories, including “The Holy Cross” and “Daniel and the Devil.”
Russell W. Freeburg was awarded the bronze star in for advancing alone under enemy fire during his service in World War II as a staff sergeant. He then began his journalism career in 1948 at the City News Bureau of Chicago as a reporter. He then joined the Chicago Tribune in 1950 and stayed there the next seven years, covering a variety of topics.
In 1958 he moved to Washington D.C. to cover the economics beat, the Justice Department, and the White House and presidential political campaigns. He was named the executive director of the Tribune‘s Washington bureau in 1966 and two years later, named the bureau chief. Lastly with the Tribune, Freeburg served as the paper’s managing editor for a year before resigning and returning to Washington.
He has also been a Meet the Press panelist, and was the White House coordinator to President Gerald Ford’s Citizens’ Action Committee to Fight Inflation. Freeburg co-authored Oil & War with Robert Goralski of NBC News, which was published in 1987 and authored There Ought to Be a Place, published in 2001.
Walter Edwin Havighurst was a novelist, and social and literary historian of the Midwest. He was awarded honorary degrees from Lawrence College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Marietta College, and Miami University.
Havighurst taught English at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, from 1928 to 1969 and served interim terms on the faculties of Connecticut College, the University of Colorado and the University of British Columbia. Miami named him Regents Professor of English Emeritus.
Havighurst was the author of over 30 books, including Pier 17, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Annie Oakley of the Wild West. His writing earned awards from the Friends of American Writers, the American Association for State and Local History and the Rockefeller Foundation. River Road to the West received the American History Prize of the Society of Midland Authors.
In 1970, the Walter Havighurst Special Collections at Miami University was established and named in his honor.
Ernest Ingold, business executive; decorated Order of the Crown of Oak (Luxembourg); recipient Silver Keystone award Boys Clubs American. Member San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. (president 1943), United States Chamber of Commerce (director 1945), California Bar Association; member Better Business Bureau (president 1942). Author of Tales of a Peddler (1942) and The House in Mallorca (1952).
Henry King Ketcham, better known as Hank Ketcham, started in the cartoon business as an animator for Walter Lantz and eventually Walt Disney, where he worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and several Donald Duck shorts. During World War II, Ketcham was a photographic specialist with the US Navy Reserve. He also created the character Mr. Hook for the Navy during World War II and four cartoons were made. Also while in the Navy he began a camp newspaper strip, Half Hitch, which ran in The Saturday Evening Post beginning in 1943.
After World War II, he settled in Carmel, California, and began work as a freelance cartoonist. In 1951, he started Dennis The Menace, based on his own four-year-old son Dennis. At the time of Ketcham’s death, Dennis the Menace was distributed to more than 1,000 newspapers in 48 countries and 19 languages. In 1953, he received the Reuben Award for the strip. Ketcham spent his last years painting in oil and watercolor. Many of his paintings can be seen in a hospital in nearby Monterey, California. In this period he also wrote a memoir The Merchant of Dennis the Menace. Fantagraphics Books published Hank Ketcham’s Complete Dennis by Ketcham from the start of the strip, in thick volumes collecting two years per book.
