Word: leas
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Tennessee's most potent publisher, one of her most potent personalities is big, athletic, round-faced Colonel Luke Lea. At 51 he is already wrapped in a cocoon of legend: the man who, at 32, was the youngest U. S. Senator ever to sit legally; who, a fighting colonel of field artillery, nearly completed an attempt to kidnap the Kaiser from a castle in Holland as a Christmas gift to President Wilson. With Banker-Promoter Rogers Clark Caldwell, he bought the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Appeal (evening) for $3,600,000 in 1927, the Knoxville Journal...
Last week a less glowing chapter in the Lea legend was in the making. Minnesota & Ontario Paper Co. asked receiver-ships for the Tennessee Publishing Co. (Tennesseans) and Southern Publishers, Inc. (Journal, Appeals). A third action by the receiver for Liberty Bank & Trust Co. demanded return of $166,000 obtained by Colonel Lea, his son Vice President Luke Jr. and others "by fraud and connivance." Reason given for the receivership suits: Partners Lea & Caldwell were guilty of "conversion, perversion, waste and misuse" of newspaper funds, and mismanagement of the papers...
...Knoxville and Memphis papers, taken individually, are supposed to be money makers. But the financing was thinly spread and the publishing properties were closely involved with a variety of other Lea-Caldwell activities, notably with Caldwell & Co., investment house, and its subsidiary Bank of Tennessee, which held one-half the stock of Southern Publishers. When, last October the Caldwell businesses began to totter (TIME, Nov. 17, 24) $1,266,310 was drawn from the Commercial Appeal and passed to the Caldwell houses. Few days later the banks crashed and the papers' money was tied up. Aggravating the situation...
...face of the court actions, Colonel Lea again demonstrated himself a fast thinker. To spar for time he moved to transfer the suits from chancery to Federal court. Then he "permitted" friendly receiverships against the individual papers, Memphis Appeals and Knoxville Journal, pending settlement of the action against their holding company. The receivers included executives of the papers...
Liberty Bank's charge of fraud was most emphatically denied by handsome young Luke Lea Jr. in the absence of his father. Young Luke, who looks much like the Colonel, is admiringly called a block chip by his father's friends. Before Luke Jr. was 21, Colonel Lea had a special bill put through the legislature to give him legal majority and qualify him as a responsible business associate...