Carmage Walls

"Spend less money than you take in." Carmage Walls’s formula for making a profit was, by his own admission, ridiculously simple. What he really made, though, was opportunity. And he offered it to the dozens of young newspaper publishers and owners he mentored.

He left school in the tenth grade to help support his family. His newspaper career began at age 15, catching papers as they came off the press at The Orlando Sentinel-Star. After taking correspondence courses, he worked his way up to a job as the paper’s bookkeeper and so impressed his superiors he was made general manager of the Macon Telegraph and News in 1932.

"My conception of a newspaper is that it is the greatest force for good or evil in a community," he wrote. "We who are fortunate in holding stock in a newspaper I consider but temporary custodians of this service vehicle for the community. By our ownership of the stock, we also assume tremendous responsibilities, first to the public that we serve, second to the employees, and lastly to the stockholders."

He was a master at putting newspapers to work for the community. He owned the Montgomery Advertiser with Gene Worrell during the civil rights era and opposed Governor George Wallace’s divisive politics. He also ended the paper’s practice of segregating the news of blacks and whites. Two of Alabama’s four Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – Buford Boone at The Tuscaloosa News and Harold Martin at the Advertiser – had been placed in their positions by Walls.

His acute business sense and remarkable grasp of tax law made him one of the most successful newspapermen in the South. He established for his mentor, Charles E. Marsh, the Public Welfare Foundation (PWF), which owned The Gadsden Times, The Tuscaloosa News, and The Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald Journal, all three of which were later sold by PWF. Walls also owned papers in Enterprise, Florence, and Prattville, founded an investment company, and created the forerunner of Southern Newspapers Inc., which is owned by his family.

Today, Southern Newspapers Inc. owns the Alabama newspapers The Scottsboro Daily Sentinel, The Weekly Post (Rainsville), and The Sand Mountain Reporter (Albertville). Members of the Walls family also own the Fort Payne Times-Journal, the Valley-Times News in Lanett, and the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper.

Walls was proud of the system he developed to buy papers and help young publishers move into ownership. By sharing this system, he launched the careers of seventy-five publishers, twenty-four of whom became millionaires.

He was such a successful businessman – a superb creator of deals and acquisitions – that his dedication to the public interest might be overlooked. But not by those who knew him best. "The truth is that he was a master at putting a newspaper to community service," says Jim Boone.