John Cowles Sr.


John Cowles Sr. was an American newspaper and magazine publisher. He was co-owner of the Cowles Media Company, whose assets included the Minneapolis Star, the Minneapolis Tribune, the Des Moines Register, Look magazine, and a half-interest in Harper's Magazine.

Biography

The son of banker, publisher, and politician Gardner Cowles Sr., John was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University.
In 1922, Cowles launched the Register and Tribune Syndicate.
In 1935, his family acquired the Minneapolis Star; John moved to Minneapolis to manage the paper. Under his leadership, it had the city's highest circulation, pressuring Minneapolis's other newspapers. With his brother Gardner "Mike" Cowles Jr., he was a co-founder of Look magazine, launched in 1937.
In 1939, the Cowles brothers, along with entrepreneur Everett M. "Busy" Arnold, became owners of the newly formed Comic Magazines, Inc., the corporate entity that would publish the Quality Comics comic book line..
That same year, the Cowles family purchased the Minneapolis Evening Journal, merging the Star and the Journal into the Star-Journal. The following year the Cowles family bought the Minneapolis Tribune and merged it with their company, giving it ownership of the city's major newspapers. The Tribune became the city's morning newspaper, the Star-Journal was the evening newspaper, and they published a joint Sunday edition. A separate evening newspaper was spun off, which published until 1948.
To help counteract the agitation against the Vietnam war in the mid-1960s, Cowles served on a committee that included such notables as Arthur H. Dean, Dean Acheson, Eugene R. Black, James B. Conant, Thomas S. Gates, Roswell Gilpatric, David Rockefeller, and John J. McCloy.
His service on boards included the boards of trustees of the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the boards of directors of the First National Bank of Minneapolis and the Equitable Life Insurance Company of Iowa.

Family

His son John Cowles Jr. married the step-daughter of Cass Canfield, the chairman of Harper & Row.