start=DESPITE DEPRESSION, JOHNSON DRIVED OBSERVER ONWARD
Curtis B. Johnson was a stout, millionaire businessman who rolled his own cigarettes - and did a poor job of that - and who, even when sitting at his desk, wore a hat to cover his baldness. But of all the men and women who helped build The Observer, he probably did the most. He owned the newspaper and was publisher from 1916 until his death in 1950. What he did during the Depression, perhaps more than anything else, paved the way for The Observer's great growth.
During the Depression, newspapers, like most other enterprises, cut back on every sort of expenditure. But Johnson's earlier newspaper investments had prospered, and he had been highly successful in the stock market and gotten out just before the 1929 crash. So as other newspapers economized, Johnson poured money into The Observer. He added to the staff, expanded news coverage, modernized the mechanical department and increased the number of news columns. His boldness paid off. The Observer gained a lead over The Charlotte News and other area newspapers it never relinquished.
Johnson entered the business running. After attending several business colleges in his native Tennessee, he persuaded the publisher of The Knoxville Sentinel, which had no salesmen, to let him sell advertising. In his first week Johnson sold a 1,000-inch contract to a business that had never advertised. That was in 1897. Johnson was 22, and on his way.
He saved his money and began buying Sentinel stock. Thirteen years later he owned the newspaper and was publisher. In 1916, after some shrewd bargaining with Word Wood and George Stephens, two Charlotte bankers who owned The Observer, Johnson bought the Charlotte newspaper for $125,000 - his price, not theirs. He persuaded Walter B. Sullivan, publisher of The Columbia Record, to come to Charlotte as president, general manager and part owner of The Observer. Sullivan died in 1921, and three years later Johnson sold The Sentinel, moved to an apartment in the then-new Hotel Charlotte and ran The Observer with keen attention to the smallest detail.
He knew costs and revenues to the penny, and if he didn't, and asked one of his executives, they had better have the answer. He personally hired many employees, even those well below the managerial level. The paper did well, and in 1927 it moved from its outgrown quarters in the first block of South Church Street to a new structure Johnson built at Stonewall and South Tryon streets, where The Observer is still published.
His long, narrow office was on the mezzanine, and anyone going to see him had what seemed an interminable walk to his desk at the other end, subject all the while to Johnson's intense and often cold scrutiny.
There, he ran The Observer. Sitting silently - always with his hat on - sometimes nearly hidden behind papers piled on his desk, dressed in dark, vested suits with a gold watch chain across his front, he would let ashes trail down his vest from cigarettes he had ineptly rolled from a sack of Bull Durham tobacco. "He was a hard taskmaster, no doubt about that," said Eudora Garrison, Johnson's secretary for 19 years. "But I was always impressed by his mind, his ethics and his honesty. In 19 years, I was never disappointed in his ethics. He was totally fair and honest. "And the smartest man I ever met. His mind was just like a steel trap." His acumen afforded him the good life. He drove a Cadillac, although not as adroitly as he ran newspapers. He often journeyed to New York, where for a time he had lived at the Waldorf-Astoria. He built a large house on the Catawba River at what is now River Hills on Lake Wylie, and he and his wife, the former Irving Harding McGeachy, lived there for a while. Later, they moved to her comfortable house on Pembroke Avenue in Myers Park.
He was a shrewd businessman. Some said he was tightfisted; others, using a saying popular at the time, declared him "tight as Dick's hatband." But privately, Johnson helped more people survive the desperate times of the Depression than anyone will ever know. Only occasionally did word leak of his benevolences to those in dire straits - a ton of coal here, a week's groceries there, medicine for someone who couldn't afford it, temporary shelter for a family tossed out on the sidewalk with all they owned. For many of his employees and others throughout Charlotte, Johnson signed the notes that enabled them to buy a house or car, pay for an operation or start a business.
One thing he did publicly, a move he often told friends and associates had brought him great pleasure and happiness, was to establish The Charlotte Observer Fresh Air Camp on 115 acres beside the Catawba River. Every summer it provided a two-week vacation for 500 underprivileged boys who had never known a vacation. In time, the camp grew so large he felt it needed professional management. He gave it, and $98,000 for operating expenses, to the Charlotte YMCA, which renamed it Camp Thunderbird and still operates it.
Curtis B. Johnson was a man of verve and vision, but in one respect he was severely nearsighted - he continued to underestimate The Observer's impending growth. The South Tryon Street building the newspaper occupied in 1926 was to have sufficed for 50 years. But 13 years later it was packed tight as Dick's hatband with workers, machines and newsprint. Plans were made to expand. The press that in 1926 was to have had sufficient capacity for years and years was inadequate 11 years later and was replaced. Ten years later, the new press was too small.
When Johnson bought The Observer in 1916 its circulation was 12,900. When he died, in October 1950, the daily circulation was 135,473. Five years later the newspaper was sold to Knight Newspapers for $7 million.