Slowly but surely the cattle barons of the young commonwealth began to crush the Leader. The owners of the Leader held on and starved until they saw that the "little fellow" got a square deal, and then Mr. Carroll and his family went to Denver.
In Denver he took charge of the moribund Denver Post and built it up to be the greatest newspaper in Colorado. It was while here that he gave the greatest negro poet of the world, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, his first real start. Later he took charge of the Times and still later became statistician for the Colorado Fuel & Iron company. Then he decided to come to the Pacific coast as editor of the Oregon Daily Journal of Portland.
Was 59 Years Old.
But before the folk of Oregon met him, John Francis Carroll had led a most active life. Born June 1858, he worked as a breaker boy in the coal mines near his native town. His mother died when he was a lad, and he and his only brother, the late Bishop Carroll, were reared by an aunt. Both parents of the children were natives of Ireland.
John F. Carroll's first newspaper work was as a reporter on the Pottsville, Pa., Evening Chronicle. He reported for his paper nearly all of the famous Molly McGuire cases; 17 of these men were hanged, and the young Chronicle representative witnessed nearly all of these executions. He never talked about them in after years.
His early newspaper work was done in order to make money to attend medical college. He had been a student at the Pennsylvania Normal school, but teaching was not to his liking. Entering the medical department of the Western Reserve university at Cleveland, he studied there for some time but was compelled to quit because his eyes failed him. He never again took up the study of medicine, which he had decided to take as a preliminary course to the study of surgery.
Before going to Cleveland, John F. Carroll worked on the Missouri Republican, at St. Louis; he was city editor of the Omaha Bee in 1880–1, when the elder Rosewater was struggling to make this paper live. Mr. Carroll used jokingly to tell how his employer would go down the alleys and by paths on his way to and from the office in order to dodge printers and other creditors.
Rose Festival and Public Market.
Mr. Carroll came to Portland in August, 1903. In May, 1906, he was made editor and publisher of the Evening Telegram. It was an editorial he wrote for the Telegram that started the annual Rose Festival. He was ever active for civic betterment, the fight he made for a public market having been won after several years of hard work. As a token of his labors, when the market was at last established it was named the Carroll public market.
He was a great reader; the best of all literature he knew—classics, history and biography, the sciences, and for light reading, mystery stories. He was a lover of all the fine arts, and his knowledge of painting and porcelain, of etchings and rugs, of gems and tapestries, was far above that of the student layman.
He was a member of the Scottish Rite Masons and the Mystic Shrine.
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