A historical account submitted to Peak of Ohio by the Logan County History Center profiles Roy W. Howard, a journalist and newspaper executive whose early years were partly spent in the Logan County village of Rushsylvania.
According to the account, Howard was born in 1883 in Butler County, Ohio, and moved as a young boy to Rushsylvania, his father's hometown. His father, William, had left work on the Big Four Railroad after an injury and opened a restaurant there that sold box lunches to railroad employees. The family stayed only a few years, but the account says Howard's ties to the village lasted.
The account follows his career from selling the Indianapolis News in Indiana to reporting for the same paper, then to the Cincinnati Post in 1905 as a telegraph editor. It says he married Margaret Rohe, a writer, in London in 1909. He was named chairman of the United Press board in February 1912 and became its president in 1914, later serving as a World War I correspondent in Europe.
Howard left United Press in 1920 to become business manager of the Scripps-McRae Group, described as a chain of nineteen publications that was reorganized as Scripps-Howard two years later. The account states the company owned twenty-six newspapers by 1928. He interviewed Josef Stalin in Moscow in March 1936; the Soviet government asked that the interview be distributed through United Press and the Associated Press.
Rushsylvania named an athletic field for him in July 1950. Howard sent $500 toward it and did not attend because he was traveling in South America, according to the account. He visited the village in July 1953, his first trip there in more than thirty years. In 1960, at age 77, he retired from the New York World-Telegram and Sun. The History Center says it offers free tours Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.