Barry Bingham, Sr.

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George Barry Bingham, Sr.

George Barry Bingham, Sr., CBE, (February 10, 1906 – August 15, 1988 in Louisville, Kentucky) was the patriarch of a family that dominated local media in Louisville for several decades in the 20th century.

Bingham's family owned a cluster of influential media properties — The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times newspapers, plus WHAS Radio and WHAS Television. The papers had been purchased by his father, Col. Robert Worth Bingham, using proceeds from an inheritance left by his second wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, herself the widow of railroad magnate Henry Flagler.

Bingham attended Harvard University, then went into the family businesses. In 1931, he married Mary Caperton, a Radcliffe graduate. Bingham Sr. took the reins of the company in 1937. At the time, "The C-J" was little more than a Democratic Party organ, but Bingham built it into national prominence, thanks to reporting that was ambitious in scope for a newspaper in a city of Louisville's size. Throughout Bingham's tenure, the editorial voices of the C-J & Times was forthrightly liberal, especially for a fairly conservative (though predominantly Democratic at the time) state like Kentucky. The newspapers were recipients of six Pulitzer Prizes, including one for public service in 1967, plus countless other awards during the Bingham years. The Courier-Journal became the commonwealth's dominant newspaper, a position it retains to this day. He also founded WHAS-TV, the city's second television station, and founded the WHAS Crusade for Children, a telethon broadcast on both the radio and television stations that today collects more than USD 6,000,000 each year for local children's charities. The family also owned Standard Gravure, a rotogravure printing company that printed the newspapers' Sunday magazine section, plus Sunday sections for other newspapers.

In World War II, Bingham served as an officer in the United States Navy, and was twice awarded the Bronze Star. Bingham Sr. was given the rank of Commandeur, Legion d’Honneur, by French government for service. In 1950, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[1] He was a Fulbright lecturer at Oxford University in 1955.

In 1971, Bingham stepped down from day-to-day operations, handing the companies over to his remaining son, Barry Bingham, Jr. Barry Bingham Sr. died on August 15, 1988, at age 82. Barry Bingham Jr. died on April 3, 2006.

Further reading

• Chandler, David Leon with Mary Voelz Chandler (1987). The Binghams of Louisville: The Dark History Behind One of America's Great Fortunes. Crown. ISBN 0-517-56895-0. 
• Brenner, Marie (1988). House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville. Random House. ISBN 0-394-55831-6. 
• Bingham, Sallie (1989). Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-55851-0. 
• Tifft, Susan E. and Alex S. Jones (1991). The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. Summit Books. ISBN 0-671-79707-7. 

See also

• List of Louisvillians
• Worth Bingham Prize, established in memory of Barry Bingham's son, Worth Bingham

References

External links

• "University of Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame bio of Barry Bingham Sr. (1981)". Archived from the original on 2007-03-23. http://web.archive.org/web/20070323071459/http://www.uky.edu/CommInfoStudies/JAT/HallofFame/halloffame/bingham1981.htm. 
• Columbia Journalism Review: The Bingham Saga