| The Boston Post | |
| Type: | Daily newspaper |
| Format: | Broadsheet |
| Foundation: | 1831 |
| Ceased Publication: | 1956 |
| Owners: | Post Publishing Company (former) |
| Language: | English |
| Headquarters: | 42 Congress Street Boston, Massachusetts Corner Devonshire & Water Streets Boston, Massachusetts 15–17 Milk Street Boston, Massachusetts 259 Washington Street Boston, Massachusetts United States |
The Boston Post was a daily newspaper in New England for over a hundred years before its final shutdown in 1956. The Post was founded in November 1831 by two prominent Boston businessmen, Charles G. Greene and William Beals.[1] [2]
Edwin Grozier bought the paper in 1891. Within two decades, he had built it into easily the largest paper in Boston and New England. Grozier suffered a total physical breakdown in 1920, and turned over day-to-day control of the Post to his son, Richard. Upon Edwin's death in 1924, Richard inherited the paper. Under the younger Grozier, The Boston Post grew into one of the largest newspapers in the country. At its height in the 1930s, it had a circulation of well over a million readers. At the same time, Richard Grozier suffered an emotional breakdown from the death of his wife in childbirth from which he never recovered.
Throughout the 1940s, facing increasing competition from the Hearst-run papers in Boston and New York and from radio and television news, the paper began a decline from which it never recovered.
When it ceased publishing in October 1956, its daily circulation was 230,000.[3]
From 1904 through 1916, "Sunday Magazine" was a regular syndicated supplement to Sunday editions of newspapers in various cities across the United States, including The Boston Post, The Philadelphia Press, New-York Tribune, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Republic, Detroit Free Press, and Minneapolis Journal.[7] The supplement in Boston was initially titled "Sunday Magazine of the Boston Sunday Post"; later, as "Boston Sunday Post Sunday Magazine". The regular 20-page periodical has a magazine-like format that is essentially identical to the versions that accompanied other major newspapers in the early 1900s, featuring the same cover illustration, articles, short stories, serials, and advertisements.[7] [8]
In 1909, under the ownership of Edwin Grozier, The Boston Post engaged in its most famous publicity stunt. The paper had 700 ornate, ebony-shafted, gold-capped canes made and contacted the selectmen in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island towns. The Boston Post Canes were given to the selectmen with the request that the canes be presented in a ceremony to the town's oldest living man. The custom was expanded to include a community's oldest women in 1930. More than 500 towns in New England still carry on the Boston Post Cane tradition with the original canes they were awarded in 1909.[10]
According to H. W. Fowler, the first recorded instance of the term O. K. was made in the Boston Morning Post of 1839.[11]