Lloyd Ballhagen, Last of the Harris greats
Into the Night
By John Marshall
In the days of big telephones on office desks, he answered with a soft voice: “This is Ballhagen.” Or if he were busy, just “Ballhagen.” He had a gentle baritone that rolled out clipped sentences, not a word wasted, the mark of assurance and authority.
The quiet manner and measured speech disguised certain skills. For years, Lloyd Ballhagen led one of the state’s great media companies with one eye on the books, the other on the horizon and both hands on the wheel. Ballhagen, the Kansas newspaper executive who joined Harris Enterprises in 1958 and advanced to become the company’s president and chairman, died early Monday, Sept. 28, in Hutchinson. He was 89.
In 1972, after assignments to several newspapers, Ballhagen became general manager at Harris Enterprises, the Hutchinson-based company that ultimately would operate a dozen newspapers and 13 radio stations in Kansas and six other states – Nebraska, Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Colorado and California. He became president (1978), president and CEO (1984), and in 1992, chairman and CEO.
Like his predecessors, Ballhagen shunned trappings. Corporate headquarters was a small suite on the sixth floor of a bank building. An assistant was at a desk in the reception area. The office of John Lee, company president, was about the size of a small bedroom; Ballhagen’s was just enough for a conference table and his desk. They shared phone duty atop a $200 million corporation.
Ballhagen was devoted to the Group’s potent and fiercely independent newspapers, cultivating fiery editors who gave their newspapers spunk and drive. Some of them were nationally, even globally known. Peter Macdonald, Ballhagen’s predecessor at the top, had been a president of the American Press Institute. Stuart Awbrey at Hutchinson, Whitley Austin in Salina and John McCormally in Burlington, Ia., were Pulitzer Prize jurors; Austin had been chairman of the Kansas Board of Regents; they were charter founders of the International Press Institute.
Ballhagen was tall and fit, a former Marine Corps heavyweight boxing champion and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate at the University of South Dakota. He was editor of the student newspaper, and president of the Independent Student Association and the Greek and Latin Honorary Society. He had physical presence and was a scholar, and without a speck of pretension.
He managed enormously talented, and sometimes volatile, men and women. His style was to encourage the skills and expertise of bright people and turn them loose. At times, Ballhagen’s limits were tested, times that he reserved for the rare “private discussion.”
Editors and publishers who worked for Ballhagen were never given direct orders. There were guidelines and suggestions; hard commands were rare. “Our publishers and editors are autonomous. That is exactly what it means,” he said many times.
In return for this license, Ballhagen expected them to use their heads, to have a sense of decency and to remember the reader. A change at your paper may make it easier for editors to do their work, but will it be better for the reader? he’d ask.
Enraged subscribers would call headquarters and ask Ballhagen to do something about the editor of their paper. We advise our editors, he would say, but we don’t order them.
Ballhagen carried an uncanny ability to harness the wild energies of creative people, encouraging them to dream and to put those dreams, if only remotely possible, into action.
“Let’s try it,” he would say. “The worst that can happen is that it won’t work. Then we’ll try something else.”
He understood the occasional frailties in talented people. There were times when those who worked for him made enormous and sometimes tragic mistakes – some of them public, personal and embarrassing. But Ballhagen understood that a person’s capability for greatness came with the potential to err. His sanction of the second chance inspired deep loyalties.
He rarely, if ever, raised his voice.
With his death, an era has passed. The old editors and their newspapers are gone.
In late 2016, the last remnants of the Harris Group were sold to a hedge fund owned by a Japanese multinational conglomerate.
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I last saw Lloyd Ballhagen at Christmastime, at a restaurant in Hutchinson. It was a holiday dinner, an annual gathering for a few old and retired former Harris employees. Cheer and good will moved up and down our long table. Stories were told, old episodes revisited, politics argued. Ballhagen was at one end, chatty and attentive. Even with his head cocked to accommodate bad hearing (he was 88, then), he sat higher than the others.
The event wound down, the adieus began. Lloyd stood, tall and fit, shoulders square. He tipped his trademark Stetson, wished us a Merry Christmas, walked down the hall and through the doorway and out, into the night.
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Thank you for that John. This brought tears to my eyes. He really valued the relationship he had with you.
Excellent memory of one of the “old timers” from the boon times of newspapering. My dad was a Harris guy also and he often shares stories with me about those years in the business. Unfortunately, I was an editor and publisher during the backside of the days when the local newspaper commanded respect, all because hedge funds ultimately squeezed the very life out of the community’s heartbeat.