Newspaper history — Ralph Knight
Early 20th Century Post-Star golf columnist Ralph Knight needed no handicap in the humor category.
“If at first you don’t succeed, putt, putt again,” he wrote in his “The Nineteenth Hole” column published Aug. 12, 1918.
“Inquires among the smartest golf professionals bring out the information that a red golf ball has proved the most popular for use on snow,” he wrote in an Aug. 9, 1918 column.
Golfing on snow might have been a stretch, but Knight would learn about winter golf, defeating Hadden Long on Jan. 2, 1919 in the first match of the debut tournament at the new indoor golf course at Glens Falls Y.M.C.A.
Whether the topic was golf, alarm clocks, Adam and Eve or college life, Knight wrote with wit.
“It is also hard to teach a new dog new tricks,” Knight wrote in his “Private Opinions” column published Feb. 7, 1923.
Knight rose at The Post-Star from part-time sports writer in high school to managing editor in the 1930s and early ‘40s.
There was a short break in his Post-Star career in the early 1920s when he was editor of Chesterfield Magazine of White Plains, N.Y.
He left The Post-Star in Oct. 1, 1944 to work for Saturday Evening Post, first as editor of “Inside Information,” the magazine’s in-house publication, and later was “Back of the Book” editor, in charge of the magazine’s short features.
In February 1946 he was promoted to become associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post.
Post-Star sports editor Frank Garcin in his “Frank-Ly Speaking” column on May 14, 1947, mentioned a Saturday Evening Post article Knight wrote about Enos “Country” Slaughter, outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals.
“Our old boss, Ralph Knight … returns to his first love — sports writing — in his latest effort for the Saturday Evening Post,” Garcin wrote.
On Dec. 30, 1949, The Post-Star reported that Knight had taken up “a new role, that of diagnostician,” in his latest feature story for the magazine.
“Under the title, ‘Hurry, Doc, I Just Sneezed,’ Mr. Knight reveals his own remarkable method for detecting the common cold, an ailment to which he claims universal sensitivity.”
Knight, grandson of the Glens Falls brewer of Knights Ale, is best known locally today for his September 1959 Saturday Evening Post feature story “Money Isn’t Everything,” about growing up on Center Street in Glens Falls.
He wrote the article when Helen Finch Foulds, daughter of Finch, Pruyn & Co. co-founder Jeremiah Finch, died and bequeathed $4.5 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Glens Falls is a city whose folk have always had a genius for doing unusual things in unusual ways. Often wonderfully creative, sometimes tom foolish, their personality is altogether endearing.”
He wrote about the sounds on the city’s East End.
“In my boyhood, when my town was quiet on a spring evening, I used to stand out on the front stoop while the breeze came mellowing from the south and listen with a tingle of fright to the falls, then a freshet, thundering four blocks away. Part of the thundering sound was logs tumbling down.”
He recalled a visit with Charlotte Hyde at her home, which now is The Hyde Collection art museum on Warren Street.
“Out on the street again, one feels like saying to each passer by: Take care of our town, you younger people who are curators for its future, for the quality of its stream of consciousness is so much worth taking care of.”
In 1960, he wrote a Saturday Evening Post article about a hiking trip in the Adirondacks.
Knight, in his younger years, was a musician, composer and actor.
He performed with the Glens Falls High School vocal octet and string quartet, and performed a violin solo at his high school commencement in 1913.
In 1916 he composed the music and wrote the lyrics to the Union College class song.
In 1917 he composed the music to “Come to Balmy Land,” a musical play the Union College Dramatic Association performed.
He attended Columbia School of Journalism.
Knight wrote two books, one about the famous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and another titled “Learning to Talk to the World Beyond” that dealt with the topic of psychic phenomena.
Sources: The Post-Star, March 15, 1912; June 25, 1913; March 10, 13, 1917; Aug. 9, 12, 19, 1918; Jan. 2, June 3, 1919; June 25, 1921; Feb. 7, 1923; Feb. 14, 1946; May 14, 1947; Sept. 26, 1959; Jan. 24, 2004; Glens Falls Times and Messenger, June 14, 1916; Lake George Mirror, Aug. 26, 1960.
