Ninety years ago today, businessman and newspaper mogul Paul Block, Sr., took control of The Toledo Blade — the city’s oldest and greatest newspaper since its founding in 1835.

Mr. Block — grandfather of John Robinson Block, The Blade’s publisher and editor-in-chief, and his brother, Allan Block, chairman of the newspaper’s parent company Block Communications Inc. — was introduced to the newspaper staff on Aug. 30, 1926.

That date in 1926 “will long be remembered by us as the beginning of a new era of good will in our association with the Toledo Blade,” stated an advertisement printed the next day in the newspaper, listing the names of all of the newspaper’s employees.

IN PICTURES: The Toledo Blade Building through the years

“We have been around Toledo during happy times and very difficult times,” said John Robinson Block. “We are an institution — the oldest business in Toledo — and we are a news organization that wants people to know if you read it in The Blade, you can believe it.”

Allan Block said his family is honored to have been the owners of The Blade for 90 years.

“That is an accomplishment that very few family businesses have realized, to continuously operate something in the same geographic location for 90 years,” Allan Block said.

Both Block brothers, the sons of Paul Block, Jr., acknowledged the challenging transformation in the newspaper’s evolution from providing news to readers solely in a print edition to now providing that information through the newspaper and multiple electronic platforms. 

THE BLADE VAULT: Buy high-quality copies of Blade photos, including a Blade Building print

Even though print circulation has fallen over the years as it has at other newspapers, The Blade is now read by more readers than ever because of the many ways to access the content written by Blade writers and editors — from the newspaper to the eBlade, to cell phone apps, and multiple news and sports websites.

Today, the Block family still owns The Blade (the newspaper dropped Toledo from its nameplate in 1960), the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Buckeye Broadband — which are under the umbrella of Block Communications Inc., based in Toledo — as well as television stations and cable and broadband firms in Illinois, Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi, and New Jersey.

Setting type by hand

Two employees are believed to have produced Issue No. 1 of the Toledo Blade in 1835, setting the type by hand and printing the newspaper one sheet at a time on a hand-powered Smith patent press.

The Toledo Blade that Paul Block, Sr., acquired in 1926 was famous around the United States as the newspaper publishing the popular Nasby Letters and for its influential national weekly edition that — so it was claimed — sent at least one copy to every post office in the country. The Nasby Letters were the creation of David Ross Locke, who became editor and then acquired The Blade after the Civil War. It was the estate of his son, Robinson Locke, which sold The Blade to Mr. Block, Sr.

The Blade has moved 11 times since the first edition was published in a 12-foot by 15-foot room in the back of the Toledo post office along Summit Street in 1835. Exact details on some of the early locations for the paper are vague, partly because the downtown street numbering system was changed in 1888.

Records generally indicate that Blade offices during the newspaper’s first four decades were on Summit Street, between Monroe and Jackson streets. Most references to The Blade’s location are to the area around Summit and Madison Avenue, about where the Toledo Trust Building now stands.

Author Frank Brady, who wrote a biography of Paul Block, Sr., which was published in 2001, described Mr. Block’s initial involvement as owner of The Toledo Blade as “a drama worthy of a film noir classic, complete with forged identities, hard-boiled detectives, underworld thugs, a hotel rendezvous, a mysterious woman, secret meetings, a double-cross, and a nighttime office break-in to photograph secret documents.”

Mr. Block, Sr., born into poverty in East Prussia to a family that had arrived from even more wretched conditions in Lithuania, moved with his family to Elmira, N.Y., in 1885 at the age of 9 — speaking little English.

Within a few decades, he had become a multimillionaire New York City advertising executive and newspaper publisher and a major national force shaping advertising, journalism, newspaper publishing, and politics in this country. He was the only American publisher who was close to William Randolph Hearst.

Mr. Block, Sr., was involved with The Toledo Blade before buying it in 1926. In 1908, a firm he created in New York City began representing the paper for national advertising sales.

Paper’s present home

The newspaper’s present home, its 12th in downtown Toledo, is the site it has occupied since May, 1927 — roughly one year after the newspaper was purchased by Mr. Block, Sr., for $4.5 million. That sum had the same buying power in 1926 as $61.1 million does today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The move to the current newspaper office, an imposing gray stone building on Superior Street at Orange Street, was accomplished over a weekend without missing an edition, and on May 2, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge used a telegraph key in the White House to activate the first press run in the new building.

In August, 1930, Mr. Block, Sr., purchased the former Toledo Times, and in 1938 when the former Toledo News Bee closed, he bought the Bee’s circulation list and library.

“Toledo was seen as an up-and-coming place and that is why my grandfather was attracted to it,” John Robinson Block said.

Several major milestones highlight the nine decades of Block control of the newspaper.

John Harrison, author of The Blade of Toledo, a biography of the newspaper written for the 150th anniversary of its founding in 1985, pointed out that The Toledo Blade under the ownership of the senior Paul Block recognized the futility of the Prohibition Amendment and was a leading force in the early 1930s for repeal of the 18th Amendment.

The newspaper supported the switch to city manager government in the 1930s, but by the 1950s the newspaper became editorially disillusioned with that form of city government.

John Robinson Block said no one in the newspaper industry during his father’s era could have predicted the Internet or what it would do to print subscriptions, but noted that his father was a visionary concerning the delivery of news.

“My father knew the day would come when a newspaper would be transmitted over a cable — a wire,” he said. “He talked about that in the ’60s … he was usually so far ahead of the times no one could follow. He thought there would be some device in your home that could print the paper.”

Mr. Block, Sr., died on June 21, 1941, after having been publisher for 15 years.

His son, Paul Block, Jr., a practicing chemist, became publisher in 1942, while his other son, William Block, took over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Contact Ignazio Messina at: imessina@theblade.com or 419-724-6171 or on Twitter @IgnazioMessina.

First Published August 30, 2016, 4:00 a.m.