PHILLIP H. AULT '35

 Inducted:  October 26, 2001

After graduating from DePauw University in 1935, Phillip Ault took a job as a newspaper reporter with the LaGrange Citizen in Illinois. Two years later, on a 2,200 mile bicycle trip across Europe, he watched first-hand as Germany prepared to go to war against the world. This experience inspired a multi-faceted career in journalism that would span sixty years.

After returning home from Europe, Ault was hired by United Press wire service in Chicago and New York. Transferred to the foreign desk in 1940, he was sent to Iceland and traveled in the first convoy to be escorted by American warships. Ault then went to England and North Africa, where he worked alongside Ernie Pyle, and was eventually transferred back to London as manager of the United Press bureau there. Six years earlier, on the bike trip that changed his life, he could not have imagined that he would find himself wading ashore with the troops at Oran, typewriter held high above his head, or writing press dispatches in the United Press office in London during German bombing raids.

In 1948 Ault left the wire service and the front lines behind to begin a 30-year segment in newspapers. He was founding editorial director of the Los Angeles Mirror-News, then vice-president of Associated Desert Newspapers in southern California. Ault moved to South Bend in 1969 to be associate editor of the Tribune, spending ten years there until his retirement from the newspaper business in 1979.

Ault reporting in Algeria for United Press in 1942-43

In the years after his retirement Ault continued to write, authoring or co-authoring 18 books, including the textbook "Introduction to Mass Communications," which was recently published in a Fortieth Anniversary edition and has been read by over a million students in college classrooms worldwide. He also wrote magazine articles for the Saturday Evening Post and American Heritage, was a college instructor, radio commentator and television host.

In 1998 Phillip Ault was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, honoring a career "of the highest distinction," as a journalist whose "dedication and contribution to journalism have in turn contributed to the regard others have for journalism."

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