Alfred O. Andersson

Alfred Oscar Andersson (1874–1950) was the publisher of the Dallas Dispatch and, briefly, of the Dallas Dispatch-Journal, daily afternoon newspapers of general circulation published in Dallas, Texas.

Andersson was born in Liverpool, England on December 10, 1874 to Alfred Carolus Andersson, a cotton broker, and Elizabeth Falk Andersson. The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri in the early 1880s. Andersson's father died there soon afterward, and his mother moved the family back to Liverpool and then, in 1884, to Weimar, Germany, where Andersson attended school for five years. His mother married Dr. Henry J. Lampe in 1889 and the family returned to Kansas City. She died in San Antonio, Texas, in 1931 at age seventy-nine, and Dr. Lampe died in 1910.

Andersson's career in newspapers began during his teenage years when he worked at odd jobs around the shop where his stepfather published a German-language newspaper. He wrote and edited campus publications while a student at Princeton University from 1893 to 1895 and then returned to Kansas City to take a job on the Kansas City World, a Scripps-McRae newspaper. He then moved on to reporting and editing jobs on Scripps papers in St. Louis, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois.

In 1898 Andersson reported on the Spanish–American War from Cuba and Puerto Rico for the United Press, which then appointed him manager of the UP's Kansas City bureau. In 1906 he scouted Texas for a suitable location to start a newspaper for Scripps-McRae. According to newspaper lore, he stopped at a downtown Dallas drugstore, noticed it sold fine cigars, and concluded "if those are the cigars the men here favor, this must be a good town." As he contemplated starting a paper in Dallas he learned that another man was in town with the same idea and likewise with Scripps-McRae's tentative promise to back it. Confronting Col. Milton A. McRae, he was told that Scripps-McRae's support would go to the man who got a paper on the street first; Andersson then hastily threw together the four-page first issue of the Dallas Dispatch, deployed boys to sell the paper on the street, and the Dispatch became the Scripps paper in Dallas.

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