Edward Rumely

Edward Aloysius Rumely (1882–1964) was a physician, educator, and newspaper man from Indiana.

Rumely was born in La Porte, Indiana, in 1882. He attended University of Notre Dame, Oxford University and the University of Heidelberg. He graduated from the University of Freiburg, where he received his M.D. in 1906.

It is said that while he studied in Germany he lived on nuts, herbs and other uncooked foods and wore sandals and scanty clothes, under the influence of views espoused by Leo Tolstoy. But he came back with every appearance of normality and founded the Interlaken School at La Porte, the school where boys did all their own work, from carpentry up.

Rumely married one of the teachers at Interlaken in 1910, Fanny Scott. The Interlaken School closed in 1918 due to anti-German sentiments associated with World War I. Isamu Noguchi was one of the last students to enroll at Interlaken before it closed.

While running the school, Rumely was also active in the family tractor business. He used his technological interest to develop the Rumely Oil Pull Farm Tractor, which burned kerosene. The Rumely family lost control of their own company due to Edward's mishandling of the company’s assets. The Rumely Hotel was built in 1913 in La Porte when Edward was still in charge of the family business.→Advance-Rumely

When the First World War broke out in Europe, Rumely was pro-German and outraged by the pro-British slant of most American newspapers. Thus, in 1915, Rumely bought and became editor-in-chief and publisher of the New York Evening Mail. Since he was a good friend of Theodore Roosevelt, he permitted him to use the newspaper as his mouthpiece. Roosevelt contributed one, and possibly many more, editorials on the subject of the development of the American merchant marine. Two other critics who wrote articles for the paper were Samuel Sidney McClure and H.L. Mencken.

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