Location: 906 Nash Street North in Wilson
County: Wilson
Original Date Cast: 2017
Elizabeth Gold Swindell, publisher and first female president of the North Carolina Press Association, was born in 1896, the same year that her father, John D. Gold, founded the newspaper that would become the Wilson Daily Times. Educated in the Wilson public schools and at St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, she married Wilson attorney Frederick Swindell in 1919. She remained a homemaker, clubwoman, and mother until her husband died in 1933. Then, in order to support herself and her daughter, Swindell went to work at her father’s paper.
In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, the National Recovery Administration reduced the workweek, which created a need for assistance at the newspaper which had been staffed six days per week. With each job at the paper being vacant one day per week, Swindell worked wherever she was needed and learned every aspect of the newspaper’s operation. One day she might write headlines and edit stories, the next she might work in the advertising department, and another she might be out covering a reporter’s beat.
In 1946 business at the Wilson Daily Times was thriving but John D. Gold, at age 78, did not have the energy to expand or update the operation, so he leased the paper to Herbert D. Brauff. His daughter Elizabeth offered to stay at the paper, which she considered “more than a newspaper, or a business, it was a living, breathing thing with a personality.” Within a few months Brauff offered her an interest in his contract and she bought the remaining share at his death in 1954.
Swindell was a leader among North Carolina journalists and was a founding, and lifetime, board member of the Journalism Foundation of North Carolina from 1949, president of the Eastern North Carolina Press Association, president of the Association of Afternoon Dailies, and first female president of the North Carolina Press Association. She was the only woman appointed to the Speaker Ban Study Commission in 1965. In 1973, she received the Emma C. McKinney Award from the National Newspaper Association, awarded to nonmetropolitan newspaper professionals who have “provided distinguished service and leadership to the community press and his/ her community.”
Among other honors and awards, Swindell was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 1994. At her death in 1983, former Senator Sam Ervin said that she was “one of North Carolina’s greatest citizens of all time.” Former Representative L. H. Fountain considered her “one of the most active—or the most active—newspaper editors in the state. She was a credit to the newspaper industry in all that she did or said.” Elizabeth Gold Swindell’s house at 906 W. Nash Street still stands.
References:
(Raleigh) News and Observer (“Tar Heel of the Week” article in 1951)
Wilson Daily Times, July 29 and 30, 1983; April 11, 1994