Adolph Ochs attended the university as a student in the preparatory division of East Tennessee University in 1869–70. Having gotten his start in the newspaper business at age 11 by carrying the Chronicle in Knoxville, to which city his family had moved following the Civil War, Ochs became a printer’s devil and then a reporter. At age 20, he borrowed $250 and bought a half interest in the floundering Chattanooga Times. Ochs helped to establish Chattanooga’s first public library, assisted in the effort to establish the Chickamauga-Chattanooga Military Park, and led a movement to preserve a substantial portion of Lookout Mountain.
Ochs had invested heavily in real estate in the Chattanooga area and created syndicates to develop the properties. Land values collapsed in 1887, leaving Ochs with enormous financial losses. The panic of 1893 also dealt Ochs a financial blow, and, in order to obtain money to meet his debts, he set out to purchase another failing newspaper. Equipped with “$70,000 and a letter from Grover Cleveland,” he acquired the nearly bankrupt New York Times in 1896. He led the organization for nearly 40 years, and built the paper into one of the world’s great newspapers. From 1900 until his death in 1935, he was a director of the Associated Press and member of the executive committee.
In 1925, at a specially arranged ceremony on October 15, the University of Chattanooga (now UTC) conferred an honorary doctor of letters (LLD) upon Ochs. During World War II, a USS Liberty ship (hull 1791) was named for him. Ochs has been inducted into the Tennessee Newspaper Hall of Fame. He is buried in Temple Israel Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester County, New York, in a grand mausoleum built on the largest gravesite in the cemetery, which he purchased in 1933.